When I started my quest to study animal behavior (and all associated fields that I might potentially be interested in) I had a hard time focusing.
Yes, I’d been stressed thanks to workplace burnout and yes I had so many projects that I wanted to work on. The thing was, even though I wanted to sit down and study, I couldn’t make myself do it.
And so, like most excellent procrastinators, I found a course on learning. I was ready to ditch it too, sure it wouldn’t hold my interest for being too basic, or for the instructor being bad at teaching learning herself. Nevermind that the topics looked fairly straightforward, all things I’d been taught in school before. Still, what did I have to lose?
And so, I began taking the course.
I was gripped from the get go.
I learned about two different modes of thinking: diffuse and focused, and about how to use one to make the most of the other, as well as about when to use which.
I learned about how to use the pomodoro technique correctly, because yes, of course I knew what it was but I did not know how to correctly use the last few minutes on a thirty-minute timer: two to five minutes to retrieve or recxall what you’ve learned to strenghen memory traces, and two or three minutes of “restful wakefulness.” I bought a tiny portable pomodro block of my own and began experimenting. It got me through tasks I’d been avoiding for a couple of weeks.
I learned that metaphors and comparisons make learning and remembering material easier than rote repetition.
I learned that sleep washes out metabolic toxins and it’s way more important than you think if you want to be able to think clearly the next day and if you want to keep those new connections neural connections strong.
I was reminded that one of the best ways to learn is through osmosis, simply by doing and getting involved, just as I did when I was learning to scuba dive—joining dive clubs, diving, volunteering to clean the exhibits at the Oregon Coast Aquarium and so on.
I learned that you learn more by actively engaging with a subject. Ask questions, think, talk about it.
I also learned that exercise is great for diffuse thinking time. Go for a run or a walk or a swim and just be. Often your brain will end up coming up with solutions or ideas for whatever you are trying to figure out, not least if you’ve been thinking about it before you begin (as with sleep). In fact, exercise is so important that in the absence of an enriched environment, it can help increase new connections in the hippocampus.
The other trick is to insert yourself into a creative environment where other people are also being creative. That can help with learning and with coming up with ideas. I wish more corporate offices who waxed lyrical about wanting creatives realized that their stuff, metrics-driven bureaucratic policies literally impacted creativity and learning.
The truth is, a lot of success is not about being smart but rather, about being passionate and persistent. Don’t let go, don’t give up.
As I neared the end of the first module of the course I though about what I wanted to learn. Well, obviously I want to learn how to learn better. I want to learn how to structure good nonfiction. I want to learn how to hypothesize and conduct a legitimiate scientific study, I want to learn about how the brain works, I want to learn how to work more effectively.
If there is discomfort in the learning process, well, that’s apparently good news. Some discomfort is key to learning. Struggling with a math problem? Probably a good thing…I know that most of the things I struggled with as a kid ended up becoming some of my favorite problems to work on: computer programming, parsing poetry, complex physics concepts.
Today, I try to give myself more grace. If learning to sail a boat is hard because I can’t for the life of me figure out how to read the wind or the water, well, I’ll get it eventually. I just have to keep at it. Keep trying, even if means looking slow, stupid, or bad at something.