Course Notes: Learning How to Learn

These are my notes on the Coursera Course - Learning How to Learn. The course is instructed by Dr. Barbara Oakley and Terrence Sejnowski.

Course Completion Certificate

What is Learning?

Learning is a process in which the brain forms new synapses on dendrites of neurons.

Focused Thinking

• The type of thinking when you concentrate intently on something you are trying to learn or understand.
• In this type of thinking, you are able to solve problems quickly if the concept you’re trying to understand is related to something you’re rather familiar with.

Diffused Thinking

• This a relaxed type of thinking it is related to a set of neural resting states.
• This type of thinking is helpful when you encounter problems which you have not solved before, or require a different approach. In this diffuse mode of thinking, you can look at things broadly from a very different, big-picture perspective. You can make new neural connections.
• You can’t focus in as tightly as you often need to, to finalize any kind of problem solving. Or understand the finest aspects of a concept. But you can at least get to the initial place you need to be in to home in on a solution.

According to neuroscientists, a person cannot be in both thinking states at one time. A person can either be in the Focused Thinking state or the Diffused Thinking state. Being in one mode seems to limit one’s access to the other mode’s way of thinking.

Using the analogy of a weightlifter, a person cannot lift a 100 kg weight after a single day of rigorous training, he has to train daily for a long period of time to be able to successfully lift 100 kg weight one day. Hence, to learn something difficult, one has to understand concepts bit by bit for a certain period of time till one eventually grasps the complex concept.

• Key Points: Focused Thinking and Diffused Thinking
  • To learn effectively our brains need to bounce to and fro from Focused Thinking and Diffused Thinking
  • Metaphors provide powerful techniques for learning.
  • To understand new things better, we must also use analogies.
  • Learning something difficult takes times.

Why do we Procrastinate?

• When you look at something that you really rather not do, it seems that, you activate the areas of your brain associated with pain. Your brain, naturally enough, looks for a way to stop that negative stimulation by switching your attention to something else. But here’s the trick. Researchers discovered that not long after people might start actually working out what they didn’t like, that neuro-discomfort disappeared.
• So it seems what happens when you procrastinate, is something like this. First, you observe, and get a cue about something that causes a tiny bit of unease. You don’t like it, so to make the sensation go away you turn your attention from whatever caused that unease. You turn toward something more pleasant. The result, you feel happier (temporarily).

Practice Makes Permanent

• It is important to practice with ideas and concepts your learning in math and science, just like anything else you’re learning, to help enhance and strengthen the neural connection your making during the learning process.
• Neurons become linked together through repeated use. The more abstract something is, the more important it is to practice in order to bring those ideas into reality for you. 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.
• When you’re learning, what you want to do is study something. Study it hard by focusing intently. Then take a break or at least change your focus to something different for awhile. During this time of seeming relaxation, your brain’s diffuse mode has a chance to work away in the background and help you out with your conceptual understanding. Your, your neural mortar in some sense has a chance to dry. If you don’t do this, if instead you learn by cramming, your knowledge base will be all in a jumble with everything confused i.e. a poor foundation.
• Using brief periods each day of focused attention, will help you start building the neural patterns you need to be more successful in learning more challenging materials.

Pomodoro Timer

• Set a timer for 25 minutes, and then turn off all interruptions and focus.
• After you are done, give a reward to yourself, a few minutes of web browsing, a cup of coffee, or a bite of chocolate.
• This technique is very effective as the brain can most sustain focus for up to 25 minutes. (It’s a little like doing an intense 25 minute workout at a mental gym, followed by some mental relaxation)

Memory

• The two major memory systems are - working memory, and the long term memory.

Working Memory

• Working memory is the part of memory that has to do with what you’re immediately and consciously processing in your mind.
• Your working memory is centered out of the prefrontal cortex although, there are also connections to other parts of your brain so you can access long-term memories.
• Researchers used to think that our working memory could hold around seven items or chunks, but now it’s widely believed that the working memory holds only about four chunks of information. We tend to automatically group memory items into chunks so it seems our working memory is bigger than it actually is.
• Although your working memory is like a blackboard, it’s not a very good blackboard. You often need to keep repeating what you’re trying to work with so it stays in your working memory. For example, you’ll sometimes repeat a phone number to yourself until you have a chance to write it down. Repetitions are needed so that your natural dissipating processes don’t drop those memories away. You may find yourself shutting your eyes to keep any other items from intruding into the limited slots of your working memory as you concentrate. So, the short-term memory is something like an inefficient mental blackboard.

Long-Term Memory

• Long-Term Memory is wide a storage warehouse, and just like a warehouse, it’s distributed over a big area. Different kinds of long-term memories are stored in different regions of the brain.
• Research has shown that when you first try to put an item of information in long-term memory, you need to revisit it at least a few times to increase the chances that you’ll be able to find it later when you might need it.
• The long-term memory storage warehouse is immense, it’s got room for billions of items. In fact there can be so many items they can bury each other. So it can be difficult for you to find the information you need unless you practice and repeat at least a few times.
• Long-term memory is important because it’s where you store fundamental concepts and techniques that are often involved in whatever you’re learning about.

Spaced Repetition

• 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 practice. To help with this process, use a technique called spaced repetition.
• This technique involves repeating what you’re trying to retain, but what you want to do is a space this repetition out. Repeating a new vocabulary word or a problem solving technique for example over a number of days. Extending your practice over several days does make a difference.
• Research has shown that if you try to glue things into your memory by repeating something 20 times in one evening for example, it won’t stick nearly as well as if you practice it the same number of times over several days. This is like building the brick wall, if you don’t leave time for the mortar to dry, that is time for the synoptic connections to form and strengthen, you won’t have a very good structure.

Importance of Sleep

• Just being awake creates toxic products in your brain. How does the brain get rid of these poisons? Turns out that 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 wash the toxins out. So, sleep which can sometimes seem like such a waste of time is actually your brain’s way of keeping itself clean and healthy.
• Taking a test without getting enough sleep means you’re operating with a brain that got little metabolic toxins floating around in it, poisons, and make it so you can’t think very clearly. It’s kind of like trying to drive a car that’s got sugar in its gas tank, doesn’t work too well. In fact, getting too little sleep doesn’t just make you do worse on tests.
• Too little sleep over too long of a time can also be associated with all sorts of nasty conditions including headaches, depression, heart disease, diabetes and just plain dying earlier.
• Sleep is 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. It erases the less important parts of memories and simultaneously strengthens areas that you need or want to remember.
• During sleep, your brain also rehearses some of the tougher parts of whatever you’re trying to learn, going over and over neural patterns to deepen and strengthen them.
• Sleep has also been shown to make a remarkable difference in your ability to figure out difficult problems and to understand what you’re trying to learn. It’s as if the complete deactivation of the conscious you in the prefrontal cortex at the forefront of your brain helps other areas of your brain start talking more easily to one another allowing them to put together the neural solution to your learning task while you’re sleeping. Of course, you must also plant the seed for your diffuse mode by first doing focused mode work.
• If you’re going over what you’re learning right before you take a nap or going to sleep for the evening, you have an increased chance of dreaming about it. If you go even further and set it in mind that you want to dream about the material it seems to improve your chances of dreaming about it, still further. Dreaming about what you’re studying can substantially enhance your ability to understand. It somehow consolidate your memories into easier to grasp chunks.

What is a Chunk?

• When you first look at a brand new concept it sometimes doesn’t make much sense, like jumbled pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Chunking is the mental leap that helps you unite bits of information together through meaning. The new logical whole makes the chunk easier to remember, and also makes it easier to fit the chunk into the larger picture of what you’re learning. Just memorizing a fact without understanding or context doesn’t help you understand what’s really going on or how the concept fits together with other concepts you’re learning.
• When you’re focusing your attention on something it’s almost as if you have an octopus. The octopus of attention that slips its tentacles through the four slots of working memory when necessary to help you make connections to information that you might have in various parts of your brain. (Remember, this is different from the random connections of the Diffused Mode) Focusing your attention to connect parts of the brain to tie together ideas is an important part of the focused mode of learning. It is also often what helps get you started in creating a chunk. Interestingly 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.
• Chunks are pieces of information, neuroscientifically speaking, through bound together through meaning or use. You can take the letters P, O and P and bind them together into one conceptual easy to remember chunk, the word POP. It’s like converting a, a cumbersome computer file into a ZIP file. Underneath that single pop chunk is a symphony of neurons that have learned to sing in tune with one another. The complex neural activity that ties together our simplifying abstract chunks of thought. Whether those thoughts pertain to acronyms, ideas, or concepts are the basis of much of the science, literature, and art.
• Example: Learning Languages by Chunking
  • Let’s say you want to learn how to speak Spanish. If you’re a child hanging around a Spanish speaking household, learning Spanish is as natural as breathing. Your mother says, mama. And you say, mama, right back to her. Your neurons fire and wire together in a shimmering mental loop cementing the relationship in your mind between the sound mama and your mother’s smiling face. That scintillating neural loop is one memory trace, which is connected of course to many other related memory traces.
  • The best programs for learning language, such as those of the Defense Language Institute where I learned Russian, incorporate structured practice that includes repetition and rote focus mode learning of the language along with more diffuse-like free speech with native speakers. The goal is to embed the basic words and patterns so you can speak as freely and creatively in your new language as you do in your native language.
• As it turns out one of the first steps towards gaining expertise in academic topics is to create conceptual chunks, mental leaps that unite scattered bits of information through meaning. The concept of neural chunks also applies to sports, music, dance, really just about anything that humans can get good at. Basically, a chunk means a network of neurons that are used to firing together so you can think a thought or perform an action smoothly and effectively. Focused practice and repetition, the creation of strong memory traces, helps you to create chunks. The path to expertise is built little by little, small chunks can become larger, and all of the expertise serves to underpin more creative interpretations as you gradually become a master of the material.
• Chunking helps your brain run more efficiently. Once you chunk an idea, a concept, or an action, you don’t know need to remember all the little underlying details. You’ve got the main idea, the chunk, and that’s enough.

How to form Chunks?

• If you’re learning to play a difficult song on the guitar, the neural representation of the song in your mind can be considered as a rather large chunk. You would first listen to the song. Maybe you’d even watch someone else playing the song especially if you were just a beginner who was learning things like how to hold the guitar. Getting an initial sense of the pattern you want to master for yourself is similar for most subjects or skills. You often have to grasp little bits of songs that become neural mini chunks which will later join together into larger chunks. For example, over several days you might learn how to smoothly play some musical passages on the guitar, and when you’ve grasped those passages, you could join them together with other passages that you’ve gradually putting everything together so you can play the song.
• The best chunks are the ones that are so well ingrained that you don’t even have to consciously think about connecting the neural pattern together. That actually is the point of making complex ideas, movements or reactions into a single chunk.

• Example: Learning Languages

  In the beginning, often just saying a single word with the proper nuance, tone, and accent involves a lot of practice. Stringing extemporaneous sentences together involves the ability to creatively mix together various complex mini chunks and chunks in the new language.

• Learning in math and science involves the same approach. When you’re learning new math and science material, you’re often given sample problems with worked out solutions. This is because, when you’re first trying to understand how to work a problem, you have a heavy cognitive load. So, it helps to start out with a work-through example. It’s like first listening to a song before trying to play the song yourself. Most of the details of the worked out solution are right there and your job is simply to figure out why the steps are taken the way they are. They can help you see the key features and underlying principles of a problem. One concern about using worked out examples in math and science to help you in starting to form chunks, is that it can be all too easy to focus too much on why an individual step works and not on the connection between steps. That is on why this particular step is the next thing you should do. So, keep in mind that I’m not just talking about a cookie cutter, just do as you’re told mindless approach when following a worked-out solution. It’s more like using a roadmap to help you when traveling to a new place. Pay attention to what’s going on around you when you’re using the map and soon you’ll find yourself able to get there on your own. You’ll even be able to figure out new ways of getting there.

Steps to form a Chunk

• Focussed Attention
  • The first step on chunking is simply to focus your undivided attention on the information you want to chunk.
  • If you had the television going on in the background or you’re looking up every few minutes to check or answer your phone or computer messages, it means you’re going to have more difficulty in making a chunk, because your brain is not really focusing on chunking the new material.
  • When you first begin to learn something, you’re making new neural patterns and connecting them with pre-existing patterns that are spread through many areas of the brain. Your octopus tentacles, so to speak, can’t reach very well if some of them are off on other thoughts using up some of the limited slots in your working memory.
• Understanding
  • The second step in chunking is to understand the basic idea you’re trying to chunk, whether its understanding a concepts such as continental drift, seeing the connection between the basic elements of a plot for a story, grasping the economic principle of supply and demand, or comprehending the essence of a particular type of math problem.
  • Students can often synthesize the gist, that is figure out the main idea or ideas pretty naturally, or at least they can grasp those ideas if they allow the focused and diffused modes of thinking to take turns in helping them figure out what’s going on.
  • Understanding is like a super glue that helps hold the underlying memory traces together. It creates broad encompassing traces that can link to other memory traces. Although you can create a chunk if you don’t understand, but it’s often a useless chunk that won’t fit in with or relate to other material you’re learning.
  • That said, it’s important to realize that just understanding how a problem was solved for example, does not necessarily create a chunk that you can easily call to mind later. Don’t confuse the ‘Aha!’ of a breakthrough and understanding with solid expertise. That’s part of what you can grasp an idea when a teacher presented in class, but if you don’t review it fairly soon after you first learned it, it can seem incomprehensible when it comes time to prepare for a test. In math and science related subjects, closing the book and testing yourself on whether you yourself can solve the problem you think you understand will speed up your learning at this stage. You often realize the first time you actually understand something is when you can actually do it yourself. It’s the same in many disciplines. Just looking at someone else’s painting doesn’t mean you could actually create that painting yourself, and just hearing a song won’t give you the expertise you need to sing it in the same resonant fashion. Just because you see it or even that you understand it, it doesn’t mean that you can actually do it. Only doing it yourself helps create the neural patterns that underlie true mastery.
• Context and Practice
  • The third step to chunking is gaining context, so you can see not just how but also when to use this chunk. Context means going beyond the initial problem and seeing more broadly, repeating and practicing with both related and unrelated problems, so that you can see not only when to use the chunk but when not to use it. This helps you see how your newly formed chunk fits into the bigger picture.
  • In other words, you may have a tool in your strategy or problem solving tool box but if you don’t know when to use that tool it’s not going to do you a lot of good. Ultimately, practice helps you broaden the networks of neurons that are connected to your chunk, ensuring it’s not only firm but also accessible from many different paths.
  • Learning takes place in two ways - a top-down approach and a bottom-up approach. In a bottom-up chunking process where practice and repetition can help you both build and strengthen each chunk, so you can easily access it whenever you need to. A top-down big picture process allows you to see what you’re learning and where it fits in. Both processes are vital in gaining mastery over the material. Context is where bottom-up and top-down learning meet.
  • To clarify, chunking may involve your learning how to use a certain problem solving technique. Context means learning when to use that technique instead of some other technique.
  • Doing a rapid two-minute picture walk through a chapter in a book before you begin studying it, glancing at pictures and section headings can allow you to gain a sense of the big picture, so can listening to a very well-organized lecture. These kinds of activities can help you know where to put the chunks you’re constructing, how the chunks relate to one another. 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. Even if a few of the puzzle pieces are missing at the end of your studies, you can still see the big picture.

Chunks are best built with focused attention, understanding of the basic idea, and practice to help you gain mastery and a sense of the big picture context.

Illusions of Competence

• One of the most common approaches for trying to learn material from a book or from notes is simply to reread it. But psychologist, Jeffrey Karpicke, has shown that this approach is actually much less productive than another, very simple, technique. Recall. After you’ve read the material, simply look away, and see what you can recall from the material you’ve just read.

To be continued…

Other Readings

• A Posting about Anxiety, Depression and PTSD from a Learner in Learning How to Learn

  I know these are topics that many might not want to talk about. My family and friends certainly do not want to talk about these topics with me.

  I am dealing with trauma and suffer from severe depression, anxiety and PTSD. Until recently I was working full time (currently I am on sick leave) and by many I was considered to be completely healthy and high functioning and in a sense, from certain perspectives, I was. In social contexts, peer and manager reviews at work and family gatherings I did everything that everyone expected of me and what I understood as being ‘successful’ in the eyes of the corporate and academic world. I excelled in university, a top performer at my job and also my friends would ALL describe me as fun and outgoing and smart and a hard worker. But I have suffered from these major afflictions for much of my adult life and have just never really been able to make strong headway despite all the investigation, doctors, medication, self awareness programs, years of meditation, research studies and experiments I have tried on myself and undertaken.

  Now, through Barbara Oakley and Terrence Sejnowski’s course, I have learned that procrastination is strongly tied to my afflictions. Procrastination for me is linked to ‘experiential avoidance’ and a strong internal critic that is at many times not quite capable of being flexible or kind when faced with product outcomes. To say I am a perfectionist is an understatement, and perfectionism is a label that unfortunately does not do its human companions justice. The word ‘perfectionist’ in my opinion is too easily applauded by some and too often considered ‘cute and neurotic’ by others. In my case perfectionism is a label that covers up a deep underlying need for safety, understanding and avoidance of shame and uncomfortable experiences.

  Through this course I have found the information on habits, focus on process vs product, using willpower ONLY to overcome the first bit of response to the cue, Pomodoro technique, rewards, diffuse mode, and importance of sleep, to name just a few concepts explored in Learning How to Learn, so immensely useful and applicable to my symptoms. Each of these concepts keep me grounded to a theory that avoids mental health labels and instead values accessible work process steps.

  I have cancelled several commitments since this course has started so that I could stay home and take notes on video lectures and do my Pomodoros (on my to do list I write down the number of Pomodoros I am going to apply on each topic instead of a length of minutes or hours, I just like writing ‘2 pomodoros’ ;) And I feel fantastic! Really, there is nothing that has helped my mood, sleep, eating, anxiety, feelings of guilt/shame etc than making small ‘process oriented’ to do lists for myself and accomplishing them without focus on the actual product. After doing two Pomodoros with a break in-between I feel like I can just keep going, bring it on, bring on more (okay, well it took a few days to get to that level of excitement, but I got there).

  Depression/anxiety/trauma/PTSD (I am not comparing them or putting them in one group, its just easier to write them like that) greatly affect one’s ability to concentrate, read, focus and keep things in memory. The fact I am retaining and understanding and making links through my work in this course is simply blowing me away. It is a testament to the evidence and facts presented via this course and the techniques that are advocated.

  One of the key reasons this course and the information presented has had such an impact on me and touched me so deeply where other books/group therapy etc could not is that Dr. Oakley has a very gentle, smiling, kind demeanor to her that I felt extremely safe with. Meaning I literally found it a pleasure to listen to her voice and watch her and see her presence in the videos. I felt like I was working with a kind teacher and, for me, it took me back to grade school days where I felt like I could do anything and the teachers really believed in me and I was not afraid of them. Dr. Oakley’s voice tone, facial expressions and body gestures all helped contribute to a sense of safety and authenticity I valued and believed as I listened to and watched her video lectures.

  I have learned in this course various ideas about how habit, pain avoidance, procrastination have all made my depression and anxiety worse. Yes I knew these things ‘intuitively’ but to have them presented by a professor from a major institution working in a non-mental health domain while simultaneously providing us links to numerous research articles and doing this all with a gentle and encouraging voice and approach has made all the difference to me. (I also do not underestimate the value of ‘good timing’, meaning the timing/occasion of coming across this course and its approach to learning strategies in this stage of my life is fortunate.) Knowing that Dr. Oakley was faced with her own challenges and discomfort when learning math to which she applied self compassion and kindness alongside science and theory makes the messages and concepts taught in her lectures quite believable. Dr. Oakley actually comes across as though she practices what she preaches and that makes a huge difference in the eyes of individuals who have tried a whole gamut of techniques and in some ways feel they are always being sold the ‘next bill of goods’.

  I am so moved by this course and the way the material was presented. The additional lectures/interviews with third parties and other professors at other institutions has further made me trust Dr. Oakley and Dr. Sejnowski and believe in the material and therefore really apply it to my own life. To be willing to summon up the ‘will power’ to make a different choice when the cue is presented is very challenging when battling major depression etc, but it is not impossible and I am so thankful to the instructors, TA’s and everyone participating in this course.

  (I am of course posting this anonymously because of the stigma around the topics. Hey, if my own family and friends don’t want to talk about it, you can pretty much understand what stigma is capable of doing. So please forgive me for having to post anonymously. I am sure there are other people in the same boat as me and I do not wish to disrespect them by posting Anon. I hope they will understand.)

  So for me, this course is life changing in a very fundamental way. I will never look at the diagnosis of ‘depression, anxiety, PTSD’ the same again. I am seeing and feeling in myself all sorts of links between experiential avoidance, pain tolerance and reaction to cues and I am wondering how many others like me are battling the medical system and mental health care system and we just haven’t come across the message in a way that has made sense to us. I feel there are many of us that can benefit from a course like this focused on habits, concentration modes, memory, response to cue, pain tolerance etc from a ‘general learning’ standpoint rather than a ‘mental health’ standpoint, in order to understand and make links to our own experience. Getting these messages presented in a different way, a different context has hit home for me. THANK YOU, more than I can articulate in this post.