Learning How To Learn: Week 2

(These are my notes from the Coursera course: Learning How To Learn, which I highly recommend to everyone)

Chunking

What is a chunk?

  • Chunks are pieces of information that are bound together through meaning and use.
  • The first step to expertise in any subject is to create chunks, uniting scattered bits of information you’ve learned.
  • Focused practice and repetition leads to strong memory traces which leads to chunks.
  • Small chunks can become larger as you gradually improve in a subject.
  • Chunking helps your brain run more efficiently. Once you chunk a bunch of information, you don’t need to remember 10 different things, but just the one chunk. e.g When putting on clothes in the morning, you just think — put on my clothes. Imagine how much harder it would be if you had to think of every single action instead of one big chunk.
  • Before chunking, 4 slots of your working memory might be used to hold a few related ideas. But after you make a chunk, it only takes 1 slot of working memory for the combination of those ideas.

Worked solutions

  • Worked through examples are very useful because they help you see key features and underlying principles.
  • But it might be too easy to focus too much on individual steps and not the connections between steps.
  • When looking at worked solutions, don’t do it mindlessly. It’s more like using a roadmap. Pay attention to how it works and soon you’ll be able to find your way on your own, and find new ways to get there.

Steps to forming a chunk

  • Focus your undivided attention on the information you want to chunk
  • Understand the basic idea you’re trying to chunk. Creating a chunk when you don’t understand is useless.
  • Just understanding something doesn’t create a chunk. Looking at a painting doesn’t mean you can paint it. You need to test yourself to verify that you can actually do it.
  • Gain context: it’s important not only to know the chunk, but when to use it and when not to use it. You can gain context by practicing / testing yourself.
  • Learn the major points first, then fill in the details (chunks)
  • A good way to get an idea of the bigger picture when studying is to glance through the book quickly, or listen to a lecture, before actually reading each section in depth.

Illusions of competence

  • A common approach to studying is re-reading material, but this is not effective. Reading a book is easier than recalling, and makes you think you know more than you actually do
  • Testing yourself is the easiest way to avoid illusions of competence
  • Just looking at a solution doesn’t mean you know it, but it may make you feel like you do.
  • Highlighting and underlining should be done effectively, otherwise it’s misleading. Highlighting can make you think you know something when you actually don’t. It should be kept to a minimum. Writing notes in the margin is a better idea.
  • Mistakes are good when recalling because they help you correct your thinking
  • Recalling material in different environments will make your knowledge independent of the cues of a particular location. This can help you do better in the exam room.

Motivation

  • It’s easier to learn something you’re interested in.
  • Neuromodulators are chemicals that tell you about the importance of an activity and its value to your future.
  • Acetylcholine: Leads to new long term memories. Activated during focused learning.
  • Dopamine: Controls motivation and helps you learn based on rewards. Released upon unexpected reward. Affects learning and decision making. Can be about future rewards as well, not just immediate rewards. Drugs spike your dopamine levels, which is why they lead to cravings and erode your free will. Severe loss of dopamine can result in Parkinson's disease. One way to use dopamine to your benefit is by promising yourself some future reward.
  • Serotonin: Affects social life. Alpha monkey has highest serotonin. Anti-depressants increase serotonin. Low serotonin leads to riskier behavior. Prisoners tend to have lower serotonin.
  • Emotions affect learning because they’re intertwined with perception and attention.

Library of chunks

  • The ability to combine chunks from different subjects is what leads to innovation.
  • Gradually build the number of chunks in your mind.
  • Chunks can help you learn new concepts from another field. e.g Physics chunks may help you when learning business.
  • Chunks are essentially compressed information, and as you become an expert, your chunks can become bigger.
  • When trying to figure something out, you can use your library of chunks to more easily solve it.
  • The diffuse mode helps you make connections between chunks to solve new problems.
  • Having a chunk library helps you see the bigger picture.

Two ways to solve problems:

  1. Sequential: focused mode.
  2. Intuition / Holistic: Diffuse mode learning. Most difficult concepts are grasped through intuition because they’re so different from what you’re used to that you couldn’t possibly get it through the focused mode. But you should always verify your intuition using the focused mode.

Overlearning and Einstellung

Overlearning

  • Studying after you’ve mastered everything you could in one session is called overlearning.
  • Overlearning is useful when you need to do something automatically. e.g Playing a piano concerto or giving a speech.
  • Overlearning in a single session is a waste of time though. It doesn’t strengthen long term connections, and you can get too strong at that one skill.
  • Practicing again in subsequent sessions could be valuable, but studying what you already know is easy. This can lead to illusions of competence. You might feel like you’ve mastered everything, when you only know the easy things.
  • Balance your studies by focusing on more difficult material as well. Practice the things you don’t understand.

Interleaving

  • You need to learn to use the best chunks by trying out different patterns / types of questions.
  • Once you have the basic idea, try problems of different types. This is called interleaving. Look ahead at varied problem sets in your textbook.
  • Knowing ‘how’ isn’t enough. You need to also know ‘when’ to use a chunk. Jump around different chapters’ questions when studying. It might be harder, but will give you far better context on when to use particular methods.
  • Interleaving helps develop creative power within a discipline and between different disciplines. It can help you make new connections between different fields, or bring new ideas to a field.

Einstellung

  • Einstellung is when neural patterns you‘ve already developed prevent new solutions from being found. It’s like installing roadblocks in your brain based in your initial views. You have to unlearn old ideas while learning new ones.
  • Experts may know one subject more deeply, but can be more entrenched in specific thought patterns. According to Thomas Kuhn, paradigm shifts in science come from either people from another discipline or young people.
  • “Science advances one funeral at a time.” — Max Planck
  • Learning doesn’t just have to be from books or lectures. Physicist Richard Feynman was inspired by watching someone throw a plate into the air.

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