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October 7 - November 11, 2021
You’ll be surprised at how spending a minute or two glancing ahead before you read in depth will help you organize your thoughts. You’re creating little neural hooks to hang your thinking on, making it easier to grasp the concepts.
You’ll be surprised at how spending a minute or two glancing ahead before you read in depth will help you organize your thoughts. You’re creating little neural hooks to hang your thinking on, making it easier to grasp the concepts.
Diffuse-mode insights often flow from preliminary thinking that’s been done in the focused mode. (The diffuse mode must have clay to make bricks!)
Diffuse-mode insights often flow from preliminary thinking that’s been done in the focused mode. (The diffuse mode must have clay to make bricks!)
It’s called the 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.9
It’s called the 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.9
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.
Closing our eyes seems to provide a micropause that momentarily deactivates our attention and allows us, for the briefest of moments, to refresh and renew our consciousness and perspective.
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. After all, they’ve been successful because sometimes they could keep going when others flagged. If you often find yourself in this situation, you can use another trick. Make it a rule to listen to study partners, friends, or loved ones who can sense when you are becoming dangerously frustrated.
It used to be thought that our working memory could hold around seven items, or “chunks,” but it’s now widely believed that the working memory holds only about four chunks of information.
when your brain first puts an item of information in long-term memory, you need to revisit it a few times to increase the chances you’ll later be able to find it when you need it.
(Techie types sometimes equate short-term memory to random-access memory [RAM], and long-term memory to hard drive space.)
solving. It takes time to move information from working memory to long-term memory. To help with this process, use a technique called spaced repetition. As you may have guessed, this technique involves repeating what you are trying to retain, like a new vocabulary word or a new problem-solving technique, but spacing this repetition out over a number of days.
Why is it important to use self-control to make yourself stop doing something? Can you think of times outside studying and academics when this skill might also be important?
Respecting the pomodoro break when you’re stuck.
Chunks are pieces of information that are bound together through meaning.
Chunking the information you deal with helps your brain run more efficiently.
Attempting to recall the material you are trying to learn—retrieval practice—is far more effective than simply rereading the material.
well-designed electronic flash card systems, such as Anki, have built into them the appropriate spaced repetition time to optimize the rate of learning new material.
strengthening an initial learning pattern within a day after you first begin forming it is important. Without the strengthening, the pattern can quickly fade away.
Everybody knows you can’t effectively learn the chunked patterns of chess, language, music, dance—just about anything worthwhile—without repetition. Good instructors can explain why the practice and repetition is worth the trouble.
recalling material when you are outside your usual place of study helps you strengthen your grasp of the material by viewing it from a different perspective.
focusing on one technique is a little like learning carpentry by only practicing with a hammer. After a while, you think you can fix anything by just bashing it.
You want your brain to become used to the idea that just knowing how to use a particular problem-solving technique isn’t enough—you also need to know when to use it.
Unlike procrastination, which is easy to fall into, willpower is hard to come by because it uses a lot of neural resources. This means that the last thing you want to do in tackling procrastination is to go around spraying willpower on it like it’s cheap air freshener.
“The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.”
Regarding procrastination
It’s easy to feel distaste for something you’re not good at. But the better you get at something, the more you’ll find you enjoy it.
Procrastination is like addiction. It offers temporary excitement and relief from boring reality.
The trick to overwriting a habit is to look for the pressure point—your reaction to a cue. The only place you need to apply willpower is to change your reaction to the cue.
To prevent procrastination, you want to avoid concentrating on product. Instead, your attention should be on building processes—habits—that coincidentally allow you to do the unpleasant tasks that need to be done.
the zombie, habitual part of your brain likes processes, because it can march mindlessly along. It’s far easier to enlist a friendly zombie habit to help with a process than to help with a product.
Focus on the process (the way you spend your time) instead of the product (what you want to accomplish).
“They say experience is the best teacher. Instead, it should be that failure is the best teacher. I’ve found that the best learners are the ones who cope best with failure and use it as a learning tool.”
By grouping things in a sometimes wacky yet logically retrievable fashion, you easily enhance your long-term memory.
The more neural hooks you can build by evoking the senses, the easier it will be for you to recall the concept and what it means.
One of the best things you can do to not only remember but understand concepts in math and science is to create a metaphor or analogy for it—often, the more visual, the better.
It’s often helpful to pretend you are the concept you are trying to understand.
Metaphors are never perfect. But then, all scientific models are just metaphors, which means they also break down at some point.
Writing appears to help you to more deeply encode (that is, convert into neural memory structures) what you are trying to learn.
people learn by trying to make sense out of information they perceive. They rarely learn anything complex simply by having someone else tell it to them.
Having a somewhat smaller working memory means you can more easily generalize your learning into new, more creative combinations.
It is the practice—particularly deliberate practice on the toughest aspects of the material—that can help lift average brains into the realm of those with more “natural” gifts.
the Feynman technique, which asks people to find a simple metaphor or analogy to help them grasp the essence of an idea.
Multitasking during the learning process means you don’t learn as deeply—this can inhibit your ability to transfer what you are learning.
the left hemisphere interprets the world for us—and will go to great lengths to keep those interpretations unchanging.
When you work in focused mode, it is easy to make minor mistakes in your assumptions or calculations. If you go off track early on, it doesn’t matter if the rest of your work is correct—your answer is still wrong.
Good learners vet their work to ensure that it makes sense. They ask themselves what the equations mean and where they come from.
Criticism in your studies, whether you are giving or receiving it, shouldn’t be taken as being about you. It’s about what you are trying to understand.
Whenever you are struggling with a concept, think to yourself, How can I explain this so that a ten-year-old could understand it?
