Learning How to Learn with Barbara Oakley's A Mind for Numbers

While on vacation last month I read A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) by Barbara Oakley, Ph.D.  In this new book, Oakley offers mental tips on learning that can help anyone with any subject or discipline, including art, music, literature and sports - not just math and science.  Of course as I was reading it I related everything back to my study and learning of music.

Barbara Oakley failed her high school math and science classes, but had a knack for language.  Without the money to go to college, she enlisted in the Army right out of high school, which gave her the opportunity to follow her passions and learn Russian.  When she later became 2nd Lieutenant in the Signal Corps, the need for the technological expertise she had shied away from became apparent.  Oakley learned how to re-tool her brain from math-phobe to math-lover and is now an engineering professor at Oakland University professor in Rochester, MI.

A free online course from the University of California San Diego, based on the methods in this book begins October 3rd through Coursera, and you can register now.  The course is being taught by the author Barbara Oakley and her colleague Terrence Sejnowski.

Here are some of the highlights I took away from the book A Mind for Numbers:

The Pomodoro Technique
Distractions pull up neural roots before they can grow.  The Pomodoro technique involves turning off all distractions, beeps and alarms such as cell phones, TVs and computers for 25 minutes and focusing intently on a task, working as diligently as you can.  Almost anyone can focus his attention for that long.  When the 25 minutes are up, treat yourself to a reward.  By doing one or two Pomodoros a day, you avoid the tendency to cram everything in at the last minute.  The Pomodoro technique combats procrastination.

The Process, Not The Product
It's about the process and not the product.  Don't worry about finishing the task, just the process - the work itself. Process is the way you spend your time - small bits of time you need over days or weeks.  Product is what you want to accomplish.

Focused Mode and Diffuse Mode
The brain uses two very different learning modes - the focused mode and the diffuse mode - and "chunks" information.

The focused mode is when you are concentrating.  The diffuse mode is not-concentrating, as in taking your mind off the problem and allowing a little time to pass while you wash dishes, go for a walk, and so on.  Part of the key to creativity is switching from focused concentration to the relaxed, dreamy, diffuse mode.  When you take a break another part of your mind takes over and works in the background.  When you return to the problem, you will be farther along in your learning.

Chunking
"Chunking" is the uniting of separate bits of information through meaning.  Chunks are built with focused attention on the information you want to chunk and understanding the basic idea.  Eventually the concept begins to connect more easily and smoothly in your mind.  Once a concept is chunked, you don't need to remember all the little details - you've got the main idea.  You start to let go of conscious awareness and do things automatically.  Once you grasp a chunk in one subject, it is much easier to grasp a similar chunk in another subject.

Recall
Attempting to recall the material you are trying to learn is far more effective than simply re-reading the text.  Don't passively re-read.  After you read a page or chapter look away and recall the main ideas.  Highlight very little and never highlight anything you haven't first put into your mind by recalling.  Highlighting can fool you into thinking you are putting something in your brain, when all you're doing is moving your hand.

Retrieval practice helps improve your understanding of a concept.  You learn more and at a much deeper level.  Recalling enhances deep learning and helps begin forming chunks.  The more effort you put into recalling, the deeper it embeds itself into your memory.

Barbara Oakley @barbaraoakley

Eat Your Frogs First
Work on the most important, most difficult and most disliked subjects in the morning.  When you later take your mind off the subject, the diffuse mode will be able to work its magic.

Exercise
Exercise helps us learn and remember more effectively.  Mentally review the problem in your mind while doing something active like walking or some other physical activity.  You usually become more effective when you return to your work.

Einstellung
The Einstellung Effect is the tendency to stick with the solution you already know rather than looking for potentially superior ones.  Be mindful that parts of the brain are wired to believe that whatever we've done, no matter how glaringly wrong it might be, is just fine, thank you very much.  If you're stumped on something, discover who first came up with the method.  Try to understand how the creative inventor arrived at the idea and why the idea is used.

Experts are slower to begin solving a problem.  Slower ways of thinking can allow you to see confusing subtleties that others aren't aware of.  This is the equivalent of a walker who notices the scent of pine and small-animal paths vs. a motorist who is whizzing by.

Repetition
Strengthen an initial learning pattern the day after you first begin by working on the problem again, as soon as possible.  Keep your focus on the parts that are difficult for you.  Space your repetition. Spread out your learning a little every day.  Your brain is like a muscle - it can only handle a limited amount of exercise on any one subject at any time.

Skim Ahead
In a textbook or learning material it helps to skip ahead to check the questions at the end of the chapter and also skim through the pages looking for text that stands out before reading it in full.  This helps prime the brain for building chunks of understanding.

Keep A Weekly List
Once a week, write a brief weekly list of key tasks.  Look at the big picture and set priorities.  Before going to sleep each night, write a list of the tasks you can reasonably work on the the next day.  This helps your subconscious grapple with the list.

Simplify And Talk Through Difficult Concepts
Simple explanations are possible for almost any concept, no matter how complex.  When you break down complicated material to its key elements, the result is you have a deeper understanding of the material.  Imagine someone has just walked into your office and explain the idea in the simplest terms, so that a ten year old could understand it.  Your own understanding arises as a consequence of attempts to explain.

Sleep
Sleep is an important part of the learning process.  Sleep washes toxins out of the brain.  Your brain pieces together problem-solving techniques when you sleep and it also practices and repeats whatever you put in mind right before you go to sleep.  Lack of sleep is related to poor concentration.  Before you go to sleep, mentally recall the problem or subject matter again in your mind.  Let your subconscious tell you what to do next.

Know When To Stop
Learn to set a reasonable quitting time, doing work earlier in the day and saving relaxation time for later.  Set a goal finish time for the day, such as 9pm.  Planning your quitting time is as important as planning your working time.  Done!

Playing Music as a form of Contemplative Practice

Music can be a mystical thing, even for a secular bloke like me. Playing tunes is almost an act of meditation.  My musical motivation, whether playing a tune by yourself or in the company of others, is to get in the groove, to surrender to the flow, until you're in that fluid place where the music plays itself.  Growth in music is like the growth of a tree - a natural unfolding of activity rather than consciously planning to achieve a desired goal. It's not about technique or your skills on an instrument - what you can or can't do - it's about an awareness of the present.  The feeling produced by participating in the flow of sounds and being actively aware of your bodily and emotional reaction to the music.

Thought is not needed to "know" traditional music. You don't have to understand the music with your mind. You don't even have try to feel it with your heart. Simply and spontaneously allow the music to reveal to you what it has and what it is without any need for further explanation. A sound is just itself, with nothing added on. Music is something to be experienced rather than analyzed, allowing it to remain simply whatever it has always been.

Playing a tune is like crossing a pond on stepping stones. You can play really simply without concern for literal melodic interpretation if you do so by feel and by sound.  Observe, listen and respond with a relaxed body and a calm mind - avoiding cleverness.  Focus on correct posture and alignment of body and instrument. Don't to force things. Reduce tension by softening the muscles in the hand and fingers.

Traditional music goes back to a very deep communal place.  The tunes go round and round like a big circle, connecting to distant pasts, lineage, and the living, breathing river of inspiration. Play in a way that removes the barrier between playing and non-playing. The groove doesn't stop when the tune ends.

Blogger's Update: I'm not sure this post properly conveys the point I intended to make. The general theme is something I've been developing for a while, but was having trouble expressing. If some of the above text doesn't quite sound like my own words it's likely because I relied on a couple external sources to help formulate the content - primarily a May 2005 interview with John Herrmann from Banjo Newsletter and Enda Scahill's Irish Banjo Tutor Volume II. 

Traditional Music in Richmond and Ashland, Virginia

Traditional Fiddle Tunes Sound Better Than They Sound!

Richmond, VA seems like a likely place for the nexus of old-time fiddle music and Irish trad.  It's not far from the mountains of Appalachia - a few hours drive to many of the major old-time festivals, such as Clifftop, Galax, Rockbridge and Mt. Airy, where hillbilly music thrives.  Richmond is also a fairly large, urban environment with Washington DC just 2 hours up I-95 North.  Another 40 miles gets you to Baltimore, then beyond that is Philadelphia, New York and Boston.  Celtic traditional music is strong all along this Mid-Atlantic and Northeast region.  Richmond also has its own annual Folk Festival taking place over 3 days each October with attendance around 200,000, making it the biggest folk festival in the country...even bigger than the national one!

Richmond, Virginia

The Richmond Folk Festival certainly hasn't hurt the participation in folk music by regular folks at a local level, and the fiddle music of Appalachia as well as the traditional jigs and reels of Ireland are now very well represented here.  The best examples being the Sunday afternoon old-time jam at Cary St. Cafe near Carytown and the 2nd and 4th Wednesday Irish Session at Rosie Connolly's in the city's Shockoe Bottom district. When combined the music covered between Cary St. and Rosie's is exactly the kind of stuff I want to be playing.  Strangely, (or not surprisingly?), only a couple other folkies besides me attend both of these meetups.  It seems most traditional and roots musicians, while aware of both the Celtic and Appalachian traditions, are either/or.

The reasons a person might voice for not liking Irish or Old-Time music are also the reasons for liking them:  Old-time with its crooked, repetitive, stand-alone tunes, open-tunings, regional quirks, and syncopation.  Irish with its multiple time signatures (4/4, 6/8, 9/8) and tune types (jig, reel, hornpipe, slide), noteyness, tendency toward "unusual" tonal centers like E-dorian, and tune sets of constantly changing keys.  These characteristics are what make each of them great, and what makes them an either/or for the majority of players.

I came to both styles of music at the same time, as a complete outsider, with no family connection, no personal history, and no familiarity with either idiom.  As a result I like both musics almost equally and see more similarities than differences.  I would consider both to be musically complete - containing all the melody and rhythm required when played by a solo instrument, but also conducive to an ensemble format where 20+ players can all play together.

The Blue Ridge Mountains - just west of Charlottesville, VA

Irish and Old-Time each come from aural traditions where you learn by ear and play by heart, forgoing classical training and scales and exercises in favor of simply learning the tunes.  There really aren't any other music communities happening in Richmond where large groups of amateur musicians get together simply for fun to play instrumental folk music in unison without taking "breaks" or solos.  Not blues, not jazz, not bluegrass, not acoustic guitar jams, not ukulele clubs.  Nope - in that respect Old-time and Irish are pretty similar...and valuable.

I cherish both the Cary Street Old-time jam and the Irish session at Rosie's as places to hear each type of music in a pure form from experienced musicians.  Cary St. is like a mini festival jam, where you get to go into a hypnotic, zen-like state for 3+ hours in a Deadhead bar on a Sunday afternoon while the music passes right through you at breakneck speeds.  Meanwhile, the Rosie's session takes place in Richmond's best and most authentic Irish pub, where the craic and the Guinness both flow freely.  Mad amounts of tunes come and go during the course of an evening.  As an ancillary member and newcomer to each of these gatherings, at this point I observe as much as I participate, although with each passing week I hope to understand more.

Call me naive, but I enjoy taking the music that I'm hearing at both of these sessions and introducing it to Ashland, the small town about 15 miles north of Richmond where I live, as part of the Ashland Old-Time Jam and Irish Session, 10am-1pm every 1st and 3rd Saturday in the listening room of Ashland Coffee and Tea, which I helped start earlier this year and continue to host.  I wish I had a better name for this friendly hootenanny.  The terms "Irish" and "Old-Time" seem so narrow and cliche.  Maybe Trad Festival Jam is another way of naming it.  It's that sound you hear at 11pm while walking the grounds of the Rockbrige Mountain Music Festival, combined with energy of the Tuesday night session at Brogan's Pub in Ennis (County Clare) Ireland.  That's what we're searching for and hoping to emulate.

Ashland, Virginia

Anyway, you can think of Ashland as an old-time jam that includes tunes in 6/8 time, and/or as an Irish session where individual tunes are played multiple times through.  The way I see it, both styles cover the tonal center/modes/keys of D, G and A pretty well.  It's not that much to ask of musicians from one tradition or another to come together and open their (beginner's) mind all over again.  Old-time might venture into C while Irish might venture into Eminor and other places.  I play tenor banjo/tenor guitar and I don't re-tune out of standard GDAE tuning, so in that way I suppose I lean slightly Celtic although I find old-time to be a little easier to pick up, for some reason.  Half and half.

I also see the Ashland session as kind of like the minor leagues of jamming.  A welcoming training ground, if you will.  While Cary St. and Rosie's are both open jams and excellent places to familiarize yourself with the nuances of the pure drop, there is a certain level of competence that's expected of the participants.  In Ashland I recognize that not all 5-string banjo players are Bela Fleck or Ken Perlman who can churn out jigs with ease, and also that not all flute players are well versed in obscure Kentucky and West Virginia tunes.  Neither am I for that matter.  But we make it work, and do so with a casual, anything goes type atmosphere:  mixing and matching, favoring repertory over style, but still treating these tunes with sensitivity they deserve.

Seattle Art Museum: Northwest Mystics and Aboriginal Art

I have cool book at home called Sounds of the Inner Eye: John Cage, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves.  It explores the artistic and biographical connection among the three Pacific Northwest artists.  Known as the Northwest Mystics, Cage, Tobey and Graves were influenced by Eastern philosophies and the natural beauty of the Pacific Rim.  About 7 or 8 years ago, before I started to learn how to play music, I took up an interest in abstract art and Eastern philosophies which led to my discovery of these artists and my purchase of this book, which I think was originally published in relation to a 2002 exhibit in Tacoma, WA.

That Sounds of the Inner Eye book has been on the shelf for a few years now (I need to get it out again!), but when I was in Seattle recently for a conference it occurred to me that I was at the center of where this mystical art was made in the 30's, 40's and 50's.  A quick check on my smart phone verified that the Seattle Art Museum was only 4 or 5 blocks away, so I snuck over there during a break.  I was hoping they would have some of this visionary art.

Out of the three artists profiled in Sounds of the Inner Eye, Mark Tobey is my favorite.  To give you an example, while standing on a street corner waiting for a bus after visiting an exhibit of Tobey's white-writing paintings, John Cage "noticed that the experience of looking at the pavement was the same as the experience as looking at the Tobey.  Exactly the same.  The aesthetic enjoyment was just as high".  Tobey's paintings have opened my eyes in a similar way, causing me to look for art in unexpected places, so I was excited at the prospect of seeing some of his work.

As I approached the Seattle Art Museum I was surprised to see a banner for its current Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art exhibit.  I had no idea this was going on but I immediately wondered if the exhibit included anything by Emily Kngwarreye?  That interest I developed in abstract art 7 or 8 years ago led me to Australian Aboriginal art, particularly the work of Emily Kngwarreye whose "dreaming" paintings bear an uncanny resemblance to (and are the artistic equivalent of) the great New York school of abstract expressionists like Kandinsky, Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning.   

Kngwarreye did not take up painting until she was 78, but once she started she was incredibly prolific, producing more than 3,000 paintings by the time she died at age 86.  A lot more can be said about Kngwarreye in a future post, but the good news is that the museum did have works by Tobey, Graves and Kngwarreye on display! (I didn't notice any John Cage visual art, but I did get to see some of his "smoked" works at the University of Richmond a couple years ago).  Enough words...here are some selected visual images of the art by Tobey, Graves, Kngwarreye and Cage. 

Mark Tobey

Mark Tobey

Mark Tobey

Mark Tobey

Emily Kngwarreye

Emily Kngwarreye

Emily Kngwarreye

Emily Kngwarreye

John Cage

John Cage

John Cage

John Cage

Morris Graves

Morris Graves

Morris Graves

Morris Graves

This experience may have rekindled my interest in art as well as Eastern philosophies.  Expect more on those topics in the future.  Please take a moment to comment on these images - similarities, differences, what you like/dislike about them.  Thanks!