[Book Summary] Learning How To Learn by Barbara Oakley
A simple yet effective way to master the skill of learning!
Ever wondered what makes a great learner? Wonder no more!
In this book, Barbara Oakley (Ph.D in Systems Engineering), Dr. Sejnowski (Ph.D in Neuroscience) and Alistair McConville (Director of Learning and Innovation) expose how, with a very straightforward array of tips and tricks, anyone can excel at learning anything.
The book is aimed at youngsters and teens, but it definitely has some key values and takeaways that anyone can benefit from. Actually, prior to the publication of this book, they already became pretty famous through their Coursera course, Learning how to learn, with almost 3 million enrolled students around the globe.
The book is divided into fourteen chapters and, even though I will not cover all of them in here, each of them talks about a specific topic concerning how we can use learning as a tool instead of as an obligation. The main insights, though, are the following:
1. DIFFUSED AND FOCUSED MODES
Diffused mode happens when your brain is relaxed and not thinking of anything in particular. Creative ways of linking a different set of ideas usually happen when you are in this particular mode, such as going for a long walk or taking a nap. On the other hand, when you are in focused mode it means you are paying close attention to a specific problem, such as solving a maths problem or solving a puzzle. A constant flow between these two modes is desired and recommended, since it allows our brain to address a problem from two very different perspectives without us noticing. Didn’t it ever happen to you that you found the solution to a problem while on the bus? Well, there you go!
2. THE POMODORO TECHNIQUE
Back in the 80s, Francesco Cirillo came up with this awesome idea, the pomodoro technique! How does it work?
You shut off all distractions (mobile phone on airplane mode, closing all unrelated tabs in your browser, music and TV… everything!),
find your favorite place to study/work,
set a timer for 25 minutes,
focus on the task as much as you can during this time,
and once you are done, you reward yourself with a 5 minutes break.
As you might have noticed, this technique is a sweet and effective way to avoid procrastination and that let us maintain a constant flow of focused and diffused modes, since we are rewarding our brain with a short break. Cool thing is we can adjust the Pomodoro timer to our needs, but meaning that a longer timer may imply a slightly longer reward.
3. ACTIVE RECALL
Once we have dealt with something new we are trying to learn, carrying out active recall is very desired to force our brain to retrieve the ideas from memory.
Say you are learning a new language, and you just studied a new set of words and verbs: instead of passively reading and re-reading the words and their meaning over and over again, try to come up with their meaning by recalling it. The effect is amazing!
According to neuroscience, if we use active recall periodically we are setting up stronger brain-links (that is, connections between ideas) that will last longer. It’s like establishing a clearer path for your brain to travel when this concepts arise in the future.
4. THE MEMORY PALACE TECHNIQUE
Using the example of Nelson Dellis, four times US Memory Champion, the authors explain what tricks can be used in order to improve our memory and make it more sticky:
Focus as much as you can on what you want to remember
Practice, a lot!
Turn your thoughts into a picture. The more interactions you add to the picture, the easier it will be to remember
Metaphors help to remember concepts dramatically
Use active recall to make the concepts and ideas stick
5. HEALTHY HABITS
Sleep. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that help us remember facts and events. While we sleep, information gathered in the neurons of our hippocampus is transferred into the neurons of our cerebral cortex, making more room for new learning.
Food. Research shows that most of the veggies, nuts and even dark chocolate, are the best stuff you can feed your body with, and also your brain!
Exercise. By exercising, we produce chemicals (such as serotonin and dopamine) that help our brain come up with new ideas. These chemicals help on linking old ideas with new ones, letting us think in news ways.
6. LEARNING SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
Authors encourage us, the readers, to learn something quite different to what we are passionate about, stating that we can become even better at our passion by doing so because of the flexibility this would give us.
Transfer learning actually comes from this idea: we find different, more creative ways to approach a specific problem by applying knowledge of a different topic at the time to solve it. So, basically we are re-using brain-links of one area to more easily build links in a completely different area.
CONCLUSION
In my case, there have been several times in which I felt like I wasn’t a good learner. Many occasions, such as dealing with integration calculus at high school, or with econometrics at college, and it was actually difficult to cope with this feeling.
There’s millions of brains out there, each of which has its perks and its inconvenients. Finding the solution that best works for you is definitely your choice, but following the advice on this book makes it super achievable and easy to understand!