Learning How to Learn

Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects

by Deep Teaching Solutions

This repository contains a summary and personal notes of Learning How to Learn course. Instructored by Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrence Sejnowski.

What motivates me?

• I taked this course just out of curiosity, I found there is a synergistic relationship between Neurosience and Artficial Intilligance (AI).

• AI researchers find that neuroscince as a useful guide in thier research for solutions to AI, also they used it as a validation method for what ideas that they are working on.

• As Matt Botvinick (Director of Neuroscience Research, DeepMind) once said:

  It would have been silly for people trying to solve flight, to completley ignore birds,
  And that's I think what we would be doing in AI research if we didn't attend to neuroscience.

• So, in the same way we had it in AI/ML, researchers they try to solve how we can learn? question, then the first thing that we want to understand how it works is our Brain, and this course will help us to understand the learning process in a good maner.

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Week 1: What is Learning

Here's the slides and a pdf of the questions and answers found in the videos

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Week 2: Chunking

Here's the slides and a pdf of the questions and answers found in the videos

Introduction

• Chunks are compact packages of information that your mind can easily access.
• How you can form a chunk? how you can use it?
• Explore illusions of competence in learning.
• Overlearning and Interleaving.

Chunking

What is a Chunk?

• Is the mental leap that helps you unite bits of information together through meaning.
• This will lets the chunk easier to remember.
• Helps to fit the chunks into the larger PICs.
• Chunking helps your brain run more efficiently. Once you chunk an idea, a concept, or an action, you don't need to remember all the little underlying details.

How to Form a Chunk?

• The best chunks are the ones that are so well ingraid that you don't even have to consciously think about connecting the neural pattern together. That actually is the point of making complex ideas, movments or reactions into a single chunk, we can see this in language learning.
• The first step on chunking is simpley to foucs your undivided attention on the information you want to chunk.
• The second step in chunking is to understand the basic idea you're trying to chunk.
• In math and science, closing the book and testing yourself on whether you yourself can solve the problem you think you understand will speed up your learning at this stage. You often relaize the first time you actually understand something is when you actually do it yourself.
• The third step to chunking is gaining context, so you can know when to use this chunk.
• Learning take place into ways
  • Bottom-up chunking
    • Process where practice and repetation can help you both build and strengthen each chunk, so you caneasily access it whenever you need to.
  • Top-down big picture
    • Process that allows you to see what you're learning and where it fits it.

Illusions of Competence

• Some essential ideas in getting your learning on the track:
  1. The importance of recall.
  2. Illusions of competence in learning.
  3. Doing mini test.
  4. The value of making mistakes.
• Recalling what you read is much productive than reread. according to the psychologist Jeffrey Karpike.
• And also recall is a much better than drawing a concepts map.
• Highlighting and underlining must be done very carefully. otherwise it can not only be ineffective, but also misleading → illusions of competence.
• If you do markup te text, try to llok for main ideas before making any marks.
• Try to keep your underlining or higlighting to a minimum one sentence or less per paragraph.
• Words or notes in margin that synthesize key concepts are a very good idea.
• Spending alotof time with the material, doesn't gurantee you'll actually learn it.
• A super helpful way to make sure you're learning and not fooling yourself with illusions of competence, is to test your self on whatever you're learning.
• Recall is actually doing test.
• Recalling material outside your usual place of study is very helpful.

Seeing The Bigger Picture

What Motivates You?

• Neuromodulators are chemicals that influance how a neuron responds to other neurons → has a synthesize relationship with the motivations for learning.
  • Acetylochoine → importance for focused learning when you're paying close attention.
  • Dopamine → controls reward learning.
  • Serotonin → effects your social life.

The Value of a Library of Chunks

• Compaction, Transfere, Creativity, and The law of Serendipity.
• The ability to combine chunks in new and original ways underlies alotof historical innovation.
• Enhance the knowledge and gain expertise → build number of chunks + piece it together in new and creative ways.
• The bigger and more well practiced chunked mental library - whatever the subject - the more easily you'll be able to solve problems and figure out solutions.
• Chunks can also help to understanding new concept. this idea is called Transfere.
• There are two ways to figure something out to solve problems.
  • Through seqential step by step reasoning.
    • Sequeytial → focused mode.
  • More holistic intution solution
    • Intution → diffuse mode linking of several semingly different focused mode thoughts.
• Most difficult problems and concepts are grasped through intution.
• Law of Serending, when things doesn't go the way think. and concepts going tough.
  • Lady luck favors the one who tries.
• Just focus on whatever sectionn you're studing and things will move on.

Overlearning, Choking, Einstellung, Chunking, and Interleaving

• Continuing to study or practice after you're mastered what you can in the session is called → Overlearning.
• If you choke on tests or public speaking, overlearning can be especially valueble.
• Research has shown repetitive overlearning during a single session, it can be a waste of valueble learning time.
• Susequant study session is the perfect way.
• Repeating something you're alrady know, is, face it, easy. it can also bring the illusion of competence that you're mastered the full range of material.
• Foucsing on the more difficult material is called → deliberate practice.
• All this is also releated to concept know as → Einstellung.
• Enistellung → mindset.
• Interleaving → practicing jumping back and forth between problems or situations that require different techniques or stratiges.
• Do what you can do to mixup you're learning.
• Phhilosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, discovered that most paradigm shifts in science are brought about either young people or pepole who were originally trained in a diff discipline.
• The old saying that:
  • Science progress one funeral at a time as people entrenched inthe old ways of looking at things die off.

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Week 3

Here's the slides and a pdf of the questions and answers found in the videos

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Week 4

Here's the slides and a pdf of the questions and answers found in the videos

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