Learning How to Learn, Part 4: Renaissance Learning and Unlocking Your Potential

This post is a summary of the final fourth week the Learning How To Learn course at Coursera.

2 Tips for Better Learning from Terry Sejnowsky:

1. Physical Exercise is by far more effective in helping you learn better than any drug
2. Recognize critical periods related to learning and be prepared for them. Like first language acquisition is better done before puberty.

Learning does not progress logically, sometimes you hit a wall or get frustrated. It means you mind is wrestling deeply with the material. After emerging from these periods, you'll often find that you learning base has broadened a lot.

Create a Lively Visual Metaphor or Analogy!

Pretend that you are the concept you are trying to understand!

People learn by trying to make sense out of the information they perceive, not from having someone else tell it to them. Greater understanding results from your mind constructed the patterns and meaning.

Genius vs Creativity

Genius and intelligence are associated with a bigger set of working memory, but on the negative side, the ideas may be coming too quickly and may leave no room for better ideas.

People with a smaller working memory are often more creative, because they can more easily come up with an unusual combination of chunks.

Many people suffer from the impostor syndrome. They feel inadequate and are afraid to be found out.

Change your thoughts, change your life

Santiago Ramon y Cahal, a Nobel prize winner, noted that any person (even with average intelligence) can change their own brain (their thought patterns) so even the least capable can produce an abundance of harvest.

Taking responsibility for my learning

I do think I take responsibility for my learning and that I spend a lot of time practicing and studying. However I feel I do not make a lot of progress, perhaps due to lack of proper techniques, or perhaps due to my impatience. I solve problems pretty quickly. I like solving problems a lot, because it gives me a lot of satisfaction. But maybe I should take more time to try to generalize my experience, to form better, more stable chunks of knowledge, to think deeply about analogies and metaphors, discuss with others. 

I've spent so much time trying to learn different things in my life, but I often can't even remember the essence of most of those things, sadly enough.

On the other hand, I have achieved quite a lot in learning: I've mastered several foreign languages, I've had several different jobs in mathematics, telecommunications and software engineering in different subject domains, each with their own sets of concepts to grasp.

The Value of Teamwork

The rest of this final part is about testing.

Testing is a great learning technique:

- Do self-testing

- Check Dr. Felder's test preparation check-list!

- Hard start - jump to easy technique: read through all problems, start with a difficult one, then quickly jump to an easy one, and so forth, back and forth.

- Do 90 seconds of deep breathing before or during the test.

- Double check your answers from a big-picture perspective: does it really make sense?

- Get enough sleep before the test!