What metacognition/metacognitive knowledge and skills can you share?
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Not to try and problem solve everything when people talk to me about their problems, and just share their emotions and be there with them.
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A few things come to mind.
- "Neurons that fire together wire together."
- Stimulating neurons will enhance its connectivity. The more it gets stimulated, the more readily available it will be. This goes for conscious actions and non-conscious actions (Example: focusing on mathematics and reacting to violence). Imagination can be used to simulate reality, hence stimulate target neurons.
- The most difficult neurons to target are those that expand your limits as it requires you to think about things you never knew you could think of, do things you never knew you could do, feel things you never knew you could feel, experience things that you never knew you could experience.
Source: My journey in attempts to recover from a brain injury.
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I think 3 is sort of engaged by when you're ready to hailmary and say "screw it, lets do it!"
About to use that in a few days to challenge a mild obstacle I've been otherwise reticent about or thats been influencing me unduly that I need to say so what and fuck it
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Well, today I learned the roof of my mouth is ticklish. I can’t even get through one letter!
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You can think without language, or senses. It's hard to perceive it, but when you talk inside your head, you are kinda "transcribing" that language-less thought.
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Can you explain further?
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For me spaced repetition and writing things down help.
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Getting a better handle on your attention
How would you recommend doing that?
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It's hard to express, but an example is the feeling that you suddenly know something, got an idea, an eureka moment.
I'm saying that all thought is like that, but less... intense. And we use language to "register" that as what we usually call "think"; but we don't need language to do that, it's just easier with it. -
Interesting thought! This feels very related to Zen. Love to find more on this.
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Learn how to meditate.
Here is a nice brief guide. http:/)fleen.org/fluffy_cloud
You might also read Ram Dass's "Journey of Awakening"
Also visit your local meditation weirdos group
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Perhaps an obvious one, but reading books and other types of long form content does wonders for your ability to concentrate and stimulates your reasoning ability.
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When during your life where you at peak learning rate?
Was it as school? Uni? If so, what did you do differently then? Can you still do it now?
I'll give few examples that honestly in retrospect are absolutely obvious and yet, few people seem to still do it :
- have a trusted teacher/mentor who can pinpoint your flaw
- do exercises that test your knowledge rather than read and assume you know
- repeat said exercises in with varying context and in increasing difficulty
- take notes (IMHO the biggest) that you gradually structure and index
- use said notes when exercises (which are safe spaces to challenge your understanding) gets tough
- have structured goals, namely you don't learn about a topic, move on randomly, but rather have 6 months over a topic
- learn regularly, e.g. weekly occurrence on a very specific topic, again and again for months on end
- last but not least, do it as a group, build, grow and sustain a network of helpful peer who you are learning from but also helping
So... yeah, none of that is secret nor even complex yet most adults seems to leave THE place to learn and somehow forget EVERYTHING they actually learned. It's nuts.
Also most of that is free. Getting a notepad or a wiki or using documents in a directory on your computer is practically cheaper than a coffee in most places. There is no excuse to note take notes then organize them. Same for regularity and exercises, get a calendar then drill, again.
FWIW that works for pretty much everything, from an abstract field of knowledge, e.g. math, to a physical skill, e.g. welding or ice skating.
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Bonus : f*ck noise! Protect yourself when you are learning from distractions. There are myriads of things begging for your attention. Brush them away and shape your environment so that you actually have a chance to learn. Learning is challenging, by definition, so you MUST make sure nothing and nobody gets in the way! Because plenty of people here are a technical side, here is a tool I built as an example https://git.benetou.fr/utopiah/online-hygiene/src/branch/master/index.js which gives me daily quota of Websites I can visit and when.
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Yes, and I'd argue to also reflect back on (long form) content, e.g. write down notes on books, critical ones, and if you watch a movie or documentary with friends, chat about it with them, reflect on your understanding of the topic, what was good, what wasn't, develop a critical sense rather than just "consume" content.
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It can be useful to get worked up about things. Rather than dwell on something it can be cathartic to play into your emotions in the moment and let them release themselves, and practicing this allows you to do it internally with a straight face.
If you forgot something you were just thinking about a few minutes ago try thinking about what you were thinking about before that, it might activate the same train of thought. It's like thinking about what you were doing before you set your keys down rather than where you put your keys.
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Your thinking is only as good as your writing
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For sure, these kinds of discussions can be really fun because everybody tens to have a slightly different interpretation of the content, or focus on different aspects of it. By talking with each other, you get a more complete shared understanding.
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This is 100% true.
It is especially clear when you sit down to write out an idea or plan that you think is fully formed in your head. It turns out that you didn’t have it all thought out and the act of writing is where the important details get worked out.
Writing is thinking, diagramming is thinking, making any external expression of an idea is thinking.
Sitting around with a cool universe in your head is not thinking, it is feeling. Put it in a tangible communicable form, then okay you have turned it into thinking.
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Yup. Also, writing is completely non-linear. It's not like grade school, where you take a blue book and a pencil and "write an essay" from beginning to end in an hour.
Hopefully they don't still teach writing the way I was taught in the 1930's.
