A Shinobi's Guide to Learning

Introduction

Welcome to my Shinobi’s Guide to Learning inspired by Learning How to Learn MOOC by Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowski!

Pomodoro Technique

And why is the Pomodoro technique so good? Because you allow yourself to commit to a smaller task and tackle your procrastination only for 25 minutes. It feels easier than if you think about doing it for 5 hours straight.

It prevents overburdening yourself as well. Even if the break is only 5 minutes long, it allows your brain to rest just a little bit and your mind to wander. It’s essential. Otherwise, you risk losing all the willpower you possess. Willpower is a limited resource of energy that we don’t want to rely on all the time.

This technique is great because when you haven’t gotten the habit of studying, the Pomodoro reminds you: “hey, it’s only for 25 minutes! It’ll be easy! You’ll get some rest after finishing it!”.

It makes a real difference. I’ve struggled with sitting down and studying for a long time, but when I started using Pomodoro (nowadays it’s almost always when I need to study something), it was almost like magic: I could sit down and study for even longer than I thought I could.

The Reward and why is it important

Well, everyone wants to be happy. Ask anyone around the world: no matter what it is, it ultimately leads to happiness. It’s a word, a concept that we always want to achieve in our lives.

No one wants to live without happiness all the time. We may feel bad when starting a study session, but after that, we want to experience pleasure. We want to feel rewarded. Why though? It’s because of our reward system: a system inside our brain that makes sure we do what is good for us.

Our brains want everything to be okay with us. But some things can fool its reward system and make it think we’re doing us a favor when in reality we’re doing the exact opposite: that’s how procrastination and addictions in general happen.

We’re lead to believe it’s good to procrastinate because we feel good watching cat clips on YouTube or browsing through the web to find this exact meme we love laughing at. But it hides the sad reality: if we’re doing it while we were supposed to be studying for that test, we’re going to fail inevitably.

And it’ll lead to sadness, but then, hey, let’s just do it again so we feel comfortable until another uncomfortable thing happens. And it builds a habit.

Building a Habit

Habits are built to make it a routine and keep us motivated to do an action that gives us some kind of advantage or pleasure. When you procrastinate, you’re giving yourself comfort and we like this. This gives us pleasure. 

It motivates us to do it again because it’s so much easier than studying, so we go away from something stressful to something good. That’s part of the job of our brain’s reward system as well.

Our brain is not ready for a society that has everything at hand all the time, so it creates this kind of “bad habits” because of it. It’s like our brains believe we might lose the disponibility of the cat’s clips on YouTube, so it makes us go back to it every time we’d rather procrastinate than study.

The same way our “zombie” mode, that is, the way our brain enters when it activates a habit and its subsequent actions can make us do bad things like procrastinating, we can make them work for us. They are there to help us after all, not the opposite, even though some people may feel like it.

As Barbara taught us in “Harnessing your zombies to help you”, habits are made of four essential parts:

Cue

Routine

Reward

The Cue

The same way every time Guy meets Kakashi he wants to greet Kakashi and see if is everything alright with his mate, we have habits that start with a cue.

It might be going to your bedroom during the afternoon, might be turning on the cellphone or anything that can start a series of automated actions (that sometimes you don’t even realize).

The Routine

The routine is a series of actions that are related to that cue that is related to the habit. Guy as much as greets Kakashi every time he sees him (a habit in itself) gets a building desire to compete against Kakashi in all sorts of ways.

The Reward and the Belief

After the routine is done, we get the reward. Our reward system - dopamine being the neuromodulator related to this system -  makes sure our dopamine levels increase after a reward, that was anticipated by it, is received and it ultimately makes us feel good.

But why does the brain expect this specific reward? Because it’s a habit and our brain is already used to receive this after the routine - remember that!

Just like Guy and Kakashi feel good when they compete with each other and make their best at the same time of having fun. They’re friends after all. And after every competition, Guy and Kakashi treat each other friendly. They like hanging out together.

They believe they feel good hanging out together because they are friends. They trust each other.

The reward of watching that cat’s clip may be watching something cute and forgetting all the problems life throws at us.

Using “Zombie Mode” in your favor 

We can make peace with our “zombie mode”. After all, we’re alive as a species thanks to that.

We need to identify the cue that starts our procrastination and focus our energy on changing how we react to it. After identifying the cue that usually leads to procrastination, you only need to spend your energy on one thing: the routine.

Remember: we have limited willpower. You don’t want to be on a tug of war against your brain all the time.

Using Pomodoro helps in it a lot. Every time you open the book, you want to turn the phone on. NO! Start the Pomodoro timer and do 25 minutes of work. After these 25 minutes of work, give yourself 5 minutes of phone-time.

If you finished all the work, give yourself that cursed cat clip. Your brain will start assimilating studying with getting this reward and it reinforces the habit of studying. You’ll see you’re in control of your Zombie Mode and not the opposite.

All the wrong ideas

At this point, you probably understood consistency is key when studying. It eases the difficulty of sitting down as your brain gets used to it. But lots of people don’t even realize it before it’s too late. I’m guilty of that. Failed lots of classes, tried using all the wrong ways to study because it used to work in school.

When I got into university, I got traumatized by how hard it was to keep up with the classes. Without consistency, I would say it’s nearly impossible. You can’t cram your way out of college.

Cramming is a bad habit I developed in a time it was best suited for the lazy student I was. I got really good grades and spent almost all the time playing videogames or doing other things I like. School times were like a dream for me.

For those who don’t really know what cramming is, it’s studying only when the tests are coming. It’s when you did not study for the first three months of classes and then in one week try to cram your way through the material. It may work for school, even though I don’t recommend.

But cramming comes with an underlying problem most people don’t realize: you do not learn properly. You may even be able to remember the material for the next few days, but after one week or one month, you won’t remember even the slightest detail well enough to actively say you’ve learned the subject.

Without consistency, you can’t learn, because your brain will understand as if it wasn’t important to keep it stored in your memory. I would say I learnt a lot in school because I loved looking like a smart person, even when I did not study a lot and the positive emotions I felt made my brain store information more easily.

The best way to learn

According to “Strengthening the Student Toolbox”, we can use better ways of learning to make the most of our study session and actually store the information in our long-term memory.

There are some of the best strategies discussed there and we’ll talk about them.

But before we continue, it’s important as well that you let yourself make mistakes. I used to be pretty judgemental about my grades/study efficiency and when I did not do well, I punished myself sometimes even unconsciously.

Don’t fall for this trap. Children learn the best because they let themselves make mistakes and they learn from them. And being too judgemental about your learning process or progress is only going to feed negative emotions.

Now let’s talk about the best strategies to study:

Deliberate Practice

Interleaving

Spaced Repetition

Deliberate Practice

Deliberate Practice is basically not only practicing inside the comfort zone. You need to learn new concepts, even though they may feel difficult to grasp at first. It’s important to get out of your comfort zone, as it’ll make your brain more susceptible to learning in general.

When we’re learning only comfortable and familiar things, our brain turns on the automatic pilot and you do not really reinforce any information inside it.