Learning how to learn - my personal course notes

I just went though the MOOC open course on Coursera, "Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects", by Barbara Oakley and Terrence Sejnowski from UCS. Below are my personal notes that I found important to remember. I enjoyed their analogy of "metabolic zombies" sucking out our memories.




Week 1

• Focused and diffused thinking modes.
• Diffused mode is used for solving new, yet unaddressed, difficult problems.
• Pomodoro technique: 25 minutes of focus with follow-up reward and relaxation. Use it to overcome procrastination.
• Spaced-repetition and recalling is key to memorize info.
• Sleep is critical to wash away the toxins from your brains.
• Physical exercising is critical too.

Week2

• Chunks are pieces of info formed during learning that are bound by use or meaning.
• Chunks are best build by focused undivided attention, understanding the idea and practice to deepen the patterns.
• Do recalls to check if remembering the key points without looking at the source is critical for forming chunks.
• Use groups (friends, students, teachers, study group etc.) to see if what you recall is correct (check for illusion of competence).
• Perform an active learning - communicate the learnings with other people.
• Use different places to recall info (makes memory independent on room or location).
• Transfer: use the chunks that you learned in one area to learn chunks of info in different areas.
• Interleave your learning by practicing your choice of different concepts, approach, and techniques all in one session.
• Illusions of competence: use mini-test of recalling what you learned.
• Einstellung (German for installation): Einstellung is when your initial thought, an idea you've already had in mind, or a neural pattern you've already developed well and strengthened, prevents a better idea or solution from being found.
• Law of serendipity: Lady Luck favors the one who tries.
• Sport coach says: no pain - no gain, meaning that discomfort must be experienced to accomplish a change or progress. Its a nature of change. Physical change in the brain has to involve some work and that work has to involve some kind of discomfort or effort.
• Agreeableness and creativity are inversely related.

Week 3

• Tackling procrastination: focus on the process, not the final product. Make that process you work on to be pleasant - life is a journey not a destination after all.
• Keep a planner journal, to-do list, so you can easily track when you reach your goals and observe what does and doesn't work. Make time dedication for tasks as precise as possible.
• Commit yourself to certain routines and tasks each day.
• Write your planned tasks out the night before so your brain has time to dwell on your goals and help ensure success.
• Arrange your work into a series of concrete and small everyday (even half hour) challenges. Block of time to do the task in the future typically does not work.
• Take a few minutes to savor the feelings of happiness and triumph, which also gives your brain a chance to temporarily change modes.
• Watch for procrastination cues (location, time, how you feel, reactions).
• Give yourself reward after the achievement, not before.
• Try putting yourself in new surroundings with few procrastination cues, such as the quiet section of a library.
• Eat your frogs first every day, meaning start the day with most important and most disliked tasks first.
• Do not multitask, serial-task instead, switch the focus from one task to another efficiently, tracking cues causing you to procrastinate.

Week 4

• Spaced practice and repetition help to save chunks of info into the long term memory.
• Not only visualize, but feel, hear and smell something that you are trying to remember.
• Create meaningful groups of learning material and relate it to something personal, eg. use mnemonics, associate numbers with years or personal lucky numbers etc.
• The memory palace technique: place memorable images in a scene that's familiar to you, this allows you to dip into the strength of your visual memory system, providing a particularly powerful way of grouping things you want to remember, eg. memorize groceries list: huge milk bottle tries to enter my house but gets stuck, giant cookie is chilling on the couch, and damn egg just broke up on the table in my common room in is running all over the floor. The more funny and evocative the visualization is, the easier to remember.

Week 5

• To remember and understand the concepts use metaphors or analogies, associations, vivid examples. Benzene ring was visualized by monkeys holding hands and tails. Voltage is pumped up water.
• Richard M. Felder has made a very useful checklist to take before test.
• Hard start - jump to easy techniques if got stuck. Start working on hard problems first.  If get stuck, switch to easier problem. This allows the brain to switch into diffuse mode for that hard problem. This also allow to avoid Einstellung (getting stuck on the wrong approach) because you get a chance to at the problem from different perspectives. This approach reminds a chef cooking a meal - work on all constituents of a meal (steak, garnish, salad, sauce etc.) simultaneously, but starting with one which take most time.
• Change the attitude towards the stress (before test) from being afraid to: “it has got me excited to do my best”.
• Having a plan B for career helps to reduce the stress of failing the test.
• Practice deep breath technique to overcome panic well in advance the test: practice, makes permanent.
• Once hitting a wall trying to solve a problem, make break, go do whatever (sports, sleep, watch TV, browse internet, do whatever you like) thereby allowing the diffuse brain mode to kick-in. "Give your subconscious an assignment" and after some time the solution will come by itself.
• One can only truly learn understand something is by doing it yourself (without looking at any reference, unaided) and later teaching it. Must rework the problem yourself (or better yet, teach someone!!!) to actually learn it.