Blobification

They say that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks, but I have found that as I get older, learning has become easier. For one thing, I have a lot more things to link things to- a lot of “base blobs”, I guess. A lot of things are manifestations of ideas I have seen. Other things are rearrangements of blobs I have seen- thus being exposed to them allow me to see the gist- the core blobs- and also to strengthen the imprint/storage of the blobs. But more importantly, I have developed a much better understanding of the brain and know now how to learn optimally. 

For example, let’s say I want to learn Econ. What would be my plan? Well, let’s say I’m writing a plan for my future kid. That makes it easier to imagine and thus create an automatic response/momentum. It triggers a feeling because it’s another person. This was the reason why I used to adopt the idea of Jesus- to be able to externalize a part of me into a believable otherness that I could talk to and avoid the paralysis of not having a criteria to select an optimal explanation (a gradient to do gradient descent, ha ha).

OF course, the first step is to have an overview of the subject. You should use Wikipedia, table of contents, browse book- just window shop the subject for a bit to see what it is about. Then read and watch popular books/videos- layman stuffs for intuition. Stories are preferred, but the ideal materials are arguments. It’s best when stories are presented as evidence supporting some theory/arguments. The argument create an organic way of linking different things- unlike the artificial links created by the memory palace or the journey method. The argument, just like Jesus and my imagination of you, are also “auto trigger”, they will usually turn on a momentum. I guess we are wired to respond to conversations with others- dialectic anyone? 

To learn a concept, say “elasticity”, “Monroe doctrine”, or a fact about a person, look it up to read relevant facts, other manifestations, examples, usage, videos and arguments,  about it to turn it into blob and also to link it to other blob. Otherwise, it is just a word. The content of learning are the blobs, not he words. What I often call intuition is also a blob. What I want to get is the right blob. To find the right blobs, I also need to intersect the blobs- thus exposing myself to different manifestations of the same thing. Furthermore, I also need to convince my brain that the fact, the details, are worth remembering. If I cannot use emotions (evoking emotions or using an anchored sense, such as music, to store and evoke memory is an interesting topic I should explore more in future posts), then I should use repetition. BUt pure repetition does not do much, because the brain gets habituated and does not pay attention upon the second repetition- it just spaces out and does not perceive everything. So intersectional repetition/varied repetition is better. It is the same as learning natural language. You hear the same phrase spoken in many different contexts. Imagine the concept is an idol you like and stalk it. Read up on gossips about it. Don’t read books from beginning till end, but rather, follow ideas across books. Chase ideas instead of books. 

For math, this “blobification” is even more important. Concepts in math are often given without any motivation. Note that motivation and intuition are two different things though. So when you learn a concept, you need to get both motivation and intuition. You need to find some motivation: a place to start is by looking to see how the concept was develop historically. Another way is by seeing how it is used in proofs. A method of learning is find the key theorems in each book and learn backward from there. That is, imagine the goal is to prove these theorems, see how the concepts developed were useful for that purpose. Then everything is linked by these theorems. Everything is developed for the sole purpose of solving these theorems.  

For intuition, one needs to compute and see examples, especially of usages. thus in learning a concept, you can skip even writing down definitions. All need you is to work out examples to identify the blobs. The best way to learn is to collect good examples. A few good key examples can be a great source in intuition to refer to when learning various different things. That is why often when one is goo at one domain/topic, that helps to excel at other domains, because one can transfer intuition across domains by drawing analogies.