Below are my notes from a book called, The Secret Life Of The Mind: How Your Brain Thinks, Feels, and Decides. It’s not a comprehensive summary of the book, just some things that stood out to me and that I wanted to remember:

Learning and teaching

-One of the best memory techniques is an ancient one known as the “memory palace.” The technique involves vividly picturing things in a specific place inside a house and it helps to make the image emotionally powerful (sexual, violent, or scatological). The reason this works is because our brains naturally evolved to remember things spatially, using imagery. We struggle to remember numbers and lists of names, but not places, such as the location of streets or the inside of buildings. We are good at “situating ourselves in space.”

-The brain is like a “rough surface on which some shapes fit well and other don’t,” not a “blank page on which things are written.” Sometimes learning improves when the teacher (could be a fellow student) is someone who “shares the same conceptual framework.”

-When attempting to solve a problem, it helps to rewrite the question in your own words before trying to solve the problem. This has been shown to improve test results by 100%.

-When teaching young children using “ostensive cues” (direct demonstration, lifting eye-brows, using receiver’s name, directing body toward them) they’re more likely to believe the lesson is complete and accurate. The downside to this is that they will be less likely to explore the subject more on their own. This is especially bad if what was taught was incorrect.

-It’s never too late to learn. Learning is more likely to occur when we are emotionally aroused or when we receive other rewards (monetary, sexual, sweets). This causes a release of dopamine and the release of dopamine while attempting to learn causes the brain to reorganize.

-Teaching helps us consolidate our knowledge. We’re more likely to benefit from our own teaching, and teach more effectively, by employing the following two principles:

• Rehearse and put your knowledge to the test.
• Establish analogies and metaphors—stories that link facts together.

Self-deception

-Experiments have revealed that when the left and right hemispheres of the brain are disconnected, the two sides can’t communicate with one another. When one side of the brain was asked by experimenters to do something, the other side of the brain (not in control of that action) didn’t know why it happened. When asking that side, the patient would make up a reason.

-People under the influence of marijuana may feel that their mental focus or insights have enhance, but a rigorous study revealed that users and non-users have similar attention capacity and have approximately the same problem-solving ability. However, each uses a different part of the brain. Marijuana users activate less of their frontal cortex and parietal, and more of their visual system.

-There is a descent amount of evidence that ancient writing became increasingly introspective over time. This adds credence to a theory in the field of cognitive neuroscience that humans were basically schizophrenics about three-thousand years ago. People behaved as though they were “hearing and obeying voices” which they attributed to “Gods or muses.” They progressively came to realize that these were their own thoughts, rather than coming from somewhere else.