Learning How to Learn_ How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens ( PDFDrive ) (3)

* A silicon chip is kind of the computer’s equivalent of a neuron.

* Nelson’s book Remember It! is a very good one. (It’s geared for adults.)

* My last name’s pronounced “say-NOW-ski.”

* The positron (“PAWZ-ih-tron”) is like a positive version of an electron.

* Graduate school is the more advanced part of university studies. Usually the first three to five years of
university studies allow you to get an “undergraduate” degree. Then after that, some people continue on at
the university and do more advanced “graduate” studies in graduate school.

* We can’t resist. What did the hippocampus say during its retirement speech? “Thanks for the memories.”

* Technically, this firming up of information as it moves from the hippocampus into the cerebral cortex is
called “memory consolidation.”

* Remember, having a lot of brain-links isn’t the same as just memorizing a bunch of facts. William
Thurston, who won the Fields Medal (that’s the top prize in mathematics), probably put it best when he
said, “Mathematics is amazingly compressible: you may struggle a long time, step by step, to work through
the same process or idea from several approaches. But once you really understand it and have the mental
perspective to see it as a whole, there is often a tremendous mental compression. You can file it away, recall
it quickly and completely when you need it, and use it as just one step in some other mental process. The
insight that goes with this compression is one of the real joys of mathematics.” Thurston was talking about
the power of a beautiful, well-built set of brain-links.

* Remember, cognitive load is the amount of mental effort being made in the working memory.

* Educators sometimes call a noninterleaved assignment a “blocked” assignment, because the subject is
worked on all in one block.

Incidentally, interleaving is good because it allows your attentional octopus to consciously compare
different techniques. This helps you develop new “deciding” links that allow you to figure out which
techniques to choose. Task switching, on the other hand, is bad because you’re just dragging your
attentional octopus from topic to topic. This makes your octopus do unnecessary work every time you
switch tasks.

Interleaving is often difficult for textbook writers to do. This is because there is a natural need for
questions at the end of each chapter that focus on that chapter. This means that interleaving is up to you, the
reader!

* Occasional memorization, such as the multiplication tables, can be helpful. This is because your brain
naturally begins to analyze the patterns and relationships it sees as you embed the tables in your brain. The
embedding process helps you to get a naturally better feel for the numbers and how they relate to one
another. But as always, it’s never a good idea to just memorize without having an understanding of what
you’re doing. (It’s like memorizing a word in a foreign language without understanding what it means. How
would you ever be able to use it later on?) And the more you practice using a variety of problems, the
deeper and richer your feel for the numbers will become.

* It’s pronounced “kin-es-THET-ick.” Kinesthetic means learning through touching or feeling. For
example, you can learn about different materials like honey, a sponge, or a steel screw, not only by looking
at them, but by feeling them.

* As sleep researcher Matthew Walker explains, due to our genes, about 40 percent of us are “morning
types” who like to wake up early. Another 30 percent are “night owls” who like to go to bed late and wake
up late. The rest are a mix of both types. Unlike adults, teenagers often have internal “sleep clocks” that
move them toward night owl status. This can make it difficult for teenagers to go to sleep early, even when
they want to. Unfortunately, many schools have too-early start times that do not allow teenagers to get the
sleep that they both want and need. A few schools have shifted to later start times, and they’ve seen
significant increases in test scores as a result.

* You can find a copy of this learning journal page at https://barbaraoakley.com/books/learning-how-to-
learn.

* I should point out that video games do not make your working memory bigger. Making a bigger working
memory is like adding more arms to an octopus, which is hard to do. If you see advertisements for games
that give you a bigger working memory, you should be suspicious. Right now, researchers don’t know how
to help people build bigger working memories. If you don’t have a good working memory, read on. You’ll
learn that you have some special benefits!

Incidentally, it’s a reasonable guess that Nobel Prize winner Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s underlying
memory challenge was that he had a poor working memory. As Santiago described in his autobiography,
his father was very good at using memory tricks to store information in long-term memory. Santiago
probably learned some of those tricks from his father. But Santiago’s father wasn’t able to help his son
improve his working memory, because we still don’t know how to improve working memory even today.

This may sound bad for Santiago, but it really wasn’t. Santiago’s poor working memory was, it seems,
part of the magic that allowed Santiago to see the simple underlying principles of neuroanatomy that
“geniuses” had missed. So, again, if you have a poor working memory, you may have to work harder on
occasion to keep up. But it can also sometimes be a wonderful gift that can allow you to see more simply
and clearly than other “smarter” people!

* Psychologists call this general idea “Einstellung” or “functional fixedness.” But these can be hard words
to remember, so we prefer “rut think.”

* If you happen to have a condition that makes it tough for you to write by hand, you can still do okay if
you type your notes. But avoid falling into the mindless trap of just typing what you hear. You need to slow
your typing so you can summarize the key ideas instead of just typing everything that flows into your ears.

* A copy of this checklist can be downloaded from https://barbaraoakley.com/books/learning-how-to-learn.

* Shallow breathing seems like a bad idea. So why do people do it when they get nervous? It relates to the
fact that eyes are natural motion detectors. By freezing, an animal can sometimes avoid detection even
when it is in plain sight. Breathing shallowly, or even momentarily holding the breath, can help an animal
or a person be as motionless as possible.

The next time you point out a bird or animal to a friend, watch your friend’s reaction. Even when you
are pointing straight at what you want your friend to see, your friend often can’t see it until it moves.

* If you are a genius, can you still find a way to incorporate some of Santiago’s approaches?

* You can find the list “10 top ideas to help your learning, and 10 pitfalls to avoid” at
https://barbaraoakley.com/books/learning-how-to-learn.



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