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

A Little Bit about reading ritin' and rithmatic

I'm taking a course on Learning How to Learn  by Dr Barbara Oakley

One of the assignments is to post something about what you have learned, to help others learn as well.

This is an excellent idea, and so the next posts will be somewhat about this.

It might inspire me to post some of my other assignments from some of the other courses I've taken.

I say 'somewhat' since this is a blog about many other things than just learning... but it's about learning as well.


This is, as you recall, the 50 Coursera Challenge from Altucher.

Another day for you and me in Paradise

Apologies blogland.wonderland. Maybe miss.so.and.so was right, and this IS the blog I’m never going to post in again…

Welp, it’s a little over a year since I started the daily practice routine. Not sure what I can say about it that's simple and easy and won't be a 5000 word essay.. there’s good, and bad (OCD, my friends.. how many times can you flip that lightswitch on and off) and indifferent.

I’m going to say overall.. good. I’ll try to explain over the course of a few posts. A lot to cover but I want to say one thing that's happened is that it’s made me very conscious that trying to cover off on 200plus things in one day is a wee bit ambitious ₁

ie, here’s the math… not counting an hour to relax, 1 for food, 1 for ‘ablutions’ for prepping for work, 2 for traveling to and from work, 6 for sleep, 1 to ‘decompress’, there’s about 12 hours killed there. 8 for work and we’re at 20 hours. So let’s be generous, and leave out chores.. and you have 4 hours to do whatever. That’s 240 minutes, leaving a little over a minute for each thing on my list of things to make me a better person… and this list includes things like watching MOOC videos on Calculus, playing a quick game of chess, reading a spiritual blog, listening to a philosophy podcast, playing with my dogs… You’d have to be insanely focused and have an almost surgical precision at triage to do it all effectively..

Anyway.. This is my progress to date...


1 231 to be exact

Day 100 post

I've already galloped past day 100. I wanted to post another 'hurrah look at my progress!!' post.

But here we are at day 105 or something, and I pretty much feel the same ₁…
anyhoo, in the spirit of blogin regularly, I give you this:

I haven't been able to find my bucket list (or 50 things to do before I die). However, I made it in my 20's, so it's likely I'm not going tour with Black Flag, and maybe best I let it lie.

If I find it I’ll post it for shits and giggles, but otherwise...

I give you this.. Altucher's challenge from his excellent blog 'the Confidentials'

from Ways to trick your kid into not going to college ...

“And it’s not all about money. The below challenges will make them healthier, more creative, wealthier, etc, depending on what they do. And none of the below requires that much money.

They will also have the pleasure of doing something that is utterly unique and will ultimately be considered cool or fascinating in their social group.

A) Make a youtube video (or channel) that has five million real views.
B ) Get past the second series of Ashtanga Yoga. (at least part of this has to occur in India).
C) Make a business that has over $50,000 in revenues in the 12th month.
D) Write a book (or set of books) that has more than 5000 paying readers
E) Create a blog that has over 100,000 unique monthly readers. Note: you don’t have to be the only writer on that blog.
F) Take 50 or more courses on Coursera. With me.
G) Intern with someone who is among the best in the world at what they do.
H) Organize at least 20 meetups of twenty people or more around a specific topic.
I) Run for political office and get at least 30% of the vote in a primary.
J) Have 50 people write to me explaining, in detail, how you saved their lives.”

Not a bad list to start off with…


1 i.e. I’m here, I’m alive, get used to it

60 day blog post

I intended to post something 60 days in, a sort of a 'hey, look how things have changed'

I'm now on day 91 for some of my day to day tasks. Soooo easy to blow by a milestone.

As they say... the hours get shorter as the time goes by...

or something like that.

It's been an interesting ride. I still have 2 or three things I haven't started that mock me each time I look to update. And the majority of what I'm focused on is health, eating, and physical stuff. Nothing that will make me a millionaire or reach enlightenment.

(note, there's always crossover between working out and spiritual with me, since I do martial arts and yoga, and spiritual and emotional since I do exercises to free the mind of emotional baggage a la buddhism)

I'm really suckin' at the idea generation. I'm pretty much faking it.

Some days I feel particularly manic, and other days lethargic. But I still get most of the day to day ablutions done...

Would love to introduce more 'meat' into my education, and mental challenges, as well as truly, truly enjoy the fun stuff in my life.

Anyway, as one of my bosses used to say, onward through the fog!

Let There be Rock - the spiritual practice

I spent the weekend with in-laws and family and some aussies at my sister's wedding. I come from a family that appreciated something I’ll deem 80’s hair metal, if you will allow me that leeway.₁

Sometimes when I visit, we’ll play Rockband, and we’ll crack out Supertramp or Journey songs…. when we’re feeling ballady.

Now with tdp, there’s a spiritual element: ‘reading something spiritual each day’

Studying. If I read a spiritual text (doesn’t matter what it is: Bible, Tao Te Ching, anything Zen related, even inspirational self-help stuff, doesn’t matter) I tend to feel good. This is not as powerful as praying or meditating (it doesn’t train your mind to cut out the BS) but it still makes me feel good.

From: Altucher's how-to-be-the-luckiest-guy-on-the-planet post

Usually for me it’s reading something about EFT or Yoga. Something like that. But every once in a while I like to listen to ear splitting rock n roll, and appreciate it for it’s pure primal energy..

So I count it when I do, and usually I listen to AC/DC let there be rock.

You bet! Sometimes you just gotta, you know? You just gotta.

1 Cause some of it was just rock n roll.

Monkey Mind

I started off with the usual  groups, Emotional, Physical, Spiritual, Mental. but already my monkey mind was trying to recategorize…

Is Yoga spiritual? Physical? Is eating well Physical? Or should Eating become it's own category, and Physical be reserved for 'working out' activities?

Does stretching then become Physical, or should it be 'Health' (like fasts). Whereas Yoga is a kind of stretching?

And hell, shouldn’t some of the mental be about learning new things for work? Should I have a work category so tdp doesn't distract me too much form my actual work?

Or the 4 HourWorkWeek idea of doing in less time, more? Should I challenge myself to do intense discrete chunks of 'work' as part of this?

Like make a most urgent thing I'm avoiding doing and block time to do it? And top 3 things I really need to get done but keep putting off. And that way stay focused and on point for them?

And spiritual? Back to that… I study lots of spiritual stuff that a normal person wouldn’t consider spiritual. For instance Buddhism is about doing, not reading!! It's about meditation, not 'thinking about it'. So does reading about it really count? Or is that more of an intellectual activity?

And the suggested "read a wiki article a day". Is that intellectual, or feeding your idea machine?

Then  things like Lumosity, for instance... Maybe I want weekends off of doing all this 5 minutes of tracking this and that. Maybe I don't always want to be doing mind games?

Categorization: a great monkey mind trait.

…but really…. everything’s interrelated..

Now: is that article yoga? or mental? or consciousness in a spiritual sense?

I do stuff all the time, so what's this daily practice thing all about?

The Daily Practice is a tool to help you track some daily activities. These are core activities that allow you to "sharpen the saw" as the 7 habits people would say. In the original design, they fall into 4 categories: Emotional, Mental, Physical and Spiritual, but you aren’t limited in only using those categories.

Why call it a Practice?

It’s a practice because it's akin to how the buddhists would term meditation.. a practice is something you do, daily. Therefore it is a doingness, and not just ‘talking about it with your friends’.

You want to get good at freethrows, go out and throw a few freethrows... Don’t sit around thinking how nice it would be if you found tie to throw some freethrows.

There is a caveat about the thinkingness part though, you should be aware of. Or in other words, let’s not totally dismiss the mind off the get go… The caveat is visualization, which can actually help one improve.

Visualization is the mental act of using your mind’s eye and imagining doing something. This isn’t just imagining it in a static way… it’s going through the steps of something…. imagining doing it step by step, rather than physically doing it. But that's still more involved than just 'thinking about it'

There’s all kinds of performance improvement information on visualization in the area of sports-coaching, specifically around psycho-cybernetics

When you login, it gives you some ‘default’ options:

• Doing X pushups per day
• Reading one Wikipedia article a day
• Reading something spiritual
• That kind of thing

I’m doing this because I want to see how this whole whositawhatsit will modify my existence. Since I do much of this kind of daily activities to keep myself on my toes, tracking it is really what I need.

I don't believe anything does anything to you unless you let it, by the way. It’s really about the ‘you’ in the equation… But a 'system' that allows you to track how often you do the things that really matter to you is a win win imho

Administrivia 101

This blog is gonna be a place where I talk and post about The Daily Practice. For those wondering what that is, see James Altucher’s excellent blog post about making your life magical: How to be the luckiest guy on the planet.

“My ONLY Three Goals in Life
A)     I want to be happy.
B)      I want to eradicate unhappiness in my life.
C)      I want every day to be as smooth as possible. No hassles. 

That’s it. I’m not asking for much. I need simple goals else I can’t achieve them.
There’s been at least ten times in my life that everything seemed so low I felt like I would never achieve the above three things and the world would be better off without me. Other times I felt like I was stuck at a crossroads and would never figure out which road to take. Each time I bounced back. 

When I look back at these times now I realize there was a common thread. Each time there were four things, and only four things, that were always in place in order for me to bounce back. Now I try to incorporate these four things into a daily practice so I never dip low again.”

It's not that I haven't seen this stuff before. Way back when, when I was all about process and efficiency.. I saw variations of the 4 step process. They can also be seen in the 7Habits material..

“Sharpen the Saw means preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have--you. It means having a balanced program for self-renewal in the four areas of your life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual.”

Just to give it purpose other than another to do list, I’ve decided to add a bucket list component to the blog. Something I wanted to have as a blog at some point. And unless I live to be over 90, I’m right smack in the middle of my life. So it's time to start bucket listing that shit!

One of the problems with being in the middle years is that I’ve always sort of done what I wanted to anyway: I live in a cool neighbourhood, do urban things, go to burning man when I can, hang with artist and poets, like tattoos, listen to punk rawk, have done pretty much all the drugs I could ever want to, drank heavily. You know, that kind of shit.

I haven’t felt like I’ve wasted my life. Sure, I haven’t focused enough on any one things to be successful like a Jobs or Gates or anything like that, but it's been a pretty good ride. It’s karate one year and St John Ambulance the next. Know what I mean? Poor Impulse Control…

So having a ‘mid-life crisis’ would have to consist of something crazy like becoming born again, moving to the suburbs, and raising goats.

Anyhoooo, I'm having fun with the Daily Practice, and want to share. so there it is...

My Progress