Terrence (Terry) Joseph Sejnowski: PhD in Physics from Princeton in 1978. shift to biology after that. Became a faculty in Biophysics at Johns Hopkins in 1982.
Barbara Oakley: PhD in systems Engineering in 1998 at her 43 and then became a professor of Engineering at Oakland Univ in 1998.
Course Objectives
By the end of the course, we expect you to be able to do the following:
- 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.
focus mode vs diffuse mode
- pinball machine.
- Diffuse mode is for you to learn something new. You think broadly to try to make a connection.
- you can’t be in both modes.
[So the bottom line is, 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.]
[To gain muscular structure, you need to do a][little work every day, gradually allowing your muscles to grow.] Similarly, to build neuro-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.
You are not the same person you were after a night’s sleep or even a nap.
use Pomodoro to trick your procrastination mind. It is easy for your mind to focus on 25 minutes and then has a little reward for the break.
Practice makes permanent. 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 a while. During this relaxation, your brain’s diffuse mode has a chance to work away in the background and help you out with your conceptual understanding. Your neural mortar has a chance to dry.
A little everyday vs all at once
working memory only hold 4 chunks of items.
To put a item in long-term memory, you need to revisit it at least a few times to increase the chances you’ll be able to find later when you might need it. The warehouse is so immense to bury each other, you have to practice and repeat a few times.
spaced repetition: repeat a new vocabulary word or a problem-solving technique over a number of days, instead of repeating something 20 times in one evening.
sleep does more than just allow your brain to wash away toxins. It’s actually important part of the memory and learning process. During sleep, your brain tidy up ideas and concepts your thinking about and learning. It erases the less important part of the memory and simultaneously strengthens areas that you need or want to remember. You brain also rehearse some of the tougher parts of whatever you’re trying to learn. Going over what you’re learning before you sleep or nap can increase the chance of dreaming it.
Terry Q&A
How do you learn completely new things?
I don’t get much out of just going and reading a lot of books. I made a transition from physics to biology. I get into a biology lab and get involved in experiments. learn by doing and learn by osmosis from experts.
How to pay attention something like a boring lecture?
ask a question. The interruption gives rise to a discussion that is a lot more interesting. You learn more by active engagement than passive listening.
Jogging or outdoor exercise is a wonderful way to get the mind disengaged, from the normal train of thought. New ideas come out to the surface. The only problem is remembering all those great ideas. So I take a little notebook along with me.
Benny Lewis Q&A
People sometimes want to learn languages for the wrong reasons, such as show off.
What you really do need is a passion for that language. For the culture, you want to really speak that language inherently for the reasons, of how fascinating that language is.
self-fulfilling prophecies.
Henry Ford, whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.
Robert Bilder
solve a problem already solved by others?
Until you solved the problem yourself you haven’t exercised your brain and made the unique connection in your brain. It is important for your brain to do that in order to pursue other creative problems.
In facing of criticism, be curious, be willing to accept discomfort sometimes because that’s necessary. When you experience some discomfort, you actually accomplish some kind of change.
no pain, no gain. It is also true to the brain.
More openness and less agreeableness tend to show higher creative achievement. It’s difficult to know how to balance the correct approach.
chunck
when you’re stressed your attentional octopus begins to lose the ability to make some of those connections. This is why your brain doesn’t seem to work right when you’re angry, stressed, or afraid.
Just because you see it or even that you understand it, it doesn’t mean that you can actually do it. Only doing it yourselves help creates the neural patterns that underlie true mastery.
gaining context. You see not just how, but also when to use this chunk.
illusion of competence
recalling is much more efficient than rereading the text a number of times. The retrieval process itself enhances deep learning.
Merely glancing at a solution and thinking you truly know it yourselves is one of the most common illusions of competence in learning. you must have the information persisting in your memory if you’re to master the material well enough to do well on tests and to think creatively with it. Highlighting and underlining must be done very carefully, otherwise it will be ineffective and misleading. Making lots of motions with your hand can fool you into thinking you’ve placed the concept in your brain. Words or notes on the margin that synthesize key concepts are a very good idea.
Students like to keep rereading their notes is because it provide the illusion that the material is also in their brain. It is easier to look at the book than recalling. Students persist in their illusions studying that isn’t very effective. This is a reminder that just wanting to learn the material and spend a lot of time with it, doesn’t guarantee you’ll actually learn it. The helpful way to make sure you are learning not fooling yourself with illusions of competence, is to test yourself on whatever you’re learning.
3 neuromodulators
Acetylcholine affects focus learning and attention.
motivation is controlled by a particular chemical substance called dopamine. Dopamine is released from these neurons when we receive an unexpected reward. It has a very powerful effect on learning. It also affects decision making.
Dopamine neurons are part of the unconscious part of your brain.
serotonin molecule is related to social life.
Emotions are intertwined with perception and attention, and interactive with learning and memory.
Law of serendipity: lady luck favors the one who tries.
overlearning, continue practice after you’ve mastered, can be valuable. An expert speaking spend 70 hours for a 20-minute TED talk. Automaticity is helpful in times of nervousness. But it can also waste valuable learning time. You need deliberate practice to do something a little harder.
Sometimes your initial intuition about what’s happening or what you need to be doing is misleading. You have to unlearn your erroneous older ideas or approaches even while you’re learning new ones.
Be lucky - it’s an easy skill to learn
Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people’s ability to notice the unexpected.
many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives.
My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
procrastination
Avoiding procrastination is so important because good learning is a bit by bit activity. You want to avoid cramming which doesn’t build solid neural structures.
habit has 4 parts:
- cue
- routine response
- reward to beat procrastination
- believe
It is normal to have a few negative feelings about beginning a leanring session. It’s how you handle those feelings that matters. say “ Quit wasting time… you will feel better soon.” focus on process instead of product. Allow yourself to back away from judging yourself and allow yourself to relax into the flow of the work.
Harness your zombies: you don’t want to do a full scale change of old habits but override parts of them and develop a few new ones.
weeklist + dailylist. task list free your working memory for problem-solving.
plan your quitting time is as important as planning your working time.
Eat your fogs first in the morning. Try to work on a most important and most disliked task first.
Sometime overdosed of the anesthesiologist to the patients can result in severe health too, doctors should take care of these and try to look after the patient by themselves.
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