In courses•December 15, 2020•3 min read
This is a summary of one of my favorite personal growth courses, Learning How to Learn
What is learning?
Learning is an active process that involves thinking, memory and emotions. It is shown in two modes:
- Focus mode: Used when we try to learn something new.
- Diffused mode: Used when we need some inspiration/improvisation. It helps to connect different parts of our brains.
It is beneficial to switch between modes to learn new things and move them into long term memory,
Chunking
The process of breaking down a new concept into small pieces easier to digest. These small pieces are kept in the short memory and slowly move to the long-term memory.
Once a concept is understood is treated as a whole chunk. The more understanding, the more compact it gets. This is important because our working memory can only hold up to 4 chunks. Huge concepts can be compacted into one chunk.
Memory
We have two types of memory:
- Short-term memory: Quite small and not very high quality. It can hold up to 4 items, and it is the first step in order to move something to the long term. Focus mode of learning makes use of this memory.
- Long-term memory: Huge like a warehouse. And as one, things can get lost or hidden. It requires work, recalling something, to be aware of all its content.
Worth mention is that humans have an outstanding visual and spatial memory coded in our genes from our old gatherer/hunters ancestors, who need to remember where the camp was or where the best zones to hunt.
Habits
During a day, humans do thousand of actions. If we required our attention and brainpower to perform those, we would be exhausted after every day. Habits are tasks that we do without processing them. Our brains have already mastered them, so we need less amount of energy to perform them. But there are good and bad habits, and the bad ones like procrastination help us feel better when there is an unwanted task. Habits have these four parts:
- The Cue: It is a trigger that tries to shift our attention to something else.
- The Routine: It is the reaction to this Cue. To change bad habits, we have to focus on changing our reactions to them to build better routines.
- The Reward: It is the immediate recompense of shifting away. For example, procrastinations give a feeling of happiness because they removed the pain from the task we didn't want to do.
- The Belief
Brain tools
- Pomodoro technique: Timer to set an amount of time to focus on something,
- Deliberate practice: Focus on those things that are more difficult.
- Spaced repetition: Repeating concepts daily, weekly… helps moving them to the long-term memory. E.g., Anki cards
- Focus on the process, not on the product: The product triggers pain zones in the brain. Thinking in the competition of the task is what brings cues for procrastination. Instead, focus on the process, on spending some time doing a task that will help "finish" the product.
- Start the day with the most challenging things. "Eat your frogs first."
- Sleep 🛌 helps with brain processes of consolidating and reconsolidating memories and cleaning our brains of harmful particles.