More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 17, 2018 - January 12, 2019
Focused-mode thinking is essential for studying math and science. It involves a direct approach to solving problems using rational, sequential, analytical approaches. The focused mode is associated with the concentrating abilities of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, located right behind your forehead.
Einstellung effect (pronounced EYE-nshtellung). In this phenomenon, an idea you already have in mind, or your simple initial thought, prevents a better idea or solution from being found.
This is precisely why one significant mistake students sometimes make in learning math and science is jumping into the water before they learn to swim.
If you are trying to understand or figure out something new, your best bet is to turn off your precision-focused thinking and turn on your “big picture” diffuse mode,
The harder you push your brain to come up with something creative, the less creative your ideas will be.
But as long as we are consciously focusing on a problem, we are blocking the diffuse mode.
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!”
Once you are distracted from the problem at hand, the diffuse mode has access and can begin pinging about in its big-picture way to settle on a solution.
Enlisting the diffuse mode helps you learn at a deep and creative level.
Sleep is probably the most effective and important factor in allowing your diffuse mode to tackle a difficult problem.
mountain. In other words, just using your diffuse mode doesn’t mean you can lollygag around and expect to get anywhere.
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
Remember, accepting the first idea that comes to mind when you are working on an assignment or test problem can prevent you from finding a better solution.
Figuring out a difficult problem or learning a new concept almost always requires one or more periods when you aren’t consciously working on the problem.
A good rule of thumb, when you are first learning new concepts, is not to let things go untouched for longer than a day.
People with strong self-control can have the most difficulty in getting themselves to turn off their focused mode so that the diffuse mode can begin its work.
Learning often means making sense of what we’ve ingested, and for that, we need to have ingested something.
don’t wait until the week before midterms or final exams for this assistance. Go early and often. The teacher can often rephrase or explain in a different way that allows you to grasp the topic.
Working memory is the part of memory that has to do with what you are immediately and consciously processing in your mind.
Your working memory is important in learning math and science because it’s like your own private mental blackboard where you can jot down a few ideas that you are considering or trying to understand.
long-term memory might be thought of as a storage warehouse.
Putting a day between bouts of repetition—extending your practice over a number of days—does make a difference.
The next time you are tackling a tough problem, work on it for a few minutes.
When you get stuck, move on to another problem.
During sleep, your cells shrink, causing a striking increase in the space between your cells. This is equivalent to turning on a faucet—it allows fluid to wash past and push the toxins out.
When you get too little sleep, the buildup of these toxic products is believed to explain why you can’t think very clearly.
Studies have shown that sleep is a vital part of memory and learning.
It seems that 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. If you go even further and set it in mind that you want to dream about the material, it seems to improve your chances of dreaming about it still further.
attest
A sleep-deprived brain simply can’t make the usual connections you make during normal thinking processes.
Going without sleep the night before an examination can mean that even if you are perfectly prepared, your mind is simply unable to function properly, so you do poorly on the test.
Focused and diffuse approaches are valuable for all sorts of fields and disciplines, not just math and science.
Use the focused mode to first start grappling with concepts and problems in math and science.
After you’ve done your first hard focused work, allow the diffuse mode to take over. Relax and do something different!
If procrastination is an issue, try setting a timer for twenty-five minutes and focusing intently on your task without allowing yourself to be drawn aside by text messages, web surfing, or other attractive distractions.
Spaced repetition helps move items from working memory to long-term memory.
Research on the biology of creativity suggests several ingredients that we all can bake into our personal recipes for success. Number one is the Nike factor: Just do it!
The best predictor of how many creative works we produce in our lifetime is . . . the number of works we produce.
If you don’t like the way it turned out—do it again!
Criticism makes us better:
Be willing to be disagreeable.
because I challenged the existing answers. So I believe the creative way is advanced whenever we strip a problem back to its roots and question our own assumptions (along with assumptions suggested by others); then repeat!
one of the first steps toward gaining expertise in math and science is to create conceptual chunks—mental leaps that unite separate bits of information through meaning.
chunk the ability to understand and work a certain type of math or science problem.
The first step in chunking, then, is to simply focus your attention on the information you want to chunk.
The second step in chunking is to understand the basic idea you are trying to chunk,
just understanding how a problem was solved does not necessarily create a chunk that you can easily call to mind later.
(That’s part of why you can grasp an idea when a teacher presents it in class, but if you don’t review it fairly soon after you’ve first learned it, it can seem incomprehensible when it comes time to prepare for a test.) Closing the book and testing yourself on how to solve the problems will also speed up your learning at this stage.
The third step to chunking is gaining context so you see not just how, but also...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
bottom-up chunking process where practice and repetition can help you both build and strengthen each chunk, so you can easily gain access to it when needed.
