9 Powerful Hacks Toppers Use To Study Smarter.

First and foremost, I have never been a topper myself. I was always sort of “somewhere in the middle” kind of guy, but recently I took this course on coursera called Learning how to learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects.

The course basically comprises of some tools and techniques that can be taken advantage of to study better and smarter. However, it is not the same vague stuff you read on every other educational blog or article. I was taken aback by the genuineness and the effectiveness of these tools and I have decided to share some of the stuff that I learned through the course in this story.

• Focused mode v Diffused mode

Our brain has two different modes of thinking. The focused mode and diffused mode. The focused mode, as the name suggests, is used while focusing intensely on a particular concept or thought. The diffused mode, on the other hand, is in function while you’re solving sort of a more complex problem involving broader chains of thoughts. The diffused mode works at a deeper level and gives you an in-depth understanding of the concept. Focused mode of thinking requires more focus and concentration and in turn more energy as compared to the diffused mode.

To efficiently use these modes we need to switch back and forth between them, to get a broader perspective.

To engage your focused mode of thinking, you simply need to focus on a given problem for some time, but you’ll tire yourself out pretty quickly if you constrain your focus for too long since it requires a lot of will power and energy. So, to use our energy efficiently we need to switch between the two modes.

To engage your diffused mode of thinking, you should let go of your focus from the problem which you’re attending to and rather let it settle in the background of your brain. This is the science behind taking breaks between study periods. Simply going for a walk or putting on some music shall be enough to let your brain assess the problem from a broader perspective.

So the bottom line is, when you’re learning, what you want to do is study something. Study it hard by focusing intently. Then take a break or at least change your focus to something different for a while. During this time of seeming relaxation, your brain’s diffuse mode has a chance to work away in the background and help you out with your conceptual understanding.

• Practice makes perfect.

Neurons become linked together through repeated use. The more abstract something is, the more important it is to practice in order to bring those ideas into reality for you. Even if the ideas you’re dealing with are abstract, the neural thought patterns you are creating are real and concrete. At least they are if you build and strengthen them through practice.

Here’s a way to picture what’s going on. When you first begin to understand something, for example, how to solve a problem, the neural pattern form is there, but it’s very weak.

When you solve the problem again fresh from the start, without looking at the solution, you begin deepening that neuron pattern.

And when you have the problem down cold, so you can go over each step completely and concisely in your mind without even looking at the solution, and you’ve even had practice on related problems, only then, the pattern becomes a dark firm pattern.

Practice makes permanent.

When you’re learning something new, especially something that’s a little more difficult, your mind needs to be able to go back and forth between the two different learning modes. That’s what helps you learn effectively. You might think of it as a bit analogous to building your strength by lifting weights. You would never plan to compete in a weight lifting competition by waiting until the very day before a meet and then spending that entire day working out like a fiend. I mean, it just doesn’t happen that way. To gain muscular structure, you need to do a little work every day, gradually allowing your muscles to grow. Similarly, to build neuron-structure, you need to do a little work every day, gradually allowing yourself to grow a neuron-scaffold to hang your thinking on, a little bit every day and that’s the trick.

Your neural mortar in some sense has a chance to dry. If you don’t do this, if instead, you learn by cramming, your knowledge base will look more like in a jumble with everything confused, a poor foundation.

• The Pomodoro Technique.

It was invented by Francesco Cirillo, in the early 1980s. Pomodoro is Italian for tomato. The timer you use often looks like a tomato and really, a timer is all there is to this elegant little technique.

All you need to do is set a timer to 25 minutes, turn off all interruptions, and then focus. That’s it! Most anybody can focus for 25 minutes. The only last important thing is to give yourself a little reward when you’re done.

A few minutes of web surfing, a cup of coffee, or a bite of chocolate, even just stretching or chatting mindlessly, allowing your brain to enjoyably change its focus for a while.

You’ll find that using the Pomodoro technique is very effective. It’s a little like doing an intense 25-minute workout at a mental gym. Followed by some mental relaxation. Give it a try.

• The Importance of Sleep in Learning.

You might be surprised to learn that just plain being awake creates toxic products in your brain. How does the brain get rid of these poisons? Turns out that when you sleep, your brain cells shrink. This causes an increase in the space between your brain cells. It’s like unblocking a stream. Fluid can flow past these cells and wash the toxins out.

So sleep, which can sometimes seem like such a waste of time, is actually your brain’s way of keeping itself clean and healthy. So, let’s get right to a critical idea. Taking a test without getting enough sleep means you’re operating with a brain that’s got little metabolic toxins floating around in it. Poisons that make it so you can’t think very clearly.

It’s kind of like trying to drive a car that’s got sugar in its gas tank. Doesn’t work too well. In fact, getting too little sleep doesn’t just make you do worse on tests, too little sleep, over too long of a time, can also be associated with all sorts of nasty conditions, including headaches, depression, heart disease, diabetes, and just plain dying earlier.

But sleep does more than just allow your brain to wash away toxins. It’s actually an important part of the memory and learning process. It seems that during sleep your brain tidies up ideas and concepts you’re thinking about and learning. It erases the less important parts of memories and simultaneously strengthens areas that you need or want to remember.

During sleep your brain also rehearses some of the tougher parts of whatever you’re trying to learn, going over and over neural patterns to deepen and strengthen them. Sleep has also been shown to make a remarkable difference in your ability to figure out difficult problems and to understand what you’re trying to learn.

It’s as if the complete deactivation of the conscious you in the prefrontal cortex at the forefront of your brain helps other areas of your brain start talking more easily to one another, allowing them to put together the neural solution to your learning task while you’re sleeping.

• Chunking.

When you first look at a brand new concept it sometimes doesn’t make much sense, as shown by the jumbled puzzle pieces here. Chunking is the mental leap that helps you unite bits of information together through meaning. The new logical whole makes the chunk easier to remember, and also makes it easier to fit the chunk into the larger picture of what you’re learning.

Just memorizing a fact without understanding or context doesn’t help you understand what’s really going on or how the concept fits together with other concepts you’re learning.

Chunks are pieces of information, neuro-scientifically speaking, through bound together through meaning or use. You can take the letters P-O and P and bind them together into one conceptual easy to remember chunk, the word pop. It’s like converting a, a cumbersome computer file into a ZIP file. Underneath that single pop chunk is a symphony of neurons that have learned to sing in tune with one another.

The complex neural activity that ties together our simplifying abstract chunks of thought. Whether those thoughts pertain to acronyms, ideas, or concepts are the basis of much of the science, literature, and art.

As it turns out one of the first steps towards gaining expertise in academic topics is to create conceptual chunks, mental leaps that unite scattered bits of information through meaning. The concept of neural chunks also applies to sports, music, dance, really just about anything that humans can get good at.

Basically, a chunk means a network of neurons that are used to firing together so you can think a thought or perform an action smoothly and effectively. Focused practice and repetition, the creation of strong memory traces, helps you to create chunks.

The path to expertise is built little by little, small chunks can become larger, and all of the expertise serves to underpin more creative interpretations as you gradually become a master of the material.

• Illusions Of Competence.

One of the most common approaches for trying to learn the material from a book or from notes is simply to reread it. But psychologists have shown that this approach is actually much less productive than another, very simple, technique; Recall. After you’ve read the material, simply look away, and see what you can recall from the material you’ve just read. Or drawing concept maps that supposedly enrich the relationships in the materials under study.

By simply reading and re-reading the material over and over we might get this illusion of competence that we have already understood the topic and it gives us a false sense of preparedness.

When we retrieve knowledge, we’re not just being mindless robots. The retrieval process itself enhances deep learning and helps to begin forming chunks. It’s almost as if the recall process helps build in little neural hooks, that we can hang our thinking on.

Concept mapping, drawing diagrams that show the relationship between the concepts have proven to be the best. But if you’re trying to build connections between chunks, before the basic chunks are embedded in the brain, it doesn’t work as well.

It’s like trying to learn advanced strategy in chess, before even understanding concepts of how the pieces move. Using recall, mental retrieval of the key ideas, rather than passive rereading, will make your study time more focused and effective. The only time rereading text seems to be effective, is if you let time pass between the so that it becomes more of an exercise in spaced repetition.

• Overlearning, Chocking, Einstellung, and Interleaving.

When you’re learning a new idea, for example a new vocabulary word or a new concept or a new problem solving approach, you sometimes tend to practice it over and over again during the same study session. A little of this is useful and necessary, but continuing to study or practice after you’ve mastered what you can in the session is called overlearning.

Overleaning can have its place. It can produce automaticity that can be important when you’re executing a serve in tennis or a perfect piano concert. If you choke on tests or public speaking, overlearning can be especially valuable.You know that even expert public speakers practice on the order of 70 hours for a typical 20 minute TED Talk?

Automaticity can indeed be helpful in times of nervousness, but be wary of repetitive overlearning during a single session. Research has shown it can be a waste of valuable learning time. The reality is, once you’ve got the basic idea down during a session, continuing to hammer away at it during the same session doesn’t strengthen the kinds of long term memory connections you want to have strengthened.Worse yet, focusing on one technique is a little like learning carpentry by only practicing with a hammer. After awhile you think you can fix anything by just bashing at it.

One significant mistake students sometimes make in learning is jumping into the water before they learn to swim. In other words, they blindly start working on homework without reading the textbook, attending lectures, viewing online lessons, or even speaking with someone knowledgeable.This is a recipe for sinking.

Mastering a new subject means learning not only the basic chunks, but also learning how to select and use different chunks. The best way to learn that is by practicing jumping back and forth between problems or situations that require different techniques or strategies. This is called interleaving.

• Diving Deep Into Memory.

You can greatly enhance your ability to remember if you tap into these naturally super-sized, visual, spatial memorization abilities.

Our ancestors never needed a vast memory for names or numbers but they did need a memory for how to get back home from the three day deer hunt, or for the location of those plump blueberries on the rocky slopes to the South of the camp. These evolutionary needs helped lock in a superior “where things are” and “how they look” memory system.

To begin tapping into your visual memory system try making a very memorable visual image representing one key item you want to remember.

Part of the reason an image is so important to memory is that images connect directly to your right brain’s visual spatial centers. The image helps you encapsulate a seemingly humdrum and hard to remember concept by tapping into visual areas with enhanced memory abilities.

The more neural hooks you can build by evoking the senses, the easier it will be for you to recall the concept and what it means.

Repetition is important. Even when you make something memorable, repetition helps get that memorable item firmly lodged into long-term memory. Remember to repeat not a bunch of times in one day but sporadically over several days. Index cards can often be helpful. Writing and saying what you’re trying to learn seems to enhance retention.

• Hard Start Jump To Easy.

The classic way students are taught to approach tests is to tackle the easiest problems first. This is based on the idea that by the time you finish the relatively simple problems, you’ll be confident in handling the more difficult ones. This approach works for some people, mostly because, well, anything works for some people.

Unfortunately, however, for many people it’s counterproductive. Tough problems often need lots of time, meaning you’d want to start on them first thing on the test.

The answer is to start with the hard problems but quickly jump to the easy ones. Here’s what I mean. When the test questions are first handed out to you, first take a quick look to get a sense of what it involves. You should do this in any case. Then, when you start working the problems, start first with what appears to be the hardest problem. But steer yourself to pull away within the first minute or two, if you get stuck or you get a sense that you might not be on the right track.

This does something exceptionally helpful. Starting hard loads the first most difficult problem in mind and then switches attention away from it. Both these activities are what allow the diffuse mode to begin its work.

If your initial work on the first hard problem has unsettled you, turn next to an easy problem, and complete or do as much as you can. Then move, next, to another difficult looking problem and try to make a bit of progress. Again, change to something easier as soon as you feel yourself getting bogged down or stuck.

When you return to the more difficult problems, you’ll often be pleased that the next step or steps in the problem will seem to be more obvious to you.

Using the hard start jump to easy technique on tests guarantees that you will have at least a little work done on every problem. It’s also a valuable technique for helping you avoid Einstellung, getting stuck on the wrong approach — because you have a chance to look at the problem from differing perspectives.

• Bonus tip from personal experience.

Personally, I’ve found it helpful to get high before or while working on some creative stuff such as writing this story. Just kidding, I wasn’t stoned while writing this, but I just took the fifth of vodka.

Anyways, I believe it relaxes you and hence engages your diffused mode of thinking even better. Hence you may come up with new ideas. There have been many researches on it, indicating that it can improve your cognitive function and memory.

Disclaimer: I am not claiming this is a proven technique. It’s just something that has worked for me. I am not promoting the use of marijuana or any psychedelics, use them at your own risk.

About The Author.

Gaurav Jha is a digital marketing strategist at an e-learning foundation.

You can contact him on Facebook: Gaurav Jha as well as on Instagram: Gaurav Jha (@gaurav_jha17) ? Instagram photos and videos.