Status Updates From How We Learn: The Surprisin...

He keeps talking about how he was a very chaotic student in college, & yet learned somewhat more than in high school + had a healthy social life. He talks about how we're still stone age foragers, our brains are all about restlessness, which is good, not bad. Which makes me think, why did I have such an encyclopedic knowledge before 7? Input hypothesis? Interleaving? Maybe there's something there…

(Nothing gleaned from Part Four during Survey, except they're about subconscious learning & sleep respectively). Conclusion “The Foraging Brain” mentions, that we learn & want to learn all the time, yet we don't naturally develop good learning insticts, & nobody really knows why.

His daughter's field notes are hilarious!

Ch8 talks about interleaving & is similar in spirit to the earlier parts of “Make It Stick”.

I wonder if it's possible to write a perfect “interleaved” maths textbooks, which leverage this effect as much as possible.

Random thot: what if SQ are bad, because they prime you to expect preconceived stuff from the material? It creates a fixed interpretation in advance?

Ch7: Estas short-term incubation & estas long-term cumulative percolation.

Ch6 talks about 4 stages of control (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_...) & specifically incubation, uses children's puzzles to illustrate.

Maths education is so traumatic that people are put off by stuff that even slightly *looks* like maths. Hence people are OK with word puzzles, but number or geometrical puzzles? Scary, “I'm not good at maths”.

Key quote on approachibility of puzzles: «Anything with geometric shapes or numbers instantly puts off an entire constituency of students who think they’re “not a math person”—or have been told as much.»

I keep bumping into names Henry Roediger III and Jeffrey Karpicke. Are these guys, like, important?

Last few ¶s explain, why Ch is called “The Hidden Value of Ignorance”. Testing exposes “fluency illusion”, it shows you what you know & don't know. Turns unknown unknowns into known unknowns. The latter type of ignorance is better than the former.

Ch5, Ok, maybe I was wrong, because Ch4 on “don't study immediately after” doesn't refer to testing, only to spacing. Testing effect seems to be only introduced in this Ch.

As this book is narrative non-fiction, the SQ3R isn't working as good, as it would on a textbook. I won't do the Q stage for it, after I finish S.

My eye picked up “fluency illusion” somewhere in the middle of Ch. Ooh, he gets it!

Ch4: Here's what confuses me. Talking about Jost's Law, he says don't re-study it immediately. But “Effective Study” says we should recite immediately after studying. Who's right?

A lot of people on Prerak's channel ask how to use Anki to prepare for an exam, say, in a week's time. There's is an interesting table in Ch4 that actually gives some suggestions on how to plan reviews.

Ch3: Remember the diving suit? If we memorize sth underwater, we'll recall it better underwater. He describes a similar experiment with smoking a joint. Sounds hilarious, can't wait to read it.

A lot of the same science roams atwix books, Ch1 talks about H.M., Ch3—Luria's S.

Ch1 seems to be about some simple brain biology, like areas of the brain and simple anatomy of a neuron. Ch2 talks about forgetting curve (knew it), but goes deeper in Ebbinghaus's backstory, that's cool!

Book is broken into 4 parts. Unfortunately, the Ch names in ToC aren't too descriptive. So I'm guessing Ch1 “The Story Maker” will hopefully tell me about the tendency of the brain to craft narratives (this topic interests me). Part Two seems wholly about Spaced Repetition stuff (context, spacing, testing). Ch9 (Part Four) seems interesting, it's named “Learning Without Thinking”. I wonder what's it about.