Learning How to Learn

Glossary

Canonical definitions for every term the course defines.

21 terms

Active recall: Bringing an idea back to mind yourself, from memory, rather than reading or rereading it off the page. The direct replacement for rereading and highlighting.
Axon: The single long arm of a neuron. It reaches toward the next neuron in a set of brain-links and delivers the signal that sparks across the synapse.
Brain-links: Oakley's term for a set of neurons that have become a team through repeated sparks across their synapses. Learning something new means building a new set or strengthening an existing one.
Chunk: The neuroscience term for a strong set of brain-links: pieces of information or skill that fire as one connected unit. Same object this course calls a brain-link, described by a different research tradition.
Deliberate practice: Practice aimed at the part of a skill you have not yet mastered, rather than material you can already do easily. Its opposite is lazy learning, which feels productive and builds nothing new.
Dendrite: One of the legs of a neuron. Dendrites receive signals through their dendritic spines and pass them toward the cell body.
Dendritic spine: A small knobbly toe sticking out of a dendrite. It forms the receiving side of a synaptic connection, and it physically enlarges with practice.
Diffuse mode: A relaxed mental state with attention on nothing in particular, using broad and largely different brain regions than focused mode. It makes wide connections between ideas and is where insight typically surfaces, but it can only recombine material focused mode has already loaded.
Diffuse mode activator: An activity that releases attention and lets diffuse mode start: sleep, showering, walking, exercise, riding as a passenger, wordless music. Oakley's shorthand is "the bed, the bath, and the bus".
Focused mode: Deliberate attention aimed at one thing, activating task-specific brain regions. The only mode that can load new material, but it mostly runs along connections already laid down.
Illusion of competence: The feeling that you know material well when no real brain-link has actually formed, typically from mistaking recognition of the page for recall from memory.
Interleaving: Practicing which technique or approach to use, by mixing different problem types together, rather than repeating one kind of problem in a row. Builds the second link a skill needs: knowing when to reach for it, not just how.
Metaphor: A comparison between something familiar and something new, used to connect new learning to a brain-link you already have. Breaks down at some level of detail, and that's expected; throw it away and reach for another when it does.
MOOC (Massive Open Online Course): A university-style course delivered online at unlimited scale. Learning How to Learn, by Oakley and Sejnowski, is the most-enrolled example.
Neural reuse theory: The idea that learning something new works partly by reusing brain-links already built for something else, rather than always growing a link from nothing. Explains why a good metaphor can feel like instant understanding.
Neuron: A cell that carries electrical signals, and the building block of the brain. The chain of signals running through connected neurons is what a thought physically is.
Neuroplasticity: The fact that the connections in your brain can change and grow throughout life. Neurons are mouldable like clay, which is why current ability at a subject is not fixed.
Neuroscience: The scientific study of the brain and nervous system, including the brain-scanning work that identified the focused and diffuse attention networks.
Recall: Producing information yourself, from memory, with nothing in front of you. The only one of recall and recognition that means a brain-link actually exists.
Recognition: Realizing something is familiar when you encounter it again, as when rereading a page. Fast and easy, but no evidence on its own that a brain-link exists.
Synapse: The very narrow gap between one neuron's axon and the next neuron's dendritic spine. The signal jumps across it as a spark, and the gap's structure grows stronger with repeated use.