### Mastering Learning: Techniques to Enhance Intelligence and Skills

Learning how to learn empowers individuals to master new skills and solve problems effectively.

### Mastering the Art of Learning: Techniques for Boosting Intelligence
* 🧠 Learning how to learn is a **crucial meta skill** that enhances your ability to **acquire new knowledge and skills more efficiently**, whether it's coding, playing an instrument, or any other endeavor.
* 📚 The course "Learning How to Learn" by Barbara Oakley emphasizes the **importance of reviewing information immediately for better retention**, which is why it includes questions for **active engagement**.
* 🔍 The brain operates in two thinking modes: **focused mode**, which is great for familiar tasks, and **diffuse mode**, which allows for broader thinking and problem-solving by accessing different areas of the brain.
* 💡 Thomas Edison exemplified the use of diffuse thinking by relaxing with ball bearings, allowing his mind to **wander and generate ideas** just before falling asleep, a technique used by many **creative thinkers**.
* 🧩 Memory is divided into **working memory**, which has **limited capacity**, and **long-term memory**, which is **vast but harder to access**; understanding how these interact is **key to effective learning**.
* 🎮 Life can be likened to an RPG, with attributes such as **intelligence**, **emotional intelligence**, and **creativity**, and classes like **Mage** and **Tank**, which help conceptualize personal strengths and weaknesses.
* ⚡ Chunking information into manageable pieces is essential for learning, as it allows the brain to **process and associate new knowledge efficiently**, rather than struggling with every detail.
* 📝 To combat procrastination, one must understand the habit loop and implement strategies such as **setting clear tasks**, focusing on the **process rather than the outcome**, and **rewarding oneself for progress**.

Learning how to learn is one of those meta skills that give you a huge intelligence stat boost, which makes anything else you're trying to learn so much easier. Whether that be coding, driving, piano, literally anything, because that's what really being smart is: you're just able to learn things and then use

the things that you learn better and faster than everybody else. So, I recently did this course called Learning How to Learn by Barbara Oakley. It's 15 hours long, but I've distilled it down to 25 minutes. However, it's not enough just to

listen to me talk, so if you actually want to get your plus one boost in intelligence, I've also included a set of questions at the end of this video for you to answer. Research shows immediately reviewing information is the best way to actually retain that information. And if

I don't do this, you're probably not going to review it yourself anyway, so it's for your own good. All right, let's get started. In a lot of TV shows, movies, and especially anime, there's often a very OP main character, and whenever they're in a situation where they have a

problem that they can't solve, their usual thing is just like, 'Yeah, I'm gonna try harder, try harder, try harder,' and then, wow, figured it out somehow. But that is actually not that good of a method to solve problems. Think of your brain like a pinball machine, you know, like those

old arcade games where you have a ball, and then it goes up, and then it has a bunch of bumpers, and it's bouncing around. There are actually two different modes of thinking. The first one is called the focused mode. In this mode, the bumpers and the pinball machine are

really really close to each other and when a ball shows up it's moving in a confined path that's bouncing quickly from one bumper to another this is what your brain is like when you're doing something that you already know how to do like adding some simple

numbers or driving a car if you know how to drive you have a thought which is like the ball saying like oh like I should add 2 plus 2 and it's able to quickly figure that out by bouncing off the bumpers that form a very familiar

path that your brain has done many many times this Focus mode is very narrow and is great for things that you already know how to do we're working on very specific details it blocks out extraneous things so there's no distractions but what happens if you

come across a problem that you don't know how to do people often just keep being in Focus mode and trying to like narrow and narrow narrow their focus down trying to figure out the solution to something well this becomes a big problem because maybe the information

that you need to solve this problem is actually located in another area of the brain but because you're focusing so hard you're not able to access this area that you need to actually solve the problem what you need to do is adjust to the second way of thinking called

diffuse thinking diffuse thinking is about big picture thinking using the same pinball analogy it's like having the bumpers now very spread out in this way when you have a thought it's able to bounce from bumper to bumper and access different parts of your brain in order

to get to the right area that you need to solve a problem, it's not detailed and precise like the focus mode, but it allows you to get to the right area of your brain, to the right information to start solving the problem. See, that's where most people go wrong. They're

almost always in the focused mode of thinking, and when they run into something that they can't solve, they just keep on trying to focus harder and harder on something and just are not able to access the right information to get started. What they actually need to

do is step back and switch over to diffuse mode. According to the course, these are the two primary ways of thinking, and you actually can't be in both modes at the same time. You're either in the focus mode or you're in the diffuse mode. So you might be

wondering now, okay, how do I access the diffuse mode then to explore this question? Let's look at how Thomas Edison does it. You know, Thomas Edison, Light Bulb Guy, he didn't actually invent the light bulb. That is a misconception, but he did, um, come up with a marketing

strategy for it, and he did make a lot of other contributions towards the telephone and like movie cameras and lenses for example. Anyway, genius guy. So what he would do when he had a very difficult problem and he wanted to enter diffuse mode is he would take some ball

bearings, which are these metal balls that are used in a lot of different machines. So he would sit down, sit back in his chair and try to relax while holding the ball bearings in his hand outstretched, and he sort of just like relax and relax and relax and drift off.

to sleep but just when he's about to fall asleep his hand loosens and the balls will drop on the floor and make a very loud clanging noise to wake him up He'll then immediately gather all the thoughts in his brain and start writing

it down and he'll often realize that he'll have an idea for how to solve this problem which he hadn't thought of before Relaxing a lot and getting really close to sleep is actually a technique that's used by a lot of other geniuses

as well as a way of accessing their diffuse mode Some other ways of accessing a diffuse mode is by going for a walk or exercising or really just doing things that can take your mind off the problem that you're trying to solve When I started implementing this

technique of switching between the focus and a diffuse mode when I'm working it genuinely was such a game changer Another key foundational concept to understand is memory Memory is actually very complex and there's a lot of different ways of approaching it a lot of different frameworks um but in

Barbara Oakley's course she focused specifically on short-term or working memory and long-term memory Working memory is sort of just whatever it is that you're thinking at this current moment like for example processing what it is that I'm saying right now solving

a math problem thinking about what's for dinner your working memory is primarily located in the front part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex and it's great because it's really easy to access whatever it is that you want to think about you can quickly just put that into

your working memory, but the downside of it is that it's very limited. Research shows that there's really only four slots, like there are four things that you can actually keep in your working memory at the same time. And in order to keep it there, you have to keep

repeatedly thinking about these things. If you ever tried to remember somebody's phone number and you're kind of like saying it to yourself over and over and over again, um, but if time goes on or like you get distracted, then you just like forget. In this way, the working

memory is like an inefficient blackboard. You can very quickly scribble on it, but it's very limited in size. On the other hand, long-term memory is like this vast warehouse. It technically has infinite capacity because it's spread out throughout your entire brain, so that's

the benefit of it. You're not limited by capacity and you're also not limited by detail of information either, but it's a lot harder to get the information stored in the warehouse. And if you you want to access that information, it also takes longer to figure out where it is in the

warehouse and then take it out again. The way that working memory and long-term memory work together is that if you're like focused on something and you have it in working memory, you can actually move that into long-term memory if you keep on focusing on that specific thing

and then eventually it will be stored into long-term memory. And once that information is stored, you can also access that information back and put it back into working memory to do whatever you want with it. This is a pretty simplified model, and this process is not

Perfect, we will get into more details about memory later in the video. I have recently come to the conclusion that, after watching a lot of VR gaming anime like "Sword Art Online", "Log Horizon", and "Solo Leveling", that life is definitely an RPG, or at least it's more fun to treat it like an RPG. So after consulting with Chachi PT, I have come up with a basic list of player attributes and classes in this game of life. So these are the attributes. So first we have intelligence, which is learning, problem-solving, and logical thinking. So why we're doing this course so that we can boost our intelligence. Emotional intelligence, which is about empathy, emotional awareness, and being able to manage interpersonal relationships. Defense, which is like resilience, mental and physical toughness, the ability to handle stress, setbacks, and be able to bounce back. Mobility, which is like adaptability, being able to be put in any situation and adapting to that situation. Creativity, which is innovation, original thinking, and coming up with different ideas. Stamina, it's about endurance, consistency, sustained effort over a long period of time, and this is both physical and mental endurance. And finally, luck, being in the right place at the right time, be able to see opportunities and to seize those opportunities. For classes, we have five basic classes and 20 points scattered across the seven attributes. We've got the Mage whose primary stats are intelligence, creativity, and luck. The Mage spends a lot of time thinking and problem-solving and just doing like a lot of brain stuff. However, their biggest weakness is stamina. They are not the kind of people who can naturally just grind it out. On the opposite of the spectrum, we have the Tank. The Tank has

extremely high stamina and really high resilience you can throw anything at them they're just going to keep going along they're going to keep grinding and they're able to handle massive amounts of damage both physical and emotional damage they also have high emotional

intelligence being able to connect well with people around them but they tend to be pretty like great shooter type people don't put a lot of emphasis on creativity and being opportunistic the Assassin is all about being opportunistic they're like the quick in

quick out kind of person they spot on an opportunity they go and get it and then they get out so very high in Mobility very high in emotional intelligence because they need to understand Dynamics to know where the opportunities are and on luck their weaknesses are on stamina

and defense can't really take damage that well next up is the Striker if you play games like DOTA it's like the carry they're similar to assassins and that they can identify opportunities and actually create opportunities by having very high creativity but they

also have the stamina to stick to something for longer periods of time I would say many entrepreneurs would be Striker class because they would figure out an opportunity and be able to work towards their vision for a long period of time and finally we have the Healer

type the Healer is all about emotional intelligence connections other people they also have high defense High resilience they're able to be there for people even if they're taking damage they're not the kind of build to lead but if there is a cause that they care

about then they will be there to support the other players they care about so yeah there you go let me know in the comments which class you tend to fall into what your game play is like also if you think I'm missing key attributes or key classes let me know as well and we

can figure out more of the game mechanics together but in the meantime let's go back to boosting our intelligence stats so that we can learn better skills and to level up don't forget to pay attention though because you only get your plus one intelligence

if you can actually answer the questions at the end of the video as you're learning new skills it'll be cool to document your progress on a website or if you're just really interested in certain topics that you're learning about you could document that as well so

I'm going to show you today how easy it is to make a website using AI Builder by Hostinger let's jump into it this is the Hostinger website builder landing page we're going to click claim deal and go with the business option so you get

access to all of the AI tools here I'm going to pick 48 months because there's a huge Black Friday deal you also get a free domain and 2 months free included and I also have a coupon code for you so if you type in Tina Hong you get an

additional 10% discount the website that I'm going to make today it is an anime deep dive which I can showcase different animes and deep dives and like lessons that you learn from it to make this even easier I just took a screenshot of the

Builder and put it into ChatGPT and ask it to help me come up with the prompt for the Hostinger AI so I'm just going to like copy that directly over and create a website there you go, literally took less than 30 seconds to generate, so

this honestly looks pretty good already. It looks like it's a blog style which is exactly what I wanted. This doesn't look quite right in terms of the overlay here, but it's really easy to change. You just go to the edit site, get rid of this part,

you can add different buttons and text that you like as well. They even have an AI writer for you where you can describe what it is that you want to write about. Why solo leveling is such an amazing anime and what we learn from it. There are a ton of other features that you can

customize as much as you want. When you feel like you're ready to publish, you can click connect domain and claim your one free domain and there you go. Isn't that crazy simple to get started and have a website in literally minutes? Go to hostinger.com/tahang and apply the

code Tina hang for an additional 10% off. Now back to the [Music] video. A chunk is a collection of pieces of information that are bound by use or meaning. When you see this word potato, probably what comes up in your mind is a tubular vegetable and that's because you

actually perceive this collection of letters to indicate something that represents this tubular vegetable. And that's because you're not perceiving it as individual letters of p-o-t-a-t-o. This is known as chunking. Your brain has associated all these letters together

into one singular thing, a potato, which your brain can easily process. Like, picture it, think about different ways of cooking potatoes, etc., etc. Chunking is really important when you're learning new things. You want to be able to associate together different characteristics to be able to

conceptualize this new information and to be able to associate it with other things that you know about. Like, imagine if there were no chunking, you would still be reading like a kindergartener, like sounding out every single letter and struggling to put everything

together. If you're driving and you didn't do any chunking, you would have to think about every single sequence of events that you do, like first you need to put on a seat belt, then you have to do this, start the engine, look at this

turn that, and every single time you see a new sign, a different scenario, you have to process, process all of that information. It would be very exhausting. So the next natural question to ask is, how do you exactly form these chunks? Great question! Let's take the example of

wanting to play a new song on the violin. The first step is that you need to pay attention. This is a really cute illustration from the course, um, where it shows the working memory having the four slots and you have an octopus of attention. So when you're paying

attention to that song and maybe practicing some passages, you have that information stored into the slots of your working memory. Here, one slot for example might be preoccupied with the way that you're moving your hands, one spot is preoccupied with the bow, one is

monitoring the tune and one is predicting the next note in that passage, your working memory is going hard. This is also why it's very important when you're chunking information to not have like distractions that are happening, like say if you have your TV going off

or like you know your notification, your phone notification going off, that would preoccupy one of the slots of your working memory and you only got four in total. So then you only get three left, the process would be a lot harder. Step two is to understand the basic idea of

the things that you're trying to chunk. For the passage of a music, the way that the notes come together, if you're learning about economics, how is it that supply and demand interact with each other? If you're looking at a math problem, what exactly are we trying to represent here?

Just sort of understand what the main idea is and you want to do this through a combination of the focus and a diffuse mode that we talked about earlier. Process that information and switch it in different ways to get a understanding of what it is that you're learning, but

it's important to note that just because you understand something doesn't necessarily mean that you know how to do it. You actually have to do the thing yourself. Step number three is to gain context. This is a nice little diagram that illustrates that not only do you

have to know how to do something, you also need to know when to do something. You can learn how to use like a math formula for example, right? Um, but you also need to know when it is that you should be using this math formula. You can't just like spam the math formula at

everything this involves a lot of practice and repetition to be able to see when it is that it's appropriate to use something and when it's not appropriate to use something when you're learning there's actually two different approaches that are happening the first one is the bottom up approach which is

when you're chunking together information and you're practicing and you're repeating the skills but there's also a top-down approach that's happening this big picture process that helps you figure out why it is that you're learning the things why it's

important where is it supposed to fit into the rest of the information in your brain and these two meet in the middle at the context figuring out the correct context for these new skills a practical little tip if you're trying to learn a new chapter in a book it's good

to first skim through that chapter and look at only the headers and the diagrams this will help you gain context for the information in there it's also what I do when I learn from online courses as well I always skim through the material first learning new things

is like doing a jigsaw puzzle when you first start off there's just this big pile of random jigsaw pieces but you start chunking together pieces as you make sense of them and these chunks grow bigger and bigger and you have a better idea of what the big picture is supposed

to look like then even if you're missing a few pieces here and there it's very easy to put them in place the course also provides a word of warning that while you're going through this process you have to be wary of illusions of competence which is when you think you

You know something when you don't actually know it yet. Some examples of this is when you see a worked out solution, you're like, "Oh, like that makes sense. I understand why they got there." Even though you may understand it, but you don't actually know how to do it. That's

why it's so important to actually do things yourself. Recall is also a very useful technique. It's when you learn something and then you look away from the material and say it in your own words. As they say, you don't truly know something until you're able to explain

it. Don't just practice the easy stuff and delude yourself into thinking that you know everything already. Deliberately try to practice the hard stuff, the things that you don't know. It's okay to make mistakes because that's when you know you're actually learning something.

During a study session, it's helpful to mix things up a little bit. Try to approach the things that you're learning from different perspectives, different approaches, even different topics. This is called interleaving and it helps you get a more multi-dimensional understanding of what it is that you're trying to

learn. A lot more productive than trying to do the same thing over and over again. Procrastination. Procrastination is a keystone bad habit, which means that it's a habit that if you have it, trickles down throughout your entire life, making everything in your life harder to do. But

fortunately, if you do manage to fix it, it would also trickle through your entire life and everything suddenly becomes a lot easier to understand. Procrastination. We first have to understand the habit loop, which has four components: a cue, a routine, a reward

and a belief if you have a procrastination habit the queue might be feeling tired, um, having a sense of like perfectionism and fear, just seeing a notification pop up on your phone, the routine is your procrastination routine, like checking your phone, and the reward is an instant

gratification and that sort of relief from that unpleasant feeling, and finally, belief, what gives a habit loop power is your belief in it. You probably have a strong belief that you are a procrastinator and maybe no matter what you do, you think you just cannot stop in

order to stop the procrastination loop from happening, you need to intervene at some point in that loop. If you're cue is this negative feeling, there's actually research that shows that non-procrastinators are people who still feel those negative feelings but they're able to

tell themselves that they just need to push through it and stop wasting time and get to it, and if they do, these feelings actually evaporate. If your cue is this like sense of failure, this perfectionism tendency, what could be helpful is reframing the way that you

think about the task. Instead of thinking about the product of what it is you're doing, try to focus on the process of doing it. For example, if you need to write an essay, instead of focusing on the fact that you need to write an essay, just focus on doing 25 minutes of

working on the essay. You can even say like 5 minutes or 10 minutes, like come on, it's a lot lower barrier of entry if you're focusing just on the process of trying to do something for 10 minutes. If your cue is something like notifications on

your phone, like at a time of day or a certain location. Try to like physically remove your phone, physically be in a different location, and just try to learn at a different time of day to intervene with your routine. You need to have a plan. Tell yourself that when you have

these negative procrastinating feelings that you're just going to focus on working on what you need to do for 10 minutes. Then you need to give yourself a good reward for not procrastinating, whatever it is that you enjoy: your favorite food, binge watching TV without

guilt, being able to hang out with your friends later. These may seem small, but over time they'll strongly enforce your non-procrastination loop, and over time you start changing your belief systems as well. Here are some other practical tips from the course to avoid procrastination.

Plan your week by having all the tasks that you need to do that week. And for each day, have a to-do list specific for that day. And try to do this the day before. This allows your brain to process this, to internalize this, and to adapt to it.

and you'll find that it's easier to get started by the next morning. Here's an example of a to-do list for the day. Try to have tasks that are defined by process, like 30 minutes or 1 hour of working on an essay or like 1 hour on

reading French. It's also good to mix in different types of activities, like going for walks for an hour, putting in different chores throughout the day as well. For smaller, more concrete tasks, it's okay to just write the task itself. Don't forget to also plan a finishing time. The

time in which you're saying okay I'm done with this, the rest of the day I can do other things that I want to do. If you have tasks that you particularly feel resistance towards or you just don't like doing, plan to have those as early

as possible during the day, that's when you have the most willpower to tackle these tasks. Now going back to memory, your memory is just like a leaky bucket, you're just shoving stuff in and trying your best to retain as much of it as

possible. Remember that the way that memory works is that if you focus on something, you can manage to get it into working memory, and then if you manage to repeat it enough times, then you can get that into long-term memory. That is why if you really want to remember something,

try your best to make that thing especially memorable and then repeat it over and over again. For example, if you're trying to memorize the equation F equals MA, force is equal to mass times acceleration, you might want to visualize this image: a fine mule's ass that is

hopefully something that is very memorable, and you will have an easier time trying to focus on it and repeat that into long-term memory. This is a very powerful technique, and the course really encourages us that when we're trying to learn something, to try to come

up with interesting analogies and interesting images. That's actually why for a lot of very memory-heavy fields like medicine, for example, there's a lot of little like pneumonics and jingles and like different acronyms that people use in order to try to remember concepts.

Now the second part of this is the repetition. One of the best ways of doing this is using flashcards in spaced repetition. So you're basically making this flashcard of whatever it is that you're trying to remember in the front and then the explanation of it in the

back. Like for example in physics, you have you could have row and then explanation of what row is in the back, but there's a technique in when it is that you should practice these flashcards. You don't want to do it all in one go. You want to practice with these flash

cards one day and then the next day do it again and then maybe the next day do it again as well. In this way, if you're spacing your repetition, you have a better chance of getting that information, um, more solidified in your long-term memory. There are really good

free flashcard apps like Anki for example that actually builds in an algorithm that supposedly has a very optimal algorithm for how it's presenting cards too. Couple other tips. Handwriting stuff generally allows you to ingrain it into your long-term memory better than typing and of course sleep

Learn To Learn In 25 Minutes

Hi! My name is Tina and I'm a ex-Meta data scientist. Now I create content and other internet things! 

This channel is about coding, tech, career, and self-study. I love learning new things and my goal is to always minimize effort and maximize outcome! 

I strive to do things in the most efficient way possible and with the highest reward. I basically refuse to do extra work to achieve my goals c: 




Tina Huang

Learning how to learn is a meta-skill that significantly improves learning ability.

Summary of Barbara Oakley's 'Learning How to Learn' course.

Reviewing information immediately improves retention.

Critique of the 'try harder' problem-solving method.

Brain is compared to a pinball machine to illustrate focused and diffuse thinking.

Focused mode: narrow, efficient for known tasks.

Diffuse mode: broad, accesses different brain areas for problem-solving.

Inability to be in both modes simultaneously.

Thomas Edison's method of accessing diffuse mode through relaxation.

Explanation of working memory and long-term memory.

Working memory: limited capacity, located in prefrontal cortex.

Long-term memory: vast capacity, distributed throughout the brain.

Interaction between working and long-term memory.

Attributes: intelligence, emotional intelligence, defense, mobility, creativity, stamina, luck.

Classes: Mage, Tank, Assassin, Striker, Healer, each with strengths and weaknesses.

Website Creation using Hostinger AI Builder

Demonstration of creating a website using AI.

Steps to create a website using Hostinger's AI Builder.

Using ChatGPT to generate website prompts.

Chunking: associating pieces of information into meaningful units.

Importance of chunking for efficient learning and processing.

Steps to form chunks: pay attention, understand the basic idea, gain context.

Bottom-up and top-down approaches in learning.

Illusions of competence and the importance of active practice.

Four components of the habit loop: cue, routine, reward, belief.

Strategies to interrupt the procrastination loop.

Practical tips for planning your week and daily to-do lists.

Memory as a leaky bucket; importance of memorability and repetition.

Using visualization and mnemonics to improve memory.

Benefits of handwriting and sleep for memory consolidation.

Importance of tutors, coaches, mentors, and AI for learning.

Caution regarding unproductive study groups.