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October 6 - October 11, 2018
Active involvement is key—the exercises are helpful only if they are completed. The book is best read with a notebook at the side, to take notes, answer questions, and make doodles with key insights.
With young “skimmers,” the more an adult can dip in, question, and interact, the more will be gained.
Brains are amazing. They’re the most sophisticated gadgets in the universe. They change their structure depending on what you do with them.
We want to help improve your ability to learn.
Learning how to learn does something more, though. It opens whole horizons for your future. The working world of the future needs creative people who have many different talents. We’re here to help you develop the many talents, and the creativity, that lie within you!
was growing up. By the time I was fifteen years old I had lived in ten different places. Each time I started a new school, I had missed a different piece of math. I felt lost. It was like picking up a book and discovering that the chapters were all out of order. It made no sense to me.
The truth is, it’s okay to follow your passions. But I also found that broadening my passions opened many wonderful opportunities.
Don’t do this! It was a big mistake. Instead, when you start a new chapter, go on a “picture walk”* through it. Scan it. Look briefly at all the pictures, captions, and diagrams, but also at the section headings, bold words, and summary, and even questions at the end of the chapter, if the book has them.
Surprise! Sometimes we need to lose concentration so we can think more clearly. Zoning out occasionally (not all the time) can be useful when you’re learning or problem solving.
Neuroscientists have discovered that your brain works in two different ways. We’ll call these two ways of working the focused mode and the diffuse mode.*
When you’re using your focused mode, it means that you’re paying attention.
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.
Diffuse mode is when your mind is relaxed and free. You’re thinking about nothing in particular.
The diffuse mode helps you make imaginative connections between ideas. Creativity often seems to pop out of using the diffuse mode. It turns out that your brain has to go back and forth between focused and diffuse modes in order to learn effectively.
Pinball tables are kind of like your brain. Their bumpers can be closer or farther apart depending on the table. When the bumpers are close together, it’s like your brain in focused mode. The ball bounces around rapidly in one small area before running out of energy and falling down.
The diffuse mode is different. In this mode, the table’s bumpers are much farther apart.
Our brains act like both kinds of pinball machine. If we want to shift from thinking about the details to thinking freely about the bigger picture, we have to shift from focused to diffuse mode.
Switching Between Focused and Diffuse
If switching between modes is so important, how do we do it?
Well, if we want to focus on something, it’s easy. As soon as we make ourselves turn our attention t...
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Unfortunately, it’s difficult to keep our attention on something for long periods of time. That’s why we can sometimes fall into...
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Your mind stays in focused mode as long as you keep using the flippers. But when you let go of the flippers, your mind goes free! The ball drops down onto the diffuse table.
Diffuse mode is when we’re not focusing on anything in particular. You can enter diffuse mode by just letting go and not concentrating on anything. Going for a walk helps. Or looking out a window from a bus. Or taking a shower. Or falling asleep. (Many famous people have had great insights when the events of the day were sloshing around during sleep.3)
It also seems that focusing on something else can take us temporarily into diffuse mode related to what we’re not focusing on. When we focus on cuddling our dog, we’re not focusing on the math problem. When we’re focusing on someone else’s chess game, we’re not focused on our own chess game.
But it seems that the best ways to give your diffuse mode a chance to work out a difficult problem are through activities like sleeping, exercising, or going for a ride in a vehicle.
How do you work the flippers more? Participate as much as you can by asking questions, writing on the chalkboard, distributing activities among your partners, and working with them whenever you have an exercise together.
The first way you can get stuck happens when you don’t catch the initial explanation. Unfortunately, with this kind of “stuck,” going into diffuse mode won’t be much use. You haven’t “loaded” anything into your focused mode. Your best bet is to go back and look at the examples and explanations in your notes or the book. Or ask the teacher to explain again. Or look on YouTube for an additional explanation.
The second way you can get stuck is when you’ve studied or focused carefully—you’ve loaded the explanation into your focused mode. But as you begin to work the problem, play the chord, or make the move, you still find yourself stuck.
The reason you get stuck is that you haven’t given your brain’s diffuse mode a chance to help out! The diffuse mode can’t get going until you take your attention off what it’s focused on.
Focused and diffuse modes. Our brains operate in two modes: focused and diffuse. You can think of them as pinball tables that have tightly packed bumpers and spread-out bumpers. We need to alternate between these two modes to learn well.
Shifting modes. You shift into focused mode by focusing. Grab those flippers on the pinball machine! But you have to let go and wait for the ball to drop on its own to get into the diffuse mode. The bed, the bath, the bus, and simply going for a walk are great ways to fall into the diffuse mode.
To be a successful problem solver, focus first. We get stuck in problem solving when we don’t first prepare our brain by focusing on the basics. Don’t just dive into problem solving without studying the explanations first. Yo...
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Take breaks to get new problem-solving perspectives.
This is the critical part. Look away from the page and see what you can recall. What are the key ideas on the page? Play them back in your mind. Or say them out loud to yourself. Do not simply reread the page over and over again. And don’t underline or highlight big amounts of text.
Pulling the key idea from your own mind, instead of just reading or rereading it on the page, is the critical idea behind active recall.
The Three Key Steps to Powerful Reading Picture walk Read with care Use active recall
When I was in middle school, I used to walk to my grandma’s house for lunch. As I was walking, I would try to recall key ideas that I’d just learned in the class, as if rewatching an interesting film. This technique helped me tremendously to excel in my studies. —Zhaojing “Eileen” Li, graduate of Tsinghua University—China’s top university
Your brain has a lot of neurons in it. Billions, roughly the same number as the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Neurons are the building blocks of your brain.
Really small. Ten neurons are only as wide as a human hair! But they can be long—longer than your arm.
Can you tell that we like to use metaphors? A metaphor is a comparison between two things.*
Today’s scientific research confirms what Santiago discovered. We can all “think” ourselves smarter. Learning makes us smarter. And learning how to learn is one of the best things you can do to get the ball rolling and make learning more successful. This is the most important idea in this book! So keep reading!
What I’m learning is useless. We don’t normally have to do push-ups, pull-ups, or sit-ups in our everyday lives. But still, those exercises aren’t useless—they help keep us in good physical shape. In a similar way, what we learn may be different from what we do in everyday life—but the new learning helps keep us in mental shape. More than that, new learning serves as a resource to help us transfer new ideas into our lives by using metaphor.
My teachers are really boring. Your teachers give you some facts and ideas. But you are the one who must come up with a story that has meaning for you and will help make the concepts stick in your mind. The most boring thing would be if the teacher did all this work for you already, leaving you with nothing to do! You are a critical part of the learning process. It’s important for you to take responsibility for creating your understanding.
Pause and Recall After you read this “Pause and Recall” section, close the book and look away. What were the main ideas of this chapter? Write down as many ideas as you can—you’ll find that your neurons will fire better and you’ll remember more easily if you’re actively writing. Don’t worry if you can’t recall much when you first try this. As you continue practicing this technique, you’ll begin noticing changes in how you read and how much you recall. You might be surprised to learn that even distinguished professors will sometimes admit that they have trouble recalling the key ideas of what
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Key Terms Related to Neuroscience
Diffuse mode: We use the term diffuse mode to mean that certain parts of your brain become active when you’re resting and not thinking about anything in particular. (Neuroscientists call this the “default mode network,” the “task negative network,” or the “activation of neural resting states.”)
Focused mode: We use the term focused mode to mean that certain parts of your brain go to work when you pay close attention to something. When you are focusing, the active parts of your brain are mostly different from those parts that are active in the diffuse mode. (Instead of “focused mode,” neuroscientists use the heavy-duty term “activation of task positive networks.”)
Two Key Ideas Behind Linking
1. Deliberate Practice (Versus Lazy Learning)
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.3
