Once upon a time, I was trying to make the case to an eleven-year-old that she would need to learn basic skills like doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, and blow-drying her own hair.
“When you’re eighteen, you’ll be on your own,” I said.
“Well then, can’t I just learn it all then?” she asked.
Read MoreI was the last customer at a favorite cafe. While an employee swept the floor and I packed up to go shortly before closing time, we struck up a conversation. She confessed that she has a tendency to procrastinate.
“What are you procrastinating about?” I asked.
“Everything,” she replied.
She said that she had just transferred to a new college and was anxious about her tendency to procrastinate. She’s always been this way and she’s not sure how to change.
Read MoreThis American Life, the long-running public radio show, had a great piece about people who didn’t realize until adulthood that they believed something that wasn’t true.
One woman, having seen “X-ING” signs on crosswalks, thought “x-ing” was a word, pronounced “zing.”
Another didn’t know that you could have variety in your meals — her family had chicken every single night.
We all have beliefs and conventions that we consider normal and correct, and we will defend them if challenged. However, it makes sense to evaluate whether our ways are still working for us.
Read MoreA fellow math teacher presented an intriguing brain-teaser involving coins. I think of myself as someone who enjoys problem-solving, so I gave it a whirl.
Solving the problem took several hours of work over the course of a couple of weeks, including some time spent talking it through with my husband. There was some eccentric behavior on my part, like staring off into space with a frown and sitting on a park bench manipulating a lap full of coins. I found myself in some tricky blind alleys that required challenging mental three-point turns to get out of them. I thought I had the solution, but then discovered that I didn’t; I thought my husband had figured it out, but he hadn’t; then I went for a walk and finally got there.
Read MoreThe human brain is extraordinarily good at optimization.
You do something a few times, and your brain goes, “Okay, I get it — we’re doing it this way from now on.” The neural pathways are strengthened so that next time, it takes less effort to get the same result. Meanwhile, unused pathways are ignored, like decommissioned highways.
Our nervous system facilitates and streamlines our learning. It gives us the so-called “muscle memory” we rely on when it comes to developing complex skills like learning a musical instrument, typing, or skateboarding. It allows us to chunk smaller pieces of information together, like recipes, times tables, and addresses, in order to memorize them.
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