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Einstellung effect (pronounced EYE-nshtellung).
an idea you already have in mind, or your simple initial thought, prevents a better idea or solution from being found.
Einstellung as installing a roadblock because of the way you are initially looking at something.)
“Befuddlement is a healthy part of the learning process.
But the learning process is all about working your way out of confusion. Articulating your question is 80 percent of the battle. By the time you’ve figured out what’s confusing, you’re likely to have answered the question yourself!”
when you procrastinate, you are leaving yourself only enough time to do superficial focused-mode learning. You are also increasing your stress level because you know you have to complete what feels like an unpleasant task. The resulting neural patterns will be faint and fragmented and will quickly disappear—you’ll be left with a shaky foundation.
you won’t have time for either learning mode to help you tackle the tougher concepts and problems or to help you synthesize the connections in what you are learning.
imagine that at the end of the day, you are reflecting on the one most important task that you accomplished that day. What would that task be? Write it down. Then work on it. Try to complete at least three of these twenty-five-minute sessions that day, on whatever task or tasks you think are most important.
At the end of your workday, look at what you crossed off your list and savor the feeling of accomplishment. Then write a few key things that you would like to work on the next day. This early preparation will help your diffuse mode begin to think about how you will get those tasks done the next day.
Mistakes are inevitable. To work past them, start early on your assignments and, unless you are really enjoying what you are doing, keep your working sessions short.
As the days and weeks pass, it’s the distributed practice—the back and forth between focused-mode attention and diffuse-mode relaxation—that does the trick.12
Jog, walk,
Draw or paint
Take a bath or shower
Listen to music, especially w...
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Meditate
Sleep (the ultimate diffuse mode!)
If you need more time to learn math and science, that’s simply the reality.
You may be surprised to discover that learning slowly can mean you learn more deeply than your fast-thinking classmates.
blinking is a vital activity that provides another means of reevaluating a situation.
Usually a few hours is long enough for the diffuse mode to make significant progress but not so long that its insights fade away before being passed on to the focused mode. A good rule of thumb, when you are first learning new concepts, is not to let things go untouched for longer than a day.
This idea of looking from fresh perspectives also gives us insight on why “sleeping on it” before making major decisions is generally a good idea,18 and why taking vacations is important.
The patient ability to keep working away, a little bit at a time, is important. This is why, if procrastination is an issue for you, it will be critical to learn some of the upcoming neural tricks to effectively address it.
Make it a rule to listen to study partners, friends, or loved ones who can sense when you are becoming dangerously frustrated.
Ask someone else for a different perspective on how to solve the problem or a different analogy to understand the concept; however, it’s best that you first wrestle with the problem yourself before you talk to anyone else, because it can embed the basic concepts deeply enough that you become receptive to the explanation.
Learning often means making sense of what we’ve ingested, and for that, we need to have ingested something.
it’s now widely believed that the working memory holds only about four chunks of information.
tackling a tough problem, work on it for a few minutes. When you get stuck, move on to another problem.
to slow down my breathing. I just keep breathing slowly in and out
set my phone alarm for twenty-one minutes
(Of course, you must plant the seed for your diffuse mode by first doing focused-mode work.)
if you go over the material right before taking a nap or going to sleep for the evening, you have an increased chance of dreaming about it.
go even further and set it in mind that you want to dream about the material, it seems to improve your chances of...
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Dreaming about what you are studying can substantially enhance your ability to understand—it somehow consolidates your me...
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If you’re tired, it’s often best to just go to sleep and get up a little earlier the next day, so your reading is done with a better-rested brain.
It’s best to work at math and science in small doses—a little every day.
but needs to be revisited occasionally to keep the memories accessible.
Figure out tough problems and find meaning in what you are learning.
Strengthen and rehearse the important parts of what you are learning and prune away trivialities.
The best predictor of how many creative works we produce in our lifetime is . . . the number of works we produce.
Criticism makes us better: By exposing our work to others, and by externalizing it so we can inspect it ourselves, we gain unique perspective and insight and develop new and improved plans for the next version.
