Learning How To Learn, by Dr. Oakley was one of my “minors” in the first semester of The PPP Project. I officially marked it under the psychology requirements, but I really took it because this sort of intensive learning project would greatly benefit from a course like this ;). I enjoyed it and learned a lot. With more than 3.5 million students, it is one of Coursera’s most popular MOOCs - and you should take it too.
Week 1
The first week contained a lot of motivational talk, and that's what I'd like to start this post with. The Professor herself hated math when she was young, and it was hard when she started - now, she has a PhD in engineering. A growth mindset is very important - and yes, I realize this is one of those things that's flung around casually but most people don't follow. It's a simple question: do you believe that it is impossible for you to get a top grade/secure your dream college/work at company X/become a millionaire/have a world-famous blog? If you do, then you don't have a growth mindset.
You don't need to (in fact, you shouldn't) believe that you will achieve something - rather, you should believe that you can. That everybody else is just as human as you are, and regardless of what's holding you back, you can overcome them and become better and better - until you're good enough to achieve your goal.
Life can be so much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call “life” was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
However, while the growth mindset is a crucial first step - it's not enough. Action, for better or worse, is required ;). For almost any goal, you need to learn - and that's what this course is about. Learning. Becoming better at this skill - or as the makers of the course style it, "learning how to learn" - is crucial.
It turns out we think in two different ways. The brain is a bit like a pinball machine: in focused mode, you can find all the existing patterns by old routes. However, when you want to create new thoughts, you need diffuse mode - where the nodes are wider apart. You can only be in one mode at a time.
What's more, we need to regularly shift between both modes. Creative work - often the best and most valued type of work - can only happen in diffuse mode. To learn or practice analytical skills, though, you need a focused mode. Most of us can (or at least have some idea as to how to) enter focused mode - but historically, people have come up with ingenious ways to enter and exit creative mode. One person used this: he'd relax in a chair with a key on a rope in his hand... so when he fell into sleep, the key would fall and wake him up. This would allow him to collect all his diffuse thoughts and take them into focused mode. Especially if you're learning something new, you need to go back and forth.
So learning happens when you relax - in fact, relaxing and sleep is crucial for learning properly. When we sleep, our brain cells shrink, and wash away the toxins that get created when we're awake. It washes away the useless parts of what you learnt and strengthens the important parts. It also has a remarkable effect on our ability to solve problems. Taking a walk, turning onto something else, and other strategies put items at "the back of your head", so to speak, where they slowly simmer and immerse themselves into your brain.
Dr. Terry gave a short speech: here are my notes. They are rough and non-linear, but the ideas are awesome.
Dr. Terry something is one of the only ten living scientists to be part of the three academies of science - extremely accomplished.
He's a firm believer in learning by doing and learning by "osmosis with experts". He suggests active engagement - for example, questions during classes.
For getting into diffuse mode, jogging a bit is a good idea.
Dr. does multitask a lot, but his best work is done when he's focused in the evening. It's impossible to do two things at the same time consciously - for him, multitasking is about switching contexts efficiently.
One of the Prof's friends made an insane discovery: we thought that neurons were created at brains, but in the hippocampus, the place for learning, neurons are created even until adulthood. Having an enriched environment helps, but surprisingly, exercise does too.
He finds that being in a creative environment helps your own creativity. The image of the creative thinker being an isolated genius doesn't really hold with him.
He advises young folks: success isn't about smartness. Success is a lot about passion and persistence.
Finally, he speaks about the importance of rebooting your perspective often.
Week 1 was kind of a swirl on a lot of things, and an intro to what's upcoming. Moving on, then!
Week 2
This was a really interesting week - we learned about chunking. The background is this: how does your brain store information? Funny, hey? We don't think about it too much.
While we aren't going to discuss the chemistry behind it, we are going to discuss chunks. Everything we know, we learn them by chunking. It's basically pulling together many unrelated bits of information together through meaning. Each chunk is a network of neurons in our brain, which can then be integrated with other small chunks and form bigger chunks.
The really interesting thing is not all chunks are of the same size. As we become more well-versed in a subject - as we tend towards mastery - the size of our chunks increases. This is why, for example, chess masters can look at a board in a second and seemingly remember it all - while most people can't. This is why as a programmer after four years, I can easily replicate dozens of lines of code that I saw hours ago, while when I started I often couldn't replicate one line that I'd seen just seconds ago. Human languages, too, are like this - this is why things sound gibberish when you don't know a language.
When you're learning to play a song or sport, you learn it in many small chunks that you'll knit together when you're actually performing. The best chunks are the ones that are so deeply integrated that you don't even think about the weaving - what we call “instinct”.
The weird thing is that in each subject, chunking is different. Here are some general tips, though:
Be really, really, focused - and then shift to a diffuse mode of thinking.
You can create chunks without understanding, but it's kinda useless. However, just understanding isn't chunking. "Aha" isn't expertise. If you don't review something soon after learning it, it will become incomprehensible. It is repetition, and not understanding, that leads to mastery.
Gain context. This allows more links to chunks. There is a "top-down" big picture of learning, and a bottom-down part of it (chunking) - and both are critical. Chunking is how, and context is when. Going through the highlights of a chapter before listening to a lecture is very helpful for chunking.
Beware of illusions of competence. These lead you to think that you know stuff, while you don't. Just reading through a textbook is very common, but far less effective than active recall. This was far better than even drawing concept maps (mind maps). Active recall helps regardless of whether it is formal or informal testing. This works because of chunking - the more you recall, the less number of "chunks" the info takes, and it gets linked more.
So what is this "active recall"? It's answering questions, working out problems, or trying to review the content of a chapter - without seeing anything.
Highlighting and underlining must be done carefully - otherwise, it would be ineffective and an IoC. Passion or more time alone is useless in learning. The place where we study is strongly linked to how we learn - we recall better due to "cues" in that environment. Thus, changing places of study is very important - you then become independent of cues from one place.
A touch of hard science! There are three big neuromodulators - carrying info about why and how important some info is. Acetylcholine neurons project widely, and they're what results in learning and deep focus. Dopamine neurons are extremely powerful in decision-making and motivation, and dopamine gets released when these neurons get an unexpected reward. Damage to these neurons causes anhedonia. Serotonin is also closely linked to risk-taking and social life (the lower you have, the higher risks you take). The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure that is a major centre of cognition and emotional interactions - it's important for effective learning.
Piecing together chunks to create original content is very important - it has been so for all of human history. All experts do this... more accurately, the better your chunking, the more your expertise. Transferring chunks is often common - things are often common between fields and ideas.
By building this "garden" of well-maintained chunks - you weed and water by practising it well - we can solve novel problems, because as can recognize patterns far better. There are two ways of solving problems - sequential and intuitive - closely tied to focused and diffused. Intuitive is almost always better for difficult problems, but sequential must be used to verify.
When overdoing things in one session, something called overlearning occurs - it is now significantly harder for you to forget this. This is useful at times (an intriguing thing I learnt here - even expert public speakers practice up to 70 hours for a TED talk). Be wary, though - repeating something you know well gives an illusion of competence.
More importantly, the Einstellung phenomenon (German for mindset) occurs - learning something so well prevents better ideas and solutions from being formed. Learning about this was brilliant - it explains why most of the novel discoveries in science come from the budding novices, not from the well-settled ones. Expertise results in rigidity, which is not always a good thing. As you age, people generally close down on other worldviews - Einstellung at work.
Ideally, we're all learning things to apply them somehow in the real world. To practice real-life solutions, interleaving helps. Learn and practice different concepts, ideas, and problems in the same session, deftly switching back and forth. Try it, and you'll be surprised at how hard it is. Yeah - here's the general principle: the harder learning seems to be, the more effective it is. Interleaving also helps against Einstellung. You need repetition for mastery, but by interleaving, you also increase independence.
Within one discipline, you become more creative - but many fields make you super creative. This, of course, results in a trade-off - you can't become deep enough. Again - this is why most paradigm shifts in science are made by either young people or people who were originally trained in a different discipline. Here's a thought-provoking quote:
Science progresses one funeral at a time as people (as folks entrenched in the old ways of looking at things die off).
I learned a lot of novel things about learning this week, and on the whole, it was great.
Week 3
This week, we discussed procrastination and memory. It seems like these two are unconnected, but in reality, they're intimately connected.
Near the beginning of the course, the Professor talked about the Pomodoro technique. You set a timer for 25 minutes, and just get started in focused work - knowing that you can leave and relax when the timer ends. After a break, you restart. This helps, but we'll cover even better tactics this week.
Tackling Procrastination
We'll be learning the lazy person's method of tackling procrastination. "Not all procrastination is bad" - but a big reason behind fighting against procrastination is that good learning happens bit by bit. Cramming is a really bad idea.
But sadly, the long-term effects of habitual avoidance can be nasty. When you put off your studies, it can become even more painful to think about studying it. You can choke on tests because you haven't laid the firm neural foundations you need to feel comfortable with the material.
When we procrastinate, we come up with "irrational excuses", such as "studying too early will make you forget the portion" (LOL, when I learned about this I had literally used it for an exam that very week).
Arsenic eaters do their work by consuming very small quantities of arsenic at the beginning - over time, they develop immunity and can ingest large amounts. The same applies to procrastination - you do it very small, but it builds up over time. You might even look healthy, but the long-term effects are harmful.
Willpower is very expensive - we shouldn't use it to fend off procrastination. Luckily, you don't need to do this. Instead, we can build a habit of not procrastinating. Easier said than done - you're thinking, and I admit that was my attitude too. To their credit, though, they offer a four-part theory of habits. the first one is the cue - this gets things set up, but it's both harmless and useless. This, however, leads to the routine. These give rise to the reward. Procrastination occurs because the reward is cheap for these actions - but they generally aren't as high quality as "good habits". The belief is also very important.
It's perfectly normal to feel negative at the beginning of a work session - how you respond is what is important. Tell yourself: yeah, you'll feel better right now if you open social media, but you know as well as I do that you'll feel awful in two hours. In contrast, if you open that book and study, you'll feel great about life in just half an hour.
Another tactic: products trigger the pain, so focus on the process. Don't think: wow, I have to complete this assignment worth 20% of my grade. Think: I need to get paper and pen out, research for the first page, and write it down. When that's over, go on to the next step. Sounds much easier, right? The idea here is that the "zombie" habitual part of your brain likes processes because it can march mindlessly along. It's far easier to enlist the friendly zombie to help with a process, then to help with a product.
Back to habits: we just want to overwrite the reaction to the cue - that's the only thing we need to change. Recognize what pushes you - the cue. This could be location, time, how you feel, or reactions. At the reaction point, you must rewire your habit. Try giving yourself some reward for rewiring. And last, but far from least, as I opened the post speaking about - believe you can do it.
When distractions arise, as they inevitably will, "let them flow by". No specific tactics were mentioned here, though.
Quick diversion again: how should one balance life and learning? As the Professor pointed out, having fun and relaxation in your life is not just required for a good and meaningful life, but is also crucial for learning itself. Some tips are discussed here:
Have a weekly and daily major task list that is reasonable - and write the ones due tomorrow the night before (it helps subconscious processes to process the list overnight). Long-term processes must be process-based - while short-term items should be product-oriented. Over time, you'll be better at estimating tasks. "Eat your frogs first in the morning" - doing your hardest tasks first helps you start the day great and remain motivated.
Have an early wind-up time - "quitting time is as important as the working time". While it's alright to override them sometimes in huge projects, you shouldn't do it as a habit. One might say you can't do this with active studies: but Cal Newport used a 5 pm deadline for most of his student career and ended up with a PhD from MIT. I immediately think: what about dual-studies?
Even if you have a dual job, have kids, or whatever (valid) excuse you have for working all the time, try to squeeze a little break time in.
Time after time, those who are committed to maintaining healthy leisure time along with their hard work outperformed those who doggedly pursue an endless treadmill.
Deeper into Memory
Memory is only a part of learning, but it's a very important one.
As human beings, we have outstanding visual and spacial memories. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Imagining a vivid image for an abstract concept - even better, hearing and feeling and smelling, the more hooks the better - is really good. This can get pretty silly - the Professor discussed utilizing a flying cow to remember a physics equation. Here's the thing, though: the sillier, the better! It's hooked more into your brain if its unusual.
To move from working to long term and staying there, it needs to be memorable and repeated. Index cards help - handwriting is better than typing, it seems. I considered it deeply, but don't think I'll drop online notes right now. The pros of it just cannot be understated
Reviewing before sleep is a very good idea - your brain tosses and turns the content to solidify them (see what I did just here? I used a sleep-related metaphor to hook the concept of reviewing before sleep into your brain. It becomes easier over time, I promise... though I'm far from the expert here)
We can remember words better by taking the first letters and putting them into a word and dreaming of an image.
Numbers: associate with memorable events, connect with some number you know well. This is a little hard, and I don't think it's for everybody, and it definitely isn't for everything. Let's say that I need to remember the year Armstrong landed on the moon. It's 1979 - the same year my father was born. Stuff like that.
I'd have thought self-generation - making up these connections yourself, as opposed to getting them online - matters, but the Prof. doesn't seem to think so.
The famous memory palace method involves taking a familiar place and linking it to shocking images. It'll be slow at first, but like everything else, it'll become quicker over time.
One study showed that a person using the memory palace technique could remember more than 95 percent of a 40 to 50 item list after only one or two practice mental walks where the items were placed on the grounds or the local university. In using the mind this way, memorization can become an outstanding exercise in creativity that simultaneously build neural hooks for even more creativity".
Purists might sniff, but studies show that these students do better. the "big picture templates helping transform novices to semi-experts much more quickly even in a matter of weeks" - I like the sound of it.
Some other interesting stuff. It turns out that memories are not fixed - whenever you recall, it changes - reconsolidation, and there is no way to distinguish false from true ones. I found that extremely scary, for some reason. We also discussed the different components of memory, and the cells that lead to them.
With that, the week is over!
Week 4
This was like a wrap up into everything covered, and some ideas on how to "unlock your potential". It's a super interesting week of many unrelated ideas and intense, science-backed, motivation - so I'm going to leave it for you to enjoy when you take the course!
If you do take it, let me know in the comments - I hope it helps you as much as it helped me!