My Notes from “Learning How to Learn” course by Coursera
Like many, at the very beginning times of COVID19 period, as a compelled/voluntarily imprisoned person, I tried to take the advantage of online learning platforms that provided precious opportunities. The first stage (selection of the topic and platform) was quite tough since there were many options. The first one that fully satisfies me was titled “CS50” (Introduction to Computer Science) by David J. Malan[1]. Despite the fact that there were not many new things for me in this course, the manner that Mr. Malan presented was wonderful. However, here, I would like to mention about another course, which can be accessed on Coursera platform freely. In fact, it is a quite popular and well-known course titled “Learning How to Learn”.
My aim is not to mention the basic introduction info about the course but I would like to share some notes from the course that I feel the need to remember anytime. I didn’t classify them under certain topics here since the full content is already available (free of charge) for whom that are interested in. It was a course for 4 weeks so I took many notes but here I tried to summarize as much as I could. Voila!
Both metaphor and analogy are really helpful when you’re trying to learn something new (of course they are also the most powerful instruments for teaching something).
Analogy; building your strength by lifting weights. To gain muscular structure, you need to do a little work every day, gradually allowing your muscles to grow. In the same manner, building mental strength by learning requires disciplined, gradual and continuous effort.
The brain weighs three pounds (1,36 kg), but it consumes ten times more energy compared to the total weight of the rest of our body. It is a very expensive organ and the most complex device in the known universe.
Sleep is important for hitting the “save button” on new memories.
Procrastination: everybody has some issues with procrastination. Because, if you’re working on something, it means you’re not working on a lot of other things.
Pomodoro: A handy mental tool for focusing. Set a timer to 25 minutes, turn off all interruptions, and then focus. When you finish this period without any interruptions, give yourself a little reward. The reward may be a few minutes of web surfing, a cup of coffee or a bite of chocolate that allows your brain to enjoyably change its focus for a while.
There are lots of different ways to slice our understanding of memory but the two major systems are: “working memory” and “long term memory”. When you encounter something new, you often use your working memory to handle it. If you want to move that information into your long-term memory, it often takes time and requires practise. To help with this process, use a technique called “spaced repetition”. Repeating a new vocabulary word or a problem solving technique for example over a number of days.
Being awake creates toxic products in your brain. When you sleep, your brain cells shrink. This causes an increase in the space between your brain cells. It’s like unblocking a stream. Fluid can flow past these cells and washes the toxins out. So, sleeping, which can sometimes seem like such a waste of time is actually your brain’s way of keeping itself clean and healthy.
Sleeping does more than just allowing your brain to wash away toxins. It’s actually an important part of the memory and learning process. It seems that during sleep, your brain tidies up ideas and concepts you’re thinking about and learning.
There isn’t a simple way to keep yourself attending something that you’re not interested in but there’s a little trick to waylay the speaker; “asking a question”. The general principle is; “you learn more by active engagement rather than passive listening”.
Children have one big advantage in learning foreign language. They are not so much perfectionist like adults tend to be. They are usually OK with making mistakes.
“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right” — Henry FORD.
Learn the major concepts or points first. These are often the key parts of a good instructor or on book chapters, outline, flow charts, tables or concept maps. Once you have this done, fill in the details.
Highlighting and underlying must be done very carefully. Otherwise it can not only be ineffective but also misleading. Making lots of motions with your hand can fool you into thinking you’ve placed the concept in your brain. If you do mark up the text, try to look for main ideas before making any marks. And try to keep your underlining or highlighting to a minimum. One sentence or less per paragraph.
If you make a mistake in what you are doing, it’s actually a very good thing.
Neuromodulators are chemicals that influence how a neuron responds to other neurons. Three of them are: acetylcholine, dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine is in the business of predicting future rewards and not just the immediate reward. It can motivate you to do something that may not be rewarding right now, but will lead to a much better reward in the future. Loss of dopamine neurons leads to a lack of motivation and something called “anhedonia” which is a loss of interest in things that once gave you pleasure. Severe loss of dopamine neurons causes resting tremor, slowness, rigidity etc. and this is called Parkinson disease.
Serotonin strongly affects your social life. In monkey troops, the Alpha male has the highest level of serotonin activity, and the lowest ranking male has the lowest level. Prozac, which is prescribed for clinical depression, raises the level of serotonin activity. The level of serotonin is also closely linked to risk-taking behaviour with higher risk in lower serotonin monkeys. Inmates in jail for violent crimes have some of the lowest levels of serotonin activity in society.
Did you know that even expert public speakers practice on the order of 70 hours for a typical 20-minutes TED Talk?
Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn discovered that most paradigm shifts in science are brought by either young people or people who were originally trained in a different discipline.
Write it out by hand, so that you’ve got the muscle memory, repeating it back to yourself.
Multi node input is critical for learning with the study groups and challenging each other. You find out what you know when you try to explain it to somebody else. That’s why teaching is one of the best ways to learn.
If you find yourself avoiding certain tasks because they make you feel uncomfortable, you should know there’s another helpful way to re-frame things. And that’s to learn to focus on the process not on product. Product is an outcome. To prevent procrastination you should avoid concentrating on the product. Instead, your attention should be on building the process.
Writing a tasks list and making a daily task list (the evening before) frees working-memory for problem solving.
“Eat your frogs first in the morning” — Mark Twain. Try to work on a most important and most disliked task first.
“Hippocampus” is an important part of brain system for learning and memory of facts and events. Without hippocampus and its inputs, it is not possible to store new memories in the cortex, a process called memory consolidation that can take many years (an advice: the film Momento is about hippocampus disease called amnesia).
It is more effective to space learning over time rather than mass learning all at once. If you want to study something for an hour, you’ll retain it longer if you spend 10 minutes each month over a semester than an hour on one day.
In addition to neurons, brain have several types of supporting cells called “glial cells”. The astrocyte is the most abundant glial cell in human brain.
When Einstein’s brain was examined to find out what made him so awesomely creative, the only difference that could be found was that he had many more astrocytes than an average human.
One of the best things you can do to not only remember, but also to understand concepts, is to create a metaphor or analogy for them. Often the more visual is the better.
At some point, self-consciously understanding why you do that you do, just slows you down and interrupts the flow resulting in worse decisions (Id, Ego, Superego & Conscious, Preconscious, Unconscious relation).
That it’s a fluke when you happen to do well on a test and then on the next test, for sure they, and your family and friends are finally going to figure out how incompetent you really are. This feeling is so extraordinarily common that it even has a name: The Impostor Syndrome (there’s more to talk about this, maybe in another post).
There’s a great deal of evidence from research that the right hemisphere helps us to step back and put our work into big picture perspective. People with a damaged right hemisphere are often unable to gain ah-ha insights. The right hemisphere serves as a sort of devil’s advocate to question the status-quo and look for global inconsistencies.
If you find group meetings of a study group that start 5 to 15 minutes late, members haven’t read the materials and the conversation consistently veers of topic, you’re best off to find another group.
The Hard Start — Jump to Easy Technique; Start with the hardest problem, have the self-discipline to pull yourself off a problem once you find yourself stuck for a minute or two. Then jump to an easy one. This technique helps you to avoid einstellung[2], getting stuck on the wrong approach because you have a chance to look at the problem from different perspectives.
Two advices for test takers:
o Advice 1: Cover up the answers to multiple choice questions and try to recall the information.
o Advice 2: Recall these two types of worry: Good worry & bad worry. Good worry helps provide motivation and focus while bad worry simply wastes energy.
There were too much details for adding as footnotes but I think it would be better to leave it out for the readers to deep dive into. Hopefully, you’ll find all these facts beneficial and please let me remind that these are notes from a 4 weeks course.
To sum up, “the most precious thing to learn is learning how to learn”.
[2] Einstellung is the development of a mechanized state of mind. Often called a problem solving set, Einstellung refers to a person’s predisposition to solve a given problem in a specific manner even though better or more appropriate methods of solving the problem exists. The Einstellung effect is the negative effect of previous experience when solving new problems.
