LEARNING HOW TO LEARN



Powerful Learning Strategies from: “Learning how to learn” Coursera course.

  1. Alternate Focus and Diffuse mode:
    1. Focus Mode: When you concentrate in purpose
    2. Diffuse Mode: When you do not concentrate in something while taking a walk, softly dancing, doodling, painting…

  1. Pomodoro Technique
    1. Set your timer for 25 minutes
    2. Focus
    3. When the 25 min are over, relax in diffuse mode for 5 min or and start again.

  1. It´s important to exercise and sleep well: investigations prob e that learning consolidates and expands during these activities if you focus first in something and then exercise or sleep.

  1. Make lists with only the possible actions you can take in one day.


  1. Make Concept Chunks:
    1. Focus
    2. Understand
    3. Repeat
    4. Test yourself

  1. Mind the process, not the product.
    1. Minding the product when it gives you pain, triggers procrastination cues.
    2. Minding the first part of the process will not trigger the pain cues and will leave you with more energy to accomplish the task.

  1. Pass from Working Memory to Long- Term- Memory:
    1. Your Working Memory has 4 spots available so it overloads easily, is like a bad quality blackboard so do not even try to keep in mind lots of things to do: write them down, group them in chunks, set alarms. Make routines for the small stuff so you don’t have to remember them also. Use default settings with clothes, exercise, sleeping, phone call hours, food, etc..
    2. Your Long-Term-Memory is like a Warehouse with a lot of space, if you memorize the important stuff grouped in chunks using space repetition and recall you will remember it when needed.

  1. Send the most you can to “Zombie Mode”:
    1. Zombie Mode is taking action automatically without concentrating on purpose so you save energy and will power for the hard stuff.
    2. Make easy and possible to follow ROUTINES
    3. See: Tackling Procrastination


  1. Plan ahead:
    1.  Right from the day the homework is described by your teacher or the test is scheduled.
    2. Be Realistic

  1. Accomplish Deliberate Practice: Give time and effort to master the difficult material.

  1. Pay attention to “Einstellung”: Your initial intuition prevents you to understand new material. Unlearn that first and open your mind to the different stuff.

  1. Make Anagrams with images and words.

  1. Use your visuospatial outstanding memory

  1. Look for a quite, peaceful place to focus

  1. Use sound-blocking earphones if you are distracted by sounds.

  1. Change scenarios while you testing yourself, it prepares you for recovering the learning material in a different place as it happens in a classroom.

  1. Practice a little bit every day: Spaced Repetition, instead of studying all the material in exhausting hours before the test.

  1. Interleave your study: alternate theory and practice, concepts with examples, relate chunks from different clases or topics.

  1. Practice easy and harder stuff: you can make it in progression or interleave it.

  1. Study in live or web groups

  1. Reward yourself every time you accomplish something or you check every box in your to do list: with some leisure activity.
  2. Find more examples to represent a concept as well as find more contexts when it could be applied.

  1. Ask questions to your reading material while you go through the titles and subtitles before you begin your studying of new material.

  1. Tackle Procrastination:
    1. Locate, recognize your CUES for procrastrination:

                                               i.     Text messages?
                                             ii.     Web material?
                                            iii.     Feelings?
                                           iv.     Locations
                                            v.     Time
                                           vi.     People who surround you.

    1. Create a Routine
    2. Reward yourself with some leisure pleasure
    3. Change your believes about yourself and your capabilities.

  1. Write and re-write with your own penmanship. Muscle memory WORKS.

  1. Doodle

  1. Study abroad when possible.

  1. Stay curious

  1. Take a deep breath

  1. Change your self sabotaging believes about yourself.

  1. Praise your mistakes and learn from them.

  1. Focus:
    1. Do not multitask
    2. Turn off or shut cell phones, chats, social pages, TV, distracting music, iPods, iPads, iEverything!

  1.  Follow these 10 rules of good learning by Barbara Oakley:

    1. 1. Use recall. After you read a page, look away and recall the main ideas. Highlight very little, and never highlight anything you haven’t put in your mind first by recalling. Try recalling main ideas when you are walking to class or in a different room from where you originally learned it. An ability to recall—to generate the ideas from inside yourself—is one of the key indicators of good learning.
    2. 2. Test yourself. On everything. All the time. Flash cards are your friend.
    3. 3. Chunk your problems. Chunking is understanding and practicing with a problem solution so that it can all come to mind in a flash. After you solve a problem, rehearse it. Make sure you can solve it cold—every step. Pretend it’s a song and learn to play it over and over again in your mind, so the information combines into one smooth chunk you can pull up whenever you want.
    4. 4. Space your repetition. Spread out your learning in any subject a little every day, just like an athlete. Your brain is like a muscle—it can handle only a limited amount of exercise on one subject at a time.
    5. 5. Alternate different problem-solving techniques during your practice. Never practice too long at any one session using only one problem-solving technique—after a while, you are just mimicking what you did on the previous problem. Mix it up and work on different types of problems. This teaches you both how and when to use a technique. (Books generally are not set up this way, so you’ll need to do this on your own.) After every assignment and test, go over your errors, make sure you understand why you made them, and then rework your solutions. To study most effectively, handwrite (don’t type) a problem on one side of a flash card and the solution on the other. (Handwriting builds stronger neural structures in memory than typing.) You might also photograph the card if you want to load it into a study app on your smartphone. Quiz yourself randomly on different types of problems. Another way to do this is to randomly flip through your book, pick out a problem, and see whether you can solve it cold.
    6. 6. Take breaks. It is common to be unable to solve problems or figure out concepts in math or science the first time you encounter them. This is why a little study every day is much better than a lot of studying all at once. When you get frustrated with a math or science problem, take a break so that another part of your mind can take over and work in the background.
    7. 7. Use explanatory questioning and simple analogies. Whenever you are struggling with a concept, think to yourself, How can I explain this so that a ten-year-old could understand it? Using an analogy really helps, like saying that the flow of electricity is like the flow of water. Don’t just think your explanation—say it out loud or put it in writing. The additional effort of speaking and writing allows you to more deeply encode (that is, convert into neural memory structures) what you are learning.
    8. 8. Focus. Turn off all interrupting beeps and alarms on your phone and computer, and then turn on a timer for twenty-five minutes. Focus intently for those twenty-five minutes and try to work as diligently as you can. After the timer goes off, give yourself a small, fun reward. A few of these sessions in a day can really move your studies forward. Try to set up times and places where studying—not glancing at your computer or phone—is just something you naturally do.
    9. 9. Eat your frogs first. Do the hardest thing earliest in the day, when you are fresh.
    10. 10. Make a mental contrast. Imagine where you’ve come from and contrast that with the dream of where your studies will take you. Post a picture or words in your workspace to remind you of your dream. Look at that when you find your motivation lagging. This work will pay off both for you and those you love!


  1. Do not follow these 10 rules of BAD learning by Barbara Oakley:

    1. 1. Passive re-reading—sitting passively and running your eyes back over a page. Unless you can prove that the material is moving into your brain by recalling the main ideas without looking at the page, rereading is a waste of time.
    2. 2. Letting highlights overwhelm you. Highlighting your text can fool your mind into thinking you are putting something in your brain, when all you’re really doing is moving your hand. A little highlighting here and there is okay—sometimes it can be helpful in flagging important points. But if you are using highlighting as a memory tool, make sure that what you mark is also going into your brain.
    3. 3. Merely glancing at a problem’s solution and thinking you know how to do it. This is one of the worst errors students make while studying. You need to be able to solve a problem step-by-step, without looking at the solution.
    4. 4. Waiting until the last minute to study. Would you cram at the last minute if you were practicing for a track meet? Your brain is like a muscle—it can handle only a limited amount of exercise on one subject at a time.
    5. 5. Repeatedly solving problems of the same type that you already know how to solve. If you just sit around solving similar problems during your practice, you’re not actually preparing for a test—it’s like preparing for a big basketball game by just practicing your dribbling.
    6. 6. Letting study sessions with friends turn into chat sessions. Checking your problem solving with friends, and quizzing one another on what you know, can make learning more enjoyable, expose flaws in your thinking, and deepen your learning. But if your joint study sessions turn to fun before the work is done, you’re wasting your time and should find another study group.
    7. 7. Neglecting to read the textbook before you start working problems. Would you dive into a pool before you knew how to swim? The textbook is your swimming instructor—it guides you toward the answers. You will flounder and waste your time if you don’t bother to read it. Before you begin to read, however, take a quick glance over the chapter or section to get a sense of what it’s about.
    8. 8. Not checking with your instructors or classmates to clear up points of confusion. Professors are used to lost students coming in for guidance—it’s our job to help you. The students we worry about are the ones who don’t come in. Don’t be one of those students.
    1. 9. Thinking you can learn deeply when you are being constantly distracted. Every tiny pull toward an instant message or conversation means you have less brain power to devote to learning. Every tug of interrupted attention pulls out tiny neural roots before they can grow.
    2. 10. Not getting enough sleep. Your brain pieces together problem-solving techniques when you sleep, and it also practices and repeats whatever you put in mind before you go to sleep. Prolonged fatigue allows toxins to build up in the brain that disrupt the neural connections you need to think quickly and well. If you don’t get a good sleep before a test, NOTHING ELSE YOU HAVE DONE WILL MATTER.



Bibliography you can check:

•      Barbara Oakley: A Mind for Numbers.

•       John Dunlosky, "Strengthening the Student Toolbox: Study Strategies to Boost Learning," American Educator, Fall, 2013.  This excellent, comprehensive article is written by one of the top researchers in learning.  
•       John Hamilton. (October 17, 2013). "Brains Sweep Themselves Clean of Toxins During Sleep." NPR All Things Considered.
•       Mind Tools, "The Pomodoro Technique® Staying Focused Throughout the Day," 
•       Gretchen Reynolds. (April 30, 2014). "Want to be More Creative? Take a Walk." The New York Times.
•       Brigid Schulte, (May 16, 2014). "For a more productive life, daydream." CNN Opinion.
•      Robert Wright, (April 21, 2012). "How to Break the Procrastination Habit" The Atlantic.
•      Charles Duhigg: The Power of Habit.
•       Maria Konnikova, "What's Lost as Handwriting Fades," June 2, 2014, The New York Times.
•       Carl Zimmer, "This is Your Brain on Writing," June 20, 2014, The New York Times.  A nice discussion of the caudate nucleus, which is involved in habitual, chunking type activities in all sorts of areas, including sports, and its role in writing expertise.
•       Johns Hopkins Medicine, "Memories of errors foster faster learning," August 14, 2014, Science Daily.  Yes, mistakes really do help you learn!
•       Travis Bradberry, "Multitasking Damages Your Brain And Career, New Studies Suggest," October 8, 2014, Forbes.
•       Sue Shellenbarger, "The Power of the Doodle: Improve Your Focus and Memory," July 29, 2014.
•      Colin Gerber "Memory Consolidation and Productivity Can Both Be Improved by Taking Break," Quora, November, 2014.
•       Benedict Carey, (May 19, 2014), "Remembering, as an Extreme Sport,"The New York Times
•       University of California Los Angeles, (June 4, 2014), "Poor health, lifestyle factors linked to memory complaints, even among younger adults," Medical Press.
•       Annie Murphy Paul, (April 29, 2014), "How Studying or Working Abroad Makes You Smarter," Time. The full text of the wonderful study cited by Annie Murphy Paul is available online for free: Maddux, W. W., H. Adam, and A. D. Galinsky. "When in Rome ... Learn Why the Romans Do What They Do: How Multicultural Learning Experiences Facilitate Creativity." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, June 2010; vol. 36, 6: pp. 731-741, May 5, 2010.
•      Lauren Davidson, "This Is the Kind of Music You Should Listen to at Work," The Telegraph, 23 October, 2014.
•       Timothy Verstynen and Bradley Voytek, Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep? A Neuroscientific View of the Zombie Brain, Princeton University Press, 2014.  (Dr. Sejnowski recommends this book!)
•       Selena Rezvani, "How to Have a Thicker Skin for Negative Feedback," Forbes, October 22, 2014.
•       Travis Bradberry, (February 6, 2014) "How Successful People Stay Calm," Forbes.
•       Carlin Flora, Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are, Anchor, 2013.
•       Cell Press, "How curiosity changes the brain to enhance learning," Science Daily (2014).
•       Robert Twigger, "Master of many trades: Our age reveres the specialist but humans are natural polymaths, at our best when we turn our minds to many things," Aeon, November 4, 2013.
•       Pam Belluck, (January 20, 2011). "To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test." The New York Times.
•      Harvard Health Publications, (May 2009). "Take a Deep Breath," Harvard Medical School.


•      OR TAKE THIS AWESOME COURSERA COURSE: Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects
by Dr. Barbara Oakley, Dr. Terrence Sejnowski (UC San Diego)

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