Four secrets from neuroscience to help you learn quicker
TRANSCRIPT OF THE VIDEO:
I’ve been listening to this podcast on neuroscience, and I’ve learned something super cool, and I didn’t know before, about how to learn, and potentially change behavior as an adult.
One thing to notice is that, between…you know when you’re born to the age 25, you learn pretty passively. You just show up to a thing, and you’re probably gonna, just because you’re there, you’re probably going to learn from it.
And just to be clear; learning in more psychological terms, it means that you are gaining knowledge, skill, or some kind of ability, and that knowledge structure changes. At a neuroscience level, there’s neuroplasticity. There’s actually, kind of a “rewiring of your neurons”.
Okay so backstory is that as a kid, when you’re born to the world, you have a bunch of these random neuron connections, and they’re kind of all over the place, and there’s no clear kind of pattern. That’s why babies flail around.
But, as you can learn more and more, certain neural pathways become strengthened, and some of them become weaker. So the ones you pay attention to become stronger and stronger, and ones you don’t become weaker and weaker.
Now as a kid, that kind of happens pretty passively. But as an adult, so 25 and above, in order to help loosen those pathways that’s already there, you have to do certain things to prime your brain to be ready for the learning state.
Let’s say you’re picking up a new book. Then you can skim it, and you skim, you kind of mind wonder sometimes, start skimming sometimes, and you kind of read it, and you put it away. It’s probably not likely that you’ve learned anything, meaning that your brain hasn’t changed in significant ways. Maybe you read the words but the pattern of what you’ve learned hasn’t stamped itself into your brain.
According to neuroscience principles, the way to really help prime your brain to start learning is a gated approach. You really have to do certain specific things to release specific chemicals in your brain so that your neurons that’s already firing together and stuck in that way, are primed to be ready to do new things. So either become even stronger in how they connect, or become weaker in how they connect.
The first key thing is you have to really become alert and pay attention. This is where intentions really come in, actually. Let’s say you’re in a corporate training. You’re kind of forced to go learn something, and you’re like, “I’m just here, whatever.” And you kind of sitting there for all day. Yeah, nothing probably has changed in your brain.
But if it’s like, “You know what, this is my opportunity to really learn something because my company’s already giving me this learning tip,” or “I’m gonna go on this retreat!”, you want to set the intention of, “I’m here to learn, why is it important to me?” and really settle into that. Or write it out, whatever it takes, why this is important for me to learn and be different from having this experience or reading or learning? That alone would start to release certain chemicals in your brain so that it’s ready and more prime to be able to change. So that’s super key.
The other piece I talked about alertness. Imagine you go into this learning, you’re like half asleep. Obviously that’s not going to help your learning. Other ways to do this is to sleep well the night before or maybe a few nights ahead of time, so that by the time you come to this training, you’re super alert and focus.
Or the other way is obviously caffeine. We all kind of know that, but this is specific that, if you need to open your mind and be willing to learn, and also be alert enough to really focus, that’s gonna really help you learn.
The other piece piece is that you want to actually focus hardcore for around, maximum, the recommendation is 90 minutes. Because then [more than that] it is kind of too much. But you want to be focused at the maximum level as you’re trying to learn that new thing for 90 minutes. Like no distractions, turn off your phone, there’s no multitasking right now. To really change your brain, you want to like be all in for 90 minutes,
And then the superduper key to then lock it in quickly is, you want to, right after a 90 minute learning cycle, super deep dive focused learning cycle, you want to do what’s called Non Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR). Like a super chill meditation, or take a nap actually, a 20 minute nap. Because if you do a 20 minute nap, you don’t go into deep sleep, you just kind of stay in the shallow side, but that’s okay it’s good enough to help your brain actually consolidate the new neuron firing patterns
Or you do what’s called, get an optic flow, where you walk or bike, or run or row whatever in a forward motion. So you’re doing this movement for 20 minutes in a forward motion, and not listening to a podcast, not doing anything in particular, just kind of having that forward movement, and letting your mind wander.
So we think that mind wandering is bad for us, but actually, if it’s happening right after a really intense learning focus time period, it’s actually going to help you later on in locking in that neural pathway even quicker than if you just learn and then go straight to doing something else. If you learn and then let your mind wander for 20 minutes to 30 minutes, that’s gonna be even more beneficial for you.
Those are some cool new tips I’ve learned about neuroscience to help you learn even faster!
Notes:
Originally published on www.drpylin.com/blog on March 30, 2021
