Learning how to learn 1

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这篇学习笔记是我上上周发布在我其中一个github博客上的，几乎没有人看。又因为课程是在coursera上的英文课程，所以笔记也是英文写的。由于加入了“不出局”，今天必须提交作业了，实在写不出其他东西了，所以把这篇学习笔记发表出来，希望战友们见谅。

1.0 Introduction

This is the first learning note from learning the course "Learning-how-to-learn". What is the fundamental principle of this universe? Some think theoretical physics has the chance to explain the ultimate problems, but other argues that the researching activity of these final issues happens in the brain of advanced intelligent lives, such as, human. We still don't know the exact answer, but the brain science is very important for learning efficiently. Therefore the course named "Learning how to learn" is about the brain science or neural science.

1.1 Focused mode and Diffuse mode

Our brains have two modes, one is called the focus mode, the other one is called the diffuse mode. When we want to concentrate on some tough tasks, we are in the focus mode. But when we do some relaxing things, such as hiking, listening to music, we are in the diffuse mode. The focus mode made us to complete the complicated and specific tasks, but innovative thinking is easily required in the diffuse mode. The reason is behind our brains.

To make a analogy, using brain is like playing pinball game: the ball is bouncing back and forth. When under the focus mode, the bouncing pattern is very confirmed, but the bouncing scale is limited. However, when in the diffuse mode, the pattern is unclear, without rules, but the bouncing scale is very wide. The wider scale of neural connections is the reason why innovative thinking is easy from this mode.

Therefore, the best usage of our brains is to use the both modes to learn.

• Firstly, using the focused mode to set the seed(the problem you want to tackle). You may can't solve the problem this time if the problem is very challenging.
• Secondly, When you feel tired, get rid of the task, do something to be relaxing, hiking, running or taking a little nap, whatever. Now you are in the diffuse mode, some inspirations may come out from your mind.
• Finally, you'd better make some notes about the innovative ideas, then go back to work to solve the problem.

1.2 Memory

There are two kinds of memory about our brains, working memory and long term memory. The working memory is the small memory buffer when you are doing something, it's like a broken blackboard, so its capacity is small. But the long term memory is immense, just like the warehouse store. Transforming the temporary memory into the long term memory is not an easy thing to do, it usually needs repetitions. The process of learning is a process which transforms abstract structures from working memory into the long term memory.

1.3 Sleeping

Sleeping is far more important than people usually thought in learning process. Ambitious guys always consider sleeping as the lazy guys' entertaining activity, and I have to say that the majority of elites sleep seemingly very little. However, sleeping actually does great contributions to our daily works and learning. It mainly has two functions: removing toxins from brain and optimizing memory structure. I can't interpret these two things completely, because it needs more knowledge about neural science. Simply speaking, in day time, the brain would generate many negative things(I only call them things right now), and when we were sleeping, our brains would have chance to erase them to make brains efficiently again. By the way, optimizing memory structure is also a mysterious process, this process can sort the stuffs we remembered or learned in day time more reasonable. In conclusion, when we can't solve some issues in short time, just get a good sleep.