Once you believe in your own expertise you begin to close off your mind to possibilities. You stop acting curiously. You may resist change in your field for fear of losing authority. Your own judgement and views can imprison you.
The Learning Rabbit Hole
To be explored…
Topics listed below are ideas that are yet to be summarized.
Memory competitions
Change in memory storage requirements (using the brain to search for connections/creativity)
Information storage limitations
The biology of learning
The importance of forgetting
Reading
- https://fs.blog/reading/
Hunter Gatherer Notes
The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives. John Taylor Gatto, in A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling
Keep your wits about you. Believe that you can rather than that you cannot. Build deep community and, having built it, trust that it will be there for you.
In light of the relative rarity of teaching both in other species and among other human cultures, we should be asking ourselves: What do we need to learn in order to become our best selves? And of those things that we do need to learn, which of them need to be taught, and which can we learn in other ways—through direct experience, or through observation and practice, for instance? Put another way: What do we need school for?
You do need school to learn to read and write. Reading and writing are so new that we need an educational supplement in order to learn it. School is also useful to learn cell biology, written history, and all but the most basic math. Literacy, like math and thinking from first principles, is like an adaptive foothill, though, and once you’re literate (or numerate, or adept with logic), you can teach yourself many things without requiring further school.
We can also use school to discuss texts with real people, to gain exposure to ways of thinking about and representing the world about which we were previously ignorant, and to gain experience in proposing and running scientific experiments. School is not necessary to engage in any of those pursuits, but it can be useful.
In school we also might learn what it sounds like when irreconcilable positions meet one another. This allows an insightful person to go on to do the same thing within themselves: hold two irreconcilable positions in their head at once. The value in this is immeasurable; it allows a person to learn argument by arguing with themselves, which facilitates their ability to both uncover and recognize truth. Humans are perhaps unique in the degree to which our theory of mind—the ability to understand that other living beings have points of view, and that those perspectives might be different from our own—enables us to explore contradiction and paradox.
- While the West has tended to avoid paradoxes and to find them troublesome, Eastern traditions are more likely to have embraced inconsistency. We argue that Buddhism being littered with contradictions is adaptive, serving exactly the educational purpose we are advocating for. Similarly, classrooms ought to be littered with paradoxes, left in various states of interpretation, for children and older students to discover and poke at and understand.
Because memory and recall are easy to assess and measure, they can easily become the metric that is being chased, by students and teachers and schools alike. Far harder to teach and to quantify—and at least as valuable, if not more so—are critical thinking, logic, and creativity. Memory exercises tend to drill down on detail, on facts that are unchanged by context. Trade-offs being ubiquitous, a focus on memorized details, then, will likely come at the expense of a focus on the big picture.
While people don’t intuit the formalization of the scientific method, children are inclined to observe pattern, to postulate reasons for the pattern, and to try to figure out if they’re right. All people are inclined to be verificationists, to look for verifying evidence of their own correctness, rather than to look for falsifying evidence that, if it doesn’t show up, makes their precious idea look more and more likely.
What Is School?
School is based on an economic efficiency, while being unimaginative about what could be accomplished. The economics—not to mention the perverse incentives behind compulsory schooling—of school tend to fill children’s heads with knowledge, without showing them a path to wisdom.
Perhaps school should serve the purpose of helping young people grapple with the question: Who am I, and what am I going to do about it? Another way of phrasing this might be: What’s the biggest and most important problem I can solve with my gifts and skills? Or: How do I find my consciousness, my truest self? Done well, then, school can provide a great platform for formalizing and delivering rites of passage. Rather than focusing on any version of these questions, though, modern schooling, especially the compulsory sort widespread across the WEIRD world, is more apt to teach quiescence and conformity.
Or perhaps school should reveal to children that fringe positions should be explored and considered, not thrown out immediately on the basis that they are unpopular. Betting against the fringe is an easy and safe bet and when done in a tone of paternalistic indulgence, say, or authoritarian disdain, it usually shuts down dissent. While most fringe ideas are in fact wrong, it is exactly from the fringe that progress is made. This is where the paradigm shifts happen. This is where innovation and creativity occur, and yes, most of it is wrong or useless, but the most important ideas on which we now base our understanding of the world and our society came from the fringe.
School should be fun, but it should not be gameable. A child shouldn’t be able to “win” at school (although many do, and many more lose at it). Social rules are learned at school, but at its base, school should be about discovering truth, both universal and local. School is, for better and for worse, a stand-in for parents, for kin group, for those with whom the child has shared fate.
School should not, therefore, teach through fear. Risk and challenge help children learn. As with parenting, this requires early tight bonding, during which a secure base is established, which provides children the confidence to go out adventuring fairly early, because they know that someone has their back, no matter what. School that operates by fear will teach the opposite lesson.
- Fear is an easy mechanism of control, and so it should not be surprising that teachers use fear to control students of all ages. As corporal punishment in the classroom fell out of favor in many (but not all) places, psychological and emotional control replaced it.
- Children are threatened with poor grades, poor test scores, and having their parents informed that they have behaved badly. The rise of metrics within a system—which are often overly simple, wrongheaded, and only pseudo-quantitative—tends to accompany a decay in social trust.
One approach, which will be more effective with older children and young adults, is for teachers to explicitly hand away their own authority by telling students not to trust them just because they are the figure in the front of the room. When a teacher then does earn the respect and the trust of her students, such that she becomes a legitimate authority figure, one with authority that was earned rather than assumed, her authority will better serve both the students and their education.
- Using fear to keep children seated in neat and tidy rows, to keep their eyes forward and their mouths closed, to keep them from moving their bodies at all but for a few scheduled moments in each day—this will help create adults who are unable to regulate their own bodies and senses, unable to trust in their own ability to make decisions, and likely to demand similarly controlled environments in their adult lives—trigger warnings, safe spaces, and the like.
For young schoolchildren, one solution would be having a garden at school, and spending time in it in all sorts of weather. Frequent field trips to natural areas, and spending time actually outside rather than in the climate-controlled protection of the “nature center,” help, too. Will it always be comfortable? No. Will some children be ill prepared for rain or wind or sun? Yes. Will they learn from small, early mistakes to start taking responsibility for their own bodies and fates and so get better at navigating the world? Yes. Yes, they will.
Preparing students to understand risk encourages them to expand their worldviews, and embrace experiences that lead to maturity. This does, however, come at a cost: understanding risk cannot completely protect individuals from danger.
Modern school tends to protect against individual tragedies, while facilitating the larger, societal ones. Arrange all the little boys and girls neatly in rows, assign them seats, and tell them never to speak unless they are called on first, because that will make it easier to keep track of them. At the same time, at home, teach the little boys and girls that they are each the center of the entire universe, and that they may and in fact should interrupt adults at any moment, for any reason. Teach the children that temper tantrums are acceptable by caving to them whenever they erupt, and also tell the children that they are the most precious and infallible beings in existence, and as such, any criticism is a crime against their core selves.
We should not be surprised when children raised this way can make no sense of the confused and confusing messages coming at them from home and from school. Nor should it surprise us when they gravitate to the systems that are most gameable.
Congratulations, society, you have successfully produced self-satisfied whiners who are accustomed to getting what they want, who are good at school but not at thinking, and who are, in fact, neither smart nor wise.
The World Is Not About You
The rise of pharmaceuticals being prescribed to children, helicopter and snowplow parenting, and the near ubiquity of screens have all made school an even more difficult place than it once was. In the United States, add to these the economic and political forces that have reduced school funding while increasing testing, thus cutting the creativity and freedom of teachers off at the knees.
Risk and potential go hand in hand. We need to let children, including college students, risk getting hurt. Protection from pain guarantees weakness, fragility, and greater suffering in the future. The discomfort may be physical, emotional, or intellectual—My ankle! My feelings! My worldview! —and all need to be experienced to learn and grow.
By inculcating in children the sense that order is always better than chaos, and that being easily counted and prioritizing doing things that are easily counted is the honorable way to go through school (and therefore life, many would extrapolate), society creates adults who bristle at the unexpected and the new.
Higher Ed
Science and art, in particular, often mistakenly described as at opposite ends of some imagined spectrum in the pursuit of truth and meaning, do not make their primary impact in the world through careful, thoughtful assessment and critique of what has come before. Yes, we stand on the shoulders of giants, and yes, the history of ideas and of creations that came before us is integral to what we know and think and do, but that does not mean that it ought to be our primary focus, or that it is our mission.
Tools Are More Valuable Than Facts
Explicitly tell students—and make sure that it is true—that they are not in competition with one another. Our students actually learned more when they collaborated with one another. There was never a “curve” looming that guaranteed that some would fail. Another piece of the puzzle is to break the “this is the time of day that we are educated” paradigm, by leaving the classroom and spending more time together. When students and faculty do this, and break bread together day after day for several days or weeks or even months, it becomes clear that, actually, good questions show up at all hours of the day, all days of the week, and if you are traveling with an intellectual tool kit that you have cultivated through logic, creativity, and practice, you can engage such questions whenever and wherever they arise, not just in the classroom when the authority with the appropriate degree is standing in front of you, paid to answer your questions.
Intellectual Self-Reliance
When I go outside at night and look up at the stars, the feeling that I get is not comfort. The feeling that I get is a kind of delicious discomfort at knowing that there is so much out there that I do not understand and the joy in recognizing that there is enormous mystery, which is not a comfortable thing. This, I think, is the principal gift of education. Teller, in “Teaching: Just Like Performing Magic”
The brick-in-the-wall model creates minds that are all alike, minds that are ever less capable of generating or considering strange new ideas, minds that are outraged by confusion, and by uncertainty. Nearly every student whom they taught was, in the end, game to be challenged, actually challenged—told when they were wrong, told the teachers when they were wrong, and told that they needed to learn to pose real questions and then sit in the not-knowing for long enough to figure out how one might figure it out.
What harm can come from looking up answers to straightforward questions? The harm is that it trains us all to be less self-reliant, less able to make connections in our own brains, and less willing to search for relevant things that we do know, and then try to apply those things to systems we know less about. If answering “how” questions quickly, with a few keystrokes, impedes the development of self-reliance, what of the desire to pursue “why” questions this way? It is even more likely to kill logical and creative thought. Why do birds migrate? Why are there more species closer to the equator? Why does the landscape look this way? Before you look it up— think on it. Walk on it. Sleep on it. Talk about it. Share your ideas with your friends, and when they disagree, engage the disagreement.
Calm Down, Level Up
In the past, it was difficult to find yourself in a habitat without having an intimate understanding of it. Either you had received wisdom about it from your elders, or you had come to understand it by entering it from the edge, gradually immersing yourself in it. We moderns, though, live in such a rapidly and unpredictably changing habitat that none of us can claim to be fully native in it. We also have a problem of abrupt boundaries that our ancestors did not, a strangely clear line demarcating safety from not: the swimming pool; the garbage disposal; the curb.
Fear, anger, and hyperbole sell products, attract an audience, and are a useful tool of control. They are not, however, representative of the best that we can do as humans. Terror-inducing stories may be a hack to prompt appropriate behavior in modernity. It is a failure of education to scare people into acceptable behavior. If the ultimate goal of education is to produce capable, curious, compassionate adults, helping students stay calm and capable of reason, rather than in a constant state of alarm, is a far better route to that end.
Observation and Nature
One set of goals for higher ed ought to be to teach students how to hone their intuitions, become experienced enough in the world to reliably recognize pattern, return to first principles when trying to explain observed phenomena, and reject authority-based explanations.
It takes being willing to fix your own errors. Modeling for students the actual process by which ideas emerge, and are refined and tested, then rejected or accepted, allows them to move away from the linear models of knowledge acquisition that most of their schooling, and nearly every textbook, have inculcated in them.
If education is, in part, preparation for an unpredictable and shifting world, teaching courage and curiosity ought to be a priority.
By creating opportunity to go into nature—regardless of what your discipline is, and what you are trying to teach—you allow students to begin trusting themselves, rather than taking other people’s words for what is true.
Students may think that they want to be seduced, led astray by false praise, as it feels good in the moment. Most whom we met, though, wanted to be educated, led forth from narrow, faith-based belief into intellectual self-sufficiency, where they could assess the world and the claims in it from first principles, with respect and compassion for all.
The Corrective Lens
School and, parents should teach children:
- Respect, not fear.
- To honor good rules and question bad ones. All people run into bad rules—whether in the legal system, at home, at school, or elsewhere. If you’re a parent, strive to show your children that you are 100% on their team—no matter the trouble they’ve bumped up against. Children should be free to ask why the parents’ rules are what they are, but also know that it is counterproductive to break the rules simply for the sake of breaking them.
- To get out of their comfort zone and explore new ideas. You will likely learn the least in exactly the areas where you are most certain of what you already know, whether or not what you (think you) know is actually accurate.
- The value of knowing something real about the physical world. When you have a sense of physical reality, you are less likely to be gameable by the social sphere. Never accept conclusions on the basis of authority; if you find that what you are being taught does not match your experience of the world, do not acquiesce. Pursue the inconsistencies.
- What complex systems actually look like, even if the messiness of those systems is beyond the scope of the lesson. Nature is an example of such a system. Nature provides, among other things, a corrective to the ideas that emotional pain is equivalent to physical pain, and that life is or can be made perfectly safe. Exposure to complexity is key.
Higher education, in particular, should recognize that:
- Civilization needs citizens capable of openness and inquiry; these should therefore be the hallmarks of higher education. The need for nimble thinking, creativity in both the posing of questions and the search for their solutions, an ability to return to first principles rather than rely on mnemonics and received wisdom—these are ever more important as we move forward in the 21st century.
- A misunderstanding of how work will look in the future is driving people to specialize earlier and more narrowly. Higher ed is the natural place to counteract that trend and push toward greater breadth, nuance, and integration. Students of traditional college age today cannot accurately predict what their career will look like by the time they are seventy, fifty, or even thirty. College is where breadth should be inculcated.
- A university cannot simultaneously maximize the pursuit of truth, and the pursuit of social justice, as Jonathan Haidt has famously noted. This is a basic trade-off, and unavoidable. It becomes important, then, to ask what the purpose of a university is. Is it necessary that we focus on the pursuit of truth? Yes, in fact it is.
- Social risks—intellectual, psychological, emotional—must be taken, but doing so in front of strangers is particularly difficult. Both small class sizes and extended time together building community are correctives to anonymity.
- Authority is not to be used as a bludgeon to shut down the exchange of ideas. Bob Trivers, evolutionary biologist, once advised them to seek positions in which they taught undergraduates. His reasoning was this: Undergrads do not yet know the field, and so are likely to ask questions that you aren’t expecting, “dumb” questions, or ones imagined to already be settled. When the educator is confronted with such questions, one of three things is likely to be true:
- Sometimes the field is right, and the answer is simple. Full stop.
- Sometimes the field is right, but the answer is complex, nuanced, or subtle. Figuring out, or remembering, how to explain that complexity or subtlety is worth the time of any thinker who deserves the title.
- Sometimes the field is wrong, and the answer is not understood, but it takes a naive view of the matter to ask the question.
- Classrooms are effectively sterile boxes removed from the world. It is difficult to learn in such a situation, because you won’t run into the things that you need to learn but that cannot be taught—things like how to survive tree falls, boat accidents, and earthquakes.
21 Lessons Notes
How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed, and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?
Today we have no idea what the world will look like in 2050, so it is extremely difficult to guide young people in the right direction. It is entirely possible that the human body might undergo bioengineering and direct-BCI in the not-too-distant future and anything we teach them now will be irrelevant. Schools still teach kids to cram information. This was fine when information was limited and the leading media outlets censored what they wanted, but now we have an overload of information making it hard to know what to believe. The last thing schools need to do now is fill their heads with more info. What they should be doing is teaching them how to decipher fact from fiction and how to think for themselves.
The four Cs – critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.
More importantly, the ability to deal with change, learn new things, and preserve mental balance in unfamiliar settings. Teachers usually lack the flexibility that the 21st century demands as they are products of a defunct teaching system. Most “adults” cannot be relied on because it is hard to tell if their advice is timeless wisdom or outdated bias.
Technology can help but you don’t want to rely on it lest you become hostage to its agenda. Most people don’t “know” themselves so when you tell them to listen to themselves, they become prey to external manipulations. It is already pretty hard to tell the difference between yourself and the directives of marketing experts. The only way to overcome this issue is to know thyself. Spend time figuring out what your operating system requires, not what your smartphone, computer, government, or bank account want.
If you are happy allowing the algorithms to dictate your decisions then enjoy the ride. If you would like to retain an element of control and the future of your life, you’ll need to run faster than the algorithms and leave behind any digital trace of illusory desires.
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning Notes
Dreyfus Model
The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition outlines five discrete stages through which one must pass on the journey from novice to expert. Nurses used this model in the early 80s.
The Dreyfus model is a construct theory. Event theories can be measured, can be verified and proven. Construct theories are intangible abstractions; it makes no sense to speak of “proving them”. Instead, construct theories are evaluated in terms of their usefulness. Mind is an abstraction. It is just an abstract concept.
The model is situational so it is applicable per skill. Not a trait or talent model. Most adults are experts at walking and novices at tax preparation. The difference is the requirement of steps in order to figure something out or if it is intuitive.
Stage 1: Novices. Little to no experience. That may count a developer who has “10 years” of experience when really they have 1 year of the same thing repeated over 10 years (not counted as experience). Novices are concerned with their ability to succeed; with little experience to guide them, they don’t know whether their actions will turn out okay. They typically don’t want to learn, they just want to accomplish a task and are vulnerable to confusion when things go awry. They need recipes or instructions to get things done. This is how call centers can function with little experience. Learning is painful and most of the time we want to avoid it (especially in the example of tax prep). The problem with rules is they can be misinterpreted and vague (Clinton esque – it depends on what you mean when you say…). This is called infinite regression. Rules get you started but take you no further.
Stage 2: Advanced beginners. They can break away from the fixed rules a little bit but still have problems troubleshooting. They want information fast and don’t want to be bogged down with a simple explanation again. They don’t want the big picture. No holistic understanding and don’t want one yet. If you try to force it on them they will dismiss it as irrelevant.
Stage 3: Competent. Practitioners can start developing conceptual models of the problem domain and work with these models effectively. They can begin to seek out and apply advice from experts. No longer knee jerk responses and will seek to solve problems based on previous experience. However, there is still difficulty without fine details to focus on. These people are usually the ones who “have intuition” and are “being resourceful”. Typically in leadership positions and can teach novices and try to avoid annoying the experts.
Stage 4: Proficient. They need the big picture. They want to learn the framework and will be very frustrated by oversimplified information. They can correct poor task performance. They reflect on how they’ve done and revise their approach to perform better next time. They can read case studies and learn from others. They learn to “test everything that can possibly break.”
Stage 5: Expert. The primary sources of knowledge and information in any field. Continually looking for better methods and ways of doing things. They write the books, the articles, and do the lecture circuits. Only 1-5% of population. They work from intuition rather than reason. A combination of subtle clues will give the person the answer but they won’t be able to come to a conclusion as to why. They are very good at targeted, focused pattern matching.
When you’re not very skilled in an area you are more likely to think you’re actually pretty expert at it. In the paper “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments”, psychologists Kruger and Dunning bring up a story about a thief who robs a bank in broad daylight. He was confident that wearing lemon juice on his face would make him invisible (second-order incompetence). Charles Darwin said “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Once you become an expert, you become painfully aware of just how little you really know.
When making experts write rules for novices it helps the novice but when you get the experts to follow their own rules they lose their expert edge. You can’t herd a racehorse. Rules for novices and intuition for experts.
Most people don’t go any further than stage 2 for most skills in their lives. They find what they need and go no further. Metacognitive abilities (self-awareness) is only possible at the higher skill levels. This means lower level practitioners overestimate their abilities by as much as 50%. If you have an expert on your team you should accommodate them since they are rare and useful. Although, keep in mind that experts are not always good teachers as teaching is a skill unto itself. It is better to get somebody slightly above their level to train them.
For mastery, Dr. K. Anderson Ericsson says:
- You need a well defined task
- The task needs to be appropriately difficult – challenging but doable.
- The environment needs to supply informative feedback that you can act on.
- It should also provide opportunities for repetition and correction of errors.
Trumpeter Clark Terry would say: Imitate, assimilate, innovate.
For teams you need high performers, a consistent team (don’t rotate people), a safe environment, good incentive, and a good structure.
Don’t Rely on Tools
Don’t rely on models or confuse them with reality in a profession. Things change and so do people. So, by relying on a model it may lose its use and the team will suffer because of it. Overreliance on formal models rewards herd behavior and devalues creativity. Be careful what traits you devalue. Don’t alienate experienced practitioners in favor of novices. Don’t spell out too much detail – leads to infinite regression. Don’t oversimplify the complex. Do not demand excessive conformity. Context is critical. Learn when to break the rules. Don’t sloganize speech or it loses meaning.
Actions:
- Rate yourself on your skills at work. List how it impacts you.
- Identify other skills where you are a novice, advanced beginner, etc. Be aware of second order incompetence.
- What do you need to advance to the next levels?
- Think back on problems within a team. Could it have been avoided if the team knew about this model? What can you do different going forward?
- Who are your teammates and where are they on their journey? How can that be helpful to you?
CPU 1 & 2
CPU 1 is linear, logical thought, and language processing. It is slow and uses a small amount of brain real estate. If it is not processing it will set an idle-loop routine that is seen as internal chatter. CPU 2 is like a digital signal processor. Like a super regular-expression search engine, responsible for searching and pattern matching. Sometimes it can grab matching patterns that aren’t related. It can go searching while you are thinking about something else and return a result asynchronously. No verbal processing so the results are typically non-verbal.
If CPU 1 is being used, CPU 2 can’t get access and vice versa. They interfere with each other. From now on linear will be L-mode and holistic CPU 2 is R-mode (rich). You need both: R for intuition, problem solving, and creativity and L for working through details and making things happen.
R mode acts as a search engine for long-term memory and ideas that are “in-process” but the non-verbal aspect makes it difficult to do things like remember dreams. It is also difficult to control. It is the peripheral vision of the mind.
An enzyme located in the synapses called PKMzeta acts as a mini memory engine that keeps memory up and running by changing facets of the synapse contacts. If the process stops, you will lose that memory no matter what it is. Memories are maintained by an executing loop rather than being stored.
Linear and Rich Mode
The fastest processing is the muscle memory response. Doesn’t travel up the cortex.
L-mode provides the following:
- Verbal – using words to name, describe, and define
- Analytic – Figuring things out step-by-step and part-by-part
- Symbolic – Using a symbol to stand for something
- Abstract – Taking out a small bit of information and using it to represent the whole thing
- Temporal – Keeping track of time and sequencing one thing after another
- Rational – Drawing conclusions based on reason and facts
- Digital – Using numbers as in counting
- Logical – Drawing conclusions based on logic (theorems and well stated arguments)
- Linear – Thinking in terms of linked ideas, one thought directly following another, often leading to a convergent conclusion.
The R-Mode is decidedly holistic and wants to see the whole picture at once, perceiving the overall patterns and structures. It works spatially and in relation to other things. Intuitive and makes leaps from insight. Occasionally not rationally as it is based on hunches and leaps of insight. They include:
- Non-verbal
- Synthetic
- Concrete
- Analogic
- Non-rational
- Spatial
- Intuitive
- Holistic
- Non-linear
The expert relies on the R-mode to make intuitive and creative decisions where others must be rational and analytical to accomplish a task. Learn by synthesis as well as analysis. Don’t dissect the frog, build it.
We tend to have a cultural bias towards L-Mode thinking and think of R-Mode thinkers as the lesser of mortals. It appears to be vestigial and only useful in the world gone by. This is mostly because L-Mode thinking brought us out of the caves. However, that overreliance on L-Mode has lost us some of our R abilities.
Being happy broadens your thought processes and is essential to learning. Once you get angry or fearful your brain starts shutting down extra resources in preparation for fight or flight.
Increase Sensory Experience
Add sensory experience to engage more of your brain. Tactile enhancement is a good place to start. It helps visualization and generating imagery with participants. Also, use cross-sensory feedback such as:
- Writing down
- Drawing a picture
- Describe verbally
- Engage in discussion with teammates; respond to questions and criticisms
- Act out the roles involved
Your brain is always hungry for this sort of cross-sensory, additional, novel stimulus. Changing your environment regularly feeds your brain.
Write drunk, revise sober. Get used to something first before trying too hard to reign it in. You can also use another person to take on another mode. The navigator can see the bigger picture while the driver is analytical.
Metaphor is the common ground for both verbalization and images. Use metaphor and random juxtaposition to flex the creative mind. Make novel connections in weird places. Humor is based on identifying relationships and distorting them.
When trying to write, you will encounter resistance. Niggling self-doubt to wildly creative procrastination to a myriad assortment of other distractions and excuses. Once you start writing it is important to maintain the flow. Don’t worry if the technical issues distract you or wondering if it needs to be edited.
Write your morning pages first thing in the morning. Write at least 3 pages, long hand. Do not censor. Do not skip a day. Once the initial resistance wears off you’ll start to harvest thought with R-Mode. You haven’t put up defenses yet so are not adapted to “reality”.
To really kick-start the R-Mode you can try doing different things and messing up your habits. You’ll start to see the world differently. Pick up on subtle cues.
Learn Deliberately
The majority of all scientific information is less than 15 years old. In some areas of science, the info doubles every three years. The word learning contains unpleasant baggage, conjuring up images of youthful chalk dust torture, the mind-numbing tedium of corporate-mandated “copy machine training”, or similarly ersatz educational events. Education comes from the Latin word educare, which means “led out”, in the sense of being drawn forward. Typically we think of education as something that is done to a learner rather than what is drawn out.
- Learning isn’t something that is done to you; it’s something you do.
- Mastering knowledge alone, without experience, isn’t effective.
- A random approach, without goals and feedback, tends to give random results.
SMART objectives
Specific: Narrow a goal down to something concrete.
Measurable: How do you know when you’re done? Use actual numbers. If you can’t it probably isn’t specific enough. Take small bites and measure incrementally. “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Achievable: If something isn’t actually achievable it will feel soul-suckingly frustrating. Be reasonable and make goals based on where you are now.
Relevant: Does this really matter to you? Is it actually in your control?
Time-boxed: You need a deadline. Without one, a goal will languish and be perpetually put aside. Take small bites, give yourself frequent milestones and you’ll be motivated when you meet them.
The objectives may encompass family, business, finance, community, and environment usually.
Pragmatic Investment Plan
PIP: Have a concrete plan. Be very specific in your plan; use SMART objectives and goals, and devise different levels of goals over time. For instance – Now (what’s the next action you can take), goals for next year, goals for five years out.
Diversify. Make a conscious action to diversify your attention so you don’t have all your eggs in one basket. Consider the risk vs. return ratio. Not only will the payoff be uncertain it will also affect the way you think and do things. So, anything you learn will have value; it just may not be direct, commercial, on the job value. Don’t forget that time does not equal value.
Active, not passive, investment. Always get feedback and realistically judge how things are going. You have to stop and reevaluate your portfolio. Is it performing as expected? Have things changed?
Invest regularly (Dollar-Cost Averaging). You may pay too much for stock but sometimes you get a great deal. The average should smooth out and pay-off. You need to make a commitment to invest a minimum amount of time on a regular basis. Create a ritual if needed. Plan what to do before sitting down.
Primary Learning Mode
General leaning styles:
- Visual learners need to see the material – and the instructor. Pictures and graphs all work well and they will be sensitive to body language and facial expressions.
- Auditory learners have to hear the material. Lectures, seminars, and podcasts. Tone of voice, speed, and other nuances.
- Kinesthetic learners learn by moving and touching. Good for sports or arts and crafts.
Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligence:
- Kinesthetic – sports, dancing, DIY projects, woodworking, etc.
- Linguistic – Verbal arguments, storytelling, reading, writing
- Logical/mathematical – Math, numbers, sciences, taxonomics, geometry
- Visual/spatial – using diagrams/plans, sketching, painting, manipulating images
- Musical – Playing music, recognizing sounds, rhythms, patterns, remembering slogans and verses
- Interpersonal – Empathetic; senses feelings, intentions, and motivations of others
- Intrapersonal – Self-reflective; works from an understanding of inner feelings, dreams, and relations with others
Everyone has combinations of these in varying amounts and some are more geared to L or R mode. However, don’t use Gardner’s categories as an excuse. They may change with experience.
Adult learners are motivated to learn to satisfy their own interest and needs, units studied should be real-life situations, analysis of the learner’s experience is the core method employed, they need self-direction, the instructor must allow for differences in style, time, place, and pace.
Study groups are legit:
- Ask for proposals. See what’s on everyone’s mind.
- Select a proposal and a leader. They don’t have to be an expert, just passionate.
- Buy books.
- Schedule lunch meetings.
Use Enhanced Learning Techniques
Better ways to deliberately read and summarize written material.
Use mind maps to explore and find patterns and relationships.
Learn by teaching.
Read Deliberately with SQ3R
Survey: Scan the table of contents and chapter summaries for an overview.
Question: Note any questions you may have.
Read: Read its entirety.
Recite: Summarize, take notes, and put into your own words.
Review: Reread, expand notes, and discuss with colleagues.
Visualize Insight with Mind Maps
Start with a largish piece of paper, write the subject title in the center of the page, and draw a circle, for each major subject subheadings, draw lines from them recurse for additional hierarchal nodes, continue.
Gain Experience
Build to learn, not learn to build.
Fail efficiently with better feedback.
Groove your neural pathways for success.
Play in Order to Learn
We seem to have a cultural tendency to shovel information in and hope it is useful later. Absurd.
On your next problem, put yourself in the picture. Anthropomorphism helps leverage experience.
Explore and get used to a problem before deciding on the facts. Come back to more exploration after absorbing the formal facts. Then back.
Play, in every sense of the word.
Leverage Existing Knowledge
Problem solving with George Polya
- What are the unknown aspects?
- What do you know? What data do you have?
- What constraints and what rules apply?
Make a plan, execute it, and review the results.
- Try to think of a familiar problem having the same or similar unknowns.
- Draw a picture.
- Solve a related or simpler problem; drop some constraints or use a subset of the data.
- Were all the constraints and data used? If not, why not?
- Try restarting the problem.
- Try working backward from the unknown toward the data.
Embed Failing in Practice
A man’s errors are his portals of discovery – James Joyce, 1882-1941.
Debugging means solving problems, generally of our own making. Errors, mistakes, and oversights. “I don’t know” is a good start.
Create an exploratory environment. Make it safe to experiment. You need the following:
- Freedom to experiment. Design time with few repercussions.
- Ability to backtrack to a stable state. If things turn to shit you can go back a step and try again.
- Reproduce any work product as of any time. Can you run what you did months ago again?
- Ability to demonstrate progress. You can’t get anywhere without feedback. Did this experiment work better than the previous one? How do you know?
You are the least creative when under time pressure. Deadlines are god for L-Mode thinking but not R. There is even a time pressure hangover after the fact. It affects your creativity. Your vision narrows under pressure.
Once the pressure of failing is relieved you tend to succeed. You can be attentive, comfortable and observe.
Perception is based on prediction. Prediction is based on context and past experience, so real time input takes a back seat.
Always be the worst guy in a band, because you will improve dramatically. Surround yourself with highly skilled people. Get used to the feeling of success and you will create a groove in the mind for it. Experience using scaffolding.
Focus
Attention Deficit. There is only so much you can pay attention to, and there are so many things competing for your attention. Beware idle-loop chatter.
Instead of saying you don’t have the time it would be better to say you don’t have the bandwidth. If you practice meditation, you will have lasting concentrative effects. Vipassana is a form of relaxed awareness.
- Find a quiet spot, free from distraction or interruption.
- Sit comfortably, alert posture, with a straight back. Take a moment to release any body tension.
- Close your eyes and be aware of your breath.
- Be aware of the rhythm, the length, and quality of the inhale and exhale. Don’t try to change it, just be aware.
- Keep mind focused on breath or thoughts. Do not begin a conversation with yourself.
- You may go over the same topics. When attention wanders let thoughts go and bring the awareness back to breath.
- Even if your attention wanders, the exercise of bringing back helps.
- You can try segmented breathing. Lower belly and abdomen, the chest and ribcage, and the very upper chest and collar bones.
Defocus to Focus
Have a recipe for mental marinade. Have you tried others?
Have you criticized others for their time spent in the mental marinade? What will you do differently now?
Have you been criticized for marinating?
Manage Your Knowledge
Create an exocortex. A log of notes, drawings, and books that contain ideas that are external to your brain that can be referenced.
A personal wiki is an example of an external brain. A text-based mind map. Once you start writing down your ideas, you’ll start to see examples of them out in the real world. The act of externalizing it makes it open for discussion.
Optimize Your Current Context
Computers have the ability to swap context easily and naturally. We aren’t, so it is mentally expensive if something interrupts us or breaks our flow. It is called context switching.
Context switching. How much disposable attention do you have? Multitasking takes a heavy toll to productivity. It costs 20-40% of productivity. Every time you swap tasks you drop thought and reload new thought in. Switching back requires reuploading it. Each interruption might take 20min of recovery. The cocktail of stressors leads to cognitive overload. Constantly interrupting your tasks with messages and emails drops your IQ 10 points vs. marijuana which only drops 4.
Prepare for distractions. Set distraction free zones but if you know somebody will interrupt at a certain time use it as a chance to do a new task.
Use multiple monitors to avoid context switching.
Summary
Start with a plan. Block out time and fight for it. Keep track of what you’ve accomplished and review them when you feel like you haven’t done enough. A great use of the exocortex.
Inaction is the enemy, not error.
New habits take time. 3 weeks minimum.
Belief is real. Your thoughts will physically alter the wiring of your brain and your brain chemistry.
Take small, next steps. Low hanging fruit. Keep the big goal in mind but not trying to map out all the steps. Just the next one.
- Start taking responsibility; don’t be afraid to ask “why”? or “how do you know?” or “how do I know?” or to answer “I don’t know yet.”
- Pick two things that will help you maintain context and avoid interruption, and start doing them right away.
- Create a Pragmatic Investment Plan, and set up SMART goals.
- Figure out where you are on the novice-to-expert spectrum in your chosen profession and what you might need to progress. Be honest. Do you need more recipes or more context? More rules or more intuition?
- Practice. Having trouble with a piece of code? Write it 5 different ways.
- Plan on making more mistakes.
- Keep a notebook on you. Doodle. Mind map. Take notes. Keep thoughts loose and flowing.
- Open up your mind to aesthetics and additional sensory input.
- Start a personal wiki on things you find interesting.
- Start blogging. Comment on books you read, and read more. Use SQ3R and mind maps.
- Make thoughtful walking a part of your day.
- Start a book-reading group.
- Get a second monitor, and start using a virtual desktop.
- Go through the “next actions” for each chapter and try them.
Huberman Lab
Neurobiology
Neuroplasticity: The Holy Grail of Neuroscience
Neurons can change their connections and the way they work. Can be adaptive or damaging. We like to think of neuroplasticity as self-directed plasticity.
Until about age 25, learning can be done passively. As an adult it is wise to ask yourself what aspect of your emotions, perceptions, or sensations you would like to change, and which ones are currently available to you. Also, how are you going to go about that change and what is the structure. Your ability to intentionally undergo change is governed by how awake or sleepy you are.
These changes can eventually be made reflexive through habit development.
The Pillar of Plasticity
The autonomic nervous system (ANS) works like a see-saw. Alertness and calmness vary with the passage of the circadian rhythm. Focus changes with it.
Both alertness and sleepiness are essential for learning. You can’t just burn the candle at both ends and expect the brain to “suck up” the information.
Plasticity Is NOT the Goal
It is a state or capacity for change. Not the goal. What is your end goal that is related to that change?
Practical Plasticity Language
LTP, LTD, spike timing plasticity, etc., are cellular changes. Short-term is anything you want momentarily, such as waking up early for a flight, where you will discard the behavior later.
Medium term plasticity, like people who want to know what they need to do to get by (like exam takers). Another example is taking a holiday and learning the areas while you are there.
Long term plasticity is the goal for those who want to learn for daily life change.
The New Neuron Myth
New neurons can occur in the olfactory bulb and hippocampus in animal studies. Human studies are less certain. Very few cells are added. Infinitesimally small number in adulthood.
Rostral migratory stream (olfactory) dendrite regrowth.
Competition Is the Route to Plasticity
You can’t just keep adding new things to the brain without some sort of sacrifice. There is energetic competition in the brain.
If you’re older than 25 there won’t be change unless you put selective attention and motivation into that specific change. Attention + awareness = change.
Neuromodulators
The Portal to Neuroplasticity
Plasticity in the adult brain is gated/controlled by neuromodulators (dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, etc.). Trauma and challenging circumstances facilitate easier learning. Epinephrine and acetylcholine focus attention and plasticity easier as the brain areas they are released on become more active.
Epinephrine = alertness. Acetylcholine = marked neurons that are active during heightened alertness. Strengthening the neuronal pathways. Even when we don’t want them to.
To learn a new language or some other skill, we require the focus from epinephrine. Neuroplasticity actually happens during sleep and non-sleep deep rest (NSDR). Agitation and a feeling of strain (epinephrine release) are required for neuroplasticity as well as deep rest for memory consolidation.
Adrenalin and Alertness and The Acetylcholine Spotlight
Adrenaline (when released from adrenal glands)/epinephrine (released from the locus coeruleus) is released when in high states of alertness. It is quite nonspecific. Increasing the likelihood that neurons will be active.
Acetylcholine is released from the brain stem (parabigeminal nucleus/parabrachial region). Filters sensory inputs. When you hone in on something, the acetylcholine amplifies the signal of what is the point of attention. Signal through the noise increases.
Acetylcholine must be released from the forebrain (nucleus basalis) too. If you have these 3 components, you can change your brain.
The Chemical Trio for Massive Brain Change
Whatever you are listening to or doing you get massive learning when these principles occur. It has to change.
Ways To Change Your Brain
You can get epinephrine from a cup of coffee and a good night’s sleep, to achieve greater alertness. Your ability to exert deliberate alertness is related to your sleep quality.
Love, Hate, & Shame: all the same chemical
Accountability, in devotion to somebody, etc. Doesn’t matter what the motivation is as long as you have autonomic arousal.
Bad Events
Negative experiences deploy high levels of NE and acetylcholine to make sure you are safe.
Surprise!
Dopamine flood can increase plasticity during surprise. Or when we think we are on the right path to an external goal.
Making Dopamine Work for You (Not the Other Way Around)
Learn to attach dopamine to the process of making errors. Frustration can be the cue. Telling ourselves this frustration is good for learning will increase motivation. Dopamine release is highly subjective. Can be released in hard wired moments (food, sex, warmth, cold) but is also subjective to what we think is good for us.
Keep bouts of learning relatively short. Younger people can probably engage in more bouts. Learn all sorts of different stuff and by about age 30 you should have a general idea on what excites you. Get really good at that thing and specialize.
Timing Your Learning
Once you’re attaching dopamine to errors, you can time them to when you have greater focus. Find the time where you have the most natural mental acuity.
The Dopamine Trap
If you get so much dopamine from the reward of being congratulated for deciding to attempt something you are probably going to be less likely to actually do the thing (like write a book).
Smart phones and devices possibly cause a lack of focus and make it harder to learn and concentrate.
Why Increasing Baseline Levels of Dopamine Prior To Learning Is Bad
Increasing dopamine before learning will reduce the signal to noise. You really want a big spike in signal as well as errors. You need more attention to identify errors. Too much dopamine beforehand means we don’t have a big enough comparable spike during these cues.
(Chem)Trails of Neuroplasticity
If you leave the motor activity at the heightened state of learning, anything following, such as reading a book, will also be subject to higher states of learning and retention. The chemicals will still be in the environment for an hour or so afterwards.
Therapy, language learning, music, research, etc., may benefit.
Limbic Friction: Finding Clear, Calm and Focused
The state where our ANS is trying to be alert or less alert which causes an element of stress.
In order to access the neuroplasticity, you need the chemical cocktail and the right state. You can use techniques to calm down and hype yourself up, such as breathing and changing gaze.
Be in a state of arousal which is relevant to the task. Alertness but calm. If you are too tired you won’t be able to get to the starting line and need sleep. You can trick your nervous system by getting more oxygen or drinking caffeine but sleep is better.
Learning
Awareness Cues Brain Change
The recognition of something that may be emotional, or a desire to learn something else, is the first step to learning and change. We need to decide if we are willing to shift our behavior to cue our nervous system to not be as reflexive.
Children don’t need this intentional awareness to create change as they are in a major information absorption phase.
We have to be deliberate or know what we want to change at the very least. If there is something we want to acquire (motor, cognitive, emotional skill) it makes it easier to target and allow change. It can’t be vague. Need a pathway.
The KEY Trigger Plasticity
Juveniles can make massive shifts of representation quickly. Adults are much slower so we need that stickability and incremental change. The adult nervous system can tolerate smaller changes and smaller errors. It’s a mistake for an adult to try to learn too much in one go.
As adults who want to mimic the similar learning abilities as children, we need error to initiate it. Frustration when we struggle is caused by the epinephrine, rather than a recognized emotion, and dopamine is released when approaching the correct behavior. The nervous system doubles down to try and correct the errors.
The epinephrine for alertness, acetylcholine for focus on the error margin, dopamine is what allows the plasticity and changes.
Use the frustration as leverage for growth to drill deeper. If you walk away, you are more adaptive to the feeling of defeat in relation to that activity. Stick with it.
However, as your nervous system makes adjustments, don’t add new errors to mix up the adaptation.
If people have to hunt for food, plasticity as an adult is just as dramatic as in a child. The need to learn must be more critical. Repercussions/how badly you need it dictate the rate of plasticity.
Any stage of life provided it is crucial to survival.
Leveraging Ultradian Cycles & Self Experimentation
Ultradian cycles occur throughout the day and require less time (90-minute rhythm). We are optimized for focus and attention during these cycles. The first 5 minutes of the cycle, the focus is not great. Focus improves the deeper into the cycle you go and then drops off again near 90 minutes. Although, this will vary depending on the individual’s ability to focus for long periods of time, how well rested they are, glucose levels, etc.
Pay attention to the cycles and your moments of clarity and focus. Engage in focused bouts of learning during 90-minute segments.
Some people are better learners in the morning, some are better in the afternoon. In saying that, there is a greater release of focus inducing neuromodulators during the first 8 hours of your waking day. Find your own productivity period.
When are you more or less motivated to get difficult tasks done?
An Example of Ultradian-Incremental Learning
Break up our day into 90-minute cycles to learn efficiently. The first 5-10 minutes, the mind will drift. 10-15 minutes up to an hour you may get tunnel vision. Toward the end of an hour or more the brain will start to flicker.
Errors within the 7–30-minute time period liberate the chemical cues for plasticity. This isn’t to say that we should intentionally fail. We should be trying to accomplish our task that pushes us.
Let the body figure out the right pathway to change.
We can tolerate a few learning bouts per day at the most. It gets quite exhausting.
Accelerating Learning in Sleep
While in deep sleep, if a cued bell happens (a sound that was played during the waking-learning time), learning is faster. Essentially Pavlovian. You can pair this with odors or a metronome that is present during learning and also sleep.
You might be able to interfere with brain states to prevent trauma from being integrated into the brain during a bad experience. Or to reduce fear/emotional load of memories.
Learning To Win, Every Time
When you win earlier you have a greater chance of winning again afterwards. An area of the frontal cortex had its activity increased or decreased and the rats who had it increased would win the tube test and the decreased activity ones would lose every time. Winners will keep making reps regardless of errors.
Stimulation of this brain area led to more effort/repetitions. Get as many repetitions as possible during the beginning learning stages.
What To Do Immediately After Your Physical Skill Learning Practice
Any motor movement learning session will have a forward replay of brain area movements during REM sleep. It plays that sequence backward during a NSDR sequence for 10 minutes. That backwards replay is important for consolidation.
Don’t devote attention to something too quickly. Sit quietly with the eyes closed after your training to automatically consolidate.
What to Pay Attention to While Striving to Improve
It doesn’t matter what you’re paying attention to, as long as it is related to the general movement of the task. The focus on the parts will improve the whole.
Playing the piano, you could teach them to press the right sequence and not worry about the pressure or actual sound. Just about generating the motor commands in the beginning.
Protocol Synthesis Part One
Feedback is important once you’ve gotten the motor patterns sorted in the initial learning stages. Then you can work on it.
Let the errors open the plasticity, then let the brain go idle and explore. With fewer errors in motor patterns, attention can migrate to different components. Can’t change them all at once.
Super-Slow-Motion Learning Training: Only Useful After Some Proficiency Is Attained
After some degree of proficiency. Proprioceptive feedback is now available and there are less errors when you do things slow.
In tennis, once your hitting rate is at 25-30% your slow training will be beneficial. Things like throwing darts aren’t going to benefit.
How To Move from Intermediate to Advanced Skill Execution Faster: Metronomes
You can use a metronome to set the cadence of your repetitions. You can perform more repetitions this way. Set it slightly faster than your normal rate. With your attention held on your metronome, you need an element of proficiency first. Anchoring to external cues seems to improve neuroplasticity somehow. Good for speed work.
Focus
How to Focus
Use the mechanisms of focus that you were born with – visual focus. Laser focus increases your abilities. Peripheral vision makes you more relaxed and creative.
Caffeine can be a “relatively” safe to way to increase epinephrine.
Eliminate distractions (turn off WiFi and hide your phone) to stop reflexive responses and agitation to the attentional drift. Maintain visual focus on what you are working on.
High Alertness, Linear Tasks/Learning
High alertness in the morning is great for strategy implementation (when you already know how to do something).
Creative tasks are better performed in a calm, or even slightly drowsy, state.
Visualization
A sleepy state is generally the best time for visualization. Some people are better at it than others. If you can use linear focus to visualize something you may find benefit. Otherwise, it probably won’t be as useful as you think.
Background Music/Noise: Yay or Nay?
Varies. Find the source of lack of focus. Eliminating background noise is probably good for linear tasks when you’re hyped.
When Very Alert, Work in Silence; When Tired, Include Background Noise
Temperaments vary and some people are more mellow and less distracted by background noise.
“GO” versus “NO-GO”: The Basal Ganglia & Dopamine
Th forebrain is always trying to plan what to do. Dopamine triggers the GO by binding to D1 receptors.
NO-GO is when it binds to D2 receptors.
Doing focused work involves doing certain things and not doing others.
Leveraging GO, NO-GO
Autonomic arousal makes us more prone to GOs and not good at suppressing action (NO-GO). If you are alert, have silence. Turn off the phone and remove distractions. Non-specific action.
Clear, Calm, Focused: The GO, NO-GO Sweet Spot
Our ability to suppress is better in this state. As we get tired, our mental fatigue accumulates as these pathways are metabolically consuming. Action suppression becomes harder. Background noise can help to elevate our level of arousal.
Early Morning Exercise and GO Networks
Heightens arousal and the GO pathway. More energy throughout the day. If you deplete your glycogen with intense exercise you may crash.
Sensation
Seeing Your Way to Mental Focus
Our acuity is much better in the center of our visual field than our periphery, making focused gaze more precise (small cone of visual gaze).
When we move our eyes slightly inward, we develop a smaller visual field and activate neurons that trigger the release of norepinephrine, epinephrine, and acetylcholine.
When eyes are relaxed, we are relaxed. When they narrow, we are focused.
When we are working and struggle to focus, we are probably darting our eyesight around without realizing. Practice visual focus by holding your gaze at something.
Blinking
When you’re alert, your eyes are wide. If you can keep focus by blinking less, you should be able to improve your focus. This is good for focusing on work. Sports are different.
An Ear Toward Learning
Auditory learning – people often close their eyes. Creates a cone of auditory attention.
Alignment of your brain maps: neuron sandwiches
Link your sensory (auditory and visual) and proprioceptive (touch and motor) maps. Takes place in the superior colliculus. The sound and visual cues for direction sit closely in the SC.
Learning In (Optic) Flow/Mind Drift
Letting the mind drift, where it is not engaged in concentrated effort is the best way to accelerate learning.
Creativity Work
Caffeine free learning bout.
1st state: Creative discovery – shuffling in a relaxed way.
2nd state: Creating something robust and concrete.
Using substances for creativity will allow them to get into a creative brainstorming mode but not the linear/implementation mode.
Autistic people are often good at linear thinking but not the creative exploration.
Balance
You can use the vestibular system to heighten plasticity. We have a hardwired system for balance. Pitch, yaw, and roll give us our brains our orientation by these movements. Tells us how to compensate for shifts relative to gravity.
When we are off balance and we have to compensate, our cerebellum signals deeper brain centers to release DA, NE, and AC to recalibrate. Essential to survival. Gates to plasticity.
Come into learning in a clear, calm, and focused state. Slightly more on the arousal state. This is the starting line. You can use motor patterns to get you into a better learning state.
Novelty and Instability Are Key
Depends on how regularly you perform a behavior. If it’s something you do all the time it won’t give as good of an effect. Your orientation to gravity should be pushed. Unless you are really good at gymnastic stuff. Get close to falling without putting yourself in harm’s way. Explore your sensorimotor space. Get vestibular and sensorimotor mismatch.
The Other Reason Kids Learn Faster Than Adults
They move in different dimensions often. As we age there are neuronal changes but we also don’t test ourselves. Everything is so much more linear as an adult. Less chemicals are released as we have less challenging exercise behavior, resulting in a less effective learning potential.
Recovery
When Real Change Occurs
Real change occurs during sleep. If you focus on something for 90 minutes or more, your neural circuits will strengthen while you’re asleep.
If you get a poor night of sleep, you probably won’t get those changes.
If people did NSDR after learning the rates of learning were significantly higher than just relying on deep sleep.
How Much Learning Is Enough?
A lot of people find they can recover from learning bouts by doing some sort of motor activity.
Diet and Supps
Fasting, Ketogenic Diets, & Food Volume
Ingesting large amounts of tryptophan will make you feel sleepy, as well as high volumes of food. Fasting and ketogenesis leads to greater focus throughout the day. Unless you can’t stop thinking about food.
Sodium/Electrolytes
People who drink a lot of coffee and shake/can’t think are probably low in salt, rather than the caffeine being the problem.
Avoiding Hot Lunch, Food Pre-Occupation
Low carb meal, choline for focus, not hot.
Post Lunch Low/No Cognitive Load
Shift work to NO-GO pathway during early afternoon. Mundane tasks that require less cognitive load. Around 4pm he makes sure he hydrates and refrains from coffee. Also, a NSDR.
Having a coffee when hitting the wall is a mistake. NSDR will give a second wind. 90-minute learning later.
Ingestible Compounds That Support Skill Learning: Motivation, Repetitions, Alpha-GPC
Alpha-GPC enhances power output by 14% (300-600mg), cognitive effects (1200mg divided in 3 doses). Fat oxidation and GH release promoted.
Adjusting the foundation rather than enhancing skill learning itself.
Nicotine for Focus
Attention and alertness assistance. Some people chew nicotine gum for attention but it may make others jittery. Increases cholinergic transmission.
A window of plasticity that is distinct from the rest of the day. Don’t rely on it constantly.
Alpha GPC is another choline donor.
Adderall: Use & Abuse
Basically, it is amphetamine. It increases epinephrine from the locus coeruleus and wakes up the brain.
High probability of abuse. Increases alertness, not focus. Does not always translate into better performance.
Psychedelics
Hazardous for people with pre-existing issues, not facilitated by an expert, or for kids.
Less filtered sensory processing. Usually, we filter sensation that is not useful to us. There is nothing creative about sensory blending but we mistake it for being creative.
Creative works lead to a novel understanding on the part of the observer. You need more than sensory blending here.
There is the element where different parts of your brain can think together but you need to actually understand and integrate it. What are you creating?
The current query has no posts. Please make sure you have published items matching your query.