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Learning how to Learn

Chunking

Seeing the bigger picture

Isabel
Isabel completed this card.
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The nitty-gritty
Chunking is a way of putting information together so that you understand how that part of the puzzle fits together. You create a neuropattern in your brain that with practice you can more easily access. Chunks are like ribbons of information, and over time they require less of your focused attention to access.

As important as chunking, is understanding concepts, or the big picture. Seeing how it all connects. Something that helps with this is looking at the outline of books, talks or courses to see where each chunk belongs. A diffuse mode of learning can also help you grasp the bigger picture.

The big picture
You are motivated by three chemicals in your brain: Acetylcholine dopamine and seratonin.

Dopamine is released for unexpected rewards.
- Reward yourself after a studio session).

  • You amygdala is where reason and emotion meet. Emotions are important to learning.

  • When you are stressed or feeling strong emotions it is harder to have focused attention and thus to learn and make new connections in your brain.

  • Keep on the lookout for illusions of mastery: highlighting, practicing only the easy stuff.

  • Also avoid Einstellung: getting stuck in a mental rut, by accessing only certain patterns that you've formed before. This happens with overlearning or when you just keep practicing the same chunk without seeing the bigger picture.

  • Ask the help of peers and other to give you feedback about what you're learning. Practice by teaching someone else. In essence, interleave. Study the material in many different ways and places. Don't only study at the library or at home. Try explaining it to different people.

*Main takeaways: *
- practice recalling what you've learned
- practice recalling in different locations
- take naps to allow yourself to process information.
- stress and emotion make it hard to focus.
- focus on one thing at time when you are trying to learn.
- Read the outlines of books and courses to understand how chunks fit together.

Stefy
Stefy completed this card.
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  • Chunking helps you unite pieces of information together through meaning.

  • What helps get you started in creating a chunk is the focused mode of learning.

  • Being angry, stresses of afraid blocks your brain from making these connections.

  • Chunks are bound together through meaning or use.

  • One of the first steps to gain expertise in academic topics is to create conceptual chunks, mental leaps that unite scattered bits of information through meaning.

How to create chunks?

  • Focused practice and repetition
  • Strong memory traces
  • Gradually putting things together (like when learning how to play a song in my guitar)
  • Mastering bits of the skills I need (in volleyball, learning the different steps and movements when spiking, or serving)
  • "Listen to the song before trying to play it yourself"
  • Paying attention to the "bigger map" in order to be able to make the way by myself without consulting it.

Practical Steps:

  1. Focus on the information you want to chunk (eliminate distractions)
  2. Understand the basic idea you're trying to chunk (figure out the main idea)
  3. Practice to gain context.

Additional Notes:

  • The best chunks don't require you to deliberately think about connecting patterns together

  • Chunking is different in different disciplines

  • Just understanding how a problem was solved does not create a chunk that you can easily call to mind later

  • Don't confuse the "aha" of a breakthrough in understanding with solid expertise

  • You fully understand something when you can actually do it yourself

  • Understanding something is not the same as being able to do it

  • Doing things yourself helps create the neural patterns that underlie true mastery

Practical Advise

  • Recall: Mental retrieval of the key ideas

  • Only looking at the solution and thinking you truly know it yourself is one of the most common illusions of competence in learning.

  • Just wanting to learn the material and spending a lot of time in it does not guarantee that you're going to learn it.

  • To make sure you're learning and not fooling yourself is to test yourself on whatever you're learning.

  • Mistakes help correct your thinking, so don't worry about "failing" when you test yourself.

  • Recall the material outside your place of study.

Seeing the Bigger Picture

  • To enhance knowledge and gain expertise, you have to gradually build the number of chunks in your mind.

  • The diffuse mode help connect chunks to solve problems.

  • It's important to practice with the bigger chunks.

  • 2 ways to solve problems:

  • Sequential step by step reasoning [Focused mode]

  • Holistic intuition [Intuition, Diffuse mode linking] --> This solutions should be carefully verified using the focused mode.

Law of Serendipity: Luck favors the one who tries.

  • Illusion competence: Thinking you master all the material when in reality you just know the easy stuff.

  • Deliberate practice: Focusing on studying the most difficult material.

  • "Don't jump into the water without first learning to swim" --> Make research, read, and ask before starting a new coding challenge.

  • Interleaving: Practicing with problems or situations that require different techniques or strategies. It builds flexibility and creativity. It is the beginning of independent thinking. This facilitates connecting chunks within different fields.

  • Mix up your learning.

Alejo
Alejo completed this card.
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Chunking is the mental leap that helps you unite pieces of information through meaning.

In my own words: chunking is the act of bringing separate concepts together by understanding how they're related to one another, with the purpose of forgetting about the specifics and just remembering the "chunk". 

A good example is "getting dressed in the morning" – this concept is a chunk made up of "choosing a shirt", "putting it on", "choosing pants", etc.

How to form a chunk

Start with chunks as small as possible. When learning a song listen to it first, then learn each of the chords or learn a "phrase". Then weave them together into a slightly bigger chunk, for example, learning how the chords go together in the chorus.

The point is to master a chunk to the point where it can be done unconsciously.

When trying to "chunk" something, it's important to focus exclusively on that. When we try to grasp new concepts our brain uses its "working memory", which has limited space. Usually, we can focus on bringing together no more than 4 different concepts – so, if we have one or two of those spaces occupied with our email or any other distraction, it'll be much harder for us to chunk a concept.

To create a chunk it's important to create context for it. Context is created by meshing the "bigger picture" (top-down learning) with the specifics (bottom-up learning). 

An example of this is speed-reading a book (or looking at the index) before reading it, so that when you re-read it, you will know where to categorize (contextualize) each new piece of information (chunk) that you're learning.

In summary:

  • Focus on what you're learning only.
  • Contextualize by understanding the bigger picture.
  • Practice to make the chunks more concrete. Until they're done unconsciously. 

The most effective method for creating chunks is recalling. That is, read something new, stop for a second and recall the main points from what you just read.

Working Memory is like a 4-track recorder. You have 4 slots in which to play with concepts while learning something. Once you're able to chunk different concepts together, (say, chunk 3 concepts together into 1) you make space for new concepts in your available working memory.

The metaphor they used in the course was imagining an octopus sitting on top of your brain while you're learning. He can put 4 of his tentacles through the 4 open slots in your brain. When you're focused the octopus tries to find very specific concepts, usually from similar areas in your brain; whereas when you're in diffuse mode, he brings together 4 concepts from disparate areas.

Mistakes are a good thing to make when you're learning, they allow you to catch illusions of competence.

and.... As a final summary, the best way to learn is to:

  1. Chunk a concept by focusing intensely.
  2. Solidify the chunk by practicing "recall", remember what you learned by quizzing yourself.
  3. Interleave different techniques or concepts while learning. Jump around from the beginning of the chapter to the end of the chapter, practice a different set of problems. While it might seem that it makes your learning more difficult, it really makes it deeper.