Learning in 20 minute bursts

: Nose of a Handley-Page manned by three men (Photo credit: National Library of Scotland)

Anyone who is familiar with the First World War will know that in the early stages of the flying part of the war, the aeroplanes were notoriously difficult to fly, and their weaponry evolved from rocks being thrown at

English: Royal Flying Corps Sopwith Camel in 1914-1916 period. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

each other, to the use of hand-guns, and finally to the fitting of machine-guns. The planes then evolved into different types : bombers would drop their deadly load and fighters would protect them. But the life-span of new flying recruits averaged 20 minutes. Hence the name "The Twenty-Minuters". Quite sad. But in our context, 20 minutes is about the best length of time for you to spend studying a section. We have mentioned before, the Amygdalae in the brain are the gateways to your ability to memorize information, but when the neurotransmitters inside the Amygdalae dry up, your ability to learn more information shuts down. That's when you need a change of scenery.

English: St John's church, Hilltown (2) The clock is only two minutes slow. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Why Twenty Minutes?

I'm not actually making 20 minutes an exact number here for you. It will vary from one person to another, but the average length will be 20 minutes. These are the steps to follow in the 20 minutes.

1. Gather your chunk of information.

This will be the chunk of information of between 5 and 9 facts. Make sure that they flow in the grand scheme of your studying progress. They mustn't be isolated. If they are isolated they are doomed.

Information overload (Photo credit: Martino!)

2. Connect the information with previous information.

Make obvious connections before learning and memorizing the information.

3. Make sure you understand the information.

It's pointless learning the information if you do not even understand it. Memorizing something for the sake of rote learning makes your brain a simple USB flash-drive. It stores information. It doesn't make it a fully-functional integrating, thinking and solving, living entity it was made to be.

4. Memorize the information in as many ways as possible.

Don't use just one way. If you are good at drawing, draw crazy pictures. For example, when I was studying Psychiatry, when I was learning about the medication called Sertraline, I drew a Search-Light : do you see the connection my brain made? Sertraline sounds like Searchlight? At least it did to me. Maybe I'm just crazy. Anyway. Moving along. If you draw good mindmaps, then use those to their maximum potential. Write a quick rap song. Act out the facts in a small skit. Use multiple ways to learn the facts.

John_Deere_4630_Tractor.jpg (Photo credit: file039)

5. When your eyes glaze over, stop.

Teachers will recognize this point very easily. Eyes become glazed over, bodies change positions and become slumped, people begin looking elsewhere. If you notice your mind start wondering, then stop. If you haven't finished your total number of facts - this has given you an idea as to where to set the bar for how much to learn in one sitting. When this happens, those Amygdala neurotransmitters have been all used up. This whole process usually takes around 20 minutes or so, but can vary widely, depending upon each individual person, subject being learned, and the type of exam being learned for.

Take a Break

This is essential. If you were to try and carry on learning now, your Amygdalae would simply bounce off all incoming information away from your learning centres. This break should be about 5 to 10 minutes and consist of you physically getting up, moving around, refreshing yourself with something to eat and drink (I personally don't have an aversion to good filter coffee here!). Go outside into the sun, stretching your legs. But don't do this for more than about 4 or 5 minutes.

Do the same again but differently

Now that you've given your neurotransmitters a chance to rebuild, you now go back and do the exact same section you have just done. The difference now is that you are going to do it in completely different ways to ways that you have done before. If you learned the facts in , let's say 3 different ways previously, I want to now to find 3 or 4 different ways to revise it. They must be crazy, different, and way-out. You must feel out of you depth and you must feel way out of your comfort zone. This is when you will remember your work.

Keep doing this over and over

Keep this cycling over and over. Give yourself a 30 minutes break for every two hours of studying you have done. After studying for about six hours, you must give yourself at least one hour's break and you must go out somewhere and do something different.

Replica of Vaughn's Camel F.I currently displayed at the National Museum of the United States Air Force (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Revision Rehabilitation

$neuron fractal 1$: neuron fractal 1 (Photo credit: Anthony Mattox)

Today we continue from the previous post on revision. Last post we looked at the factors that can influence how you implement your revision program. Today we are going to look at how to put together a revision program.

Neuronal dendrite formation (Photo credit: TheJCB)

We have already established that our minds can only handle between 5 and 9 connected facts at any one time, and that it is a good idea to study those number of facts in one sitting, with a break between each study session. Now that we have confirmed these points, let's now look at some of the theory behind revision.

When we learn a chunk of facts, our neurons immediately build new dendrites in a region of the brain where it can connect the new information with old information. The research that showed us that information also showed us that if we leave that information as is and don't revise it soon, those dendrites will disintegrate. But, frequents bouts of brief rest during your study sessions are important to replenish the stores of neurotransmitters in the gaps between your neurons. Even more important though, is that the most amount of build-up of these chemicals takes place during sleep - and especially during your deep sleep, rather than during "dream sleep" (or Rapid Eye Movement or REM Sleep). So, that is why it is absolutely essential that you get at least seven hours sleep a night, and that there is no such thing as "catching up on your sleep" from a studying point of view. So, let's look at some guiding principles that you can follow when drawing up your own revision timetable. 1. Your first revision must be immediately after the rest period that follows the study session itself. So, if you have just learned a chunk of information related to Acute Myocardial Infarction and have just had a three minute rest, revise that same information, but... 2. The first revision must be done in a totally different way to the way you studied the material to begin with. This is where creativity comes in handy! If your study session has employed mainly drawing and talking, when you revise, use singing and acting. This first revision session may end up being longer than your original study session, but don't stress! All your subsequent revision sessions will be much shorter! 3. Try and do a second revision the same day before you go to sleep. As mentioned above, your dream sleep is the critical time during which the brain transforms that newly imbibed information into long-term memories by building and extending the dendritic branches.

Photo by Bob Jacobs, Laboratory of Quantitative Neuromorphology Department of Psychology Colorado College http://www.ColoradoCollege.edu/IDProg/Neuroscience/ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

4. Revise the next day. 5. Revise the next week. 6. Revise a month later. 7. Revise a week before a test or exam. 8. Revise the day before the test or exam. Easy? Good. Now start getting creative with a calender!

The Single Most Important Study Fact You Will Ever Learn(schooledforlife.com)

Revision Surgery

$http://achesandjoints.org/2010/12/07/femur-fractures-around-hip-implants/$

Femur fracture around hip implant from UMass Aches And Joints Blog

The other day I was in the operating room assisting Dr Roloff once again. This time, the patient was in a predicament very similar to the patient in the X-ray above. She had fallen and broken her thigh bone (femur) below her prosthetic hip joint. She must have been in a lot of pain! It took us about three and a half hours to get the old hip joint out, as well as the cement, and get the femur ready for the new prosthesis. But the femur was in such a bad state that we had to create a cage of metal wires around it so and leave it for six weeks to heal before we go back in and insert the new prosthesis. That procedure is called a Revision Hip Replacement. Quite ironic, I think! Seen as we are dealing with surgery to your revision planning.

The timetable (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As already noted here, when we learn a new piece of information, the brain grows new dendrites on neurons, thus hard-wiring the new information. But if we do not quickly review that new information, we will quickly lose that information. The rest of this post is going to deal with the factors that will influence how you will structure your revision planning, and the next post will give you some ideas of how to structure your revision planning. I'm not going to be dogmatic like Dr House about how you should structure your revision timetable because there are a number of factors that will influence how you will structure your revision timetable.

1. The duration of each study session. If each study session is one hour, then you are going to be extremely unlike to follow an intensive revision timetable. By the same token, if your study sessions are only five minutes, your revision timetables are going to be so complicated that not even Tom Cruise (excuse the background hurling noise) in Minority Report would be able to keep track of. You need to find a study time of about 20 to 25 minutes because it means for each subsequent revision session, the amount of time you spend on that section decreases by about 50-60%.

Cover of Minority Report [Blu-ray

2. The number of facts learned per session.This is a very similar concept to the first point and for the same reasons. Bear in mind here that the optimum number of distinct learned facts that should be learned at any one sitting that are directly related should be between 5 and 9. If you can learn more per session, then go ahead - everyone is different. 3. Your existing schedule. This is an obvious one. There are only so many hours in the day, and you have got a certain number of commitments and activities already scheduled. You will need to plan around these events.

Late Night Sessions (Photo credit: candyschwartz)

4. Your own rhythms. What I mean by this is that each of us is unique in the way we function during the day. For example I can stay awake very easily late into the night but struggle to wake up in the morning. Whereas my wife is the opposite. She can hardly keep her eyes open beyond 9 pm! During the day, some people have a mid-afternoon slump. I don't seem to have that. You need to take note of what your own rhythms are.

A patron of "Sammy's Bowery Follies," a downtown bar, sleeping at his table while the resident cat laps at his beer, 12- - NARA - 541905 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Diagnosing Your Revision Sickness(schooledforlife.com)
Five things I have learned about learning in the operating room(schooledforlife.com)

A Gym called Focus

attention (Photo credit: gordonr)

"David! Focus!" The teacher was screaming in my face, snapping her fingers inches away from my nose. I can't remember which class it was and when (which goes to show how successful her attention-making was!), but I do remember I was day-dreaming that day. It didn't matter what it was. Maybe it was Pippa's beautiful smile, or the coming weekend with its endless hours playing computer games. Whatever it was, my attention was far away from that lesson that day.

Sound familiar to you? Thought so. I've got an interesting fact for you. The more you practice focusing your attention, the better you will get at focusing your attention. It kind of seems logical, except in a kind of "Why didn't I think of that?" kind of way, doesn't it? Well, it seems that the brain boffins (that pun was intended, nudge, nudge), have found that every time a student focuses his or her attention, the resultant activation of the alerting and focusing pathways results in these attention circuits becoming stronger and much more efficient at carrying new data from the sensory areas of the brain into the storage areas of the brain via the Amygdala. Chew on that for a little while. Yummy.

The myth of true multi-tasking

: Via Amazon

I am reading a book called Getting Organized in the Google Era by Douglas Merrill, former C.I.O. of Google. I highly recommend it. He approaches this multi-million dollar topic of organizing your life in a totally unique and different approach. One of the segments of the book that is very relevant is when he talks about our brains and their short-term and long-term memory.

Short-term memory

Your brain is only able to hold between 5 and 9 things in its short-term memory. But, these items need to be related to each other in some way. If you then shift contexts quickly, the new pieces of information entering your short-term memory will push some of those previous memories out before you have been able to put them into long-term memory. Multi-tasking? So, in essence, the concept of multi-tasking in many contexts is going to make you less effective. That's why the good writers and bloggers will create chunks of information in their writing. Then they will tell a story about it. Then they will re-iterate it in different words, then again a third time from a different angle.

Multitasking by stoneystainer (www.flickr.com/photos/stoneysteiner/)

Good Writers? Yes, good writers will chunk the information, paint some pictures of it, then re-iterate it in different terms. Then they will link those 5 to 9 items to a further 5 to 9 items, hoping that you have had time to transfer those first 5 to 9 items into long-term memory. Good Studiers? This is absolutely essential for learners. You learn in chunks of 5 to 9 items at a time. Insert them into long-term memory by linking them to things you already know, and by applying study techniques that work for you. Don't let someone tell you that there is only one way to learn. S4L That is one of the big reasons I am developing the S4L (Schooled For Life) program. My big plans for it are to release a curriculum based on those seven principles. Don't let anyone tell you how you must learn. You decide that for yourself. The S4L program will empower you to do that. Now, where has that novel I was reading whilst writing this post gone?