Notes for Brain Hack: 6 secrets to learning faster, backed by neuroscience | Lila Landowski | TEDxHobart
attention, alertness, sleep, repetition & spacing, breaks, mistakes

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  1. What works for incredibly talented people comes down to:
    1. practice,
    2. perseverance, and
    3. when in development they started learning that skill.
  2. Ability to learn goes downhill after age 5, and exponentially decreases after age 20.

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Neuroscience based 6 hacks for improving learning:

  1. 04:00 Attention:
    1. "We are designed to focus on one thing at a time."
    2. To improve attention in the long term, do focused attention meditation, and in the short term just exercise.
    3. Exercising increases the size of the part of brain involved in learning and memory, helps make new brain cells, and regular exercise improves memory and cognition; even moderate exercise increases attention for the next two hours.
    4. Do light exercises before studying or doing challenging work.
  2. 06:51 Alertness:
    1. Activating the sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight) increases alertness; exercise, breathing techniques (like Wim Hof's), and small stress can help.
    2. Chronic stress physically changes our brain and causes issues with learning and memory.
    3. An increase in adrenaline after learning also helps enhance learning.
    4. Caffeine also increases performance on learning tasks.
    5. Eating switches off the fight-or-flight system, so don't study after a big meal.
    6. There is a 90-minute ultradian rhythm for alertness, with a peak of about 8-30 minutes.
  3. 09:39 Sleep:
    1. Sleep serves a really important constellation of functions.
    2. It resets our immune system, resets our metabolism, resets our emotional control, and gets rid of the waste that gets built up in the brain over the course of the day.
    3. Sleep is critical for memory consolidation, i.e. turning short-term memories into long-term memories.
    4. Hippocampus is important for learning and memory, it is like a RAM for the day's activities.
    5. Sleep transforms the short-term memories in the hippocampus to long-term memories in the cortex.
    6. Sleep before learning so that you can stay alert, but prioritize sleeping after learning to retain information in the long term.
  4. 11:25 Repetition and spacing:
    1. Repetition is key when it comes to learning; repetition is key when it comes to learning. ☺
    2. Just like exercise builds muscle, repetitive patterns of thinking or doing things will reinforce those pathways and connections in the brain associated with doing those things.
    3. This process is metabolically expensive, and hence not performed for one-off tasks; repetition is how we indicate to the brain that this information is worth keeping.
    4. Space your learning so that the learning has a chance to build on the long-term memories.
    5. Two shorter learning periods over different days produce significantly better learning than the same amount of time spent in a single day.
    6. "One-trial learning" happens when there is a strong emotional component tied to that experience; if the event is scary there is particularly strong learning, which leads to PTSD.
  5. 13:52 Breaks:
    1. 10-20 minute break in between learning sprints helps.
    2. Newly encoded information isn't very stable, and learning something else soon afterwards can destroy that information in what is called "retrograde interference."
    3. Take a 10-20 minute break after you finish learning; do mundane tasks that don't require much thinking.
    4. Wait before trying to learn something similar; preferably do it on a different day.
  6. 15:19 Mistakes:
    1. Making a mistake releases neuromodulators that increase the activity of your focused attention networks, so that we learn better and become more efficient.
    2. If you make a mistake, feel anxious, and walk away, then we (1) lose the opportunity to learn that thing, and more disastrously, (2) you learn to be less able to cope with failure.
    3. Set yourself up for failure in between; quiz yourself while you are learning, don't wait till you are ready.
    4. If you get it right the released dopamine helps consolidates the learning, if not the released neuromodulators increase your attention.

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@toilaxuannam's comment:

  1. Attention
    • Use phone less
    • Prioritize sleep
    • Excercise
  2. Alert
    • Have a focus point
    • (Light) excercise
    • Sufficient eating
  3. Sleep
    • Sleep to transform short-term memories in the hippocampus->long-term memories in the cortex
  4. Repetition and Spacing
    • Learning is like excercising, to get 'muscles' you need repeting it
  5. Breaks
    • Deep breaks (15 minutes) after learning to let brain recall the information
  6. Mistakes
    • Go for challenges, matches, competitions, or simply practice the thing you want to learn the different way

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@abdullah_771's comment:

  1. Exercise: It improves our brain and create new brain cells
  2. Focus: Do some focus exercises like meditation
  3. Practice alertness (to improve its 8-30 min cycle)
  4. Sleep: it converts short term memory into long term
  5. Repeat: Repetition is necessary in various stages of learning
  6. Take breaks (20 min) in between long hours learnings
  7. Make mistakes to train your brain to handle new things

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@sricharan4772's comment:

For those who are trying to remember the 6 keys to improve their learning curve: SAMBAR

Date: July 11, 2024

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