Practice Makes Permanent

Yep, that’s me when I was 10.

I loved animals, handicrafts, and dreaming. Back then, I was the belligerent queen of anti-math.

I neglected, ignored, flunked, and downright hated math and science all through grade school, middle school, and high school. It’s strange to realize I’m now a professor of Engineering. I enlisted in the army right out of high school to study language at the Defense Language Institute.

That’s me at 18, looking very nervous and very focused while throwing a hand grenade. I only started to study math and science when I was 26 years old, after I got out of the military. At first, it was really hard.

There were all these quick thinkers in my classes who seemed to get everything a lot easier and faster than me. Sometimes I’d take a break for a few months, I’d go out and work as a Russian translator on Soviet trawlers. That’s me up in the Bering Sea.

And I’d come back to school and try and learn some more. As I gained technical know-how, new doors started opening up for me. I ended up working as a radio operator at the South Pole Station in Antarctica. That’s where I met my husband. I always say I had to go the end of the Earth to meet that man.

Here he is, after only 10 minutes outside at minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit with a 60-mile-an-hour wind. The wind chill takes it off the charts. Now, I wasn’t natural in math and science. Not at all. The way I succeeded was to gradually begin to figure out some tricks. But let’s back up a step.

In the greater scheme of all the different careers and disciplines that people can pursue, why are those involving math and science, sometimes, a bit more challenging? We think it may be related, at least in part, to the abstract nature of the ideas. I mean, let’s take a cow for example, out standing in a field.

If you have the word cow, you can point right to a cow to learn what that word means. Even the letters for the word cow, C-O-W, are roughly analogous to sounds that they stand for. But for mathematical ideas, there’s often no analogous thing that you can point to. There are no plus signs standing out in a field.

No multiplication, division, or other kinds of things that can directly equate to mini mathematical or scientific terms. These terms are more abstract, in other words.

Well, you might say, yeah, but what about ones like love, zest, or hope? Those are all abstract. Yes they are, but the thing is, these abstract terms are often related to our emotions.

We can feel our emotions, even if we can’t see and point to concrete examples, like we could with the cow.

This means it’s important to practice with ideas and concepts your learning in math and science, just like anything else you’re learning. to help enhance and strengthen the neural connection your making during the learning process. You can see on your left here the symbolic representation of a thought pattern. Neurons become linked together through repeated use. The more abstract something is, the more important it is to practice in order to bring those ideas into reality for you.

Even if the ideas you’re dealing with are abstract, the neural thought patterns you are creating are real and concrete. At least they are if you build and strengthen them through practice. Here’s a way to picture what’s going on.

When you first begin to understand something, for example, how to solve a problem, the neural pattern from is there, but very weak. Kind of like the faint pattern at the top of our paintball machine analogy here. When you solve the problem again fresh from the start, without looking at the solution. You, if you begin deepening that neuron pattern, kind of like the darker pattern you see here in the middle.

And when you have the problem down cold, so you can go over each step completely and concisely in your mind without even looking at the solution, and you’ve even had practice on related problems, why then, the pattern is like this dark firm pattern you can see towards the bottom of the pinball frame. Practice makes permanent. When you’re learning, what you want to do is study something. Study it hard by focusing intently. Then take a break or at least change your focus to something different for awhile.

During this time of seeming relaxation, your brain’s diffuse mode has a chance to work away in the background and help you out with your conceptual understanding. Your, your neural mortar in some sense has a chance to dry.

If you don’t do this, if instead you learn by cramming, your knowledge base will look more like this, all in a jumble with everything confused, a poor foundation. If you have problems with procrastination, that’s when you want to use the Pomodoro, that brief timer.

This helps you get going, using brief periods each day of focused attention, that will help you start building the neural patterns you need to be more successful in learning more challenging materials.

Next stop, we’ll be talking about chunking, the vital essence of how you grasp and master key ideas. I’m Barbara Oakley.