Learning How to Learn - Week 2

Chunking

• conceptual chunks
• chunk means a network of neurons that are used to firing together
  • focused practice and repetition helps you tou create chunks
  • after being given out a sample solution, don't focus too much on how an individual step works, but you should also focus on the connection between the steps (why this particular step is the next thing you should do)
• How to make a chunk
  • finding a pattern
  • only doing it yourself
  • understanding context
  • context is where bottom up (learning chunking) and top down learning (big picture) means
  • 1. focused attention
  • 1. understanding of the basic idea
  • 1. practice to gain master and sense of big picture context
  • recall than reread
    • after learning a material, just recall (Karpicke research)
    • by simply practicing and recalling the material -> learn far more and at a much deeper level than just rereading only

Illusion of Competence

• seeing a solution and thinking you understand it yourself
• only doing it yourself and recalling
• underlining and adding notes is better than highlighting (highlighting provides the illusion that you know the material)
• learning outside your usual study place helps (since you get subliminal cues from your study place)

What motivates you?

• Neuromodulators
  • Acetylcholine
  • dopamine
    • drugs
  • serotonin
    • closely link to risk taking behavior
• emotions is intertwined with learning

library of neural patterns

• consulting people
• Chunks can help you understand new concepts through a process called transfer
• Law of Serendipity

Overlearning

• 70 hours practice for a 20 minute ted
• overfitting, illusion of competence, mastering the easy stuff
• deliberately focusing on the difficult material

• Einstellung - phenomenon

  • your initial intuition about what's happening or what you need to be doing is misleading

    Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn discovered that most paradigm shifts in science are brought about either young people or people who were originally trained in a different discipline. They're not so easily trapped by einstellung, blocked thoughts due to their preceding training. And of course there's the old saying that science progresses one funeral at a time as people entrenched in the old ways of looking at things die off.

• jumping into the water without knowing how to swim

Interleaving

• mix up learning
• look ahead

interleaving - building flexibility and creativity practice and repetition - helping to build solid neural patterns