学会如何学习学习笔记——1. 3 什么是学习——集中与发散思维

利用集中与发散思维，或者采用一点画家达利所用的方法也行

So, let's take a look at some famous people from history who used their different thinking modes to help them with their problem solving. If you look at that guy right there, he was Salvador Dalí, a very well known Surrealist painter of the 20th century. He was the very definition of a wild and crazy guy. You could see him here with his pet ocelot Babou. Dalí used to have an interesting technique to help him come up with his fantastically creative Surrealist paintings. He'd relax in a chair and let his mind go free, often still vaguely thinking about what he had previously been focusing on. He'd have a key in his hand, dangling it just above the floor, and as he would slip into his dreams falling asleep, the key would fall from his hands and the clatter would wake him up, just in time so he could gather up those diffuse mode connections and ideas in his mind, and off he'd go back into the focus mode bringing with him the new connections he'd made while in the diffuse mode.

Now, you might think, well, you know that's okay for an artist. But what does it have to do with more scientific or mathematical kinds of thinking? Well, if you look down here, this guy was Thomas Edison, one of the most brilliant inventors ever. According to legend, what Edison used to do was he'd sit and relax in his chair, holding ball bearings in his hand. He'd relax away letting his mind run free. Although, it would often noodle back in a much more relaxed way to what he'd been focusing on previously. When Edison would fall asleep, the ball bearings would drop and clatter to the ground just as with Dalí, and it would wake Edison up, and off he'd go with his ideas from the diffuse mode ready to take them into the focus mode and build on them.

So, the bottom line is, 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 weightlifting competition by waiting until the very day before a meet and then spending the 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 neural structure, you need to do a little work every day, gradually allowing yourself to grow a neuro-scaffold to hang your thinking on a little bit, every day, and that's the trick. In summary then, we learned that analogies provide powerful techniques for learning. We learned about how the brain's two different thinking modes focused and diffuse, each helps us learn but in very different ways.

Finally, we learned that learning something difficult can take time. Your brain needs to alternate it's ways of learning as it grapples with and assimilates the new material. Thanks for learning about learning. I'm Barbara Oakley.

让我们来看一些历史上的著名人物，他们利用不同的思维模式来帮助他们解决问题。如果你看那个人，他是萨尔瓦多·达利，20世纪非常著名的超现实主义画家。他是一个狂野和疯狂的家伙的典型代表。你可以在这里看到他和他的宠物豹猫巴布在一起。达利曾经有一个有趣的技巧来帮助他创作出充满创意的超现实主义画作。他会坐在椅子上放松，让他的思维自由流动，通常仍然模糊地思考着他之前专注的事情。他会拿着一把钥匙，让它悬在地板上方，当他进入梦乡入睡时，钥匙会从他的手中滑落，发出咔嗒声把他吵醒，正好可以及时收集到他脑海中那些散漫模式下的连接和想法，然后他会回到专注模式，带着他在散漫模式下建立的新连接回去。

现在，你可能会想，好吧，你知道这对艺术家来说没问题。但是这与更科学或数学类型的思维有什么关系呢？嗯，如果你往下看，这个人是托马斯·爱迪生，有史以来最聪明的发明家之一。根据传说，爱迪生过去常常坐着放松在他的椅子上，手里拿着球轴承。他会放松下来，让他的思维自由流动。尽管它经常会以一种更放松的方式回到他之前专注的事情上。当爱迪生睡着时，球轴承会掉落并发出咔嗒声落到地上，就像达利一样，它会把爱迪生吵醒，然后他会带着来自散漫模式的想法去专注模式并加以发展。

所以，最重要的是，当你学习新东西时，特别是一些稍微困难的东西时，你的大脑需要能够在两种不同的学习模式之间来回切换。这就是帮助你有效学习的方法。你可以把它看作是通过举重来增强力量的一种类比。你永远不会计划等到比赛前一天才开始锻炼，然后整天像疯子一样锻炼身体。我的意思是，事情不会那样发生。为了获得肌肉结构，你需要每天做一些工作，逐渐让你的肌肉生长。同样地，为了建立神经结构，你需要每天做一些工作，逐渐让自己建立一个神经支架来挂住你的思维一点点地成长，这是窍门所在。总之，我们了解到类比提供了强大的学习技巧。我们了解了大脑两种不同思维模式——专注和散漫——如何帮助我们学习，但方式却截然不同。

最后，我们了解到学习困难的东西可能需要时间。当你努力理解和吸收新知识时，你的大脑需要交替使用不同的学习方法。感谢大家对学习的探索。我是芭芭拉·奥克利。

集中与发散思维概论

Welcome to learning how to learn. My name is Terry Sejnowski. Let me introduce you to your brain. First, some brain surgery. We take off the skull and take out the brain. This brain weighs three pounds, but it consumes ten times more energy by weight than the rest of the body, a very expensive organ. It is the most complex device in the known universe. All of your thoughts, your hopes, your fears are in the neurons in this brain. We prize our abilities to do chess and math, but it takes years of practice to acquire these skills. And digital computers are much better at it than we are. It came as a surprise to discover that what we do so well and take for granted, like seeing, hearing, reaching, running, are all much more complex problems than we thought and way beyond the capability of the world's fastest digital computers. What this illustrates is that we are not consciously aware of how our brains work.

Brains evolved to help us navigate complex environments, and most of the heavy lifting is done below our level of consciousness. And we don't need to know how it's done in order to survive. Psychologists who study the unconscious mind have found that influences include thought processes, memory, emotions and motivation. We are only aware of a very small fraction of all of the activity in the brain, so we need to rely on brain imaging techniques to guide us. Here is the activity map of someone's brain who was asked to lie still, at rest, in a brain imaging scanner. On the left is the side view of the brain and on the right is the view from the midline. The colors indicate brain areas whose activities were highly correlated, as shown by the time courses below, color-coded to the brain areas. The blue areas are highly active when the subject interacts with the world, but turn off in a resting state. The red-orange areas are most active in the resting state and are called the default mode network. Other brain areas are also more active when you are resting, and these areas can be further divided into groups of areas that have common patterns of activity. This is a new and intense area of research, and it will take time to sort out all the resting states and their functions.

There are a million billion synapses in your brain where memories are stored. The old view of the brain is that once it matures, the strengths of synapses can be adjusted by learning, but the pattern of connectivity does not change much unless there is brain damage. But now we know that brain connectivity is dynamic and remains so even after it matures. With new optical techniques for imaging single connections between neurons called synapses, we can see constant turnover, with new synapses being formed and others disappearing.

This raises a puzzle. In the face of so much turnover, how do memories stay stable over so many years? This is a picture of one dendritic branch on a neuron which receives inputs from other neurons. The synapses are on the spiny knobs coming off the dendrite. On the top, the dendrite was imaged before learning. The same dendrite is shown below after learning and after sleep. Multiple synapses that are newly formed together on the same branch are indicated by the white arrowheads. You are looking down into the brain of a live animal. This is really a fantastic new technique. Synapses are less than a micron in diameter. In comparison, a human hair is around 20 microns in diameter. This new technique allows us to see how learning changes the structure of the brain with a resolution that is near the limit of light microscopy. This illustrates that, intriguingly, that you are not the same person you were after a night's sleep or even a nap. It is if you went to bed with one brain and woke up with an upgrade. This is a better deal than you can get from Microsoft.

Shakespeare, the great English poet, already knew this. Here is Macbeth lamenting his insomnia. Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, the death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast. Here Shakespeare is making an analogy between knitted clothes and sleep that knits up the loose threads of experience and concerns during the day and weaves them into the tapestry of your life story. You will learn in this first week how to take advantage of your unconscious mind, and also sleep, to make it easier to learn new things and solve problems.

During the lectures you may ask yourself, how does the brain do this? A good place to find out more about your brain is the website brainfacts.org, brainfacts, one word, .org. You will find a wealth of interesting things about brains and behavior, and in particular about learning and memory. I am Terry Sejnowski. Happy learning until we meet again.

欢迎学习如何学习。我是特里·塞吉诺斯基。让我来介绍一下你的大脑。首先，进行一些脑部手术。我们取下头骨并取出大脑。这个大脑重三磅，但它的能量消耗比身体的其他部分高出十倍，是一个非常昂贵的器官。它是已知宇宙中最复杂的设备。你所有的思想、希望和恐惧都在这个大脑中的神经元中。我们珍视我们在下棋和数学方面的能力，但需要多年的实践才能掌握这些技能。而数字计算机在这方面比我们做得更好。令人惊讶地发现，我们所擅长并认为是理所当然的事情，如看、听、伸手、跑步，都比我们想象的要复杂得多，远远超出了世界上最快的数字计算机的能力范围。这表明我们对大脑如何工作的意识是有限的。

大脑进化帮助我们在复杂环境中导航，而大部分繁重的工作都是在我们意识水平以下完成的。我们不需要知道它是如何工作的就能生存下去。研究无意识心理的心理学家发现，影响包括思维过程、记忆、情感和动机。我们只意识到大脑活动中的一小部分，因此我们需要依靠脑成像技术来指导我们。

这是一个人被要求在脑成像扫描仪中保持静止不动时的大脑活动图。左边是大脑的侧视图，右边是从中线看的视角。颜色表示活动高度相关的大脑区域，如下方的时间序列所示，按大脑区域进行彩色编码。蓝色区域在主体与世界互动时非常活跃，但在休息状态下关闭。红色-橙色区域在休息状态下最活跃，被称为默认模式网络。当你休息时，其他大脑区域也更活跃，这些区域可以进一步分为具有共同活动模式的区域组。这是一个新的、激烈的研究领域，需要时间来整理所有的休息状态及其功能。

你的大脑中有一百万亿个突触用于存储记忆。旧的大脑观点认为，一旦它成熟，突触的力量可以通过学习进行调整，但连接模式不会发生太大变化，除非有脑损伤。但现在我们知道大脑连接是动态的，即使在它成熟后也是如此。通过新的光学技术对神经元之间称为突触的单个连接进行成像，我们可以看到持续的变化，新的突触形成而其他的消失。

这引发了一个难题。面对如此多的变化，记忆如何在这么多年里保持稳定？这是一张神经元的一个树突分支的图片，它接收来自其他神经元的输入。突触位于从树突上突出的棘状结节上。在上面，学习前显示了树突的图像。下面显示了学习后和睡眠后的同一树突。在同一分支上新形成的多个突触用白色箭头表示。你正在俯视一只活体动物的大脑。这确实是一种奇妙的新技术。突触直径小于一微米。相比之下，人类的头发大约是20微米直径。这种新技术使我们能够以接近光学显微镜分辨率的清晰度看到学习如何改变大脑的结构。这表明，有趣的是，你在睡了一觉之后甚至小睡了一会儿后都不是同一个人了。就好像你带着一个大脑上床睡觉，醒来时得到了升级一样。这比你可以从微软那里得到的更好。

伟大的英国诗人莎士比亚已经知道这一点了。这是麦克白在哀叹他的失眠症：“睡眠编织了松散的烦恼，是每日生活的休息时刻，劳累工作者的沐浴，受伤心灵的药膏，大自然的第二道菜肴，生命中的主要营养。”在这里莎士比亚将编织的衣服与睡眠进行了类比，睡眠编织着白天经验和担忧的松散线程，并将它们编织成你生活故事的挂毯。在这个第一周里，你将学习如何利用你的无意识心理和睡眠来更容易地学习新事物和解决问题。

在讲座期间，你可以问自己：大脑是如何做到这一点的？了解你的大脑的一个好地方是brainfacts.org网站，brainfacts是一个词，后面跟着.org。你会发现有关大脑和行为的大量信息，特别是关于学习和记忆的信息。我是特里·塞吉诺斯基。祝你学习愉快，直到我们再次见面。