Focus and diffuse mode
Researchers have found that we have two fundamentally different modes of thinking. As far as scientist know, we can’t use both thinking modes simultaneously, but it is important to use both, in their time and place, for efficient learning.
Here, we’ll call them the Focused and the Diffuse modes.
Focus mode
- It’s when you concentrate intently on something you’re trying to learn or to understand.
- It’s almost like zooming in and focusing on a very specific parts/chunks of you brain at a time.
- One important aspect of being in focus mode is that it uses your working memory, which is limited in size. That’s why it’s necessary to avoid distractions: to keep your working memory free of unrelated thoughts.
Diffuse mode
- This more relaxed thinking style that is related to a set of neural resting states. So even when relaxing and sleeping the brain is working in the background. Thought takes off, it moves widely, bounces around the mind.
- 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 traveling along new pathways. 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.
Short and Long term memory
Short term memory in hippocampus. Long term in neocortex.
How stuff moves from one to the other is not completely understood. Thought to happen in between study sessions, breaks and crucially during sleep.
Recall reactivates the long term memory, by reactivating the neurons might also connect to new ones that have formed or moved since last recall, making memories and knowledge susceptible to change. The more recalls the more pathways strengthen and solidify. Creating connections between pathways makes recall more efficient and you better at making connections.
Procrastination
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.
- Researchers discovered that not long after people might start actually working out what they didn’t like, that neurodiscomfort disappeared. It’s important to just jump in.
- It is vital to direct you willpower to changing the reaction to the unpleasant tasks.
- Every habit develops and continues because it rewards us. It is important to build good habits, but also monitor and change old ones.
- Create lists of tasks, subtasks and focus on one at a time. Holding all the tasks in your head takes working memory.
Chunking
Chunks are compact packages of information that your mind can easily access. Suppose the mind has 4 slots of working memory. Each of those 4 slots can hold a certain thought or task in any of the slots, but a more efficient way to use the working memory is to use chunks, a larger package of bits of knowledge.
- 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.
- 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 can be compared to a zip file. 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. Chunks are pieces of information, neuroscientifically speaking, bound together through meaning or use.
- Understanding is like a super glue that helps hold the underlying memory traces together. That’s why it is needed to be deeply in the focused mode when adding to a chunk or starting to chunk a new idea, concept, skill etc.
- Doing it yourself are the pieces that the glue of understanding holds together. That’s why practice is vital.
Procrastination and memory
Building solid chunks in long-term memory, chunks that are easily accessible by your short term memory takes time. It’s not the kind of thing you want to be putting off until the last minute.
- The pomodoro technique is a well-known way to combat putting tasks off. Works by creating a very specific time window, where you focus on one thing and minimize all distractions. For example: 25 minute timer with all notifications turned off.
- Avoid cramming, which doesn’t build solid neural structures, by putting the same amount of time into your learning. But spacing that learning out by starting earlier, you’ll learn better.
- Things we procrastinate still make us uncomfortable and take some working memory because the mind doesn’t like unfinished tasks.
Tips to becoming a better learner
- Physical exercise is by far, more effective than any drug on the market today to help you learn better. It has shown to help in creating new neurons. It benefits all of your vital organisms, not just your brain. It is unfortunate that schools are dropping gym and recess to make room for more instruction. Gym and recess are by far the most important parts of the curriculum.
- Practice can repair, as well as train the brain. 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. But this takes much longer, especially past the critical period (for most cases: the puberty).
- Learning doesn’t progress logically so that each day just adds an additional neat package to your knowledge shelf. Sometimes you hit a wall in constructing your understanding. Things that made sense before can suddenly seem confusing. This type of knowledge collapse seems to occur when your mind is restructuring it’s understanding, building a more solid foundation.
- Analogies and metaphors allow to tap into the visual and spacial skills of the brain to help both learn and memorize new things.
- Monitoring and changing how you think can be hugely beneficial.
- Understanding something is when you can actually do it yourself.
- Repetition works in solidifying some situations, but also loses it’s effect exponentially and thus is usually not efficient for learning.
- However repetition works through interleaving with other tasks by helping the the repeated tasks become part of a bigger picture.
- Physicist Richard Feynman perhaps said it best when he pointed out, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself. The right hemisphere, which is related to the diffuse mode, helps us step back and put our work into big picture perspective. People with damage to the right hemisphere are often unable to gain ah-ha, insights. The right hemisphere serves as a sort of devil’s advocate to question the status quo and look for global inconsistencies. The left hemisphere, which is relate to the focus mode, instead tries to cling tenaciously to the way things were. That’s the problem with the focus, sometimes a bit left hemisphere, leaning mode of analysis. It provides for an analytical and upbeat approach, but abundant research evidence suggests there’s a potential for rigidity, dogmatism, and egocentricity.
- Friends and teammates can serve as sort of ever questioning larger scale diffuse mode outside your brain that can catch what you missed, or what you just can’t see.
- Hard Start - Jump to Easy. Start with the harder questions, but allow yourself to jump to the easier ones when you get stuck. This is what allows you use both modes of thinking in an exam.
- Focus on breathing if you seem panicky before an exam, test or otherwise.