Bend Your Brain
10 tips to Bend Your Brain into submission :
These tips are a starting point of how to learn things while reading any book. Listen to your brain and figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. Try new things.
1. Slow down. The more you understand, the less you have to memorize.
Don’t just read. Stop and think. When the book asks you a question, don’t just skip to the answer. Imagine that someone really is asking the question. The more deeply you force your brain to think, the better chance you have of learning and remembering.
2. Do the exercises. Write your own notes.
Workout the exercises while reading any book. Use pencil. There’s a plenty of evidence that physical activity while learning can increase the learning.
3. Don’t do all your reading in one place.
Stand-up, stretch, move around, change chairs, change rooms. It’ll help your brain feel some difference, and keeps your learning from being too connected to a particular place.
4. Atleast rest for sometime after you read. Or recall what you read before you go to sleep.
Part of the learning (especially the transfer to long-term memory) happens after you put the book down. Your brain needs time on its own, to do more processing. If you put in something new during that processing-time, some of what you just learned will be lost.
5. Drink water. Lots of it.
Our brain works best in a nice bath of fluid. Dehydration (which can happen before you feel thirsty) decreases cognitive function.
6. Talk about it. Out loud.
Speaking activates a different part of the brain. If you’re trying to understand something, or increase your chance of remembering it later, say it out loud to someone else. You’ll learn more quickly, and you might uncover ideas you hadn’t known were there when you were reading about it.
7. Listen to your brain.
Pay attention to whether your brain is getting overloaded. If you find yourself starting to skim the surface or forget what you just read, it’s time for a break. Once you go past a certain point, you won’t learn faster by trying to shove more in, and you might even hurt the process.
8. Feel something !!
Your brain needs to know that this matters. Get involved with the stories. Make up your own captions for the photos. Groaning over a bad joke is better than feeling nothing at all. Uttering the magical “F!!!” word at something interesting (or boring) is still better than just blindly reading it.
9. Linking system.
The traditional linking system plays a major role in the remembering of things. Link whatever you learn to the things in your room, to the daily activities, to the incidents you remember the most (good or bad) and to the persons you remember the most (good or bad). Remembering is flexing your brain into recursion of remembering things. Remember new things by linking it to things you already remember. This goes on and on to an endless limit. Do u know the memory storage of your brain?? 1 GB or 80 GB or... You are wrong. Its infinity. You believe it or not !!
10. This is for the Computer Geeks out there. Type and run code.
Type and run the code you want to know about. Then you can experiment with changing and improving the (or breaking it, which is sometimes the best way to figure out what’s really happening) code. For lengthy code, you can download the source files from internet and run. ( no need to be lazy about downloading the readily available code :-) ).
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Metacognition
Metacognition: thinking about thinking
If you really want to learn, and you want to learn more quickly and more deeply, pay attention to how you pay attention. Think about how you think. Learn how you learn.
Most of us did not take courses on metacognition or learning theory when we were growing up. We were expected to learn, but rarely taught to learn.
But we assume that if you’re holding a book, you want to learn something . And you always don’t want to append a lot of time on it.
To get the most from any book or learning experience, take responsibility for your brain. Your brain on that content.
The trick is to get your brain to see the new material you’re learning as Really Important and crucial to your well-being. Otherwise, you’re in for a constant battle, with your brain doing its best to keep the new content from sticking.
How do you get your brain hungry?
There’s the slow, tedious way, or the faster, more effective way. The slow way is about sheer repetition. You obviously know that you are able to learn and remember even the dullest of topics, if you keep pounding on the same thing. With enough repetition, your brain says, “This doesn’t feel important to him, but he keeps looking at the same thing over and over and over, so I suppose it must be”.
The faster way is to do anything that increases brain activity, especially different types of brain activity. The things on the previous post (Reader as a Learner) are a big part of the solution, and they are all things that help your brain work in your favour. This is out of my personal experience. :-)
For example, studies show that putting words within the pictures they describe (as opposed to somewhere else in the page, like a caption or in the body text) causes your brain to try to makes sense of how the words and picture relate, and this causes more neurons to fire. More neurons firing is equal to more chances for your brain to get that this is something worth paying attention to, and possibly recording.
A conventional style helps because people tend to pay more attention when they perceive that they’re in a conversation, since they’re expected to follow along and hold up their end. The amazing thing is, your brain doesn’t necessarily care the “conversation” is between you and a book! On the other hand, if the writing style is formal and dry, your brain perceives it the same way you experience being lectured to while sitting in a roomful of passive attendees. No need to stay awake.
But pictures and conversational style are just the beginning. There’s a lot to explore on this. This should be done by yourself. Be creative at drawing pictures, writing stories about the content you are going to remember. Link at any stage , your content to pictures, stories, etc.
I talked much about pictures, because our brain is tuned for visuals, not text. As far our brain’s concerned, a picture really is worth 1024 words. And when text and pictures work together i.e, we need to embed the text in the pictures because our brain works effectively when the text is within the thing the text refers to, as opposed to in a caption or buried in the text somewhere.
We need to use the concepts and pictures in unexpected ways because our brain is tuned to novelty, and we use pictures and ideas with atleast some emotional content, because our brain is tuned to pay attention to the biochemistry of emotions. That which causes you to feel something is more likely to be remembered, even if that feeling is nothing more than a little humor, surprise, or interest.
If you really want to learn, and you want to learn more quickly and more deeply, pay attention to how you pay attention. Think about how you think. Learn how you learn.
Most of us did not take courses on metacognition or learning theory when we were growing up. We were expected to learn, but rarely taught to learn.
But we assume that if you’re holding a book, you want to learn something . And you always don’t want to append a lot of time on it.
To get the most from any book or learning experience, take responsibility for your brain. Your brain on that content.
The trick is to get your brain to see the new material you’re learning as Really Important and crucial to your well-being. Otherwise, you’re in for a constant battle, with your brain doing its best to keep the new content from sticking.
How do you get your brain hungry?
There’s the slow, tedious way, or the faster, more effective way. The slow way is about sheer repetition. You obviously know that you are able to learn and remember even the dullest of topics, if you keep pounding on the same thing. With enough repetition, your brain says, “This doesn’t feel important to him, but he keeps looking at the same thing over and over and over, so I suppose it must be”.
The faster way is to do anything that increases brain activity, especially different types of brain activity. The things on the previous post (Reader as a Learner) are a big part of the solution, and they are all things that help your brain work in your favour. This is out of my personal experience. :-)
For example, studies show that putting words within the pictures they describe (as opposed to somewhere else in the page, like a caption or in the body text) causes your brain to try to makes sense of how the words and picture relate, and this causes more neurons to fire. More neurons firing is equal to more chances for your brain to get that this is something worth paying attention to, and possibly recording.
A conventional style helps because people tend to pay more attention when they perceive that they’re in a conversation, since they’re expected to follow along and hold up their end. The amazing thing is, your brain doesn’t necessarily care the “conversation” is between you and a book! On the other hand, if the writing style is formal and dry, your brain perceives it the same way you experience being lectured to while sitting in a roomful of passive attendees. No need to stay awake.
But pictures and conversational style are just the beginning. There’s a lot to explore on this. This should be done by yourself. Be creative at drawing pictures, writing stories about the content you are going to remember. Link at any stage , your content to pictures, stories, etc.
I talked much about pictures, because our brain is tuned for visuals, not text. As far our brain’s concerned, a picture really is worth 1024 words. And when text and pictures work together i.e, we need to embed the text in the pictures because our brain works effectively when the text is within the thing the text refers to, as opposed to in a caption or buried in the text somewhere.
We need to use the concepts and pictures in unexpected ways because our brain is tuned to novelty, and we use pictures and ideas with atleast some emotional content, because our brain is tuned to pay attention to the biochemistry of emotions. That which causes you to feel something is more likely to be remembered, even if that feeling is nothing more than a little humor, surprise, or interest.
Reader As A Learner
So, what does it take to learn something? First, you have to get it, then make sure you don’t forget it. To be precise, make sure you remember it. Based on the latest research in cognitive science, neurobiology, and educational psychology, learning takes a lot more than text on a page. Lets know what turns our brain on.
1. Make it visual
Images are far more memorable than words alone, and make learning much more effective. It also makes things understandable. Put the words within or near the graphics they relate to, rather than on the bottom or on another page, and learners will be up to twice as likely to solve problems related to the content.
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2. Use a conversational and personalized style
Tell stories to yourself instead of feeling what you read as a lecture. Use casual language. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Which would you pay more attention to : a stimulating dinner party companion, or a lecture?
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3. Think more deeply
In better words, unless you actively flex your neurons, nothing much happens in your head. A reader has to be motivated, engaged, curious, and inspired to solve problems, draw conclusions, and generate new knowledge. And for that, you need challenges, exercises, and thought provoking questions, and activities that involve both sides of he brain, and multiple senses.
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4. Touch the emotions
Your ability to remember something is largely dependent on its emotional content. You remember what you care about. You remember when you feel something. No we’re not talking about any heart-wrenching stories. We’re talking emotions like surprise, curiosity, fun, “what the…?” , and the feeling of “I Rule !!” that comes when you solve a puzzle, learn something everybody else thinks is hard, or realize you know something that “ I’m more technical than thou”, etc.
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