Learning How to Learn

June 8, 2026

Here are my condensed notes (WIP) on the classic Coursera course about learning how to learn. The working repository is here.

Module 1, Abridged

Your brain has two modes of thinking, focused and diffuse.
Focused thinking is defined by sustained effort and attention on something external.
Diffuse thinking is basically everything that happens when you’re not focused on something.
- The diffuse mode is associated with neural resting states, such as sleep, or restful wakefulness.
  - Taking a shower, going on a walk, making a cup of tea – anything that is not cognitively demanding, that allows your mind to wander.
Solving difficult problems and learning new things can be improved by the alternation between these two states of thinking. Focused thinking to grasp a new concept / understand a problem, diffuse to process the information / problem in the background, and finally focused again to finalize the details of a solution or recall the information in a different setting.

When we procrastinate, studies show that what’s happening is thinking about the task triggers the part of the brain associated with feeling pain – the insular cortex.
Therefore, procrastination is conditioned avoidance. What happens is exactly as follows:

You observe the need to do something that you don’t want to do, such as fulfill some obligation – cue
You think some thought associated with that activity that triggers a negative thought / emotion.
In order to avoid the negative feeling, you shift your attention elsewhere, short circuiting the process of completing that task.
As a result, the negative stimuli is removed, leading to a positive feeling.

As such, you become conditioned to avoid certain tasks / activities.
The way to deal with procrastination is to make it easy to get started. The pomodoro technique is useful for this, because it means that effort is constrained to 25 minutes, which makes the task tolerable.
And research suggests that once we get started, the negative feeling associated with the activity goes away, and we are able to complete the task. - To put my own little spin on things – if you feel like procrastinating, make it easy to start. Schedule a single pomodoro session, with the understanding that if you want to stop after, you can. This way, you’ll overcome the initial resistance, and detrain the condition negative feeling.

The pomodoro technique (for studying) consists of:
- A 25 minute study session, where you turn off all distractions and focus intently on the current task
- 2-5 minutes of diffuse recall / consolidation, where you write down what you’ve just learned
  - Do not look at your notes, if possible
- 2-3 minutes of restful wakefulness, where you do some non-demanding task which does not require focus.
  - Go on a walk, make some tea, stare out the window, tidy up a bit, take a shower.
  - Most importantly, do not pick up your phone, as it interferes with the diffuse mode processing that occurs in the background as you subconsciously process the material.
It’s helpful to not view the 4 - 8 minutes of recall and wakefulness as a free-for-all break. You’re still studying, just in a different sort of way.

Working memory is your mental scratchpad
- Localized to your prefrontal cortex
- You have to keep re-upping what’s in your working memory by repeating it.
Long term memory is your mental warehouse
- Stored throughout the entire brain
- There can be so many memories that they literally bury each other and are hard to recall.
To move something from working into long term memory, you should be practicing recall.
- First, repeat