Ta Da! Ole! Salut! Do svidaniya!

Welp, it’s 3:30 here and I want to go reward myself with something else. I have only touched on a few topics, and might post more later. Who knows… This is the beauty of asynchronous blog posting and the net..

If you want more, you should enrol in the next installment of the course

Here’s some of the things I either mentioned in the post briefly or missed chatting about:

Recall and self-testing

How memory works

And here’s some other topics pulled directly from the course page on this assignment:

Key techniques proven by research to help students learn most efficiently

Illusions of learning

Metaphor, story, and visualization in learning

Transfer of ideas and concepts from one area to another

Deliberate practice

Interleaving

Testing

Mindset

Working with others in learning

Cultural similarities and differences in learning

Life-long learning and broadening your passions

Learning independently

Go little bird! Fly! be free! Learn!

To Be or not to be.. or rather, to Do? Much about nothing?

Task list

Another technique mentioned in "Learning How to Learn" is creating a task list. This frees up your working memory as well, and can give you the planning tools to do things like scheduling Pomodoro’s, making sure you build in rewards and time to relax for diffuse learning

This has been my goto. In the course they mention ‘doing the frogs first’. I do something similar... I got from Tim Ferris’s 4 hour work week. Figure out:

a) What are you avoiding/ what do you fear? Try to do that first.
b) Top 3 things you really need to do.

Do those and you will be surprised how much ‘quality’ stuff you get done rather than just busy work all day.

A little bit more on this. Personally, I use ‘the daily practice’ tool. This is a website developed by Jay Shirley based off of James Altucher's post here about the 4 things you really need to do each day

My progress is here

And this is an excellent post about someone who used it to help learn another language!

Procrastination re: the overcoming of dotdotdot

I thought I’d never get to this one… But fiiiiinalllllly

Procrastination:

As presented in the course, seems to be related to a way your brain tries to avoid pain. It associates these boring-as-all-hell learning exercise as, well BORING, and makes you feel the pain…

This is a chemical thing, and habit forming, so you regularly avoid tasks that seem painful and go do something fun like surf the interwebs.

One technique suggested is the Pomodoro method. There’s a little primer here

But here’s a quick summary:

Choose a task to be accomplished.

Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes (the Pomodoro is the timer)

Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper

Take a short break (5 minutes is OK)

Every 4 Pomodoros take a longer break

This allows you to ‘know’ that it’s not going to be forever, so you can ‘willpower’ your way into it. And using the dopamine effect of reward eventually this trains yourself to so these little training sessions seem enjoyable. I know for me, there's nothing more cool than watching a 5 min Coursera video, then maybe another, then going and doing something else. rather than sitting in a 3 hour class...

Another way to help overcome procrastination is to try to do repeated small learning staggered over several days. This seems to be suggested as a way to help you solidify your learning over time.

In a way it is combining several techniques. Small focused learning with a reward, then time off to allow diffuse learning to assimilate the ideas into chunks, freeing up your working memory for the next session.

If you include ‘self testing’ via the recall method (possibly discussed later) you are affirming what you know and do not know. And can further focus your study on those areas you do not know.

This is your Brain on Drugs

Had a sleep. Can post more on this now. All those metabolic chemicals have been washed away

Speaking of chemicals… this installment: Mind Chemicals involved in learning

[cue theramin noise] 

There are 3 that were focused on in the course: Acetylcholine, dopamine and serotonin

Seratonin:

Serotonin is probably the most familiar what with all the literature and controversy controversy over the last few years about depression

It ‘strongly affects your social life” as Dr. Terrence Sejnowski mentions in a video. Social life is a key component of learning, if in no other way than the ‘diffuse’ method of assimilating information. 

It’s also related to risk taking behaviours… So serotonin affects emotions, and it has been found that emotions are intertwined with cognition and perception, and affect learning. Hey, remember trying to study that for that final exam right after breaking up with your girlfriend? No? me neither.. but still, that would suck, and I would fail.

Dopamine:

It controls motivation, and is related to ‘reward learning’. You know that squishy feeling you get in your gut when you accomplish a task? Something like that.

In learning, dopamine acts to help you predict future rewards. This can help with procrastination, working with the Pomodoro method. Study for smaller periods of time and give yourself a reward when you accomplish that task. It then becomes about being 'process based' and not ‘product’ (aka productivity). More on that later.

Acetylcholine: 

This is related to a particular neuron that is involved in neuroplasticity. This helps with long term memory. But for our purposes let’s consider that it allows your brain to change and develop as you involve yourself in new learning and focused learning.

Growth Mindset:

There’s a whole new area of thought in this thanks to Carol Dweck who’s material I ran into a few years back on a self-help blog… the jist is that you can learn over your lifetime, and the brain is designed for it. Instead of the old idea that each of us is given some set of talents and that’s it bub, that’s all, do that one thing only and then lights out.

Instead, you CAN teach an old dog new tricks.

You add the sugar to the spice and you get everything nice

Another technique for learning: Chunking

This one comes up a fair amount in the Course (Learning How to Learn)

Chunking is the way you group ideas into a whole, to assist you in learning..

The analogy is to puzzle pieces. Imagine 'ideas on a topic' as many puzzle pieces all scrambled… Chunking allows you to “group the bits of information together through meaning”. Like putting all the pieces of a puzzle of a face together and the body together and eventually starting to see how they fit together into a complete picture. the knee bones connected to the... thighbone! The thigh bones... you get the idea...

This is more than just memorization. This is part of the process of integrating the ideas into conceptual level of knowledge, so that eventually you can draw upon it without having to think of it as disparate ‘facts’. This includes how it fits together with other concepts you know or are learning.

I think of this personally as part of that process of integrating the data into the whole so that you become the master.

For me, this was part of the process of learning by trying out ideas from their very smallest parts and adding to them and building from ‘first principles’. Although a more formal engineering approach than what’s presented in the course, I can see the similarities.

Sleeptime ZzzzzZZZzzzz

Another topic covered in the Learning How to Learn course: Sleeping

Sleep is good. It’s one of my favourite things. In fact, I think I am *thee* champion of sleep! This is no joke. If there was a medal, I would win it. One time in University I went to sleep after a very busy week and woke up 20 hours later. Ah Sundays.. sweet Sundays…

Anyhoo. In this course, sleep is important for learning. Being awake creates toxic products in your brain. Sleep washes them away. Sleep actually causes your brain cells to shrink, and this is ‘like unblocking a stream’. Fluid can flow past these cells and wash away the toxins.

It’s also an important part of the memory and learning process. It helps you assimilate ideas and ‘clean them up’, strengthening them.. according to the course.

This I do know. When I was in the military, our Sergeants used to warn us that being awake 3 full days made you incapable of reacting as an effective soldier. They said the military had done tests once upon a time. Now recall, the US military are crazy about testing their soldiers!

And I know this. Nothing makes a day end faster than going to sleep and waking up feeling like it’s a new day. This is a fairly effective ‘reset’ button in my own experience.So go! Goto sleep! Do eeeeet!

As an aside: Lack of sleep can have many negative health effects. Here are some from webmd:

The usual stuff like heat disease, diabetes... but also it contributes to depression, loss of sex drive, and increases the likeliness of accidents..

Here's a fun little anecdote about item 10

"10. Sleep Loss Impairs Judgment, Especially About Sleep

Lack of sleep can affect our interpretation of events. This hurts our ability to make sound judgments because we may not assess situations accurately and act on them wisely."

Once upon a time in 2005 a friend and I were driving across the US of America to find the American Dream _tm aka: the road less traveled...

We had driven from Toronto to Chicago, and got caught in construction, so were about 3 hours behind. Depressed at our progress, we decided to make a run for Colorado. Screw stopping…

Maybe 20 hours of driving straight by my insane friend later… we were driving along the Rockies about 200 feet up along a road that wound along a cliff-face. I recall Dan-oh holding a coffee in his one hand and leaving the pinky finger free to steer, while I passed him baby carrots into his other hand. He promptly popped them into his mouth.

I looked down and saw railroad tracks by a river way way down in the distance and realized our judgement was horribly impaired. Imagine the headline, I thought.. "Two dumb Canadians drunk on too much driving crash into Colorado river and die. Car exploded. Bodies not recovered. Parents weep."

"I think we're overdue for sleep, buddy. We're making horrible judgments."

Dan-oh agreed by mumbling "hrrblle.. jdddgments."

"buddy, look at this river."

He looked over and I think he had a thing about heights and gulped and agreed to pull over next little hamlet and sleep..

And we are alive today. But I remember thinking how great our driving prowess was, at the time. 

Now I think we were just frigging crazy…

Learning How to Learn Overview

The core points so far:

Analogy

Analogy works best for learning. The example given in the course is that the mind is like a pinball machine. Imagine the many bumpers as ideas that the ball can bounce along to make connections. Focused learning has bumpers closer together than diffuse learning.

Another analogy is that learning is like building a wall. You have to let the ‘mortar’ settle and the foundation solidify. This take learning things in smaller bits, over time, rather than cramming (this would be building the wall in one night and so it collapses under the weight of so much brick on unsolid mortar!!)

Focus versus Diffuse

These are ways the mind works. We all know focused: this is the classic idea of studying something with as full attention as possible. Like in a library, with that A/C sound humming the background, until you are reading the same line over and over and over and slowly falllll asleeeeeeezzzzZZZzzzzzzz. I kid I kid! Of course we all know this. This is the classic exam time in University where you study and study. And of course 'learn'

Diffuse is that way of thinking you do when you are not really thinking. It’s akin to the mind making subconscious (I hate that word, but more on that later) connections between ideas. Maybe even this is that ‘A-HA!' mechanism at work here, the mechanism that we hear so much about with the geniuses.

Importance of Diffuse

It allows the focused bits of information to be organized and absorbed and eventually take shape into ‘chunks’ of ideas that help you to one day become a ‘master’.

More points to cover.

There’s more, but I’m going to follow the course methodology and go watch an episode of Broadchurch and let it all settle in there.

Importance of Sleeping

Chunking

Mind Chemicals involved in Learning

Procrastination/the overcoming of dotdotdot