Coursera-Learning how to learn-take away

Topics

1. diffuse and focused mode

two fundamentally different modes of thinking. Here, I'll call them the Focused and the Diffuse modes.

when you're learning something new, especially something that's a little more difficult, your mind needs to be able to go back and forth between the two different learning modes. Similarly, to build neural structure, you need to do a little work every day, gradually allowing yourself to grow a neuro-scaffold to hang your thinking on a little bit, every day, and that's the trick.

2，practice makes permanent

it's important to practice with ideas and concepts your learning in math and science, just like anything else you're learning. to help enhance and strengthen the neural connection your making during the learning process.

The more abstract something is, the more important it is to practice in order to bring those ideas into reality for you.

Even if the ideas you're dealing with are abstract, the neural thought patterns you are creating are real and concrete. At least they are if you build and strengthen them through practice.

Study it hard by focusing intently. Then take a break or at least change your focus to something different for awhile. During this time of seeming relaxation, your brain's diffuse mode has a chance to work away in the background and help you out with your conceptual understanding.

3.memory

When you encounter something new, you often use your working memory to handle it. If you want to move that information into your long-term memory, it often takes time and practice.

when you grasp one chunk, you'll find that that chunk can be related in surprising ways to similar chunks, not only in that field but also in very different fields. This idea is called transfer.

When you're trying to figure something out, if you have a good library of these chunks, you can more easily skip to the right solution by metaphorically speaking, listening to whispers from your diffuse mode.

You may think there are so many problems and concepts just in a single section or chapter of whatever you're studying. There's just no way to learn them all. This is where the law of Serendipity comes into play. Lady Luck favors the one who tries. Just focus on whatever section you're studying. You'll find that once you put that first problem or concept in your mental library, whatever it is, then the second concept will go in a little more easily and the third more easily still. Not that all of this is a snap, but it does get easier.

4.Overlearning, Choking, Einstellung, Chunking, and Interleaving

Instead, you want to balance your studies by deliberately focusing on what you find more difficult. This focusing on the more difficult material is called deliberate practice. It's often what makes the difference between a good student and a great student.

Understanding how to obtain real solutions is important in learning and in life. Mastering a new subject means learning not only the basic chunks, but also learning how to select and use different chunks. The best way to learn that is by practicing jumping back and forth between problems or situations that require different techniques or strategies.

Although practice and repetition is important in helping build solid neural patterns to draw on, it's interleaving that starts building flexibility and creativity.

When you interleave between several subjects or disciplines, you can more easily make interesting new connections between chunks in the different fields, which can enhance your creativity even further. Of course it takes time to develop solid chunks of knowledge in different fields, so sometimes there's a trade off.

don't make the mistake of thinking that learning only occurs in the kinds of subjects you acquire from teachers or books. When you teach a child how to deal effectively with a bully, or you fix a leaky faucet, or you quickly pack a small suitcase for a business trip to Hong Kong, all of these illustrate the outcomes of important aspects of learning.

5.Zombies Everywhere

Number two, the routine. This is your zombie mode, the routine habitual response your brain is used to falling into when it receives the cue. Zombie responses can be useful, harmless or sometimes harmful.

Finding ways to reward good study habits is important for escaping procrastination.

1. Surf is Up: Process Versus Product

you find yourself avoiding certain tasks because they make you feel uncomfortable, you should know there's another helpful way to re-frame things. And that's to learn to focus on process not product. Process means, the flow of time and the habits and actions associated with that flow of time. As in, I'm going to spend 20 minutes working. Product is an outcome, for example, a homework assignment that you need to finish.

For you, one of the easiest ways to focus on process is to focus on doing a Pomodoro, a 25 minute timed work session, not on completing a task.

7.Harnessing Your Zombies to Help You

four components of habit: the cue, the routine, the reward, the belief.

The only place you need to apply willpower is to change your reaction to the cue. The cue: location, time, how you feel, reactions.

You can prevent the most damaging cues by shutting off your cell phone or keeping yourself away from the internet and other distractions for brief periods of time, as when you're doing a Pomodoro.

Don't feel bad if you find that you have trouble getting into a flow state at first, I sometimes find it takes a few days of drudgery through a few cycles of the Pomodoro technique before flow begins to unfold, and I find myself starting to enjoy work on a new topic.

8.Juggling Life and Learning

A good way for you to keep perspective about what you're trying to learn and accomplish is to once a week write a brief weekly list of key tasks in a planner journal.

Then, each day on another page of your planner journal, write a list of the tasks that you can reasonably work on or accomplish. Try to write this daily task list the evening before. Some are process-oriented, some are product-oriented but that is only because they are doable within a limited period of time.

Mixing other tasks up with your learning seems to make everything more enjoyable and keeps you from prolonged and unhealthy bouts of sitting.

Sometimes I sprinkle a few tasks that involve physical motion on my list even if it's just cleaning something.

Notice my goal finish time for the day - 5 pm.

Over time, as I've gained more experience, I've gotten much better at gauging how long it takes to do any given task.

You'll find yourself improving quickly as you become more realistic about what you can reasonably do in any given time.

Note my reminders. I wanted to keep my focus on each item when I'm working on it and I want to have fun.

9.Summing Up Procrastination

Keep a planner journal so you can easily track when you reach your goals and observe what does and doesn't work. Commit yourself to certain routines and tasks each day. Write your plan tasks out the night before so your brain has time to dwell on your goals and help ensure success. Arrange your work into a series of small challenges. Always make sure you and your zombies get lots of rewards. Take a few minutes to savor the feelings of happiness and triumph, which also gives your brain a chance to temporarily change modes. Deliberately delay rewards until you finish the task. Watch for procrastination cues. Try putting yourself in new surroundings with few procrastination cues such as the quiet section of the library. Gain trust in your new system.

Gain trust in your new system. You want to work hard during times of focused concentration and also to trust your system enough so that when it comes time to relax, you actually relax without feelings of guilt or worry. Have backup plans for when you still procrastinate. No one is perfect after all. Eat your frogs first every day.

10.Creating Meaningful Groups and the Memory Palace Technique

Another key to memorization is to create meaningful groups that simplify the material.

It's much easier to remember numbers by associating them with memorable events.

In using the mind this way, memorization can become an outstanding exercise in creativity that simultaneously build neural hooks for even more creativity.

11.How to Become a Better Learner

Tip number one, the best gift that you can give your brain is Physical Exercise.

Practice can repair, as well as train the brain.

Learning, Planning, Language, these are the skills that make us human. The prefrontal cortex is also involved in complex analysis in social behaviors, as well as decision making and planning.

12.Renaissance Learning and Unlocking Your Potential

Remember, it takes time to assimilate new knowledge.

You'll inevitably go through some periods where you seem to take an exasperating step backwards in your understanding.

13.Create a Lively Visual Metaphor or Analogy

One of the best things you can do to not only remember, but understand concepts, is to create a metaphor or analogy for them.

Often the more visual the better.

A metaphor is just a way of realizing that one thing is somehow similar to another.

As you climb to a more sophisticated understanding of whatever topic you're concentrating on, you can revise your metaphors or toss them away and create more meaningful ones. Metaphors and visualization, being able to see something in your mind's eye, have been especially helpful not only in art and literature, but also in allowing the scientific and engineering world to make progress.

It's often helpful to pretend that you are the concept you're trying to understand.

Interestingly, metaphors and analogies are useful for getting people out of einstellen.

Stories, even if they're just using silly memory tricks, can also allow you to more easily retain what you're trying to learn. Metaphors also help glue an idea into your mind, because they make a connection to neural structures that are already there.

14.No Need for Genius Envy

Smooth repetition creates muscle memory, so your body knows what to do from a single thought. One chunk instead of having to recall all the complex steps involved in hitting a ball. In the same way, once you understand why you do something in math and science. You don't have to keep re-explaining the how to yourself every time you do it.

The greater understanding results from the fact that your mind constructed the patterns of meaning, rather than simply accepting what someone else has told you.

Remember, people learn by trying to make sense out of the information they perceive.

A superb working memory can hold its thoughts so tightly that new thoughts can't easily peek through.

It is practice, particularly deliberate practice on the toughest aspects of the material that can help lift average brains into the realm of those with more natural gifts.

Whether you're naturally gifted or you have to struggle to get a solid grasp of the fundamentals, you should realize that you're not alone if you think you're an imposter. If you suffer from these kinds of feelings of binadequacy just be aware that many others secretly share them. Everyone has different gifts, as the old saying goes, when one door closes, another opens. Keep your chin up and your eye on the open door.

10 Rules of Studying

These rules form a synthesis of some of the main ideas of the course--they are excerpted from the book A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel in Math and Science (Even if You Flunked Algebra), by Barbara Oakley, Penguin, July, 2014. Feel free to copy these rules and redistribute them, as long as you keep the original wording and this citation. 10 Rules of Good Studying

1. Use recall. After you read a page, look away and recall the main ideas. Highlight very little, and never highlight anything you haven’t put in your mind first by recalling. Try recalling main ideas when you are walking to class or in a different room from where you originally learned it. An ability to recall—to generate the ideas from inside yourself—is one of the key indicators of good learning.

2. Test yourself. On everything. All the time. Flash cards are your friend.

3. Chunk your problems. Chunking is understanding and practicing with a problem solution so that it can all come to mind in a flash. After you solve a problem, rehearse it. Make sure you can solve it cold—every step. Pretend it’s a song and learn to play it over and over again in your mind, so the information combines into one smooth chunk you can pull up whenever you want.

4. Space your repetition. Spread out your learning in any subject a little every day, just like an athlete. Your brain is like a muscle—it can handle only a limited amount of exercise on one subject at a time.

5. Alternate different problem-solving techniques during your practice. Never practice too long at any one session using only one problem-solving technique—after a while, you are just mimicking what you did on the previous problem. Mix it up and work on different types of problems. This teaches you both how and when to use a technique. (Books generally are not set up this way, so you’ll need to do this on your own.) After every assignment and test, go over your errors, make sure you understand why you made them, and then rework your solutions. To study most effectively, handwrite (don’t type) a problem on one side of a flash card and the solution on the other. (Handwriting builds stronger neural structures in memory than typing.) You might also photograph the card if you want to load it into a study app on your smartphone. Quiz yourself randomly on different types of problems. Another way to do this is to randomly flip through your book, pick out a problem, and see whether you can solve it cold.

6. Take breaks. It is common to be unable to solve problems or figure out concepts in math or science the first time you encounter them. This is why a little study every day is much better than a lot of studying all at once. When you get frustrated with a math or science problem, take a break so that another part of your mind can take over and work in the background.

7. Use explanatory questioning and simple analogies. Whenever you are struggling with a concept, think to yourself, How can I explain this so that a ten-year-old could understand it? Using an analogy really helps, like saying that the flow of electricity is like the flow of water. Don’t just think your explanation—say it out loud or put it in writing. The additional effort of speaking and writing allows you to more deeply encode (that is, convert into neural memory structures) what you are learning.

8. Focus. Turn off all interrupting beeps and alarms on your phone and computer, and then turn on a timer for twenty-five minutes. Focus intently for those twenty-five minutes and try to work as diligently as you can. After the timer goes off, give yourself a small, fun reward. A few of these sessions in a day can really move your studies forward. Try to set up times and places where studying—not glancing at your computer or phone—is just something you naturally do.

9. Eat your frogs first. Do the hardest thing earliest in the day, when you are fresh.

10. Make a mental contrast. Imagine where you’ve come from and contrast that with the dream of where your studies will take you. Post a picture or words in your workspace to remind you of your dream. Look at that when you find your motivation lagging. This work will pay off both for you and those you love!