2-2 The Value of a Poor Memory

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Do curso por McMaster University

Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential

2471 ratings

McMaster University

Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential

2471 ratings

Mindshift is designed to help boost your career and life in today’s fast-paced learning environment. Whatever your age or stage, Mindshift teaches you essentials such as how to get the most out of online learning and MOOCs, how to seek out and work with mentors, the secrets to avoiding career ruts (and catastrophes) and general ruts in life, and insights such as the value of selective ignorance over general competence. We’ll provide practical insights from science about how to learn and change effectively even in maturity, and we’ll build on what you already know to take your life’s learning in fantastic new directions. This course is designed to show you how to look at what you’re learning, and your place in what’s unfolding in the society around you, so you can be what you want to be, given the real world constraints that life puts on us all. You’ll see that by using certain mental tools and insights, you can learn and do more—far more—than you might have ever dreamed! This course can be taken independent of, concurrent with, or subsequent to, its companion course, Learning How to Learn. (Mindshift is more career focused, and Learning How to Learn is more learning focused.)

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Getting Deeper into Happy Learning

Key to your ability to mindshift is being able to learn effectively. This week, we’ll dive deeper into this vital area. Getting yourself motivated to tackle procrastination can sometimes be a challenge in learning, so we’ll give you some important tips here. But we’ll also give insights into mental tricks to help you focus, relax, and reframe if stress intrudes. We’ll also show you how to avoid common learning pitfalls. Welcome and enjoy!

2-1 Week 2 Introduction1:01

2-2 The Value of a Poor Memory6:07

2-3 Meditation and Mindfulness – What to Look for4:01

2-4 The Pomodoro Technique as Working Meditation7:23

2-5 Getting Past Procrastination7:35

2-6 The Value of Procedural Fluency and Deliberate Practice6:42

2-7 Bad Grades and Barb's Hands – The Value of Mental Tricks3:48

2-8 Learning to Reframe – Put a Label on It!8:35

2-9 Integrate All Your Senses Into Learning – The Pitfalls of "Learning Styles"3:53

2-10 Can You Try to Learn Too Much?3:00

2-11 Your Social Brain5:00

2-12 Week 2 Wrap Up4:23

Optional Bonus Video: Interview with Singapore Entrepreneur Adam Khoo20:45

Optional Bonus Video: Nelson Dellis Memory Tips #24:13

Conheça os instrutores

Dr. Barbara Oakley
Ramón y Cajal Distinguished Scholar of Global Digital Learning, McMaster University
Professor of Engineering, Industrial & Systems Engineering, Oakland University
Dr. Terrence Sejnowski
Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Computational Neurobiology Laboratory

[MUSIC]

We sometimes fool ourselves about our good attributes with relation to learning.

We think they're bad.

We saw that with the race car brains verses the hiker brains.

Being a slow hiker type thinker can give you an advantage because you can be less

likely to jump to conclusions and

more able to flexibly change your mind when you're wrong.

But there's another advantageous attribute that we often think is bad, and

that is a poor memory.

The reality is that a poor memory has a valuable side to it.

Let's review the key idea.

We know that the prefrontal cortex has roughly four slots of working memory.

This means we can hold a maximum of about four neural

chunks of information in those slots when we focus our attention.

Chunks can be simple, like those related to numbers,

the notes that form a musical chord, or words or phrases in a foreign language.

If we've practiced enough, we can build more

complex neural chunks that we can easily pull into working memory and work with.

The neural chunks are kind of like ribbons of thought.

These neural chunks can also relate to more complicated ideas,

like longer portions of a song, or a more complex equation.

As you can see, these neural sort of chunks, ribbons, can,

with practice, involve incredibly complex activities.

Experts have lots of well practiced neural chunks that they can easily bring to mind.

The key idea here is that when you first look at something to try to figure it out,

your working memory in your prefrontal cortex is working very hard.

But once you've understood that something and practiced enough with it

to form a solid neural pattern, you've created a neural chunk.

That's like that ribbon that you can easily draw into one slot of

working memory, leaving the rest of your working memory free for other processing.

And this is why, once we've practiced enough, beginning since we were toddlers,

as adults, we can think a single thought, like walk towards the door, and walk,

which is actually a very complex maneuver, without even continuing to think about it.

Some people have working memories like steel traps,

whatever ideas come before them can be easily retained in their working memories.

This can make it easier for them to understand complex topics and

solve complicated problems.

But other people, like say, me, have not so good working memories.

They may get something in mind, but then, shiny, they get distracted, and

then some of what they were thinking about falls out their minds.

But when that something falls out, something else comes in.

And that's where creativity comes to play.

Those new ideas that come willy nilly into your mind can be the source of creative

new thoughts.

And in fact, as we know from research,

those with poor working memories are often more creative.

Do you have to work harder to keep up with the steel trap memory types?

Sure, but you wouldn't want to trade the asset that your poor memory gives you,

that is your creativity.

But digging deeper, a poor working memory means something else.

As it turns out, a poor working memory gives you an effective tool

to figure out simpler ways to do things.

It may take you a while to figure those things out, but

when you do figure them out, you can sometimes see elegant simplifications and

brilliant shortcuts [LAUGH] that a person with a strong working memory

just doesn't have the motivation to figure out.

There's more.

Andrew Wiles, for example, is a mathematical legend who,

after 358 years of efforts by some of the world's leading mathematicians,

at last proved Fermat's last theorem, has pointed out that you

often need forgetting, as well as remembering, to help you solve problem.

Forgetting helps you get past previous mistakes you might have made.

Andrew's less than perfect memory,

in other words, helped him to solve one of the world's most difficult problems.

Remember, if you do have a poor working memory,

you'll want to use memory tricks like the memory palace or learn to associate.

For example, you can associate people's names with memorable images.

In English, it turns out that we have the name Wanda.

You can remember Wanda's name by imagining a magic wand.

Or the name Phil, which sounds like the word fill in English,

can be more easily remembered if you fill Phil's head with fizzy water.

Putting motion into your visualization helps make things stick better in memory.

Mental tricks can be very powerful tools.

We'll cover some more mental tricks in the videos to come.

But just a bit of insight now.

Whether you have a good, or a not so

good working memory, get yourself into the habit of making mind

dumps of information that you do not need to keep online in your working memory.

Every time you think of an errand, or something you need to remember,

rather than holding it in working memory, commit to writing it down in a notebook or

any other trusted inbox.

[MUSIC]

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