Chunking

How do you become a software engineer.

How can you program a robot.

How do you solve this extremely difficult problem.

Now we learned.

Up until now that we had this idea of focus of focus mode of thinking where we’re so focused on a task

that’s where we start gaining that knowledge.

And then we combine it with the diffuse mode of thinking now when we focus on something we create chunks

of knowledge.

That’s what we’re doing when we learn something.

We’re creating neural patterns and connecting them with pre-existing patterns in our long term memory

by focusing when we’re learning something we don’t have random things popping in our head.

We focus on those four chunks that we’re able to store in our working memory.

And then we create chunks with our focused attention by understanding and practicing a topic.

For example if you’re learning how a car works you’re not going to learn how a car works right away.

You’re going to break down how each part of the car works and then combining the missing pieces to create

the whole system to understand how the whole system works.

If you want to become a rocket engineer you need to form different chunks of knowledge and combine them

to actually learn how everything works together.

And this is the idea behind chunking.

You need to understand how chunks in your brain relate to one another.

For example we all remember math class.

A lot of us learned math and found it extremely confusing calculus for example seemed like we were creating

graphs and charts without really understanding why we’re learning something.

It seemed like we’re just learning a little puzzle that doesn’t really apply to real life.

How does it apply to your life.

That’s why math sometimes is so hard for people because it just seems like we’re playing games that

are unrelated to everyday life.

And we learned an active versus passive learning that we have to actually DO things actually practice

to create these chunks of knowledge.

Now this idea of chunking of breaking things down into different chunks is sometimes called a bottom

up learning.

And that is this idea that we start from the bottom and go up.

We combine different chunks of knowledge and we connect the dots between these chunks.

We create a mind map.

This is why I introduced the mind map at the beginning of this course.

This idea of these are the different pieces of knowledge that we’re going to combine to create this

overall understanding of efficient learning of learning how to learn.

This demonstrates chunking we’re breaking down into each lecture this idea of efficient learning.

Now that’s bottom up learning what we also need is something called top down learning that’s something

where we start with the big picture.

What is this big landscape of learning what is the big picture here.

And by combining This top now learning of what is the big picture how do you connect the dots with a

bottom up learning of what is this individual chunks of knowledge and how can I use them can create

really strong long term learning.

This idea of chunking is actually described in Barbara Oakley’s book learning how to learn if we form

different knowledge and chunks.

It’s all great but without having also the top down of connecting the dots seeing how each chunk relates

to one another then we might have these tools but we won’t know when to use that tool.

The idea is to gradually build chunks in our minds and these chunked mental library will create different

patterns.

And when you learn how to connect them how you can relate concepts to different things using diffuse

mode to connect far distant chunks it’s what creates knowledge.

This idea of connecting the dots is absolutely instrumental to long term learning.

So start with the chunks of chunking different piece of knowledge then look at the top down how do all

these chunks connect and let your brain work towards connecting these chunks.

This is why the trunk based knowledge we talked about in the pillars is so important.

We need to have these foundations and principles so that we’re able to connect these chunks these different

Leafs to one another.