This week, we're going to be talking about chunks, compact packages of information that your mind can easily access. This was when you're using ineffective study methods that fool your mind into thinking you're learning something when you're mostly just wasting your time. Finally we'll talk about something called overlearning, which can solidly ingrain information in your mind, but also can be a little like digging deeper ruts as you might spin your wheels ineffectively in learning.

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. Your neurons fire and wire together in a shimmering mental loop cementing the relationship in your mind between the sound mama and your mother's smiling face. As it turns out one of the first steps towards gaining expertise in academic topics is to create conceptual chunks, mental leaps that unite scattered bits of information through meaning.

That, actually, is the point of making complex ideas, movements or reactions into a single chunk. In the beginning often just saying a single word with the proper nuance, tone and accent involves a lot of practice. Stringing extemporaneous sentences together involves the ability to creatively mix together various complex mini-chunks and chunks in the new language.

That's part of why you can grasp an idea when a teacher presents it in class, but if you don't review it fairly soon after you first learned it, it can seem incomprehensible when it comes time to prepare for a test. In math and science related subjects, closing the book and testing yourself on whether you, yourself, can solve the problem you think you understand, will speed up your learning at this stage. Summing it up, chunks are best built with focused attention, understanding of the basic idea, and practice to help you gain mastery and a sense of the big picture context.

The results, in the same amount of time, by simply practising and recalling the material students learned far more and at a much deeper level than they did using any other approach. Using recall, mental retrieval of the key ideas, rather than passive rereading, will make your study time more focused and effective. The reason students like to keep rereading their notes or a textbook, is that when they have the book or Google open right in front of them, it provides the illusion that the material is also in their brains.

Acetylcholine neurons form neuromodulatory connections to the cortex that are particularly important for focused learning, when you are paying close attention. 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.

Bill Gates and other industry leaders set aside extended week-long reading periods so that they can hold many and varied ideas in mind during one time. 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. When you're trying to figure something out, 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.

The crowded bumpers of the focus mode and the previous patterns you built can create a sort of rut that prevents you from springing to a new place where the solution might be found. In other words, they blindly start working on homework without reading the text book, attending lectures, viewing online lessons, or even speaking with someone knowledgeable. When you teach a child how to deal effectively with a bully, or you fix a leaky faucet, or you quickly pack a small suitcase for a business trip to Hong Kong, all of these illustrate the outcomes of important aspects of learning.

You can think of a chunk as a scintillating network of neurons that compactly synthesizes key ideas or actions. But at the same time, they're a single easy to access item that you can fit like a ribbon into the slot on your working memory. Simple recall, trying to remember the key points without looking at the page, is one of the best ways to help the chunking process along.

That's one of the reasons why people need to be careful when you have a faculty member or a teacher to put something on, on overheads or, or Powerpoints these days. again, with the study groups and challenging each other, because what you, what you think you know, you find out when you try to explain it to somebody else, that's why teaching is one of the best ways to learn. And so you have to take the time to explain it, teach it, whatever, to somebody else as a way to make sure that you, in fact, have what you think you have in terms of your learning.

So I've gotten a few emails from people who have, you know, heard about the project, and they said, well, maybe you and your friend who were doing this have this natural talent for languages and, you know, this, this genetic gift. And I just, I love your story that you gave of, of learning math, because I think that's just a perfect example and it's too bad that a lot of people just don't conceptualize the world that way. So I think if you are willing to be bit more adventurous, there's literally almost no topic you can't learn through this kind of structured, university-like format through the resources available online.