Contents

• Focus vs Diffuse mode
• Working and long term memory
• Procrastination
  • Developing good habits
• Creativity
• Importance of Recall & Illusions of Competence
• Test taking - Hard-Start-Jump-to-Easy technique
• References

For the past couple weeks, I’ve taken the free massive open online course (MOOC) “Learning How To Learn”, co-taught by Dr Oakley & Dr Sejnowski at the University of California, San Diego which provides fascinating and invaluable insight into how the mind stores, processes and retrieves memories and what we can do to become the most effective learners we can be.

A ‘mathaphobe’ by her own admission, Dr Oakley despised the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and math) and gravitated naturally towards history and languages during her teens. It wasn’t until later on in her career that she realised that if she were to climb the ladder of success, she would have to find a way to overcome her fears of those subjects. When she went back to school, she discovered she had a distinct disadvantage to other students because she had to learn the basics where others had already mastered. What transpired was a relentless journey in self discovery, leading to learning the most effective patterns and techniques to acquire mastery in any subject. Today, she is a professor of engineering and teaches other students those very techniques that brought her success in her own life.

The following are notes based on the course material as well as the book “A Mind for Numbers” by Barbara Oakley.

Focus vs Diffuse mode

Whenever you solve a problem that requires you to follow a predefined ordered set of steps, you are activating the focus mode of thinking. For instance, when you change your clothes to go out, you might change pants, shirt, socks then shoes in that order. It wouldn’t make much sense to put on your shoes before socks. Similarly, the same applies for solving math problems so the focus mode is responsible for these types of rational, sequential & analytical thought processes.

The diffuse mode is ‘bigger picture’ thinking and involves abstracting or generalising concepts. This is where insights and ‘eureka’ moments occur and usually happen after a period of focused mode. Diffuse mode is especially used when learning something for the first time.

The difference between focus and diffuse mode can be aptly described by thinking of the brain as a pinball machine where the ball is the thought and the bumpers are different memories. When the plunger is pulled and the ball shoots into the playing area, the ball is like the initial thought entering your mind. The ball shoots up the side of the machine and into the bumpers.

In focus mode, the bumpers are really close to each other so when the ball collides with the first bumper, it rebounds into other bumpers in close proximity. The bumpers that it collides with could represent a single idea for solving a problem. Because the bumpers are so densely packed, there is not much room for the ball to bounce to other bumpers (other parts of the brain).

In diffuse mode, the bumpers are spaced much further apart so that when the ball collides with the first bumper, it has more chance of whizzing off to bumpers located further away. Have you ever tried to solve a problem and after some time has passed, realised that your approach was completely wrong? That’s because you were thinking intently in focus mode so when your thought hit the bumpers, they bounced off the bumpers immediately nearby when in fact the right approach (bumper region) was situated somewhere further away.

Latching onto the first idea that pops into your head and not considering other ideas is so common that there’s a special term for it: einstellung effect. It means ‘installing’ in German. Think of it as installing mental roadblocks that prevent the right answer from surfacing.

All of this has been interesting so far but how does one switch modes?

• Do one of the 3 B’s: bed, bath, bus. Take a nap, draw a bath, or drive/ride in a vehicle
• Do some physical activity. A positive side effect from doing physical activity is that it promotes the growth of brain cells in the hippocampus. Another effective method is brain storming with others.
• Listen to music (without words)
• Play songs you know well on a musical instrument
• Meditate

The time spent in this mode depends on how long it would take for your mind to forget about whatever problem you were tackling in focus mode. The famous inventor of the light bulb, Thomas Edison would enter diffuse mode by nodding off to sleep in his chair whilst holding a ball bearing in his hand. Just as he was about to fall asleep, the bearing would drop to the floor, producing a loud clatter that would startle him awake. It was at this moment that he would gain insights.

Working and long term memory

When thought processes are going through your mind at present, it is stored in working memory, a region that is like a temporary store like RAM in a computer. It is thought that the brain holds about and can process 4 chunks of working memory at any time. Items are stored in working memory through repetition but just like RAM, they are volatile, meaning they disappear shortly after. It’s like a fuzzy whiteboard that rubs off easily.

Chunks can vary in size so that the more you know about something, the bigger the chunk will be. A chunk is like a hyperlink that leads to a web page. Chunking is the concept of integrating many ideas into one so it forms a seamless concept and allows you to free up precious chunk slots in the working memory.

The steps to building a powerful chunk involve:

• Work through a problem on paper without looking at the solution unless you absolutely need to
• Go through the same problem again. Keep in mind the key steps. This seems like waste of time but is similar to the way you need to play a song on an instrument repeatedly to get proficient or doing multiple reps in the gym to gain muscle. Use spaced repetition (discussed in the next paragraph)
• Take breaks
• Add a new problem to your repetoire. Once you’re confident in doing the previous problem. Repeat with a new problem.

Long term memory, as the name implies, is like a storage warehouse where large amounts of items stay for extended periods. This can be thought of as hard drive memory but unlike the computer part, items stored in long term memory need to be written many times for it to stay there. This can be done through spaced repetition, a process that involves reviewing material frequently when it is first assimilated then gradually decreasing the review sessions as it gets firmly embedded. For example, learn on the first day, review on the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 7th, then 10th day. Spaced repetition is practiced over days or weeks. Research has shown that learning this way strengthens long term memory far better than cramming into a single day¹. The Memrise web site or Anki desktop app let you store things you need to remember in the form of flash cards and will quiz you based on the spaced repetition principle.

Procrastination

Procrastination is replacing a painful task with something that is immediately rewarding. Learning takes time and involves periods of focused attention followed by diffuse mode. Think of it as building a wall where each brick is a focus mode and waiting for the mortar to dry is diffuse. Studies show that once you get started on a task you wanted to avoid, the pain sensation automatically disappears. More time and energy is spent during procrastination than it is doing the actual work². One thing to note is that it is natural to feel discomfort when starting to study, even if it’s a subject you enjoy. That’s why it’s often hard to get the ball rolling so to speak as it’s feelings of procrastination combined with the unease of starting.

Developing good habits

Procrastination is a bad habit but we can create a good study habit to counteract the bad. A habit consists of:

• a cue: the trigger that causes what you’ll do next. This can be caused by: time, location, mood, reactions to people, something that happened.
• a routine: the automatic response to the cue.
• a reward: habits are made because of the rewards. When procrastinating, the cue is the idea of doing a task we’d rather avoid so we respond by doing something less painful, normally something that gives us an instant reward like playing a game, or browsing entertaining web pages.
• a belief: the idea that fuels your habit such as “this assignment isn’t due for another month, I have enough time so playing this game for a couple hours won’t matter”

Some ideas to create good habits:

• Develop a new cue to trigger a healthy study habit. This could be setting a specific time to study, think of it as an appointment you have to keep.
• Too many distractions like tv, phone, internet? Leave them all at home and go to the library.
• The best way to avoid falling back onto old routines is to create a plan. This is fundamental when starting out as the new habit isn’t even a habit yet. The Pomodoro technique involves a Pomodoro - working undistracted for 25 minutes. Although setting the amount of time is entirely up to you, 25 minutes generally used as it allows enough time to get work done yet isn’t too long that it makes it seem like an impossible task. After completing a Pomodoro, reward yourself with a 5 min break by getting up for a drink, browsing your favourite site or listening to music. Check out programs like Tomighty or web sites like Pomodoro timer.
• Developing a good belief is essential. Spend more time with positive people who are highly motivated and have the same goals. Another approach is the mental contrast. For a student aspiring to work at Google, they may watch videos of all the perks and benefits there are to work at the company, then contrast it with their current life, a lack of money, a boring side job, etc. This has a 2 prong push/pull effect where the ideal job entices while at the same time, the mediocrity of the present pushes you toward change.
• Focus on process not product. Process is the flow of time and the actions/events that occur. Product is an outcome or end goal. Take reading a book as an example. Instead of focussing on the product “I need to read 1 chapter by the end of today”, think of the process “I will read as much as time allows today”

Creativity

Here are some tips on how to be more creative from an interview between Dr Oakley and the director of UCLA’s Biology of Creativity Robert Bilder:

• Be prolific: the more original work we create, the more creative we become. It doesn’t matter if the first attempt is a complete disaster. You will need to start from scratch many times.
• Be fearless: Always push the edge of your fear threshold by attempting something that’s scary.
• Embrace criticism: gain a fresh perspective by getting feedback from others
• Be disagreeable: It turns out there’s a correlation between creativity output and the degree to which you question the world around you. Cultivate an attitude to challenge preconceived notions and forge new paths that can lead to things you never knew were possible.

Importance of Recall & Illusions of Competence

Illusions of competence are study habits that fool you into thinking you’re learning the material when in fact you haven’t. These include:

• highlighting: the act of highlighting lots of passages gives the impression that material will stick every time the pen passes through. Highlighting is only useful when used in moderation and you want to mark the salient points in a passage.
• rereading: can be useful when used with spaced repetition to jog your memory or when trying to understand a concept but to truely learn, more effective learning strategies should be used.
• reading worked examples: throughout the chapter, many textbooks will have examples of problems with the solutions immediately following them. What many people do is read the question and without pausing to come up with a solution by themselves, will read the answer thinking they understand how the steps work. They equate understanding the steps as learning but in reality, coming up with the answer by themselves is the real key to learning.

Some good learning strategies involve:

• recall: instead of rereading a passage, try to remember what you just read. Close the book and pretend you have to explain the concept to a 10 year old. Better still, speak it out loud or writing it on paper cements the idea more deeply in your head. An hour of testing yourself is more productive than an hour of reading.
• interleaving: Knowing how to solve a problem using a set of steps is not enough. You need to know when to apply that technique to a problem. Many textbooks have problem sets based on the content presented earlier in the chapter. Opening the book to a randomly chosen problem mixes it up and allows you to practice changing mental gears. This is similar to taking a final exam.
• analogies/metaphors: abstract ideas can be hard to understand unless you make a comparison to something more tangible in the real world. For instance, in chemistry there are cations which are positive and anions that are negative. You can easily remember the charge by thinking of the ‘cat’ in cations having paws, making it pawsitive and anions as ‘onions’ which when eaten make you cry so that’s negative.
• use the visiospatial: for our prehistoric ancestors to survive, the visual part of the brain needed to be highly developed. This made sense as it was crucial to recall where drinking water was available and how to get there. We can harness the visuospatial by employing the memory palace technique which involves recalling a familiar place such as your home. For instance, if you need to remember a shopping list of milk, eggs and honey, you can imagine in your bath tub overflowing with milk, a giant egg laying in your bed and honey dripping from your kitchen faucets.
• create meaningful groups/memorable sentences: for instance, to remember the planets in the solar system, you would remember My Very Elderly Mother Just Sat Up Near Pluto where each letter of the word is the planets name: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus & Pluto.

Test taking - Hard-Start-Jump-to-Easy technique

Traditionally, students have been taught to do the easy questions first then move onto the harder ones but from what we know now about the diffuse/focus mode, the better method is to start with the hard question and when you inevitably get stuck or feel like you’re not on the right track, immediately switch to an easy question. This allows your mind to enter diffuse mode while working on the easy questions so that when you go back to the tough question, you’re more likely to gain a deeper insight.

By doing the easy then hard questions, what normally happens is you don’t have enough time left to do the hard questions which not only puts extra stress but also forces you to enter a deepened focused mode which can lead to einstellung.

This method only works if you have done sufficient preparation for the test. If you don’t know all the material, it doesn’t matter what technique is used.

References