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The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why it Happens
Benedict Carey
JLJ - perhaps Benedict Carey is too obsessed with his puzzles. A science reporter writes about learning and historical learning studies. Can this book make you a genius? Probably not, but it will make you go "hmmm..." with information about studies which provide insight to the learning process. So come on, pick up a book and learn all there is to know about learning, including the experiments of Hermann Ebbinghaus, who logged more than 800 hours memorizing and recalling nonsense sounds. Learn about the SEQUENC_ puzzle, the pencil problem, Maier's rope problem, and about pinning candles to a door with tacks and tape. Don't forget to interrupt yourself as you read. Then experience first-hand the effects of the "forgetting curve" as your mind promptly empties into the bit-bucket all that you learned.
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p.28 What Ebbinghaus created was a catalog of nonsense sounds... He created about 2,300 of them - a pool of all possible syllables... He put together lists of the syllables, random groupings... Then he began to memorize one list at a time, reading the syllables out loud, pacing himself with a metronome, keeping track of how many repetitions he needed to produce a perfect score. By the time he landed a job as an instructor, at the University of Berlin in 1880, he'd logged more than eight hundred hours of practice with nonsense sounds. [JLJ - RIY SEH XOP QUZ PUY NIQ.]
p.64 Daniel Willingham, a leading authority on the application of learning techniques in classrooms, advises his own students, when they're reviewing for an exam, not to work straight from their notes. "I tell them to put the notes aside and create an entirely new outline, reorganizing the material," he told me. "It forces you to think about the material again, and in a different way." ...Each alteration of the routine further enriches the skills being rehearsed, making them sharper and more accessible for a longer period of time.
p.68 Hermann Ebbinghaus... found that he could learn a list of twelve syllables, repeating them flawlessly, if he performed sixty-eight repetitions on one day and seven more on the next. Yet he could do just as well with only thirty-eight repetitions total if they were spaced out over three days.
p.114-116 Each insight experience, as it were, seemed to include a series of mental steps, which Wallas called "stages of control." ...preparation... incubation... illumination... verification
p.116 Wallas's principal contribution was his definition of incubation. He did not see this as a passive step, as a matter of the brain resting and returning "fresh." He conceived of incubation as a less intense, subconscious continuation of the work. The brain is playing with concepts and ideas, pushing some to the side, fitting others together, as if absentmindedly working on a jigsaw puzzle. [JLJ - not for me. When I incubate ideas, I do not think at all about the subject. Zero. Not even a hint, even subconsciously. It is when I pick up the idea again, after weeks, months, years, or after reviewing notes, that I get new ideas on how to proceed. I re-grasp the idea as if it were new, having meanwhile read material in other areas. Often when I review notes I am surprised that I felt that way, when I wrote them. I often have much to add from what I have read since then.]
p.217 The point is not that concentration doesn't exist, or isn't important... Concentration may, in fact, include any number of breaks, diversions, and random thoughts.
p.221 The science of learning is not even "science" to me anymore. It's how I live. It's how I get the most out of what modest skills I've got. No more than that, and no less.
p.222 Here's one prediction I'd be willing to bet money on: Perceptual learning tools will have an increasingly central role in advanced training - of surgeons and scientists, as well as pilots, radiologists, crime scene investigators, and more - and perhaps in elementary education as well.
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