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Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough…
Learning How to Learn:
Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects
Deep Learning Solutions
Module 1. What is Learning?
Focused Versus Diffuse Thinking
Two fundamental ways of thinking. Probably either one or another mode.
General introduction
This course is meant to give you practical insight on how to learn more deeply and with less frustration.
Objectives
Explain the difference between focused and diffuse modes of thinking.
Explain what a chunk is, and how and why you can and should enhance your chunking skills.
Explain how working memory and long term memory differ from one another.
Describe key techniques to help students learn most efficiently such as: the Pomodoro, metaphor, story, visualization, deliberate practice, and interleaving.
Describe actions that hinder students from learning most effectively, such as procrastination, over-learning, Einstellung, choking, multi-tasking, illusions of learning, and lack of sleep.
Describe the most important aspects of proper test preparation.
Explain the importance of “mindset” in learning.
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.
Procrastination, Memory, and Sleep
When you look at something that you really rather not do, you activate the areas of your brain associated with pain. Your brain, switchs your attention to something else. But here's the trick.
Pomodoro
Set a timer to 25 minutes, turn off all interruptions, and then focus. Give yourself a little reward when you're done.
Neurons become linked together through repeated use. The more abstract something is, the more important it is to practice in order to bring those ideas into reality for you.
Study by focusing intently. Then take a break or change your focus for awhile. Your brain's diffuse mode works away in the background and helps you out with conceptual understanding.
Two major memory systems
Working memory
Part of memory that has to do with what you're immediately and consciously processing in your mind. Centered out of the prefrontal cortex.
Holds only about four chunks of information. We tend to automatically group memory items into chunks so it seems our working memory is bigger than it actually is.
Short-term memory is something like an inefficient mental blackboard.
Long-term memory
It's like a storage warehouse, distributed over a big area. Different kinds of long-term memories are stored in different regions of the brain.
When you first try to put an item of information in long-term memory, you need to revisit it at least a few times to increase the chances that you'll be able to find it later when you might need it.
Spaced repetition
Repeating what you're trying to retain, but what you want to do is a space this repetition out over a number of days.
Sleep and learning
Taking a test without getting enough sleep means you're operating with a brain that got little metabolic toxins floating around in it, poisons, and make it so you can't think very clearly.
Sleep does more than just allow your brain to wash away toxins. It's an important part of the memory and learning process. Your brain tidies up ideas and concepts you're learning.
Go over what you're learning right before you take a nap or go to sleep for the evening, to have an increased chance of dreaming about it.
Go even further and set it in mind that you want to dream about the material and this seems to improve your chances of dreaming about it.
Researchers discovered that not long after people might start actually working out what they didn't like, that neurodiscomfort disappeared.
Module 2. Chunking
Chunks
Conceptual chunk:
A network of neurons that are used to firing together so you can think a thought or perform an action smoothly and effectively
Compact packages of information that your mind can easily access
Chunking is the mental leap that helps you unite bits of information together through meaning.
The new logical whole makes the chunk easier to remember, and also makes it easier to fit the chunk into the larger picture of what you're learning.
Focused practice and repetition, the creation of strong memory traces, helps you to create chunks.