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March 25 - April 18, 2019
percolation.
percolation is for building something that was not there before, whether it’s a term paper, a robot, an orchestral piece, or some other labyrinthine project.
Perhaps unfinished jobs or goals linger in memory longer than finished ones.
Interestingly, being interrupted at the “worst” time seemed to extend memory the longest.
A goal is anything we want to possess or achieve and haven’t yet,
the act of starting work on an assignment often gives that job the psychological weight of a goal, even if it’s meaningless.
interrupting yourself when absorbed in an assignment extends its life in memory and—according to her experiments—pushes it to the top of your mental to-do list.
The first element of percolation, then, is that supposed enemy of learning—interruption.
Having a goal foremost in mind (in this case, a drink), tunes our perceptions to fulfilling it.
“Once a goal becomes activated, it trumps all others and begins to drive our perceptions, our thoughts, our attitudes,”
So the question is: How, then, do we most effectively activate that goal? By interrupting work on it at an important and difficult moment—propelling the assignment, via the Zeigarnik effect, to the top of our mind.
The problem is that, when we’re embarking on a research project—especially when we’re younger—we don’t necessarily know how to identify those intellectual landmarks. Often, we don’t even know they exist.
Percolation is a matter of vigilance, of finding ways to tune the mind so that it collects a mix of external perceptions and internal thoughts that are relevant to the project at hand. We can’t know in advance what those perceptions and thoughts will look like—and we don’t have to.
If more fully formed ideas (as opposed to perceptions) seem to arrive “out of the blue,” it only means that that mixing happened outside of direct conscious awareness.
What does this mean for a learning strategy? It suggests that we should start work on large projects as soon as possible and stop when we get stuck, with the confidence that
Quitting before I’m ahead doesn’t put the project to sleep; it keeps it awake. That’s Phase 1, and it initiates Phase 2, the period of gathering string, of casual data collecting. Phase 3 is listening to what I think about all those incoming bits and pieces. Percolation depends on all three elements, and in that order.
Varied practice is more effective than the focused kind, because it forces us to internalize general rules of motor adjustment that apply to any hittable target.
Transfer is what learning is all about, really. It’s the ability to extract the essence of a skill or a formula or word problem and apply it in another context, to another problem that may not look the same, at least superficially. If you’ve truly mastered a skill, you “carry it with you,” so to speak.
But repetition creates a powerful illusion. Skills improve quickly and then plateau.
varied practice produces a slower apparent rate of improvement in each single practice session but a greater accumulation of skill and learning over time.
Interleaving. That’s a cognitive science word, and it simply means mixing related but distinct material during study.
The mixing of items, skills, or concepts during practice, over the longer term, seems to help us not only see the distinctions between them but also to achieve a clearer grasp of each one individually.
What made those questions so tricky, explained Rohrer, was that “math students must be able to choose a strategy—not just know how to use it—and choosing a strategy is harder when an exam covers many kinds of problems.”
Mixing problems during study forces us to identify each type of problem and match it to the appropriate kind of solution.
interleaving is, essentially, about preparing the brain for the unexpected.
But they could do one thing the novices could not: memorize a chess position after seeing the board for less than five seconds.
Their eyes, and the visual systems in their brains, are extracting the most meaningful set of clues from a vast visual tapestry, and doing so instantaneously.
stimulus-response,
discrimination.
their brains came equipped with evolved modules to make important, subtle discriminations, and to put those differing symbols into categories.
perceives to learn.
Perceptual learning, she wrote, “is not a passive absorption, but an active process, in the sense that exploring and searching for perception itself is active.
It’s self-correcting—it tunes itself. The system works to find the most critical perceptual signatures and filter out the rest.
In many perceptual situations like this one, the novice is essentially blind to patterns that the expert has come to see at a glance.”
perceptual learning module, or PLM.
PLMs are meant for a certain kind of target: discriminating or classifying things that look the same to the untrained eye but are not.
Run through a bunch of examples—fast—and let the sensory areas of your brain do the rest.
sleep is essentially a time-management adaptation.
“Another way of looking at it is that unnecessary wakefulness is a bigger mistake.”
Sleeping and waking adjust themselves to the demands and risks of our life, not according to what the health manuals say.
sleep’s primary purpose is memory consolidation.
sleep architecture,
embedded hierarchy
“We think what’s happening during sleep is that you open the aperture of memory and are able to see this bigger picture,” the study’s senior author, Matthew Walker, told me. “There is evidence, in fact, that REM is this creative memory domain when you build different associations, combine things in different ways and so on.”
The preponderance of evidence to date finds that sleep improves retention and comprehension of what was studied the day before,
the Night Shift Theory.
REM is also involved in interpreting emotionally charged memories.
Walker describes REM as “a nighttime therapy session.”
“Stage 2 seems to be the single most critical stage for motor learning,”
Starve people of deep slumber, and it doesn’t just dim their beauty; they don’t get the full benefit of sleep-aided recall of newly learned facts, studied vocabulary, names, dates, and formulas. “We have a lot of evidence that slow-wave is important for declarative memory consolidation, and that this doesn’t happen as much in REM,” Stickgold told me.
