Dark time--two important habits of efficient learning

Reprinted from: http://mindhacks.cn/2009/12/20/dark-time/

If you have a computer, you put a system on it and leave it there all day, do you think this computer is actually used? No. Because the CPU is running idle processes all day. Running an idle process is also a day, and the program that runs the big data calculation is one day, and for the same day on the CPU, the value is completely different.

So is the brain.

The person who is good at using the thinking time can be infinitely more time than others, thus can live many years in actual sense than others. We often hear that the word "mental age", people who think a lot, tend to have a greater mental age. Someone with 10 years to understand a reason, because they are passive understanding-only in the reality hit his face when the pain, after the pain is not remember always remind himself, the results quickly changed the brain after the second encounter with the same hole when the time has been forgotten once fell over, like this efficiency, Unless every day falls in the pit, otherwise the efficiency of forgetting is always greater than the loss of long memory. People who are good at thinking time can remind themselves of important things and turn temporary memories into hard-coded behavior habits.

Everyone's watch goes as fast, but everyone's life is not. To measure how many years a person lives, it should be calculated by thinking time. To cite an extreme example, if a person is born to stay in a specially constructed sterile protection room for him, without social intercourse, without knowledge acquisition, spent 18 years, you will think he is an adult?

Think that time is equal to everyone is an illusion, think others one day, I also someday, in fact, is not the case at all. If you are learning a major, you use the number of days you put into the measurement, it is easy to create an illusion, think that a lot of time, but in fact, the "time to invest" in itself is absurd, the actual investment is the product of time and efficiency. You can "put" a lot of time on one thing, but find that there is no progress, because you do not spend all day doing what you want to do, what you want to learn is resident in your brain, always giving it the highest priority. When you are walking, when you are eating, when you dream, it is this thing that hoping at, your CPU is always assigned to it, this time your thinking time is used to the extreme, the time you put into really equals the actual elapsed time, because your CPU is full.

If you have a summary of the habit, you spend a period of time after summing up the amount of time invested in such fields, it is recommended that you do not roughly calculate how many days after work to pick up the book to look over, because you may find that the book is often turned, but the understanding is not much deeper, the surface spent a lot of time, the benefits are Because reading and remembering things in the book is only memory, and does not involve reasoning, only by reasoning to understand a thing deeply, see others can not see the place, this part of the process of reasoning is your thinking time, but also occupy a significant proportion of the life of the " Dark Time ", you walk, buy vegetables, wash your hands , take the bus, go shopping, travel, eat, sleep, all these times can become "dark time", you can make full use of these time to think, ruminant and digest what you usually read and see, so that your understanding can be divorced from the level of the scripted. This may seem trivial, but over time it will have a huge effect.

Can make full use of the dark time of the person will be more than a large chunk of life, you may find that such people seem to play no less than you, see no more than you, but somehow is more than you go farther. For example, I often find some foreign cattle why not only learn, even the "amateur" play the East are also very good, not a bit amateur (last time in "How We Decide" to see a cow in Stanford, theoretical physics PhD, but also the top six players in the World Poker Contest, So far the jackpot has taken more than 6 million knives), and you wonder, where in the world did these guys come in to be able to excel in more than one area ?

Programmers know that task switching takes a lot of extra expense, and in layman's terms, you first need to save the current context so that you can switch back smoothly the next time, and then load the context of the target task. If a system keeps moving back and forth between multiple tasks, it can take a lot of time to Daoteng on the context switch, virtually wasting a lot of time.

In contrast, if only one task is done, there is no such loss. That's why people who focus on time use much more efficiently than people who don't focus. The dark time of the task switch seems to be very low, even many people think that "multitasking" is a good thing (sometimes it is), but the accumulation of time will be found that the cost of switching more and more.

In addition, the brain must have a certain amount of time to "warm up" when it starts a task, and this time varies from person to person and can be changed by practice. For example, you read a book, suddenly feel a bit bored, can't help open the browser, 10 minutes later you want to continue to read, but to revert to the ideal state, but need a period of time to concentrate on the memory of the relevant knowledge all activated, so as to enter the "state", Because after you've been on the grid for 10 minutes, these memories have been suppressed. If this "warm-up" state requires a quarter of an hour, then seemingly 10 minutes of surfing the internet actually takes 25 minutes.

If the example of reading is not vivid enough, there is a better example for programmers: You write a program that is high, and you suddenly get called to open a meeting and write half of the code there. How long will it take you to get back into the state when you're done? Or, you are debugging the program, you have spent 20 minutes of the bug may be related to the code to understand the back and forth, the heart built a rough map, just then, you are called to open a meeting (:D), after the meeting will come back, imagine, It's going to take some time to think about what you just figured out.

The ability to get into the state quickly can be exercised, which, according to my personal experience, can be reduced to at least 3-5 minutes. But it is hard to achieve it in such a short time to be fully in state. The so-called fully-entered state, for example: you read a 3-hour book, or debugging a half-hour program, is often full of related things, all this knowledge is active, in other words, all the relevant memory neural network in your brain is activated, to achieve such a forget the time of the passage of the "immersion" State (psychologically called "streaming experience"), not three or two minutes of things. And once this state is destroyed, the efficiency of the intangible will be greatly compromised. This is why I always tend to create chunks of time to read important things, because it helps to "immerse" in it, so that new knowledge can be fully integrated with the various existing knowledge in the brain, which is very helpful for deep memory.

To take full advantage of dark time, not only to be able to enter the state quickly, another important habit is to keep the state for how long (mental energy). The Psychology of invention in the mathematical Field has an introduction to the thinking habits of Poincaré, very representative. Poincaré often go to the seaside on vacation or walk on the road in the mind to think about mathematical problems, many times the answer in these moments suddenly flashed. Although I and Poincaré are unable to compare, but often also on the road to come up with the answer, this is really a pleasant experience.

Being able to quickly get into focus and be able to stay focused for a long time is the two most important habit of effective learning.

Many people have this experience (including myself), after work, to deal with things a lot more, not like in the campus, the environment is simple, life simple, can do a thing without distractions to be disturbed. The post-work situation is that the first thing you need to deal with is a lot of things that need to be changed from time to time, and even if you can prioritize tasks, it's hard to think of something else that's not done in the mind when you do one thing, because the unfinished business will leave a "Hidden process", sending a message from time to time to remind you of the interruption of what you are doing.

So here comes the last efficient habit: anti-jamming. Only with super-strong anti-jamming ability, can effectively use the above mentioned in the various dark time. Anti-jamming ability is also can be practiced out, on the undergraduate that will often ride, so I often take this tome in the car to see, sit and watch or stand to see, it turns out that in a disturbed environment reading is very exercise concentration ability of a method: D In addition, the frequent use of various fragments of time to read and think, to quickly focus attention and to maintain attention is very helpful. Remember a long time ago, toplanguage on the use of "toilet time" with interest, including a small bookcase in the bathroom. PS: On this point, I do not agree with the original, at this time should be "Quick" O (∩_∩) o ha! ）

From for notes (Wiz)

Dark time--two important habits of efficient learning