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Breaking Through Learning Obstacles: Activate Your Neural Networks, with Barbara Oakley, Professor of Engineering, Oakland University, and Author, Mindshift
A very important idea that people are often unaware of in false effect that we have two completely different ways of seeing the world. Two different neural networks we access when we’re perceiving things.
Focus Mode Thinking
When we first sit down to learn something, for example, we’re going to study math. You sit down and you focus on it. So you focus and you’re activating task-positive networks. And then what happens is you’re working away and then you start to get frustrated. You can’t figure out what’s going on. What’s happening is you’re focusing and you’re using one small area of your brain to analyze the material. But it isn’t the right circuit to actually understand and comprehend the material. So you get frustrated. You finally give up and then when you give up and get your attention off it, it turns out that you activate a completely different type or set of neural circuits. That the default mode network and the related neural circuits.
Diffuse Mode Thinking
What happens is you stop thinking about it, you relax, you go off for a walk, you take a shower. You’re doing something different. And in the background this default mode network is doing some sort of neural processing on the side. And then what happens is you come back and voila, suddenly the information makes sense. And, in fact, it can suddenly seem so easy that you can’t figure out why you didn’t understand it before. So learning often involves going back and forth between these two different neural modes; focus mode and what I often call diffuse mode which involves those neural resting states.
Meditate
When you’re trying to think about how can I focus more effectively or how can I be in diffuse mode, right, more effectively – can you at will make yourself go into one mode versus another? Well focus mode is totally easy. You just focus and it’s like a flashlight. It’s on. But default mode network, right, that diffuse mode thinking you’ve got to relax into it. It’s very similar to the idea of falling asleep. You can’t command yourself okay, fall asleep now. No, it just doesn’t happen. One of them is focusing. You’re activating patterns. And the other one is activating patterns but they only activate when you don’t focus.
So you have to not be thinking of anything in particular in order to be in the default mode network or the diffuse mode. And it’s really hard to like not think about anything in particular because as soon as you start thinking that I’m not going to think about anything in particular you’re thinking about something in particular. And so it’s a little bit of a challenge sometimes.
One thing that can help enhance focus mode thinking is certain types of meditation. So a mantra type meditation helps build neurocircuitry of focus. Whereas there are more open like mindfulness types of meditation and these very different types of meditation enhance your ability to use the default mode network, the diffuse mode. So you want to be careful about what type of meditation you use because different types of meditation can have an effect on either improving your ability to focus or increasing your ability to be creative. And so different types have different effects.
Take breaks
Exercise is a great way of getting your mind completely off the topic even while you’re sort of pumping a lot of blood and kind of getting your creative juices going. And many organizations do encourage exercise. You don’t necessarily have to take like a half an hour break here and a half an hour break there or something like that. What you want to do is encourage a little bit of you’re working on something and when it starts to feel a little bit old, switch attention to something different. And this kind of just occasional switching on things can help sort of break the task up so that while you’re focusing on the second thing you’re kind of doing a little bit of background processing on the first thing.