Category: Learning

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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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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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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.

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Justifying fun

In his auto-biographical “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, Richard Feynman criticized physics textbooks of his day by saying that most examples in them were written by people, who never tried to replicate the problems as experiments (for example, to illustrate friction, one could have timed how long it would take a rolling ball to stop on different surfaces). When I first read it, I thought how much fun it would be to do things not for their potential value or impact, but simply for “the pleasure of finding things out”, as Feynman put it. But at the same time, I thought that it would be prohibitively impractical: who would be interested in a simple friction experiment that must have been done countless times before?

It is justification of trying and doing fun things that what I, and probably most other people, struggle with. Perhaps, one way to think about it is to somehow link the individual fun experiments into larger-scale projects. Perhaps, thinking about them as contributing to a “body of work“, e.g., learning a skill, developing a relationship with a child, etc.

Speaking about doing fun things with children, last week, I learned that a cheetah, my daughter’s favourite animal, can cover 7 m in a single stride. This came from the illustrated book called “Animal!” that she spent a lot of time with over the Spring break. As a side note, the photographs in that book and nothing short of amazing – quite inspiring. In the spirit of Feynman’s suggestion, we measured 7 m with a measuring tape, and it turned out that a cheat could jump across both our living and dining rooms at once! I must say that it is one thing to read about 7 meters in a book and another to see what it looks like in reality. Power of a physical demonstration in action!

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Developing new skills

At the last tournament, I repeatedly tried to hit the opponent’s kote (lower arm just above the wrist), but judges gave me no ippons for any of the hits. I think this is because my strikes were not sharp enough. There is a particular quality of hits that’s needed to score points in kendo. It is not the force that counts, or even not the speed per se, although speed is important. It is precisely sharpness, snappiness of the hit. And I cannot do it at my current level. At least not consistently.

This presents a conundrum that applies beyond kendo to learning any new skill: how do you practice something that you cannot (correctly) do yet? If you practice using your current, incorrect, form, you risk reinforcing bad habits.

One option is to break down the skill into its constituent parts and work on them one-by-one before trying to connect them. This is how I work on the basics of violin-playing: First, work on the rhythm of a new song using a single open string. Second, get the left hand into position for playing correct notes without paying attention to rhythm or quality of sound. Third, focus on the sound quality (bow movement). Fourth, try to connect everything together and circle back to the rhythm.

In the case of a kote strike, however, the overall motion is already so short and simple that it doesn’t make sense to break it down further. But the overall quality of my kote hit is lacking, so something needs to be done. According to my sensei, the answer is to practice a different, but related, motion, which will eventually support and enable whatever you are trying to perform. In the case of the kote strike, the supporting exercise is matavari suburi – large-amplitude, straight swing of the shinai with maximum speed and an abrupt stop at the end of the swing. I’ve began doing it as my morning warm-up, but haven’t done enough yet to see any qualitative difference in my kote strikes. If anything, it will teach me not to over-extend my elbows at the end of a strike – something that’s annoyingly painful and potentially dangerous.

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Music and air combat

Air show. Milan. Italy.
Air show. Milan. Italy.

My violin-playing assignment for the Christmas break is practicing the D major and the A major scales. Finally. When I started the lessons with my daughter four months ago, I expected that I would be doing only “scales and arpeggios” , like Berlioz from “The Aristocats” – the movie that at the time shaped my view of music education.

I can see that breaking up the established muscle memory and coordination between my right and left hands is not going to be easy. That is why kids have an advantage in learning music – they don’t have years of muscle memory to unlearn.

For myself, as a late-starter in music, I see it as a good opportunity to practice John Boyd’s “Destruction and Creation” principle. I recently came across his essay of the same title, and it is a fascinating read. Boyd himself was an amazing character. He developed a highly-influential Energy-Maneuverabilty theory of air-to-air combat. His writing is to-the-point practical and concise but also surprisingly deep in the underlying philosophy.

One of the main ideas is that creative process (he used the process of decision-making as an example) is really a combination of analysis (“destruction”) of the existing mental models in view of the current observations of reality, followed by synthesis (“creation”) of new and improved models from the individual components (concepts, ideas, etc.) that are the result of breaking apart the old models. In other words, breaking-down and building-up go hand-in-hand in a continuously repeating loop. In fact, one of the best-known results of Boyd’s work is the Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) loop, which has been the foundation for training of fighter pilots and design of fighter aircraft. There, “Orientation” is the part that contains the analysis and the synthesis of the observed data to form a current mental perspective.

With music, five-year-olds have an advantage over adults in that they have less breaking-down (of existing habits) to do before they can get to the creative part. On the other hand, I’d like to believe that as an adult, if I do the analysis part of my existing habits well, I would have more material to play with when I am eventually in a position to do some synthesis.

Orchestra pit at Teatro alla Scala. Milan. Italy.
Orchestra pit at Teatro alla Scala. Milan. Italy.

Air show. Milan. Italy.
Air show. Milan. Italy.

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Too present to learn

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“You can’t think and hit at the same time.”

– Yogi Berra

I wonder, wouldn’t it be super-productive to apply my analytical skills to learning a physical skill? For example, I could use a fundamental studying technique like note-taking for learning kendo or violin-playing.

However, this is obvious and easy only in principle. In reality, I find that practicing a martial art or music requires so much focus and present-moment awareness that I literally remember very little to take notes of after practice. All my energy, both physical and mental, is spent on doing the thing, not on thinking about it. In fact, I am surprised how some people can ask questions during a kendo practice. Not that that find the answers obvious (mostly, quite the opposite) or the behaviour awkward (even though the structure of a typical kendo practice is not conducive to question-and-answer sessions, we are not in Japan after all). I just don’t find that beyond the very basic level, intellectual understanding of a particular technique is helpful for making progress. It feels like practice is needed at the moment, not another explanation.

I recently came upon a similar reflection in a book I’ve been reading, “A Man in Love” by Karl Ove Knausgaard (which is a fantastic book, by the way – I can’t say that I enjoy any particular aspect of it, and the story is not exciting, but somehow I just know it’s a modern masterpiece, and I cannot stop reading it). There, a writer friend of the main character describes his experience of writing about and training with professional boxers: “You know, the boxers I wrote about had an incredible presence. But that meant they weren’t spectators of themselves, so they didn’t remember anything. Not a thing! Share the moment with me here and now. That was their offer.”

Having said all this, I think there is a way of harnessing the power of analysis. In fact, this is how progress usually happens – at the juncture of previously disjointed fields. Just look at Bruce Lee’s notebooks with all the detailed sketches and notes on the physical, psychological and philosophical aspects of his practice. I think the idea is to separate the two activities in time. Practice first, analyze later. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, you cannot think while hitting, but you can think about how you’ve just hit.

In fact, I was probably wrong, when I said that couldn’t remember anything about the last night’s practice. After all, there are established techniques for helping me remember, to improve my ability to remember:

  • Verbalize the learned concep. If I learned only one thing during last practice, what is that? Assigning words to the idea captures it and gives it some substance. Now it can be studied and analyzed.
  • Do this soon after practice (within the first 24 hours). Make a written note of what you learn.
  • Revisit the note before the next lesson, so you can build upon what you’ve learned during the practice.

In the case of violin practice, things are even simpler – my teacher takes notes while I practice and gives them to me after the lesson.

All these suggestions sound incredibly simple and obvious. This is what we teach our students, who study math, physics and engineering.

Obvious – definitely. Simple? I find them easier said than done. But if nothing else, learning this way is a practice itself.

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Violin lessons

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When I was taking photos of famous Italian violins at the Sforza Castle museum in Milan a few months ago, I did not imagine that very soon I would begin my first violin lessons to keep a company for my six-years-old daughter. These are the first formal music lessons of any kind for both of us, I might add!

So here are my first impressions of learning violin.

The initial stage of learning the most basic fundamentals of this highly technical skill, which is completely foreign to me (that is, I cannot draw upon my experience in any other field) is incredibly rewarding. Immediately, after the very few first attempts to extract a clear sound, I have a completely new level of appreciation of classical music that opened to me. If before, when I heard some virtuoso play a violin concerto, I would think: “This must be incredibly difficult.” Now I have a first-hand sense of what specifically is so difficult and how many of these tremendously difficult aspects must align perfectly for the music to appear that fluid. It’s a different world from what I could imagine!

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Also, it was nice to hear my teacher draw an analogy between violin-playing and martial arts in that the essence of practice in both areas is to focus on the form. If the form is executed flawlessly, the result is automatically beautiful.

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