Intelligent Attitudes (Part 2)

This is the second of several parts on attitudes that will put more information in your brain and keep it there. These tips are meant to be applied in all areas of life, so that maximal learning happens on every front, not just the academic ones.
The first part of Intelligent Attitudes lists tips 1 and [...]

Intelligent Attitudes (Part 1)

This will be the first of three (or four) parts on attitudes that will help you learn more in all areas of your life. Not only are these tips are useful in an academic sense, they are even more useful for learning as a whole.
1) Be humble in knowledge
No matter how much you know in [...]

A free university / college education

If you share a love of free learning – with no cost or boundaries – here is a wonderful resource from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT):
MIT OpenCourseWare
MIT has graciously uploaded course lectures with topics ranging from astrophysics to feminist political thought.
As I love the idea of independent learning, content from one of the world’s [...]

Staying healthy to stay focused

My nose is a torrent, my head is a pressure-cooker and my lymph nodes are a series of warzones.
Maybe it goes without saying, but I haven’t gotten much studying in today.
From an experiential point of view, we know that when we over-stress our body — through studying, physical exertion, emotional tumult, etc. — our body [...]

Dedication: Screw the naysayers

There is a unique way of thinking that dedicated people have. In the same vein, there is an all too common way of thinking that undedicated people have. Here are some things I’ve heard over the past month on the topic of studying:

No one needs to study for a week for an exam.
I don’t want [...]

Getting yourself to commit

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help [...]

Finding flow in your work

Yesturday, I had the pleasure of leading a discussion on ‘how to live in the present moment’ with some lovely ladies at a Goal-Oriented Living Club meeting (you will find this post on the club’s website as well). This post covers the some salient points of the discussion (of those that I remembered or wrote [...]

The Monotillation of Traxoline

Brad Hoge at the HUNBlog wrote a very poignant post regarding the problems that can come about through lecturing and test making; in this post he makes reference to the monotillation of traxoline: in this post he floods you with jargon from an imaginary field, then quizzes you on the same.
I’ll give you an example [...]

You can remember everything

… Almost.
More and more, just from experience and from learning about cognitive psychology, I’ve found that we can remember much more that we thought. Even seemingly lost facts, places, faces, etc. can be found.
How can we perform such amazing feats? Through associative memory. (Those of you with some psychology background may not be too surprised.) [...]

A new memory philosophy for a new year

Toward the end of last semester I’ve come across a different way of thinking about memory. It comes from an audio program from Vera Birkenbihl called Memory Optimizer.
She describes memory as construction: when you attempt to place a fact – say someone’s name – in your brain, you must first construct the idea of that [...]