"Uncovering the 6 Essential Ingredients for Effective Learning"

For this to happen you need Neuroplasticity in your brain.

Neuroplasticity is the scientific term that essentially means our brain’s ability to change to respond to experience physically.

When we learn something, tiny connections called synapses form between neighboring neurons in the brain. The more we do that thing, whether information or skill, the more robust the connections become and the better we get at whatever it is.

The neurons actively sense the environment around you, and they help each and every one of the 86 billion neurons in your brain find the correct place to connect to.

This represents how our brains wire themselves during development. When something goes wrong with that wiring process or when it doesn't happen in the usual way, you can have issues with learning and memory.

Kids are like little sponges. They need to be exposed to stuff and seem to remember it. Learning happens quickly with languages, skills, sports, and whatever else.

Have you ever met someone you think is incredibly talented or good at something?

These skills come from practice and perseverance; they learn that skill when they develop.

The EARLIER you start the BETTER!

Our ability to learn goes downhill after age five. It gets harder through childhood, through teens, and once we hit our mid-twenties, it gets exponentially harder.

THE GOOD NEWS ARE...

I will tell you what you can do about it because there’s a thing you can do!

To improve your learning, you can use Attention, Alertness, Sleep, Repetitions, Breaks, and Mistakes.

ATTENTION

To learn, we need to pay ATTENTION.

Attention is a really important function.

We have the ability to CHOOSE how much we pay attention to something, and studies have shown that when we are fully FOCUSED on a task. We are more likely to retain that information, especially for the LONG TERM.

How many times do you find yourself rereading or replaying something because you got a bit distracted?

WE ARE DESIGN TO FOCUS ON ONE THING AT A TIME.

It’s no secret that frequent context switching (that happens when we use social media, scrolling through our phones and seeing lots of different bits of completely unrelated information like news, ads, you know, cat videos) results in significantly measurable attention deficits. So, I am not saying it causes ADHD, but studies have shown that using your phone for more than an hour in teens results in these attention deficits.

SO TRY TO USE YOUR PHONE A LITTLE BIT LESS!

If you want to improve your attention in the long term, you can do things like focused attention meditation. And if you want to improve your attention in the short term, you can actually exercise.

Did you know that exercise can actually increase the size of the part of the brain involved in learning and memory?

It also helps you make new brain cells, and studies have shown that regular exercise improves memory, cognition, and thinking ability. Twenty minutes of moderate exercise, not even intense, will improve your attention for about two hours afterward.

So if you are sitting down to study, go for a jog or do some star jumps. It's even better if you challenge your balance. So, if you are at work, run up and down the stairs.

There are lots of things that you can do to make this happen.

ALERTNESS

To learn, you have to be alert.

If you are not fully focused on a task, you will have a harder time retaining that information.

Activating our body’s fight-or-flight system, or our sympathetic nervous system, releases adrenaline and noradrenaline, which increase our alertness.

What can we do to increase our fight-or-flight system?

-Exercise

-Breathing techniques like Wim Hof's breathing.

-End your shower with a bit of a cold blast of water.

-Stress will do the same thing, so sitting down to learn after a small stressor will enhance our learning.

When you experience long-term or chronic stress, it physically changes your brain and causes issues with learning and memory. So, if you have been experiencing stress for a long period of time, you will have impairments in memory. It is that simple, so do be kind to yourself.

However, a little bit of stress is good. It actually helps you reach peak performance. A little adrenaline increase after a learning task will also enhance your learning.

You can also ingest substances to enhance your alertness, such as caffeine. A growing body of evidence shows that having caffeine before learning a task or being a regular caffeine drinker can enhance your learning and memory through various mechanisms in the brain. If you eat, you are less alert because that’s switching off our fight-or-flight system. So, don't sit down to study after a big meal.

Our alertness is also limited; it’s still contentious, but studies have shown that we constantly go through an “ultradian rhythm." So, every 90 minutes, we go in and out of peak alertness. So the reality is you can't be 100% alert all the time, and it's going to be a chunk of about 8 to 30 minutes in the middle, there, we will be most alert. Sleep is another factor in alertness. If you haven't been sleeping, you won't be as alert. Sleep is also really important for learning.

SLEEP

Sleep serves as a really important constellation of functions.

For examples:

-It resets our immune system.

-it resets our metabolism.

-it reset our emotional control.

-eliminates the waste that builds up in our brains over the day.

Sleep is CRITICAL for memory consolidation, turning short-term memories into long-term memories.

A particular part of the brain called the HIPPOCAMPUS is important for learning and memory.

When you do things throughout the day, your hippocampus keeps track of them, like a diary.

If I ask you what you did before reading this article, you are using your hippocampus to recall that information. But it only keeps information there for the short term. When you sleep, all of those short-term memories get flitted off to other parts of the brain, the cortex, and turned into long-term memories.

So, if you don't sleep, you can't turn those short-term memories into long-term ones.

That’s why sleep is so important for learning. Pulling an all-nighter and cramming is the worst thing you can do to study if you will not retain that information for the long term.

Here is something you can do...

Make sure you prioritize your sleep before your study to be a bit more alert, but also really prioritize that study after learning because you will need that to retain that information for the long term.

REPETITION

The old adage says that practice makes perfect, there is much truth to that because repetition is key to learning.

Repetition is key to learning.

It is not enough to hear or see something once and expect to remember it forever.

Just like exercise builds muscle, repetitive patterns of thinking or doing things will reinforce those pathways and those connections in the brain associated with doing that thing, making it easier to recall.

Through the process of neuroplasticity, you are making these brand-new connections. And that takes energy, fatty acids, and lots of little proteins to be made. It's a big job; it takes a lot of energy. And the brain will not want to invest all of this energy in creating these new connections if it’s something you’ve only done once.

That is why repetition is so important for learning. It basically flags to your brain at the cellular level, “ Hey, this is what keeps coming up in my life. So, in order to be more efficient, I need to reinforce this and do it better.”

Here is what you should do...

Repeat what you try to learn as many times as possible in that learning period, using the spacing technique. Space your learning over multiple days so that the way you learn can build on those new long-term memories.

We know that two shorter learning periods over different days will result in significantly better learning than using that same amount of time on a single day.

Sometimes, we can learn things in one go, which is called “ one-trial learning” in psychology and neuroscience. It happens when a strong emotional component is tied to that experience.

For example, If it makes us really happy or sad or scared, especially if it makes us afraid, actually, there's a really important biological reason for that if you think about it.

Your brain wants to remember everything about that scary event in exquisite detail so that you know how to respond the next time you encounter it or avoid it completely. And when things go wrong with that process, you can end up with things like PTSD.

BREAKS

Breaks are also incredibly important for learning, and there are two main reasons for that.

So, first of all, it gives our brains a chance to replay that information. It happens completely subconsciously.

For example, if you were learning a sequence on the piano and took a ten-second break afterward, your brain would actually be recording so that you’d replay that sequence and do it 20 times faster. And it looks like it might be even better if you spend 10 to 20 minutes afterward either just having a quiet break—no phones, having a nap, or doing a round of nonsleep, deep rest.

The other reason breaks are important is that newly encoded information isn't very stable. If you were to use those same networks to learn something else soon afterwards, what will happen is that newly encoded information can be destroyed in a process called “retrogade interference”. Kids stabilize pretty quickly, within a few minutes.

But as far as we know, adults are still unstable after an hour, maybe longer.

Here is what you should do...

Make sure you take a 10—to 20-minute break after you finish learning. If you are at work, try to do those mundane tasks that you can do without thinking too much and wait at least an hour before trying to learn something similar, preferably on a different day.

MISTAKES

Mistakes can be terrifying, but there's a biological reason behind them. The feeling of anxiety and stress you get when you make a mistake serves a really important purpose.

So when you make a mistake, what happens is you are releasing neuromodulators like acetylcholine, and you are getting increased activity in your focused attention networks.

That increase in attention and that feeling of anxiety serve a really important purpose. They are basically saying to us, “Hey, you made a mistake. You need to change, do better, and become more efficient.” They are opening up this window for neuroplasticity.

So whatever happens next, your brain is ready to take in. Now, if you make a mistake and feel a bit anxious and walk away, well,

‘A' you are not going to learn that thing, and

‘B' you are actually learning to be less able to cope with failure.

Here is what you should do...

Set yourself up for a little bit of failure. quiz yourself on that topic as you go. Don't wait until you are ready. If you're learning something, for example, soccer, don't kick straight at the goal; change the angle. Make it more difficult, so you make mistakes. Don't wait for everything to be perfect before you have to go because, at the end of the day if you make a mistake, you’ll be using neuromodulators that improve your attention. And if you get it right, you’ll be releasing things like dopamine in your reward circuits, which makes you feel good, which makes you feel more motivated, and consolidates the learning of the thing that you just did correctly.

That's why turning our learning into a bit of a game can work as well. It is a bit of a win-win situation for our brains either way. So when you make a mistake, don’t view that anxiety as a bad thing. Lean into that feeling and get going because it's really your brain’s way of helping you be your best. It's helping you be better than the person that you were yesterday.

Understanding the brain, you have the keys to unlock your potential to learn faster and more effectively.

Once again, those keys are ATTENTION, ALERTNESS, SLEEP, REPETITION, BREAKS, AND MISTAKES.

So next time you sit to learn, get rid of these distractions, increase your attention, and increase your alertness, maybe through a little bit of exercise. Repeat the thing that you are trying to do as many times as you can in that training period and repeat it over multiple days, making sure to prioritize sleep between.

Embrace your mistakes and take a 10-to- 20-minute break after learning because your brain will thank you.

"Knowledge isn't POWER if you don't TAKE ACTION on it"!

Let's hope for the best, ONE GIGGLE AT A TIME!