Practice instead. Learning means being receiving information and keeping it stored as knowledge. It’s a really useful skill to have. Practicing, on the other hand, is finding ways to apply knowledge until you get good at it. It’s very easy to sit back and learn. Play some background music while doing homework. Listen to a […]
The Easy Thing About Hard Things
Iowa State researchers conducted a study where they took three groups of students and gave them a list of words to remember. Afterward, a group either recited the words immediate, after 15 seconds of rehearsal, or after 15 seconds of doing math problems. Unsurprisingly, the average scores followed this same order when ranked highest to […]
Intuition Can Lead You Astray
In a hospital where babies are being born and put into separate lines, do any of these lines of boys and girls seem less likely than the others?: BBBGGG GGGGGG BGGBGB Intuitively it would appear that the first one seems less likely and certainly the second one is very unlikely. The third one seems as […]
The Information Dilemma
I remember taking a test to fill out all the capitals of the U.S. You probably had to do that a while ago too. But to be quite honest, I must have done something wrong, because I forgot. And now when I’m in a situation where I need to know the capital of a state, […]
Learning To Not Be Educated
“When it’s work, [people] try to figure out how to do less. When it’s art, they try to figure out how to do more” Seth Godin An interesting study was taken whereby a large group of community college students were taken to be testing on their math skills. The question? Which of the following is […]