Brain Techniques To Help You Learn Better

Are you having trouble making the material you are supposed to be learning (or teaching!) stick? These insights into the human brain should help you create a more effective learning experience, whether you are a student, a self-educating adult, or a teacher of any kind.

Focused Vs Diffuse Thinking

What do you do when you're supposed to be concentrating on something but your brain simply doesn't seem to cooperate? You have probably had the experience of reading the very same pages again and again, only to realize the contents don't seem to want to sink in. In these cases, you might well be overcome with a strong urge to do something else — go for a walk, have a bite to eat, exercise, just sit around seemingly doing nothing, or actually, anything other than continuing with your attempts. 

People who regularly give into the urge to take a break from serious tasks they can't seem to concentrate on may have noticed that they're often able to focus much better when they return to their work later. They may find that loose bits of information that were floating around their head, but were not forming a whole, can suddenly be connected into a decent essay, for instance. 

This is actually called "diffuse mode", a brain mode with a wide focus that leaves you free to connect information and knowledge. The diffuse mode is, as far as scientists know so far, one of two brain modes, the other being "focused mode". While people in diffuse mode might appear to be dreaming or wasting time, they could well be on the verge of something important. Once the connections have been made, the brain will be ready to switch to "focused mode", where a more narrow scope of information can be processed more effectively. 

Trying to focus, on the other hand, may mean that you keep on spinning the same information along the same synapses, unable to see the bigger picture and make adequate conclusions. Similarly, information is bound to look an awful lot different when you sleep on it and reassess the next morning. By giving yourself permission to let your mind wander — and crucially, scheduling time for that purpose if you're working with tight deadlines — will allow you to achieve much better learning results in the future. 

Train Your Reticular Activating System

While some people are able to multitask very well, others easily get distracted by the many stimuli around them. I can, for instance, hear the sounds of cars honking in the background, my children arguing, and the cooking timer ticking as I am writing. I can also smell an incense stick, and see that the room in which I am working wasn't tidied even though I asked my kids to do that yesterday.

The Reticular Activating System (RAS) links your brain stem to your prefrontal cortex, and is responsible for keeping you focused. It may do a pretty good job all by itself, but you may want to train your RAS to not send irrelevant and distracting stimuli into your conscious brain, by really trying to focus only on what you need to be doing. 

See Also: Health Benefits Of Learning Languages

Some ways in which you can work on training the RAS are: 

• Listen out for all those background sounds and identify them, then try to shut them out while concentrating on one task. In a classroom setting, this can be turned into an interesting game. 
• Hyper-focus by telling yourself you might well be expected to repeat instructional materials back to the instructor. Your attention is less likely to wander this way. If you are the teacher, tell your students they might be expected to repeat what you say back to you later.
• Try focusing on the small details of objects, paintings or even poems for a while, and then try to switch back into "big picture mode". Taking the time to notice the small things many people miss will increase your vocabulary and allow you to remember what you saw better.

More Steps Towards Effective Learning

'Chunking' Your Learning

My elementary-aged kids and I recently played a fun game: I dumped a collection of random small objects from all over the house on the floor and placed a blanket on top. Then, I told them I'd lift the blanket for 20 seconds and would then ask them how many items they could name afterwards. They didn't do very well. Next, I told them to find some way to categorize the items — perhaps by looking at the rooms in which the items belonged, or their purpose, or their color, shape or size. 

When I lifted the blanket for a further 20 seconds, both kids could remember an awful lot more. The moral of the story? When the pieces of information you are supposed to memorize appear to be unconnected, it becomes very hard to remember much. However, when you link the things you are working on together in some logical manner, the process is simplified. 

Everything is more palatable in bite-sized "chunks". When a learner has that knowledge, all they have to do is find a way to "chunk" the information they are working with. 

You may chunk by:

• Actually breaking lots of information into smaller chunks. You can remember phone numbers more easily if you break the number into three separate sections of numbers. Poems can be memorized verse by verse, and long lists can be broken into smaller parts.
• Looking for patterns in the material you are studying, and using the patterns you discover as pegs to remember information. While this is very effective when you're working with lists, it may also be possible to apply the same principle to entire books. 
• Association is another powerful technique. If you are trying to remember something like foreign words or brand names, you can try to associate them with a word or concept that is easy to remember, because of the way the word sounds. One elementary geography I came across made up stories about the way countries are shaped, saying one country looks like an elephant, another like a boot, and so on. These associations help the shapes stick in the child's memory.
• Sorting your learning material into categories, much in the way I described above, is a very useful learning technique that will immediately benefit you. 

Feel Good, Learn Well

Your amygdala, the brain's center for emotion processing, is somewhat like a guard dog who lets folks it knows to be friendly in (into the prefrontal cortex in this case), while keeping people who seem threatening out. The people who appear threatening may actually be perfectly fine, but the dog isn't taking any chances with that.

The amygdala, too, allows stimuli that feel friendly to go through, while keeping the threatening stuff out. If you feel judged negatively, threatened, ridiculed, humiliated or otherwise treated unfairly, your amygdala won't allow you to think with the rational part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex. That means, in short, that you will not be able to retain information well if your learning environment feels threatening. 

See Also: Dyslexic Child: How to Deal with Learning Problems

Would you be able to concentrate on learning Shakespeare's Hamlet by heart while you were being attacked by a tiger? No. It's the same with the less physical modern threats that come in the form of an attack on our self-worth. Teachers who are aware of this mechanism will work towards creating a friendly, discussion-rich learning environment free of shaming. This allows students to think creatively, learn well, and thrive.