# How we learn  ## Summary ### 🚀 The Summary in One Sentence 1. The book uses the newest findings related to the nature and biology of our brains as a springboard for a fun-to-read exploration of our learning habits and a sort of operational manual on how to tweak them so that you can harness the full power of your innate memory mechanisms. ### ☘️ Lessons I will Apply in Real Life _(what concrete actions will I take after reading this?)_ - Taking a break from a project helps you finish that project not merely _more_ _successfully_ but also _more_ _efficiently_. This is called the incubation effect. Incubation breaks are divided into three categories: - _Relaxing_ (like listening to music) - _Mildly active_ (like surfing the Internet) - _Highly engaging_ (like writing a short essay) Well, it seems that as far as math or spatial problems are concerned, you can benefit from either of these three. However, in the case of linguistic problems (such as anagrams), only the second category actually helps. - Remembering Is Not the Opposite of Forgetting – But Its Corollary We learn and remember things by creating networks of neurons called synapses; the thicker these synapses are, the more long-term the memory and the easier to recall it. However, if you want to remember specific things, then the trick is to forget everything else Forgetting acts as a sort of a background noise blocker, a static, which makes the right signal stand out. The sharper your forgetting, the stronger your memory. - Incubation, Percolation, and Interleaving: Three Concepts to Know If You Want to Solve Problems. Incubation is basically another word for the Eureka effect: we tend to see old problems better after a 20-minute break. Percolation is the same, but over a longer period: if you want to write a better novel, then interrupt writing it daily with a long walk or something like it; this will stimulate to think of better ideas. Finally, interleaving means mixing things up: don’t learn just theory and then practice, but learn a chunk of theory, then practice it, then another chunk of it. - Change the Studying Context and Test Yourself to Remember Better. If you sometimes forget somebody’s name, go to the place where you met the person, and there’s a good chance that you’ll remember it. The other side of this coin: if you really want to remember _things_ regardless of the context, then study them in different situations and circumstances, so that they don’t get too attached to a certain set of conditions. Also, once you do learn them, test your knowledge by transforming your mental knowledge into a speech. That is the only way for you to realize whether you know them fluently. ### 📒 Summary + Notes #### Point 1 - If you want to remember something well, try explaining it to someone else, even if that someone is, well, you. Test your knowledge in the silence of your room in any way possible – because that’s not actually testing, but _learning_. #### Point 2 - Taking a break from a project helps you finish that project not merely _more_ _successfully_ but also _more_ _efficiently_. This is called incubation effect. Incubation breaks are divided into three categories: - _Relaxing_ (like listening to music) - _Mildly active_ (like surfing the Internet) - _Highly engaging_ (like writing a short essay) Well, it seems that as far as math or spatial problems are concerned, you can benefit from either of these three. However, in the case of linguistic problems (such as anagrams), only the second category actually helps. Also, incubation periods seem to work better if they are longer – i.e., about 20 minutes – and don’t do the job if they are short (i.e., 5 minutes). > [!TIP] The most important thing is people don’t benefit from an incubation break unless they have reached an _impasse_ #### Point 3 - _Zeigarnik effect_ after Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik is that we tend to remember better things that are not finished than finished ones. Why? Because finishing them is akin to crossing out something on your checklist: a cue for your brain to stop thinking about it anymore. The reverse is true as well. Consequently, interruption pushes the thing you’re interrupting to the top of your mental to-do list. #### Point 4 - We’re creatures of habit and [we tend to adapt to just about everything](https://blog.12min.com/the-upside-of-irrationality-summary/). While that is good for your body and your brain in terms of conserving energy for later, it is not good for your learning capabilities. Because adapting to something puts your brain on autopilot, and you don’t want your brain to be on autopilot if you really want to _comprehend_ something. The solution? _Interleaving_. Interleaving is a cognitive science word, but it simply means “mixing related but distinct material during the study.” Basically, it is the reason why your music teacher switches from scales to theory, to pieces all in one sitting; it’s not a bad idea – but, actually, the _best_ one. Interleaving is “essentially, about preparing the brain for the unexpected,” a “way of building into our daily practice not only a dose of review but also an element of surprise.” It is – to use an analogy – a sort of an alarm, a reminder, a cue to signal your brain that it shouldn’t be on autopilot. #### Point 5 - Learning Without Thinking: Harnessing Perceptual Discrimination There are so many things happening around you that it is fairly difficult to realize what’s happening even as an outsider watching it on TV. The moment you find out what has _actually_ happened is the slo-mo replay. The mechanism underlying this is _perceptual discrimination_: the ability to see only what matters. And if there’s such thing as perceptual seeing, there’s also a thing such as perceptual learning. According to Eleanor Gibson, a pioneer in the field, perceptual learning has three traits: - It is not a passive absorption, but an _active process_, “in the sense that exploring and searching for perception itself is active.” In other words, “we do not just see, we look; we do not just hear, we listen.” - It is also _self-regulated_, “in the sense that modification occurs without the necessity of external reinforcement.” - Finally, it is _stimulus-oriented_, “with the goal of extracting and reducing the information simulation.” To sum up, the system works to find the most critical perceptual signatures and filter out the rest. And the discovery of distinctive features and structures in the world is fundamental to the achievement of this goal. #### Point 6 - _You Snooze, You Win: The Consolidating Role of Sleep_ We don’t know a lot about sleeping, but we do know this: it is so intricately related to memory, that it is virtually impossible to consolidate new memories if you remain awake for longer periods of time. There are different phases of sleep, and some of them are more important to certain types of activities than others; even more importantly, sleeping during different periods of the day makes a difference as well. For example, if you are interested in retaining facts and learning vocabulary words, then it’s best to go to bed early in the night; however, if you are a creative person, then you better become a night owl: creative thinking requires REM sleep, and this happens mostly in the morning hours. Now that you know this, it’s time to start a [sleep revolution](https://blog.12min.com/the-sleep-revolution-summary/) in your life; which is essentially the same as a studying revolution. ## Blinkist - Notes # 🧐What’s in it for me? - Discover how your mind works to optimize your study sessions. # 💡In this Blink I’ll learn: - how to remember someone’s name at a party. - why listening to the right kind of music can boost your memory. - how you can quickly become an expert at identifying skin rashes. # 👀 Other viewpoints / Further reading # 📒 Blink Notes ## Blink 1 - Memories are formed through the connection of cells and are stored in specific areas of the brain. Memories are created through the process of connecting different neurons, or cells which send signals within the brain to transmit information. A memory, such as your first day at school, is created when neurons are stimulated and then form a network of many connected neurons, called synapses. Each time we retrieve a specific memory, synapses essentially grow thicker. In other words, having thicker synapses means our recall of that memory or information stored in that network is faster and clearer. But memories aren’t stored all in the same place, forming one huge knot of synapses. In fact, different types of memory form in different areas of the brain. The area of the brain that forms new, conscious memories, such as the name of the person you’ve just met, is called the hippocampus. But older memories are stored somewhere else: in a region called the neocortex. This area of the brain is divided further, into areas that control how we move or how we process what we see. If a memory includes lots of different stimuli – colors or smells or textures – stored by many neuronal networks in different regions of the brain, you can understand why you can remember these memories more clearly: more connections in more places means better recall. ## Blink 2 - Getting a good night’s sleep is crucial to remembering and retaining things you’ve learned. If you’re a busy person, you might feel that sleeping just gets in the way of getting things done. But this is completely wrong! Getting enough sleep is essential for your brain to form and consolidate new memories. While we still don’t completely understand how sleep affects our bodies and our brains exactly, research suggests that sleep can help us better understand and memorize information. Sleep is important. But, it’s actually more complicated, in that different stages of sleep are more important depending on the kinds of tasks you need to perform. You don’t actually sleep in the same manner throughout the night. So if you have an exam tomorrow and still need time to study, it’s important to understand whether staying up late to cram or getting up early is more effective. Your first hours of sleep in the early evening are important for retaining facts. If you’re studying vocabulary words, it’s better to go to bed early. However, if you need to think creatively, then it’s more effective to stay up and study at night. Creative thinking requires rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which happens mostly in the early morning hours. So it’s OK to stay up late and study as long as you get a couple of hours of sleep before the sun comes up! ## Blink 3 - Don’t always use the same study routine, as variation can help you remember things better. In school, a teacher may have suggested that you set aside a certain time of day where you could study in solitude, free from distraction. However, distractions aren’t the only things that influence our ability to learn. It is true that our surroundings during a study session generally affect our ability to remember what we’ve learned. Your brain picks up on all kinds of environmental cues while you study – a room’s musty smell, your chair’s hard, uncomfortable seat, and so on. These things aren’t just idle observations! They are actually hints that can help us remember and retrieve the information that we’ve learned during our studies. Using this information, consider changing your study environment to ensure that you are able to retrieve information in any situation. As you probably won’t be able to recreate your study environment while taking an exam, you could instead change your study routine. You could alternate between taking notes on a computer and by hand. Or you could study outside one day, and in your kitchen the next. These seemingly trivial variations ensure that the information you learn is stored in different parts of your brain, which increases retention. ## Blink 4 - Cram today, forget tomorrow: to remember information for the long-term, study in intervals. Are you someone who crams in all the information you need to learn a day before an exam? Does this strategy actually work for you? It might be effective for the test, but you probably won’t remember the material for much longer. In fact, only by breaking up your study time can you be sure that you will retain information over a long period of time. This is called the spacing effect. Studying the same fact over and over again in a short period of time doesn’t result in effective memorisation, as your brain essentially gets bored. Think of it like this: if you are at a party and are introduced to a new neighbour, you’ll try to remember his name. But try as you might, you probably will have forgotten his name by the time you leave, even if you’ve heard it repeated a few times. However, if you hear your neighbour’s name again a few days later – say if you overhear him introducing himself to another neighbour – then this “new” information will thicken the synapses between the neurons of your original memory, thus strengthening it and making the name stick. So if you want to better retain information, you don’t actually have to spend more time studying, as long as you use the spacing effect. For example, you have a test in two weeks and you plan to study for a total of nine hours. Rather than studying for nine hours the day before the test, a more effective strategy would be to study for three hours on three different days. Following this study plan will help you increase your chances of remembering all the relevant information without spending any extra time studying – you’re simply distributing your time better! ## Blink 5 - Quizzing yourself and explaining what you’ve learned to others helps cement what you know. You probably know that when you have to explain a certain subject to someone, that process helps you better understand the subject yourself. This is because reciting information is more effective for memory retention than simply reading information. If you want to get the most out of what you’ve learned, then you need to actively test your knowledge, rather than simply rereading passages from a book. One way to do this is to explain the material to another person. When you put in that extra effort in explaining a certain subject, the connections between the neurons that store your knowledge will intensify, thus making the retrieval of information both easier and faster afterwards. But what if you can’t find a suitable audience for your knowledge? What then? Testing yourself – even before you know anything about a topic – can help you improve your understanding of the material later. Say you have to take a multiple-choice test on a topic you know nothing about. You’d probably guess incorrectly most of the time! Even so, this process actually increases the chances that you’ll be able to correctly answer a related question on a later test. Psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles had students answer a few questions about a topic they were going to learn about a few weeks later, and then gave them the correct answers to the questions after the test. They then compared their earlier answers with their final exam results at the end of the semester. Surprisingly, students scored 10 percent higher on questions that were related to the ones they answered at the beginning of the term! ### Blink 6 - Interruptions don’t knock you off track; instead, they actually can help you learn better. Procrastination plagues almost everyone. We dawdle before a task, easily distracted, until we’re forced to hastily complete it. As you’ll see, this habit is easily avoidable. Some people believe that it’s most efficient to start and finish a project right away; this way, it’s done and they don’t have to think about it anymore. Yet completing a project over a longer period of time leaves room for interruption and is optimal for learning. With more time, we can think freely, developing new ideas and committing what we’ve learned with our project to memory.  What is the point of doing a project if you don’t retain the results? In a study, subjects were given a number of small assignments, such as completing a crossword puzzle. During the study, a researcher would occasionally interrupt the subjects so that they’d be unable to finish some of the tasks. Afterwards, the researcher asked the subjects to list all the assignments they performed, and found that they best remembered those tasks that they were unable to complete. So not only will you remember your projects better if you allow for interruptions, interrupted projects will also stay in your memory and possibly lead to new ideas. Furthermore, when you’re trying to solve a problem, breaks can help you to see the problem from a new perspective. That’s because interruptions allow you to let go of fixed assumptions and perspectives, and view the project as with “new eyes.” So if you’ve been working on a math problem for a long time, it’s important to take a break. Go for a walk, and try again later. You’ll soon realize that you often come up with solutions to your problems when you aren’t even thinking about them – that your insights seem to come out of nowhere. ## Blink 7 - Variety is the spice of memory! Don’t focus on only one skill; practice different skills at once. Research shows that in fact, varied repetition is more effective than a narrow focus. The advantage of adding variation to your training is that it better prepares you for unexpected situations. Variations require you to put in more thought and effort, which then intensifies the gains made through repetition. So how can you apply varied repetition to your school work?Try varying how you study, even from hour to hour. That will increase the likelihood that you’ll be able to use the skill in another context. For example, if you’re studying geometry, instead of just reading about the Pythagorean theorem, make sure you also practice the many different ways that it can be applied. This way you’ll be better equipped to manage an exam with unfamiliar questions that require you to use the theorem in different situations. ## Blink 8 - Perceptual intuition helps us separate important facts from the noise of information around us. How does a baseball player decide so quickly whether to swing at a fast ball? There is so much information to take in at once: how high is the ball? How fast is it traveling? Is it curving? The secret behind this ability is called perceptual learning. Perceptual learning, which develops perceptual intuition, is all about making sound “snap judgments.” It’s about developing the ability to successfully respond to our environment, seeking out only the most important signals and ignoring the rest. While we’re not born with this skill, we can become experts with enough time and training. Novice pilots are often overwhelmed by the huge array of dials and instruments inside an airplane’s cockpit. Experienced pilots, on the other hand, have become experts in visual perception, and therefore only need one quick look to discern what the instruments are telling them. Because an experienced pilot has spent so much time in the cockpit, he’s had plenty of time to master perceptual intuition. He already knows how the instruments are configured, what they mean and importantly, what to pay attention to. We too can learn to differentiate and filter out unnecessary information from what we need to know, thereby building perceptual intuition with enough practice. To do so, we can use perceptual learning modules. These are pictures or short videos that students use to help them hone their ability to make quick judgments from a particular set of stimuli. In one study, medical students were shown pictures of different skin rashes (which look indistinguishable to a non-expert eye) and were then asked to quickly decide which sort of lesion or rash was depicted. These snap decisions made the students “feel” the right answer, and they eventually became experts at intuitively identifying dermatological problems. By applying perceptual learning models to your own studies, you too can start building your perceptual intuition. # 📋Final Summary: - To optimize your studies, you need to have a good understanding of how your brain works, and how it processes and stores information. Using this knowledge, you can devise more effective routines based on what you’re studying and how you need to use the information you’ve learned. # ☘️ Lessons I Will Apply in Real Life _(what concrete actions will I take after reading this?)_ - Getting a good night's sleep - Changing the study routine - Use one of the methods out there to put a distraction to a learning routine (Like [Pomodoro Technique](https://www.themuse.com/advice/take-it-from-someone-who-hates-productivity-hacksthe-pomodoro-technique-actually-works#:~:text=The%20Pomodoro%20Technique%20is%20a,separated%20by%20five%2Dminute%20breaks.&text=After%20about%20four%20pomodoros%2C%20you,about%2015%20to%2020%20minutes.)) - Quizzing myself and explaining what I’ve learned to others or myself - Don’t focus on only one skill; practice different skills at once.