Category: Techniques

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Study skills

I’ve been listening to an audiobook called “Make It Stick” by Peter C. Brown et al. In the past, I’ve come across to references to this work on educational methodologies and underlying psychological principles in my work as a university professor. I even recorded a video note to my students on the so-called curve of forgetting (see below). This time, I stumbled upon a review of this book in the “Perpetual Chess” podcast and decided to listen to the entire thing. It certainly doesn’t disappoint in terms of the academic soundness of the presented ideas and a good mix of psychological principles and practical takeaways. As I listen to it, I am constantly tempted to ask my daughter to listen to some parts that relate to study skills in the hopes that she would be able to use these techniques for herself. I actually did so the other day and, in the spirit of what is argued in the book, even asked her to summarize what she learned in her own words. I probably used up quite a bit of my parenting credit with her, as she obliged. I am not sure if that was in any way productive, but for what it’s worth, here is my own summary of that part (advice for students) that we listened to together:

  1. Embrace the fact that effective learning is challenging. Self-quizzing as the main study technique is very effective.
  2. Practice, i.e. retrieving the learned information from memory, is most effective if it is spaced in time and interleaved. Spacing means that instead of long continuous practice sessions that immediately follow the introduction of the new material, we should allow some between the sessions in order to some amount of forgetting to take place. The effort of trying to recall the information makes it stick better. Interleaving means that several topics/subjects/skills are better studied together, rather than in blocks of similar examples/problems. This approach models real-life situations, where identification of the types of problems is necessary. Spacing and interleaving are so called “desirable difficulties“, and they subjectively do not feel as effective as massed practice. One needs to “trust the system”, though, to benefit from it.
  3. Elaboration is an effective technique for reflecting on the learned material. It means formulating the concepts in your own words and using analogies with already-familiar concepts (e.g., warming your hands on a cup of coffee as an example of thermal conduction).

One thing I noticed as a result of this exercise is that my “spaced repetition” video needs a footnote that it is not re-reading of the material that is beneficial, but self-quizzing of it.

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More on flow and photography

I noticed some time ago that photography, which started for me as a hobby, rapidly lost it’s appeal when I began treating it as a business. This phenomenon is not unique to me, of course. Many photographers say that becoming a pro is a sure way to kill a perfectly fine hobby. It is not surprising either, since any job, no matter how fun it is, has some dreadful elements, buy definition of a job. These are things like deadlines and, more generally, the obligation to meet external expectations.

Lately, I’ve been listening to an audiobook called “Flow: living at the peak of your abilities” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which is a collection of audio recordings of his lectures or seminars. It is not to be confused with the earlier-released book called “Flow: the psychology of optimal performance“. This earlier book, by the way, is one of my all-time favourites in the non-fiction genre. In the book am listening to now, I’ve come across another plausible explanation of why photography loses its appeal when it becomes a business. According to the “flow” theory, from an amateur’s standpoint, photography is an autotelic pursuit. That is, the activity itself constitutes its own reward and meaning. An amateur photographer takes pictures simply because it’s fun to do. It is exciting to learn new techniques and play with new gear. Even the process of transitioning to becoming a pro is initially fun, because it presents new challenges to overcome and things to learn. However, professional photography immediately introduces an additional set of goals , namely, making money and increasing the efficiency of the workflow. These business-related goals conflict with the original, creative goals of the photographer. The conflict can be subtle. For example, as I post-process a particular image and decide to learn some technique that I haven’t tried before, I might have a thought on the back on my mind: “Is this the best use of my time at this time? My processing workflow is good enough. Maybe, it would be better to plow though the rest of the images in this photoshoot., rather than fiddling with this one picture.” This is precisely the flow-breaking point. Instead of being fully concentrating on the creative task, which is learning new technique and increasing the complexity of my activity, my attention becomes split between what I am doing right now and what I could have been doing instead. I also become self-conscious, in the sense of starting to consider how what I do affects my image as a photographer.

The good news is that, according to Csikszentmihalyi, it is totally in my power to maintain flow, or at least maximize the amount of time spent in the flow state. After all, the attention split between the conflicting objectives happens entirely in my head. The trick, for the lack of a better word, is to convince myself to take interest in what needs to be done and to apply mental energy in order to increase the complexity of the activity at hand. For example, if a business-related task requires attention, it would be wise to make that the focus of the activity and strive to become really good at it. Conversely, it helps to recognize that the necessary attribute of an autotelic activity is that it needs to be done without any expectation of an external reward or future utility. It is certainly easier said than done, at least for me personally, but it does help to be reminded that “wasting time” on fun things is, upon consideration, not wasteful at all. In fact, it is often the best possible thing I can do.

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Fiction


I write quite a lot as part of my job as a university professor – journal papers, reports, research proposals, etc. All of this is squarely in the non-fiction category. Recently, I came across a suggestion that writing fictional stories could a fun creative exercise and a way of cultivating observation and communication skills. I decided to jump on it, taking advantage of my sabbatical. Frankly, at this time I’d jump on any idea to mix things up in terms of the workflow and study techniques – that is what a study leave is all about, I think.
Writing fiction is a completely new thing for me, though. So, as any good student, I turned to YouTube.  I decided to try this exercise, described by Abbie Emmons as a “story smoothie” (the point being that all stories are, in-fact, re-told old stories that are “blended” into something new):
  1. Take your four favourite scenes from fictional literature (or even movies, Abbie suggested, but I was happy to be able to recall four books that I liked).
  2. Take one of the four components from each of the four books/scenes – genre, theme, plot and character(s) – and mix them up into your own story.
  3. For a bonus point, change the genders and social positions, etc. of the main characters. Et voilà, c’est fait – the blended “story smoothie” idea is ready.
I do realize that there is much more to writing than generating a story idea, but it has always been the difficult part for me. I really liked this, somewhat algorithmic, way of tackling at least this first creative aspect of writing. Because I am on sabbatical in Paris, I decided to base the story here.
Can you guess where I (mostly) took the main character and the plot from? Hint: It’s an opening of a famous novel, which was made into movies many times, and the action of which mostly takes place in Paris too.
If it doesn’t ring a bell (yes, I am aware that cliché is not our friend – it’s on my list of things to work on), then I blended the ideas sufficiently well to at least avoid blatant plagiarism.
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What I learn while learning to play violin

When my daughter started taking violin lessons, I joined her in this adventure without having any prior music experience until that point. I still enjoy keeping her company, but more than my miserable advances in playing skills I enjoy learning about the learning process itself and the techniques for developing complex skills that have been distilled in the musical field over the centuries. I should mention that the mathematical aspects of music and the physics of sound generation are always fascinating to me, since they are very close to to what I do professionally as a professor in fluid mechanics.

Once of the things about complex task performance that caught my attention recently was a profound comment made by out teacher, Simon, about multitasking. “A popular view these days is that multitasking is not possible,” he said, “but in fact, I am doing it right now: I am breathing, standing, holding my bow in one hand and my violin in the other, looking at the music score in front of me and talking to you.” “The trick is,” he continued, “to turn all these separate things into one action and mentally treat them as such.”

I found this mental model quite helpful in my music practice. There is one exercise in particular, where you set a metronome at a given tempo and play a sequence of 4 notes, 1 note per beat, in a single draw of the bow. Then, you double the tempo of your playing, keeping the metronome and the bow speed constant – that is, you would play 2 notes per beat, and 2 sequences of the 4 notes per length of the bow. After that, you quadruple the tempo: 4 notes per beat, 4 note sequences per bow. And so on (I couldn’t get past the third step yet on even the easiest of the note sequences). The trick that seems to be working for me for this exercise is to treat the group of notes that are played on the same beat of the metronome as one motion of the fingers of my left hand. So I would focus on individual notes (and fingers that play them) in the first pass, on a pair of notes on the second, and on a group of four notes (as a single motion of the fingers) on the third.

This apparent work-around for the “there is no such thing as multitasking” idea also came up in the book I am listening to (“Indistractable” by Nir Eyal and Julie Li). This phenomenon is well-known in psychology, and it’s called multi-modal stimulation and perception. It means that two or more of our sensory systems – vision, hearing, proprioception (perception of the body position), smell and taste – can process information simultaneously. There is even evidence that human performance of certain tasks can be enhanced if multi-modal stimulation is present. For what it’s worth, I certainly like working while listening to music or even while sitting in a relatively-noisy environment such as a cafe.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that multitasking in a conventional sense of the word is possible (otherwise, as Nir Eyal points out, we could listen to two different podcasts at the same time – one in each ear). But if it’s possible to combine many complex activities into a single one, such as “teaching a violin lesson”, perhaps by applying this mindset wider we can manage something like “going through a day” or even “living a happy life” without being pulled in a million directions by conflicting goals and obligations. Perhaps, there is no conflict, and this goals and obligations are all part of one thing. And, with some practice, we can do one thing at a time.

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Mind tricks for focus

There is a saying that anything worth doing is worth doing slowly. Certainly, there is a lot to be said about being able to focus on the details of the process, instead of rushing through it under the threat of a deadline or even under the awareness of the fact the the might be better spent doing something else. I’ve come across a technique for tricking myself into a more methodical working mode in a book “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin. She describes using a mantra “I am in jail” when working on a side project like setting up a website for a blog. The idea is to invoke a state of mind where it seems alright to spend as much time on the task at hand because there is nothing better to do at the moment and you have all the he time in the world to do it. It seems like simplistic mind trick to play on myself, but I find it surprisingly effective.

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Minimal effective dose

I’ve been a fan of a personal productivity tactic referred to by Robert Boice as brief regular session, or BRS for short. His research on work patterns of university professors from different disciplines shows that those who wait for large, uninterrupted chunks of time to do their academic work (mostly, writing) tend to be less successful according to various more-or-less objective metrics (ability to obtain tenure, publish highly-cited papers, etc.) Instead, a more effective strategy is to make regular, even if microscopic, progress by working in BRSs. This approach fits nicely with the idea of starting and stopping the work sessions before you are subjectively ready, but it flies in the face of another compelling tactic that calls for long, uninterrupted periods of time for doing deep work, which was popularized by Cal Newport. Newport defines deep work as a challenging activity, for which you are uniquely qualified.

I really like Newport’s uninterrupted deep work idea, but find the BRS approach more practical in terms of making consistent progress and avoiding procrastination. I think that there is a caveat to it, though: depending on the type of work, there is a lower limit for how brief a BRS can be. In other words, there is a minimum amount of time that I need to spend on task in order to make any progress. For example, when I am editing videos, either for classes that I teach or simply for fun, documenting the games that we play with my daughter (like the one below), I need to spend a finite chunk of time of watching raw footage, defining the cut-in and -out points and placing at least several clips together in the timeline. If I don’t do at least that much in a given editing session, I would effectively need to start from scratch the next time.

Finding this minimal effective dose for different types of work is generally not easy. In some cases, you might enjoy the activity so much, that you would enter the state of flow, where you literally lose the sense of time and blow through the time limit you might have set for yourself. A flow state, or more specifically, maximizing the time spent in a flow state, of course, is the goal, so if it happens regularly, there is certainly nothing to complain about.

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New gear

There is no way around it – shooting with a brand-new camera is one, if not the, most exciting aspects of photography. Admittedly, I like new technology in a stereotypically geeky way, so my view is probably biased. Still, these are exciting times for photographers, with the technology advancing at an amazing pace.

During the past couple of weeks, I’ve been taking my new Sony α7R IV for some sports and concert performance shoots. The amazing 61 Mpix of resolution and the super-nimble autofocus (I mostly shot with a Sony FE 70-200mm f/2.8 GM OSS lens) makes shooting incredibly exciting. Last time I had the same feeling was when I laid my hands on a then-new Canon 1Dx. Immediately, I knew that it was a revolutionary piece of equipment that was going to change the way I approach taking photos.

I am glad that I’ve had an opportunity to take my photography hobby to a professional level. Not the smallest part of it is that it allows me to play with the latest and greatest gear. Ironically, the state-of-the-art gear is needed to stay competitive as a pro. So it is not clear at all what is the means and what is the end.

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Intermittent reinforcement

Jump

I’ve been working on the photos from the year-end show of my daughter’s dance school. Processing thousands of photos that were all taken within two days of each other can be really boring rather monotonous. But coming across images like this, which I forgot I took, every now and then is what makes me want to keep going. “Every now and then” is the key point.

Something similar happens in golf, when I mostly play very poorly rather unremarkably but sometimes get to the green in one stroke. It doesn’t happen often at all, and that’s what makes me want to keep playing.

In dog training, this is called intermittent reinforcement. When a puppy has learned a trick or a command, he is no longer getting a cookie every time, but only once in a while, at random intervals. This makes him want to work and makes the learned skill more reliable.

Similarly, when I manage to capture a cool image, that’s an automatic “Good boy!” signal to me as a photographer. Hopefully, this motivation translates to more practice and, eventually, to some kind of qualitative change.

Anchors aweigh

Hip Hop

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Prepared piano

I have never heard of a prepared piano until a couple of months ago. It’s one of the many music-related things I have not heard about until I started learning violin and piano alongside my seven year old daughter. It’s ironic, because my main work area is related to acoustics, and some of the most fundamental works in the field deal with theory of musical instruments. So it is quite exciting to come face-to-face with some of the physics that I have only known in theoretical or applied engineering contexts.

Last Saturday, my daughter tried playing a prepared piano for the first time. She has been looking forward to it ever since she heard about wedging coins and pieces of rubber between piano strings from our teacher, who studied it systematically and actually wrote a book about John Cage’s techniques. As you can see in the video, she was delighted at the transformation of the piano into a percussion instrument. “I don’t recognize the sounds!” she cried.

What I personally learn from this is that music in general, and musical education in particular, is more about excitement of discovery and joy of “flow” than it is about training for performance. My daughter and I have been incredibly lucky to have teachers, who give us these glimpses of optimal experiences, to borrow a term from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, so early in our studies. “Don’t forget to smile!” Is my daughter’s favourite reminder to me during our practice sessions.

Another thing I learned is to remember to switch my camera to manual focus when filming in a dimply-lit room. To my excuse, though, the whole prepared piano demonstration was very spontaneous, so I was shooting from the hip, both literally and figuratively speaking.

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Adult beginners

I am studying violin and piano alongside my six-year-old daughter. We both started from the same level – absolute beginners. Yet at the music store, our lesson books are in different sections. I am classified as an adult beginner, while she is a beginner without a modifier. This made me think whether our experiences of learning music are really that different.

I think we, adult beginners, do approach music differently: we are both more and less serious about it. And in both instances, we are wrong.

On the one hand, being a hobby, music is quite low on the list of adults’ priorities. This prevents them from focussing on the practice completely, instead of worrying at the back of their minds whether they should be doing something else at the moment. By not maintaining the focus, the adult beginners miss an essential component of an optimal (read:enjoyable) experience.

At the same time, and ironically in contradiction to the point above, adults expect too much from the music practice in terms of results. For children, the practice itself is the game. My daughter literally plays music, so it is an autotelic activity for her. I, on the other hand, may be able to convince myself with the logical part of my brain that the practice itself is the goal, but somewhere on the background there is an expectation of a payoff, e.g., improvement of my technique. In other words, I play to learn how to play, and my daughter plays for the sake of playing.

The autotelic quality of an activity, when it derives meaning from itself, is another essential component of an optimal experience. It allows children to stick to music practice week after week and year after year, while most adults quit soon after starting because their goals are different. Actually, children don’t even think in terms of goals; they just play.

…This makes me marvel once again at the depth of Nike’s “Just do it” slogan.