20 Preliminaries
For the student, be aware thatyour attitude matters!As noted in previous sections,caringis
an essential component of successful learning because you haveto attachvalueto the process
in order to get your amygdala to do its job. However, you can domuch more. You can see
howmanyaspects of learning can be enhanced through the simple expedient of making it a
positive experience! Working in groups isfun, and you learn more when you’re having fun
(or quavering in abject fear, or in an interesting mix of the two). Attending an interesting
lecture is fun, and you’ll retain more than average. Participation is fun, especially if you are
“rewarded” in some way that makes a moment or two special to you,and you’ll remember
more of what goes on.From all of these little factoids (presented in a way that I’m hoping helps you to build at least
the beginnings of a working conceptual model of your own brain) I’mhoping that you are coming
to realize thatall of this is at least partially under your control!Even if your instructor is scary or
boring, the material at first glance seems dry and meaningless, andso on – all the negative-neutral
things that make learning difficult,youcan decide to make it fun and exciting,youcan ferret out
the meaning,youcan adopt study strategies that focus on the formation of cognitive maps and
organizing structuresfirstandthenon applications, rehearsal, factoids, and so on,youcan learn to
study right before bed, get enough sleep, become aware of your brain’s learning biorhythms.
Finally, you can learn toincrease your functional learning capabilitiesby asignificantamount.
Solving puzzles, playing mental games, doing crossword puzzles or sudoku, working homework prob-
lems, writing papers, arguing and discussing, just plainthinkingabout difficult subjects and problems
even when you don’thaveto all increase your active intelligence in initially small but cumulative
ways. You too can increase the size of your hippocampus, learn to engage your amygdala bychoosing
in a self-actualized way what you value and learning to discipline your emotions accordingly, and
create more conceptual maps within your brain that can be sharedas components across the various
things you wish to learn. The more you know aboutanything, the easier it is to learneverything
and vice versa! This is the pure biology underlying the value of the liberal arts education.
Use your whole brain, exercise it often, don’t think that you “just”need math and not spatial
relations, visualization, verbal skills, a knowledge of history, a memory of performing experiments
with your hands or mind or both – you need it all! Remember, just as is the case with physical
exercise (which you should get plenty of),mentalexercise gradually makes you mentally stronger,
so that you can eventually do easily things that at first appear insurmountably difficult. You can
learn to learnthree to ten times as fastas you did in high school, to have more fun while doing it,
and to gain tremendous reasoning capabilities along the way just bytryingto learn to learn more
efficiently instead of continuing to use learning strategies that worked (possibly indifferently) back
in elementary and high school.
The next section, at long last, will make a very specific set of suggestions foronevery good way
to study physics (or nearly anything else) in a way that maximally takes advantage of your own
volitional biology to make learning as efficient and pleasant as it is possible to be.
How to Do Your Homework Effectively
By now in your academic career (and given the information above) it should be very apparent just
where homework exists in the grand scheme of (learning) things. Ideally, you attend a class where
a warm and attentive professor clearly explains some abstruse concept and a whole raft of facts in
some moderately interactive way that encourages engagement and “being earnest”. Alas, there are
too manyfacts to fit in short term/immediate memory andtoo little timeto move most of them
through into long term/working memory before finishing with one andmoving on to the next one.
The material may appear to be boring and random so that it is difficult to pay full attention to the
patternsbeing communicated and remain emotionally enthusiastic all the while tohelp the process