Learning

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.

There’s a word I’m particularly enjoying right now because it has a susurrus sound and because it’s a new notion for me. 

I came across it a couple of days ago while reading Sentient (which by the way, so far, is a fantastic book. Each chapter focuses on a different animal and could be read alone). Anyway, the term comes up in relation to the spookfish which, incidentally, has excellent scotopic vision, a type of vision that apparently even us humans have. 

If, like me, you are unfamiliar with the term, I’ll break it down. Basically, it refers to an eye’s ability to see under low-light conditions. If you have scotopic vision, well you have some of that ability. 

As you can imagine, the spookfish is a deep sea fish (think mesopelagic deep, down to 1,000 meters) and though this vision comes hand in hand with a poorer ability to discriminate between colors and lower visual acuity, those with scotopic vision are highly sensitive to light and are capable of seeing in starlight-level darkness. Incidentally spookfish are really also quite cool because they’ve got mirror-based eyes. I won’t go into it now but it’s super rare. So rare in fact that only two vertebrates on our planet are known to have a retinal mirror in their eye rather than a lens. 

What struck me as most surprising is that though humans aren’t great at seeing in the dark, after some time—say 20 to 30 minutes—we too can tap into our scotopic powers as we rely solely on our rod photoreceptors cells in our retinas, to make sense of the dark. That marker of time is when rods are supposed to approach near-max sensitivity. 

Though uncorroborated, it’s also apparently why pirates wore an eye patch—so that they could quickly go between the bright above deck and the dark below deck level and still see. It’s also apparently what my boyfriend does when he goes to the bathroom at night. He closes one eye against the light, does his thing, turns off the light, then uses the dark-adapted eye to navigate his way back to bed. 

Of course, I had to test this for myself and so, for the past few nights I’ve been lying awake paying attention to my vision improving without lights. Thankfully, the blackout blinds in our bedroom allow for experiments like this. The results truly are stunning. 

If you head outside to try it at night, I’ve got another factoid you might appreciate: the fovea in your eye (the sort of central area) has no rod photoreceptor cells. This means that the center of your gaze is actually quite poor at night. And so, if you want to see better in near darkness levels of illumination, try averting your vision and looking at the thing you want to see out of the side of your eye. Star gazers will often use this trick! 

And this is what I love so much about learning. Though I’m only at the start of embedding myself in the world of animal behavior, already I’m enraptured. It doesn’t even matter that my first textbook focuses solely on dogs, it too is fascinating. 

All I can say is I’m relieved I’ve switched to a contract deal with my employer (such a hard decision given I had a fairly good position) as it buys me the mental space to start filling my head with new information. It feels like a return to meaning and somehow that makes me both immensely happy and somewhat sad. Why have I taken this long to return to academia? Learning is definitely one of my love languages.

Final aside: I feel so damn sorry for all the ratfish that Pacific Northwest divers blind when diving those darker waters. I still recall the first time I saw the fish. I was bowled over by its enormous eyes. Turns out that like the spookfish (it’s actually part of the same group of deep-sea cartilaginous fish called chimaeras) ratfish eyes are highly adapted to low-light conditions, and they lack the ability to regulate the amount of light that enters them. This means that a diver shining a light in their eye can actually blind them and who knows for how long. If only our dive agencies were required to teach marine behavior etiquette specific to their own areas. And I mean REQUIRED.

I’m starting to love my early mornings kudos of jet lag. I wake up around 4 am or so, make tea and avo toast, and then settle down to learn. It’s one time of the day I find it easy to concentrate as no one else is awake, including the birds. There’s simply nothing to distract me.

Today, I logged in to my site (here) and Coursera, so I could jot down notes and thoughts as I learned.

Though I took a course titled “Research Methods in Psychology” in my undergraduate years when I was hopping from course to course trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I can’t say that I remember a whole lot from the class. We did design and run experiments (that was fun if I recall) but we also did a lot of stuff with statistics which is far less memorable. And, to be perfectly honest, though I’ve studied engineering-level calculus (yes, I once thought I wanted to be a programmer), I have never taken a class dedicated to statistics.

Obviously, I need to be able to hit the ground running if I’m going straight into a Masters program. That means having a solid grounding in research, statistics and study design. At least according to one of the programs directors at a UK university I reached out to.

To bone up, I’ve decided to take a series of courses on Qualitative Research Methods in Psychology specialization on Coursera. I settled on this series because it was created by the American Psychological Association and if they don’t know what they’re talking about, who on earth does?

I expected the course to be completely dry and have so far been pleasantly surprised to find it interesting. In the back of my head the storyteller in me can’t help but think qualitative research is quality research because it relies on stories…and, well, because it’s in the name. Also, in some form and fashion, as a digital marketer for many years, I had to do a bit of it in order to develop user personas—the fictional characters marketers make that are intended to synthesize some segment of a user group or audience profile. Usually they come packaged with stupid names such as Savvy Sally (an accountant who likes to do her research before making a purchase), or Adventurous Andy (a tech nerd who makes more emotional purchases and who is swayed by energetic and heartfelt language).

Anyway, you get my drift, qualitative research feels familiar.

At one point in module 3, the course talks about the philosophical underpinnings of qualitative research and presents this lovely image that I believe perfectly illustrates the magic of research and how much there is to it, though most people only ever see the tip (the techniques used, or the method). I wanted to share it here. I’ve no idea who designed this illustration unfortunately as there’s no credit given. But, given this article is just for me and just for educational purposes, I’m going to hope it’s okay to share.

I did, however get really hung up on the philosophy section focused on ontology, axiology and epistemology as it was very poorly explained.

And then…well, after muddling through that, I decided to take a break and switch to a cup of coffee and actual paid work.

Balancing (quiet and secret) future plans is one thing but I still have to pay the Coursera bills!

I’ve started my Learn R course through Codecademy and am pleased to report that much of what I’m learning feels like familiarization.

Why R? Well, I’m told that psychologists, researchers and many scientists need to know how to code using R in order to analyze data.

Though I’ve never taken an R course, I did take computer programming in high school (Borland Delphi graphic user interface programming) and in my first year of university (C programming). In another life I wanted to be a programmer.

The one gripe I have thus far, though I’m only in the first of 10 modules, is that I don’t think some of the concepts are explained that well. Thankfully I already know what a variable and a string are, and a whole lot more about writing programs but still, not ideal for helping people really comprehend. There are other R courses on many other sites but I’m going to keep plugging through as it’s still a simple format.

I think the crux to this programming language, like all IRL languages, is that repetition and practice is going to be the best way to learn. You need to work on problems, and write code. The only way is through!