This article is my “honor peer-graded assignment” of week 3 of the “learning how to learn” Coursera short course. The assignment requires that you create some content (presentation, article, etc…) where you explain what you have learned and how you applied it.
After finishing reading the book “la dittatura delle abitudini” (italian translation of “The power of habits” by Charles Duhig), I decided to deepen the topic. Moreover, I recently stumbled upon a very interesting presentation regarding how to learn. The next logical step was to reach out for my favorite MOOC platform to find useful resources. That’s how I started the “learning how to learn course”.
The concept that resonated the most with me were:
- the habit cycle
- the chunking formation theory
- the interleaving as a mean to have a better learning
Let’s see them in detail.
The habit cycle
Neuroscientists have found that there’s a pattern behind a habit:
- Cue: something that triggers the habit.
- Process: the habit routine is executed.
- Reward: some sort of reward, relief is perceived by your brain (and so, by you :)).
- Belief: this is like a cross-phase or precondition. If you don’t believe in the effectiveness of your habit, it doesn’t work.
What is even more interesting is the fact that, when the habit is well established, your brain “fires” the chemical reactions ralated to the reward when the cue is perceived. It’s like if your brain was saying: “ehy, good things are going to happen! let’s celebrate right now”.
The second point is that you can game your brain by teaching him new tricks by wilfully setting up new cues, new processes and, most of all, new rewards. And don’t forget to believe in them!
The chunking formation theory
A chunk is a “useful piece of information” that you can store in your long term memory and recall in your working memory when needed.
That’s great, but you can’t buy them on Amazon and they don’t grow on trees either. How do you get them?
Forming a chunk requires :
- Focused attention: you have to concentrate on what you want to learn. The pomodoro technique is your friend in that sense
- Context: you must understand the context of what you are learning in order to be able to make link amongst chunks, to fit them in the big picture.
- Repetition: just reading once doesn’t work. You have to challenge yourself, to avoid the illusion of knowledge: you think you know, but you don’t. “Binge-studying” in a single session doesn’t work. You need to make room between repetitions (Tip: use Anki) and alternate different approaches. Also increasing difficulty of the exercise helps.
Interleaving
Interleaving is a way to strengthen you understanding. It boils down to “use different approches, techniques and methods to learn a topic”. Practice, study, peer review other people’s work… It’s like attacking a target from multiple directions: the chances of conquering the objective are higher!
Another nuance of interleaving is trying to study different things at the same time. Maybe you study a programming language for a couple of pomodoros, then you practice something different, like writing an article in a foreign language (that’s what I’m doing right now :-)) or teach your daughter playing checkers. This helps creating connections and knowledge transfer among chunks.
Let’s try it out!
I decided to try out this theories right away on three different topics (to make room for interleaving :-)):
- Learning which metrics are useful to measure improvement in software development teams
- Learning how to solve a Rubik cube
- Mastering a new programming language (Kotlin).
That’s how it went… how it is still going, actually.
Form an habit
I work full time and I’m very busy. There’s always something urgent to focus on. Is there, actually? Sometimes, but more often than not, it’s just my tendency towards procrastination. I’ve got plenty of opportunities to … put things off. The goal number one feels overwhelming, how to tackle it?
Let’s form an habit and focus on process!
The cue: I’ve put a rubik cube (a very geeky one) on my laptop. The cube on the laptop means “study” :-).
The process: Every morning, before starting working, I remove the cube from the laptop and I focus for at least one pomodoro on one of the two topics I’m actually studying by reading articles, books or applying what I’ve learned to my context.
The reward: after every successfully completed pomodoro, I cool down for 5 minutes trying to solve the cube. Solving a rubik cube isn’t simple, but there’s plenty of tutorials explaining various techniques. I’ve found this one very easy to follow. It just requires executing this sequence of steps:
- Do the “daisy”
- Solve the bottom
- Solve the second layer
- Do the “cross”
- Do the “fish”
- Solve the top
- Solve the corner
- Solve the cube
Seems easy, but requires memorizing different sequences of moves, that can be described by a very elegant notation based on letters. So, rotate clockwise the top layer is a “U”, rotate conterclockwise the left face is “L'”, and so on. This leads to funny “words” that the solver has to memorize. For instance, doing the fourth step, “the cross”, requires applying the word “furu’r’f'”. Solving the “fish” corresponds to “rur’uruur'”. Memorizing meaningless strings isn’t easy. Analogies to the rescue:
- “fururf” is the purr of my cat, Poldo.
- “rururuur” is the purr of my other cat, Tato.
and so on… The best one is the final step: the string to memorize is the daunting “ffur’lfflruff”. No cat purrs like this. So?
Well, there are two tiny hidden words that are easy to remember (at least for me) in that string “ffur’lfflruff”.
- URL : universal resource locator, a hyperlink.
- LRU: least recently used, an eviction policy for caches.
the rest are just “f”. So I can remember the string with the following mnemonic: “there’s a link, but I don’t use it”.
Learning how to solve the Rubik cube gave me the opportunity to first hand experience the “illusion of learning” and the sort of easiness that comes with practice. I watched the video multiple times, and every time I was 100% sure i could remember everything and solve the cube. Except I wasn’t. But after a lot of attempt without reading the sequences (most of them failed), I was finally able to solve the cube. And after many repetition, something happened: my hands simply knew what the next, right move was. Just mentally speaking the right “word”, triggered the corresponding sequence of movements without need of thinking. The chunk was stored :-).
To further strengthen my reward, I adopted two more tricks:
- I put a “done” mark on a paper sheet after at least a successful pomodoro. The sheet of paper has been previously nicely decorated by my loved daughter, Giulia, so just reaching out to it makes me feel instantly better.
- If I put a mark on the paper sheet every day for a week, good things are going to happen on sunday: could be an extra ice cream, sleeping longer or whatever relatively bad habit I like sometimes to indulge.
Doing something on a piece of paper instead of using an app or a spreadsheet is much more powerful. First of all, it’s always visible, reminding me that I did well (or i could have done better). Second, it’s part of the process, like a “closing ritual” for the session. I tried the same approach year ago, when I decided to start running again after a long stop, and it worked like a charm.
The belief: well, I believe it works 🙂
Conclusion
I tried firsthand some of the techniques I’ve learned. They work. They really do.
Interleaving helps winning the boredom and strengthen the memorization. It’s like exercising different muscles: when your biceps are sore, do some squat for your legs.
Our brain is inherently lazy. It wan’t to go the easy way. Always. Good news is, you can trick him into believing that meaningful stuff is as easy as lying back in your favourite couch watching tv.
