Learning in chunks

Coursera courses by Oakley.

https://www.coursera.org/instructor/barboakley

Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects

https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

There are 4 modules in this course

This course gives you easy access to the invaluable learning techniques used by experts in art, music, literature, math, science, sports, and many other disciplines. We’ll learn about how the brain uses two very different learning modes and how it encapsulates (“chunks”) information. We’ll also cover illusions of learning, memory techniques, dealing with procrastination, and best practices shown by research to be most effective in helping you master tough subjects.  

Using these approaches, no matter what your skill levels in topics you would like to master, you can change your thinking and change your life. If you’re already an expert, this peep under the mental hood will give you ideas for turbocharging successful learning, including counter-intuitive test-taking tips and insights that will help you make the best use of your time on homework and problem sets. If you’re struggling, you’ll see a structured treasure trove of practical techniques that walk you through what you need to do to get on track. If you’ve ever wanted to become better at anything, this course will help serve as your guide.

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Rethinking Logic: Surprising Science of Critical Thinking

https://www.coursera.org/learn/critical-thinking-science

Explore the hidden forces shaping our thoughts in "Rethinking Logic: Surprising Science of Critical Thinking." This innovative course, led by Barbara Oakley, Terry Sejnowski, and Adam Trybus, uncovers the complexities of human reasoning and the challenges of critical thinking.

Discover why our brains struggle with formal logic and learn to navigate common cognitive pitfalls. You'll explore fascinating concepts like the Wason Selection Test, circular reasoning, and the social nature of critical thinking. The course delves into the neuroscience behind reasoning, revealing how our brains process information differently in social contexts. What sets this course apart is its exploration of the limits of formal reasoning and the importance of context in critical thinking. You'll gain insights into different types of curiosity, the role of intellectual humility, and how to transform discomfort into personal growth. By the end of the course, you'll have a deeper understanding of your own thinking processes and practical strategies to enhance your reasoning skills. Whether you're a professional, student, or lifelong learner, this course will equip you with the tools to navigate complex decisions and evaluate information more effectively in our increasingly challenging world.

"The mechanism is something neuroscientists call chunking, and it is the most underexplained concept in all of learning."

https://x.com/ihtesham2005/status/2039764863401300018?s=20

Ihtesham Ali

@ihtesham2005

A professor of engineering who failed math all through school built one of the most popular online courses in history by figuring out exactly why her brain had been working against her the whole time. Her name is Barbara Oakley, and she did not teach herself how to learn until she was in her mid-twenties, after leaving the military with a head full of Russian and almost no useful science knowledge. What she discovered about her own brain eventually became a Coursera course that over 4 million people have taken, and the core insight she teaches has been sitting in neuroscience research for decades waiting for someone to explain it in plain language. Here is the framework that changed how I think about every hard thing I am trying to learn. Your working memory is an octopus sitting in your prefrontal cortex with exactly four arms. Those four arms reach out and grab pieces of information, hold them in place, and manipulate them while you are actively thinking through a problem. Four is the limit. When you try to hold more than four things in conscious awareness at once, the arms start dropping things and everything becomes a scramble which is exactly what you experience as confusion when learning something genuinely difficult. This is not a flaw. It is a design feature. And the entire game of becoming expert at anything is learning how to game this constraint. The mechanism is something neuroscientists call chunking, and it is the most underexplained concept in all of learning. When you practice something enough times that it becomes automatic a guitar chord, a grammatical structure, a mathematical procedure, a debugging pattern in code your brain compresses it into a single neural package stored in long-term memory. That compressed package now fits in just one of your four working memory slots instead of filling all of them. Which means once you have built enough chunks, your octopus can reach down into long-term memory, pull up an entire complex procedure in a single grab, and still have three arms free to work with new information on top of it. This is what expertise actually is. Not raw intelligence. Not natural talent. A library of compressed patterns that can be retrieved quickly and stacked together to solve problems that would overwhelm a beginner whose working memory is still occupied with fundamentals. The finding that Oakley emphasizes most forcefully is the one that sounds backward until you understand the mechanism. People with smaller working memory capacity those who can only hold two or three items at once rather than four are often forced to develop stronger chunking habits earlier and more aggressively than people with larger working memories, because they have no choice. Their constraint becomes their training. Over time, that aggressive chunking practice can produce more robust expertise than a larger working memory that never had to be disciplined in the same way. The most powerful practical implication is this: when you feel completely overwhelmed trying to learn something, that feeling is almost always your four-slot octopus running out of arms. The solution is not to concentrate harder. The solution is to stop, isolate one small piece of the problem, practice it until it compresses into a single chunk, and only then pick up the next piece. You cannot learn everything at once because your brain was never designed to hold everything at once. It was designed to build libraries of compressed knowledge and retrieve them on demand. Every expert you have ever admired is not smarter than you. They just have a bigger library.

Read books to live longer

 

Anish Moonka

@anishmoonka

A Yale study tracked 3,635 people for 12 years. The ones who read books for 30 minutes a day lived almost 2 years longer. Your average book takes about 5 hours to finish. For a $15 paperback and a few nights on the couch, that’s a wild return. The gap was 23 months. Didn’t matter how old you were, how much money you had, what your education looked like, or whether you were dealing with depression. If you read books, you were 20% less likely to die during the study. Newspapers and magazines didn’t do the same thing. The researchers found that books specifically were keeping people’s brains sharper for longer, and that’s what was driving the survival gap. Emory University wanted to see what books actually do inside your head. They put 21 people in brain scanners every morning for 19 straight days while they read a novel in the evenings. The connections between different parts of their brains got stronger, especially in areas that handle language and physical sensation. Those changes were still showing up on scans 5 days after they finished the book. The lead researcher Gregory Berns called it shadow activity. Like muscle memory, but for your brain. A 14-year study found that people who read at least once a week had 46% lower odds of losing their mental sharpness as they aged. Separate work out of Rush University Medical Center showed that older adults who stayed mentally active through reading, writing, and puzzles experienced 32% less decline in memory and thinking ability. Then there’s stress. A University of Sussex study found that just 6 minutes of reading cut stress levels by 68%. Music only managed 61%. Drinking tea or coffee, 54%. Going for a walk got 42%. The money angle is interesting too. A European study tracked 5,280 men across 9 countries. Kids who grew up with more than 10 books in the home earned 21% more for each additional year of school they completed. For kids with fewer than 10 books, it was just 5%. A separate 27-country study of over 70,000 people found that children from homes full of books finished 3 more years of school regardless of how educated or wealthy their parents were. Pew data from the U.S. shows 86% of people earning over $75K read at least one book in the past year, compared to 70% of those earning under $30K. He’s right. The average book takes 3 to 5 hours. But those hours buy you brain connections that last for days and mental sharpness that holds up over decades, with a real shot at almost 2 more years alive.

Delusional spiraling

 

Nav Toor

@heynavtoor

SHOCKING: MIT researchers proved mathematically that ChatGPT is designed to make you delusional. And that nothing OpenAI is doing will fix it. The paper calls it "delusional spiraling." You ask ChatGPT something. It agrees with you. You ask again. It agrees harder. Within a few conversations, you believe things that are not true. And you cannot tell it is happening. This is not hypothetical. A man spent 300 hours talking to ChatGPT. It told him he had discovered a world changing mathematical formula. It reassured him over fifty times the discovery was real. When he asked "you're not just hyping me up, right?" it replied "I'm not hyping you up. I'm reflecting the actual scope of what you've built." He nearly destroyed his life before he broke free. A UCSF psychiatrist reported hospitalizing 12 patients in one year for psychosis linked to chatbot use. Seven lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI. 42 state attorneys general sent a letter demanding action. So MIT tested whether this can be stopped. They modeled the two fixes companies like OpenAI are actually trying. Fix one: stop the chatbot from lying. Force it to only say true things. Result: still causes delusional spiraling. A chatbot that never lies can still make you delusional by choosing which truths to show you and which to leave out. Carefully selected truths are enough. Fix two: warn users that chatbots are sycophantic. Tell people the AI might just be agreeing with them. Result: still causes delusional spiraling. Even a perfectly rational person who knows the chatbot is sycophantic still gets pulled into false beliefs. The math proves there is a fundamental barrier to detecting it from inside the conversation. Both fixes failed. Not partially. Fundamentally. The reason is built into the product. ChatGPT is trained on human feedback. Users reward responses they like. They like responses that agree with them. So the AI learns to agree. This is not a bug. It is the business model. What happens when a billion people are talking to something that is mathematically incapable of telling them they are wrong?