Interesting Facts

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How Your Brain Changes As You Learn a New Skill?

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Every time you learn something new, your brain changes in a pretty substantial way. In turn, this makes other parts of your life easier because the benefits of learning stretch further than just being good at something. As The New Yorker points out, learning a new skill has all kinds of unexpected benefits, including improving working memory, better verbal intelligence, and increased language skills.
Specifically, training resulted in decreased activity in brain regions involved in effortful control and attention that closely overlap with the frontoparietal control and dorsal attention networks. Increased activity was found after training, however, in the default network that is involved in self-reflective activities, including future planning or even day dreaming. Thus, skill mastery is associated with increased activity in areas not engaged in skill performance, and this shift can be detected in the large-scale networks of the brain.
Essentially, the more adept you become at a skill, the less work your brain has to do. Over time, a skill becomes automatic and you don't need to think about what you're doing. This is because your brain is actually strengthening itself over time as you learn that skill

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What is long-term potentiation?

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The process that we understand best is called long-term potentiation, in which repeatedly stimulating two neurons at the same time fortifies the link between them. After a strong connection is established between these neurons, stimulating the first neuron will more likely excite the second.

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How You Learn Faster?

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In order to learn, we need to fail. We’ve heard a lot lately about the benefits of experiencing and overcoming failure. One way to get these benefits is to set things up so that you’re sure to fail—by tackling a difficult problem without any instruction or assistance. Manu Kapur, a researcher at the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education of Singapore, has reported (in the Journal of the Learning Sciences) that people who try solving math problems in this way don’t come up with the right answer—but they do generate a lot of ideas about the nature of the problems and about what potential solutions would look like, leading them to perform better on such problems in the future. Kapur calls this “productive failure,” and you can implement it in your own learning by allowing yourself to struggle with a problem for a while before seeking help or information.

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Spread Out Learning Over Time

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When we're picking up a new skill or learning something entirely new, it's easy to binge-learn and obsessively work on it over time. However, that's not always the best idea. In fact, spreading out learning, also known as distributed practice, is thought to be a better way to learn. A review of studies in Psychological Science in the Public Interest found that spreading out learning is far more effective than cramming:

Dunlosky and colleagues report that spreading out your studying over time and quizzing yourself on material before the big test are highly effective learning strategies. Both techniques have been shown to boost students' performance across many different kinds of tests, and their effectiveness has been repeatedly demonstrated for students of all ages.

"I was shocked that some strategies that students use a lot — such as rereading and highlighting — seem to provide minimal benefits to their learning and performance. By just replacing rereading with delayed retrieval practice, students would benefit," says Dunlosky.

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Distributed practice

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Distributed practice is an old technique, but it actually works really well for the busy lives most of us lead. Instead of sitting down for hours on end to learn a skill, distributed practice is all about shorter, smaller sessions where you're stimulating the link between the neurons more often throughout time. So, instead of trying to learn a skill by taking an hour long class every night, give yourself a lot of time overall, and small chunks throughout the day. Heck, even 15 minutes a day to spend on projects is enough for many of us.

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When to learn?

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The study found that subjects who went to sleep right after learning something did significantly better in a series of memory tests. We've seen this before with naps, and know that sleep has a big impact on memory retention in general. Basically, when you learn a new skill before bed, you're helping fortify the link between the neurons in your brain. This means you retain information better.

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The Illusion of Knowledge

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The illusion of knowledge is believing familiarity is the same as wisdom. You’ve probably felt it when trying to do something like fix a sink or explain to a child how taco shells are made. Just because you’ve become familiar with the operation and function of a thing doesn’t mean you truly understand how it works. For most of life, your understanding is only of the surface, the visible aspects that allow for a reasonable level of prediction. If you were teleported back to medieval times and placed outside a castle, what understanding could you offer those people from your own time?

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Spending Money

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if you are seeking long-term happiness, nothing compares to unique experiences, even short experiences, even bad experiences. Over time, things lose their luster, but memories do not.
It’s peculiar, your inability to predict what will make you happy, and that inability leads you to do stupid things with your money. Once you get a decent job that allows you to buy new shoes on a whim, you start accumulating stuff, and the psychological research into happiness says that stuff is a crappy source of lasting joy.
if you want to be happy you should buy experiences.
The evidence suggests that the average millionaire CEO and her lawyer’s paralegal’s accountant’s dental hygienist are within a smidge of being equally happy day-to-day. If you make enough money to buy new tires when you need them, then you are probably not poor, and the research tells us that pretty much all versions of being not poor are basically equal, even being insanely rich.
The wealthier the person, the less likely he or she reports a desire to pause and enjoy the serenity of a waterfall, or the desire to go on a hike. That’s time that could be spent doing something that only the super-rich could do.