Because building solid chunks of long term memory, chunks that are easily accessible by your short term memory, takes time. That powerful 25 minute concentrated period of energized focus. This week we're going to fill you in with more information about how procrastination happens and simple ways to tackle it.

You've already learned one handy tool to help you with procrastination the pomodoro that 25 minute period of uninterrupted focus followed by a bit of relaxation. You devise irrational excuses that sound superficially reasonable like if I study too far ahead of the test I'll forget the material. This can allow you to take larger doses and look healthy, even as the poison is slowly increasing your risk of cancer and ravaging your organs.

Your brain goes into this sort of zombie mode, where it is only semi aware of a few key factors, instead of being overwhelmed by all the data. Procrastination's an easy habit to develop because the reward, moving your mind's focus to something more pleasant, happens so quickly and easily. Finding ways to reward good study habits is important for escaping procrastination.

If you find yourself avoiding certain tasks because they make you feel uncomfortable, you should know there's another helpful way to re-frame things. The essential idea here is that the zombie habitual part of your brain likes processes because it can march mindlessly along. Many students find that either a quiet space or noise canceling headphones if, if you can afford them, can be helpful when they're really trying to concentrate.

Does a text message disturb your studying taking you 10 minutes to get back into the flow of things even when you try to keep yourself on task? Many students discovered the value of settling into a quiet spot in the library or closer to home, the productive effects of simply sitting in a favorite chair at the proper time with all Internet access disconnected. For example, breaking for lunch with a friend at the deli at noon or stopping the main task at 5 p.m., gives a solid, mini deadline that can help spur work.

If you don't write your tasks down on a list, they lurk at the edge of the four or so slots of your working memory, taking up valuable mental real estate. Generally, I aim to quit at 5 p.m., although when I'm learning something new, it can sometimes be a pleasure to look at it again after I've taken an evening break, just before I go to sleep, and occasionally, there's a major project that I'm wrapping up, like say, this MOOC that has me running into a bit of overtime. In other words, this method, implausible though it may seem for some, can work for undergraduate and graduate students in rigorous academic programs.

Keep a planner journal so you can easily track when you reach your goals and observe what does and doesn't work. Write your planned tasks out the night before so your brain has time to dwell on your goals and help ensure success. Take a few minutes to savor the feelings of happiness and triumph, which also gives your brain a chance to temporarily change modes.

If you were asked to look around a house you never visited before, you'd soon have a sense of the general furniture layout and where the rooms were, color scheme, the pharmaceuticals in the bathroom cupboard. The image helps you encapsulate a seemingly humdrum and hard to remember concept by tapping into visual areas with enhanced memory abilities. Great flash card systems like Anki have build in algorithms that repeat in scale ranging from days to months.

Curiously, you could have a normal conversation with HM, but if you left the room for a few minutes, he could not remember you or what you had discussed. Astrocytes provide nutrients to neurons, maintain extra cellular ion balance, and are involved with repair following injury. Interestingly, when Einstein's brain was examined to find out what made him so awesomely creative, the only difference that could be found was that he had many more astrocytes than the average human.

Like the layout of your house, and using it as a sort of a visual notepad where you can deposit the concept images that you want to remember. In addition, imaging research on how people become experts, shows that such memory tools speed up the acquisition of both chunks and big picture templates. You may say, well, you're just not that creative, an equation or theory could hardly have its own grandiose motivations or persnickeity emotional needs to help you understand and remember it.

You need to practice and repeat in order to help store items in long term memory so you can retrieve them more easily. When you master a technique or concept in some sense, it compacts the ideas so they can occupy less space in your working memory when you do bring them to mind. By making meaningful groups and abbreviations, you can simplify and chunk what you're trying to learn so you can more easily store it in memory.

The real problem is I'm just not a quick thinker so by the time I come up with some kind of memorable gimmick, I've already missed the other couple of names. >> Right so you know let me first say that in competitions we memorize specific things cards, numbers, names because there, there has to be a way that we can uniformly test everybody on the same level every year, right? That we can all have healthy brains in the future and I work with this company Dart NeuroScience and they have this awesome kind of research program where you can login and take a little memory test.

By practicing continuously, you can bring those, those parts of a melody to mind instantly, and, and play them and fit them together in new ways more easily, and that can be a very effective technique for learning. Now when I get stuck, I deliberately take a break and try to do something just to relax, you know, almost thoughtless, it can be as simply as bouncing a tennis ball off the wall or something like that. Of course, the next step is to choose examples that can give students a real feel for the subject, and let them realize how simple Physics, or science in general, can be.

But somehow weird stuff happens inside the brain when you're doing something else and what three hours ago seemed like an impossible problem just melts away and everything just falls into place. The, the way to get through the school system is to learn to act fast under pressure of time, and that's the last thing you can do when it comes to mathematics. Well, part of what you do when you're spending a lot of time with a problem is you're in some sense reifying and growing the neural structures, that are related to what you're trying to think about.