Chunk

My Course notes for Learning How to Learn.

1. What is a Chunk

A chunk is a way of compressing information much more compactly, creating a chunk is like converting a cumbersome computer file into a ZIP file. As you gain more experience in chunking in particular subject, you’ll see that the chunks you’re able to create are bigger. Neuroscientifically speaking, a chunk means a network of neurons that are used to firing together so you can think a thought or perform an action smoothly and effectively. Once you chunk an idea, a concept, or an action, you don’t know need to remember all the little underlying details. You’ve got the main idea, the chunk, and that’s enough.

When you’re focusing your attention on something it’s almost as if you have an octopus. The octopus of attention that slips it’s tentacles through those four slots of working memory when necessary to help you make connections to information that you might have in various parts of your brain. Remember, this is different from the random connections of the diffuse mode. Focusing your attention to connect parts of the brain to tie together ideas is an important part of the focused mode of learning. It is also often what helps get you started in creating a chunk.

2. How to form a Chunk

If you’re learning to play a difficult song on the guitar, you often have to grasp little bits of songs that become neuro mini-chunks, which will later join together into larger chunks. For example, over several days, you might learn how to smoothly place the musical passages on a guitar, and when you’ve grasped those passages, you could join them together with other passages that you’ve learned, gradually putting everything together so you can play the song.

The best chunks are the ones that are so well ingrained, that you don’t even have to consciously think about connecting the neural pattern together. That, actually, is the point of making complex ideas, movements or reactions into a single chunk.

Basic steps behind how to make a chunk:

1. Focus your undivided attention on the information you want to chunk. Your octopus tentacles, so to speak, can’t reach very well if some of them are off on other thoughts using up some of the limited slots in your working memory.

2. Understand the basic idea you’re trying to chunk. Understanding is like a superglue that helps hold the underlying memory traces together. You actually understand something is when you can actually do it yourself.

3. Gaining context, so you can see not just how, but also when to use this chunk. Context means going beyond the initial problem and seeing more broadly, repeating and practicing helps you broaden the networks of neurons that are connected to your chunk, ensuring it’s not only firm, but also accessible from many different paths.
   As you can see from this top down, bottom up illustration, learning takes place in two ways. There’s a bottom up chunking process, where practice and repetition can help you both build and strengthen each chunk, so you can easily access it whenever you need to. And there’s also a, a sort of a top down big picture process that allows you to see what you’re learning and where it fits in. Both processes are vital in gaining mastery over the material. Context is where bottom up and top down learning meet. To clarify here, chunking may involve your learning how to use a certain problem-solving technique. Context means learning when to use that technique instead of some other technique.

3. The Value of a Library of Chunks

Creativity

Basically what people do to enhance their knowledge and gain expertise is to gradually build the number of chunks in their mind. The bigger and more well practiced your chunked mental library, whatever the subject you’re learning, the more easily you’ll be able to solve problems and figure out solutions. if you have a good library of these chunks, you can more easily skip to the right solution by metaphorically speaking, listening to whispers from your diffuse mode. Your diffuse mode can help you connect two or more chunks together in new ways to solve novel problems.

Transfer

Chunks can also help you understand new concepts. This is because when you grasp one chunk, you’ll find that that chunk can be related in surprising ways to similar chunks, not only in that field, but also in very different fields. This idea is called transfer. For example, concepts and problems solving methods you learned for physics can be very similar to chunked concepts in business.

Law of Serendipity

You may think there are so many problems and concepts, just in a single section or chapter of whatever you’re studying, there’s just no way to learn them all. This is where the law of serendipity comes into play. Lady luck favors the one who tries. Just focus on whatever section you’re studying. You’ll find that once you put that first problem or concept in your mental library, whatever it is, then the second concept will go in a little more easily. And the third more easily still. Not that all of this is a snap, but it does get easier.

4. Illusions of Competence

Merely glancing at a solution and thinking you truly know it yourself is one of the most common illusions of competence in learning. A super helpful way to make sure you’re learning and not fooling yourself with illusions of competence, is to test yourself on whatever you’re learning. In some sense, that’s what recall is actually doing.

Using recall, mental retrieval of the key ideas, rather than passive rereading, will make your study time more focused and effective. When we retrieve knowledge, we’re not just being mindless robots. The retrieval process itself enhances deep learning, and helps us to begin forming chunks. It’s almost as if the recall process helps build in little neural hooks, that we can hang our thinking on. By recalling and thinking about the material when you are in various physical environment, you become independent of the cues from any one given location. That helps you avoid the problem of the test room being different from where you originally learned the material.

If you make a mistake in what you are doing, it’s actually a very good thing. You want to try not to repeat you mistakes, of course, but mistakes are very valuable to make in your little self-tests before high stakes real tests. Because they allow you to make repairs and you’re thinking flaws bit by bit mistakes help correct your thinking, so that you can learn better and do better.

5. What Motivates You

It is hard to learn when you’re not into it. But if it’s something you’re really interested in, learning is easy. Why is that?

Your brain has a set of diffusely projecting systems of neuromodulators, that carry information not about the content of an experience but it’s importance and value to your future. Neuromodulators are chemicals that influence how a neurons responds to other neurons.

• Acetylcholine is particularly important for focused learning, when you are paying close attention. These acetylcholine neurons project widely and activate circuits that control synaptic plasticity. Leading to new long term memory.

• Dopamine is found in a small set of neurons in our brain stem shown below in orange. These dopamine neurons are part of a large brain system that controls reward learning and in particular in the basal ganglia, which is located in the green region above the dopamine neurons and below the cortex at the top of the brain. Dopamine is released from these neurons, when we receive an unexpected reward. Dopamine is in the business of predicting future rewards and not just the immediate reward. This can motivate you to do something that may not be rewarding right now but will lead to a much better reward in the future. When you promise to treat yourself something after a study section you are tapping into your dopamine system. Addictive drugs artificially increase dopamine activity and fool your brain into thinking that something wonderful has just happened. In fact just the opposite has just happened. This leads to craving and dependence, which can hijack your free will and can motivate actions that are harmful to you. Loss of Dopamine neurons leads to a lack of motivation; and something called anhedonia, which is a loss of interest in things that once gave you pleasure. Severe loss of Dopamine neurons causes resting tremor, slowness, rigidity, this is called Parkinson’s disease. Ultimately it leads to catatonia, a complete lack of any movement.

• Serotonin strongly affects your social life. In monkey troops the alpha male has the highest level of serotonin activity and the lowest ranking male has the lowest levels. Prozac, which is prescribed for clinical depression, raises the level of Serotonin activity. The level of Serotonin is also closely linked to risk taking behavior. With higher risk in lower Serotonin monkeys. Inmates in jail for violent crimes have some of the lowest levels of serotonin activity in society.

Your emotions strongly affect learning as you are well aware. Recent research has shown that emotions are intertwined with perception and attention and interact with learning and memory. The amygdala an almond shaped structure shown here, nestled down at the base of the brain is one of the major centers where cognition and emotion are effectively integrated. The amygdala is part of the limbic system which together with hippocampus is involved in processing memory and decision making as well as regulating emotional reactions. You will want to keep your amygdala happy to be an effective learner. The emotions and your neuromodulatory systems are slower than perception and action but are no less important for successful learning. Brain Fact

6. Overlearning, Deliberate Practice, the Einstellung Effect, and Interleaving

Overlearning

Continuing to study or practice after you’ve mastered what you can in the session is called overlearning. Overleaning can have its place. It can produce an automaticity that can be important when you’re executing a serve in tennis or a perfect piano concerto. If you choke on tests or public speaking, overlearning can be especially valuable. But be wary of repetitive overlearning during a single session. Research has shown it can be a waste of valuable learning time. The reality is, once you’ve got the basic idea down during a session, continuing to hammer away at it during the same session doesn’t strengthen the kinds of long term memory connections you want to have strengthened. Worse yet, focusing on one technique is a little like learning carpentry by only practicing with a hammer. After awhile you think you can fix anything by just bashing at it.

Deliberate Practice

Repeating something you already know perfectly well is easy. It can also bring the illusion of competence that you’ve mastered the full range of material, when you’ve actually only mastered the easy stuff. Instead, you want to balance your studies by deliberately focusing on what you find more difficult. This focusing on the more difficult material is called deliberate practice. It’s often what makes the difference between a good student and a great student.

Einstellung Effect

Einstellung Effect is a phenomenon that your initial simple thought, an idea you already have in mind or a neural pattern you’ve already developed and strengthened, may prevent a better idea or solution from being found. Incidentally, the German word einstellung means mindset. Basically you can remember einstellung as installing a roadblock because of the way you were initially looking at something.

Interleaving

Mastering a new subject means learning not only the basic chunks, but also learning how to select and use different chunks. The best way to learn that is by practicing jumping back and forth between problems or situations that require different techniques or strategies. This is called interleaving. Once you have the basic idea of the technique down during your study session, sort of like learning to ride a bike with training wheels, start interleaving your practice with problems of different types or different types of approaches, concepts, procedures. Sometimes this can be a little tough to do. A given section in a book, for example, is often devoted to a specific technique, so when you flip to that section you already know which technique you’re going to be using. Still, do what you can to mix up your learning.

Interleaving is extraordinarily important. Although practice and repetition is important in helping build solid neural patterns to draw on, it’s interleaving that starts building flexibility and creativity. It’s where you leave the world of practice and repetition, and begin thinking more independently. When you interleave within one subject or one discipline, you begin to develop your creative power within that discipline. When you interleave between several subjects or disciplines, you can more easily make interesting new connections between chunks in the different fields, which can enhance your creativity even further. Of course it takes time to develop solid chunks of knowledge in different fields, so sometimes there’s a trade off. Developing expertise in several fields means you can bring very new ideas from one field to the other, but it can also mean that your expertise in one field or the other isn’t quite as deep as that of the person who specializes in only one discipline. On the other hand, if you develop expertise in only one discipline, you may know it very deeply but you may become more deeply entrenched in your familiar way of thinking and not be able to handle new ideas.