学会如何学习学习笔记——3. 1 拖延症与记忆——治疗拖延症

拖延症与记忆

本单元我们将探讨两个有紧密联系的概念，即拖延症与记忆。在长期记忆里创建牢固的组块（短时记忆里可轻松获得的组块）比较耗时。因此学习应对拖延症相当重要。最后我们将探讨一些最佳的、进入你大脑中最强大长期记忆系统的方法。

​​​​​​​拖延症与记忆概论

This week, we're going to be talking about two seemingly different ideas: procrastination and memory. But the two topics are intimately related, why? Because building solid chunks in long-term memory, chunks that are easily accessible by your short term memory takes time. It's not the kind of thing you want to be putting off until the last minute. You already have one good tool for procrastination, the pomodoro, that powerful 25 minute concentrated period of energized focus. This week, we're going to fill you in with more information about how procrastination happens and simple ways to tackle it, and this is key, ways that don't take much will power. Then we'll move on to talking about some of the best ways to access your brain's most powerful long-term memory systems. I'm Barbara Oakley, thanks for learning how to learn.

本周，我们将讨论两个看似不同的想法：拖延和记忆。但是这两个主题密切相关，为什么？因为在长期记忆中建立坚实的块，这些块可以轻松地被短期记忆访问需要时间。这不是你想推迟到最后一分钟的事情。你已经有一个很好的工具来拖延，番茄工作法，那是一个强大而集中的25分钟时间段，让你充满活力和专注力。本周，我们将向您提供更多关于拖延发生的原因以及简单的应对方法的信息，这是关键，不需要太多意志力的方法。然后我们会谈到一些最好的方法来访问你大脑最强大的长期记忆系统。我是芭芭拉·奥克利，感谢学习如何学习。

治疗拖延症，这比你想象的更简单也更有价值

Arsenic is incredibly toxic. For centuries, until modern methods of detection were discovered, murderers found it to be a very popular substance. So, you can imagine the shock at the 48th meeting of the German Association of Arts and Sciences in 1875 when two men sat in the front of the audience and downed more than double a deadly dose of arsenic. The next day, the men were back at the conference smiling and healthy. How is it possible to take something so bad for you and stay alive, and even look healthy despite the damage being done at a microscopic level to your body? The answer has an uncanny relationship to procrastination. That's what we're going to be talking about in the next few videos. You've already learned one handy tool to help you with procrastination, the pomodoro, that 25-minute period of uninterrupted focus followed by a bit of relaxation.

This week, we're going to learn more, understanding a little about the cognitive psychology of procrastination. Just like understanding the chemistry of poison can help us develop healthy preventatives. In these videos, I'm going to teach you the lazy person's approach to tackling procrastination. This means you'll be learning about your inner zombies, the routine habitual responses your brain falls into as a result of specific cues. These zombie responses are often focused on making the here and now better. As you'll see, you can trick some of these zombies into helping you fend off procrastination when you need to, although not all procrastination is bad. Even if you're pretty good already in handling procrastination, you'll learn some helpful insights here that can allow you to better prioritize your learning. The reason that learning to avoid procrastination is so important is that good learning is a bit by bit activity. You want to avoid cramming, which doesn't build solid neural structures, by putting the same amount of time into your learning. But spacing that learning out by starting earlier, you'll learn better.

First things first, unlike procrastination which is easy to fall into, willpower is hard to come by. It uses a lot of neural resources. You shouldn't waste willpower on fending off procrastination except when absolutely necessary. Best of all, as you'll see, you don't need to. If you'll remember, we procrastinate about things that make us feel a little bit uncomfortable. You think about something you don't particularly like, and the pain centers of your brain light up. So, you shift and narrow your focus of attention to something more enjoyable. This causes you to feel better at least temporarily. But sadly, the long-term effects of habitual avoidance can be nasty. When you put off your studies, it can become even more painful to think about studying it. You can choke on tests because you haven't laid the firm neural foundations you need to feel comfortable with the material.

Procrastination can be a single, monumentally, important keystone bad habit, a habit, in other words, that influences many important areas of your life. If you improve your abilities in this area, many other positive changes will gradually begin to unfold. Procrastination shares features with addiction. It offers temporary excitement and relief from sometimes boring reality. It's easy to fool yourself, for example, into thinking that the best use of any given moment is surfing the web for information instead of actually reading the textbook or doing the assigned problems. You'll start to tell yourself stories. For example, you might tell yourself that organic chemistry requires spacial reasoning, your weakness. So, of course, you're doing very poorly at it. You devise irrational excuses that sound superficially reasonable like, if I study too far ahead of the test, I'll forget the material. If you're troubled by procrastination, you may even start telling yourself that procrastination is an innate unchangeable characteristic. After all, if procrastination were easily fixable, wouldn't you have fixed it by now? The higher you go in your studies however, the more important it is to take control of procrastination. Habits that worked in earlier years can turn around and bite you. What I'll show you in these next few videos is how you can become a master of your habit. You should be making the decisions, not your well-meaning but unthinking zombies, your habits. As you'll see, the strategies for dealing with procrastination are simple. It's just that sometimes they aren't intuitively obvious.

So, let's return to that story that began this video. The arsenic eaters started with tiny doses of arsenic. In tiny doses, arsenic doesn't seem harmful. You can even build up an immunity to its effects. This can allow you to take larger doses and look healthy even as the poison is slowly increasing your risk of cancer and ravaging your organs. In a similar way, procrastinators put off just that one little thing. They do it again and again, gradually growing used to it. They can even look healthy, but the long-term effects not so good. Thanks for learning how to learn.

砷的毒性极强。几个世纪以来，直到现代检测方法被发现之前，杀人犯发现砷是一种非常流行的物质。因此，你可以想象1875年德国艺术与科学协会第48次会议上的震惊一幕：两个男人坐在观众席前，喝下了两倍于致命剂量的砷。第二天，这两个男人又回到会议上，面带微笑，看起来很健康。怎么可能摄入如此有害的物质却还活着，甚至看起来还很健康，尽管在微观层面上你的身体已经受到了损害？答案与拖延有着不可思议的关系。这就是我们接下来几段视频要讨论的内容。你已经学会了一种有用的工具来帮助你克服拖延症，那就是番茄工作法，即25分钟不间断地专注于一项任务，然后稍作休息。

本周，我们将学习更多关于拖延的认知心理学知识。就像理解毒药的化学性质可以帮助我们开发健康的预防措施一样。在这些视频中，我将教你一个懒人的方法来应对拖延症。这意味着你将了解你内心的僵尸，也就是你的大脑由于特定线索而陷入的常规习惯性反应。这些僵尸反应通常集中在让现在和这里变得更好。正如你将看到的，当你需要时，你可以欺骗其中一些僵尸来帮助你击退拖延症，尽管并非所有的拖延都是坏事。即使你已经很擅长处理拖延症了，你仍然可以从中获得一些有益的启示，让你更好地优先安排你的学习。学会避免拖延之所以如此重要，是因为良好的学习是一个逐步积累的过程。你不想通过临时抱佛脚来建立坚实的神经网络结构，而是希望通过在学习上投入相同的时间来实现这一目标。但是通过提前开始学习并将学习分散开来，你会学得更好。

首先要注意的是，与容易陷入拖延不同，意志力很难获得。它消耗大量的神经资源。除非有必要，否则你不应该浪费意志力来抵御拖延症。最重要的是，正如你将看到的，你不需要这样做。如果你还记得的话，我们会拖延那些让我们感到有点不舒服的事情。当你想到你不特别喜欢的事情时，你大脑的痛苦中心就会亮起来。因此，你会转移注意力并缩小关注范围，转而关注更令人愉快的事情。这至少会让你暂时感觉更好。但遗憾的是，习惯性回避的长期影响可能是可怕的。当你推迟学习时，再次考虑学习可能会变得更加痛苦。你可能会在考试中表现不佳，因为你还没有建立起对材料感到舒适的坚实神经网络基础。

拖延症可能是一个极其重要的、具有重大影响的恶习，换句话说，这个习惯会影响你生活中的许多重要领域。如果你在这方面提高自己的能力，许多其他积极的变化将逐渐开始展现。拖延症与成瘾有一些相似之处。它提供了暂时的兴奋和对有时无聊的现实的一种解脱。例如，很容易欺骗自己认为在任何给定的时刻最好的做法是浏览网络获取信息，而不是实际阅读教科书或做指定的习题。你会开始给自己编故事。例如，你可能会告诉自己有机化学需要空间推理，这是你的弱点。所以，当然，你在这方面做得很差。你会编造一些表面上看似合理但实际上不合理的借口，比如“如果我在考试前学得太远了，我会忘记材料”。如果你被拖延症困扰，你甚至会开始告诉自己拖延是一种天生的、不可改变的特征。毕竟，如果拖延症容易解决的话，难道你现在还没有解决吗？然而，随着你学习的深入，控制拖延变得越来越重要。早年有效的习惯可能会反过来咬你一口。在接下来的几个视频中，我将向你展示如何成为自己习惯的主人。你应该做出决定，而不是让你那些善意但缺乏思考的习惯左右你的行为。正如你将看到的，应对拖延的策略很简单。只是有时候它们并不直观明显。

让我们回到这个故事的起点。那些吃砷的人从微小的剂量开始摄入砷。在微小的剂量下，砷似乎没有危害。你甚至可以对其产生免疫力。这可以让你摄入更大的剂量，看起来健康，即使毒药正在慢慢增加患癌症的风险并损害你的器官。类似地，拖延者只是推迟那一件小事。他们一次又一次地这样做，逐渐习惯了它。他们甚至可以看起来很健康，但长期影响却不太好。感谢学习如何学习。