More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
sometimes you need to be less focused in order to become a better learner.
When you are trying to learn something new, you must first focus intently on it in order to “turn on” those parts of the brain and get the learning process started.
When you’re in focused mode, you’re paying close attention.
In diffuse mode, you’re not thinking about anything in particular.
It turns out that your brain has to go back and forth between focused and diffuse modes in order to learn effectively.
Procrastination means putting things off until later.
Once you get started on the task you didn’t want to do, the pain goes away after about twenty minutes. The insular cortex calms down when you start the task you were avoiding.
When you even just think about something you don’t like, it activates a pain center of the brain called the insular cortex. This can lead to procrastination.
Just get going. Don’t put work off until later.
Metaphors allow you to connect what you already know to the new concept you’re learning. This helps you learn faster.
Teaching others is a great way to learn,
Guang found that neurons do change. And the big change happens after we learn something and then go to sleep.
Your brain changes when you learn!
Space your practice and you will remember it longer.
Recall is one of the most effective ways to boost your learning.
So don’t feel bad if it takes you longer to learn things than your friends. You can still learn the information just as well—sometimes even better!
The more you send a thought around your neural pathways, the more permanent it becomes.
Space out your learning over several days.
We all learn at different speeds. Don’t feel bad if someone else is quicker than you. That’s life. Just put in a little more time. You’ll also soon discover that being a “slow” learner can give you special advantages.
If you’re not focusing on something, your attentional octopus drops the information and dozes off.
Your long-term memory has almost never-ending storage space. But you need to harness it through practice and process.
If you convert a fact you are trying to remember into a picture, you can remember it more easily. If the picture is unusual, it’s even easier to remember. And if the picture involves movement, that seems to make it stick even more strongly.
The more you practice commanding your focus, the better you’ll get at focusing!
“You don’t get good at something unless you practice. That’s for anything in the world.”
Find a way to relate the information to things you already know. Find an anchor. This allows you to put the pictures into your brain in places where you can easily retrieve them.
You’ll be amazed by how easy it is to remember things when you have a goofy way of remembering them. And it’s fun making them up!
When you’re learning anything new, your working memory can only hold so much in mind at once. This is why it’s so important to make strong, well-practiced sets of brain-links.
Just start! The first steps are often the most difficult. Enjoy the process and wait for the results to come.
we know the important effects of exercise and sleep on making stronger memories. I have made exercise an important part of my daily life. I know it helps me think and learn much better.
Learning in one area can give you more ideas in other areas.
So sleep not only helps build new synaptic connections, it also clears out the hippocampus to make room for new learning.
Exercise helps new neurons grow
BDNF makes your new neurons strong and healthy.3 It protects them from injury and makes them more likely to connect to other neurons. It also acts like a food for synapses and dendritic spines, making them grow larger.
Exercise does something else magical. It enables your brain to produce other chemicals, such as serotonin and dopamine.5 These chemicals help you come up with new ideas. They allow you to see how old ideas can link up to form new ones. Then you can think in new ways.
The best way to speed your learning is to avoid lazy learning. If you spend too much time on material you already know, you won’t have time to learn new material. This idea of focusing on the harder stuff is called deliberate practice.2 Deliberate practice is how you become an expert more quickly in whatever you are studying.
Practicing different aspects and techniques of the skill you are trying to learn is called interleaving
The key is to actively practice or bring to life whatever you are learning yourself
Practice your new skill over a number of days, making sure you get some good sleep each night. This helps your new synaptic brain-links to form. You want to broaden the forest pathways—thicken the links—for your mental mouse.
Deliberate practice with interleaving. Focus on the hard stuff and mix it up. That’s how you become an expert.
Lady Luck favors the one who tries.
Actively working through a problem, or doing an activity, is what creates brain-links.
You create and strengthen sets of brain-links through deliberate practice. That’s focused, repeated work on the more difficult parts of a concept. Don’t waste much time on the easy stuff that you already know.
Interleaving is the other important part of making an expert set of brain-links. Switch around within a subject. This will give you a sense of the topic as a whole. Your neurons will eventually link up and you’ll have completed a whole “puzzle.”
Get creative and develop your own tricks to shake things up. Move your chair sometimes to a different part of the room. Take notes with a different color pen. Move your lamp. Anything to switch your learning up a bit!
So whenever you’re learning anything, try to take advantage of all your senses. Don’t think of yourself as having a preferred learning style. Think of yourself as an “all-inclusive” learner. If you imagine hearing a famous person from history speaking to you, or you visualize a chemical, that counts as multisensory learning, which is the most effective kind. For everyone.
Sleep is the best thing you can do to retune yourself each day and keep yourself healthy.
If you want to improve your focused or spatial thinking, research says you should stick to action or spatial kinds of video games.
In fact, if you’re passionate about anything, you can become even better at your passion if you also learn a little bit about something quite different.
Transferring ideas from one subject or activity to another helps you to be more creative. It’s like a template you can adapt from one area to another.
If you review your notes one last time before you go to sleep, you can make your dendritic spines grow even better while you sleep!
