43 - No Need for Genius Envy

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This is a good place for us to step

back and look again at chunking from

another perspective.

Notice what we’re doing here.

We’re interleaving our learning by jumping

back to revisit

and deepen our understanding of a topic

we’ve already covered.

There’s an interesting connection between

learning

math and science and learning a sport.

In baseball, for example, you don’t learn

how to hit in one day.

Instead, your body perfects your swing

from lots

and lots of repetition over a period of

years.

Smooth repetition creates muscle memory,

so your body

knows what to do from a single thought.

One chunk instead of having to recall all

the complex steps involved in hitting a

ball.

In the same way, once you understand why

you do something in math and science.

You don’t have to keep re-explaining the

how to yourself every time you do it.

it’s not necessary to go around with a

hundred

beans in your pocket and to lay out ten

rows of ten beans again and again so you

get that ten times ten is equal to 100.

At some point you just know it from

memory.

For example you memorize the idea that you

simply add exponents, those

little superscript numbers, when you are

multiplying numbers that have the same

base.

Ten to the fourth times ten to the fifth

is equal to ten to the ninth.

If you use the procedure a lot, by doing

many different

types of problems you’ll find that you

understand both the why

and the how behind the procedure far

better then you do

after getting a conventional explanation

from a teacher or a book.

The greater understanding results from the

fact that your mind constructed the

patterns of meaning, rather than simply

accepting what someone else has told you.

Remember, people learn by trying to make

sense out of the information they perceive.

They rarely learn anything complex simply

by having someone else tell it to them.

Chess masters, emergency room physicians,

fighter pilots, and many

other experts often have to make complex

decisions rapidly.

They shut down their conscious system and

instead rely on their

well trained intuition, drawing on their

deeply ingrained repertoire of chunks.

At some point self-consciously understanding

why you do what you do, just

slows you down and interrupts the flow

resulting in worse decisions.

But wait, are chess masters and people who

can

multiply six digit numbers in their heads

exceptionally gifted?

Not necessarily, I’m going to tell it to

you straight.

Sure.

Intelligence matters.

Being smarter often equates to having a

larger working memory.

Your hot rod of a memory may be able to

hold nine things in mind instead of four

and you can latch on to those things like

a bulldog, which makes it easier to

learn.

But guess what, it also makes it more

difficult for you to be creative.

How’s that?

It’s our old friend and enemy Einstellung.

The idea you are already holding in mind

can block you from fresh thoughts.

A superb working memory can hold its

thoughts so tightly that new

thoughts can’t easily peek through.

Such

tightly controlled attention could use an

occasional whiff of ADHD-like fresh air,

the ability,

in other words, to have your attention

shift even if you don’t want it to shift.

If you’re one of those people who can’t

hold a lot in

mind at once, you lose focus and start

daydreaming in lectures and have

to get to some place quiet to focus so you

can use your

working memory to its maximum, well

welcome to the clan of the creative.

Having a somewhat smaller working memory

means you can

more easily generalize your learning into

new, more creative combinations.

Because your working memory, which grows

from the focusing abilities

of the prefrontal cortex doesn’t lock

everything up so tightly.

You can more easily get input from other

parts of your brain.

These other areas, which include the

sensory cortex,

not only are more in tune with what’s

going

on around you in the environment, but are

also

the source of dreams, not to mention

creative ideas.

You may have to work harder sometimes or

even

much of the time to understand what’s

going on.

But once you get something chunked you can

take that chunk and turn it outside in

and inside round, putting it through

creative paces

even you didn’t think you were capable of.

Here’s another point to put into your

mental chunker.

It is practice, particularly deliberate

practice on

the toughest aspects of the material that

can help lift average brains into the

realm of those with more natural gifts.

Just as you can practice lifting weights

and get bigger muscles over time,

you can also practice certain mental

patterns

that deepen and enlarge in your mind.

Whether your naturally gifted or you have

to struggle to get a solid grasp of

the fundamentals, you should realize that

you’re

not alone if you think you’re an imposter.

That it’s a fluke when you happen to do

well on a test, and then on the next

test, for sure they, and your family and

friends,

are finally going to figure out how incompetent

you really are.

This feeling is so extraordinarily common

that it even has a name.

The Imposter Syndrome.

If you suffer from these kinds of feelings

of

inadequacy just be aware that many others

secretly share them.

Everyone has different gifts, as the old

saying goes, when one door closes, another

opens.

Keep your chin up and your eye on the open

door.

I’m Barbara Oakley.

Thanks for learning how to learn.