3-1: How memory works

In this section were going to be talking about how memory works and how you can
remember ideas better. Still surprise I have to tell you this, memories important for
learning. If you could remember things better, you can remember the mean the way you
deeply understand them, then you will be able to use those ideas later in your life, you will
be able to pass exam, pass project, you will be able to use the ideas when you actually
encounter them in situations.

Now a lot of systems that require that teach memory, there are lot of systems out
there that teach you ways, you can remember things really well. But all of them will try to
teach you in a way that I feel is fairly superficial, so they violate the second principle of this
courses that they teach you to memorize instead of understand. So what I’m going to be
talking with in this session is I’m going to be talking about on how you can remember ideas
while also deeply understanding them. So instead of just try come up with superficial hook
in order to remember a bunch of ideas. How can we increase our memory, while at the
same time improving our understanding which, in my experience, is 95% of classes and
probably over 99% of real life situations. We want to have a deep understanding that we
remember not just superficial ideas that we remember. There are going to be some
situations where you need to memorize things and it’s not possible to use these techniques
that I’m describing. But I feel that these are under 10% of cases and we will cover those in
different sections. The sections are in facts and trivia; I will be going over pneumonic
systems which you might want to use if you are in a classroom just have to memorize a lot
of information and understanding it actually is it important. But in bask majority of task
cases of the real life situation and classes where understanding is important where you
going to be focusing on that in this particular section.

So the first thing is, understanding just how memory works. So one thing to
understand is that memory works by association, most memory is associated. So the way
computer uses memory, this is not associated at all, it is just a line of data and if you go to
this part of the line you can perfectly recover the information, you can write it down there,
the fact that’s something on page 100 is very similar to something on page 312. The
computer, unless you manually create that link will not necessarily make that association.
Where as a person, a human being, we learn by the association, it’s not a big line of data
where we will be writing all of our memories on, it’s a web, its connected interface. And
because we learn by association, that’s also how we should be using this tool in order to
learn better if we create this association between ideas, great connections, we’ll be able to
remember ideas much better.

Second thing is that vivid applies over boring. So if you are learning an idea, then
learning it the most vivid way possible where you connected to bright colors, sounds, big
ideas, shapes, feelings, senses, this would make the idea more memorable. Even emotions
that would make the idea more memorable, a story that you hear that you feel makes you
angry, that something is happening. You will remember that better than something that
just kind of mildly interested you. So the problem is a lot of schools subject are kind of
boring, they’re teaching facts and dry way that doesn’t really connect with our senses or
emotions. So by making things more vivid, more emotional, you will be able to memorize
things better or you will be able to remember things better. And this is something that is
particularly useful tool because so many classes do not do this very well then you not
teaching in an engaging way, if you can manually make the information more connected to
the things you cared about more important both emotionally and also more vivid sensor,
sensory wise then you will be able to remember ideas better.

And final idea is that we learn thru narrative better than we learn to casual
information. So if you have a story, if you have a story art to bring all these details together,
you will remember that better. Now the unfortunate part is that a lot of what we’re learning
are steps in the process and it’s fairly antiseptic, it’s fairly just detach from the emotional
characters in reality to be normal in experience if you’re learning how to do a chemistry
experiment. These going to be lot of steps, and they’re going to be fairly dry you’re not
going to feel at the story. So if you can make something closer to story, to make the story
out of the whether characters and actions and events, cause of other events, they’re not just
completely separate and things and just in the list. If you can create a story out of
something so you can also understand it better.

So these three principles, creating connections, lots of connection between ideas,

understanding things in a vivid way not a boring way and also understanding things thru
narrative instead of just a casual information, these are three principles that if you apply to
what you are learning, you will be able to remember much, much more of what you are
learning. So in the later session, I maybe going to be discussing very specific tactics for
using these three principles in order to understand ideas better
3-2: Metaphors and analogies
In this video, I’m going to share with you tactic that is very important if you want to
remember ideas both longer and at the same time understand them better. These are
metaphors and analogies. Humans already reason with metaphors and analogies all the
time, it present in our language, it present in the way we discuss things, it present the way
we teach things. Most of that is an automatic process, most of that is sitting in a classroom,
professor uses analogy, you just need to understand analogy that they gave you. If you are
understand the idea very well just comes up with metaphor automatically. Very rarely to be
deliberately apply this process is very rarely doing say to ourselves and when it
deliberately creative metaphors for the subject so I can better understand them.

The idea behind metaphors and analogies is that it helps you understand and
remember ideas better in two ways. So the first way is that the way a metaphor works and
the way analogy works, is that you’re not just trying to come up with very superficial link
between ideas. You’re not just going to be just linking derivatives with dogs because they’re
both start with a letter “d”, that’s a very superficial connection. It doesn’t bare anywhere
sound almost like reality. What you’re trying to do is you’re trying to figure out what’s the
deep structure of the idea, how does it actually look as a structure and trying to find
something comparable that has similar structure and the advantage of this is that in
actually creating a metaphor for analogy, you have to see the entire deep structure of an
idea. And this can be something that you don’t pick up or you don’t even realize you’re not
picking up when you’re just reading a book or sitting an electro for the first time. It will
long and say yeah, yeah I get that, I get what they saying. But if when the test comes, you’ll
not be able to perform on it, and the reason why is because you never really understood the
deep structure, you just understood the surface layer. And so what’s were going to try to do
here is that creating a metaphors and analogies and try to match the deep structure closest
as possible and even when you can’t make a perfect match recognizing where it matches
doesn’t matched gives you so much insight on how your original idea works then you
understand a lot better.

The second advantage on using metaphors-analogy goes back to the principle we

discussed earlier. You’re creating association between ideas, so creating a metaphor and
create it connections, more connections, more access point to the idea, easier to remember.
Second, you’re making the idea more vivid, you’re making it more emotional, and you’re
making it something you can actually connect with. So you’re taking the abstract idea and
making it the concrete one that improves memory. And finally, in many cases you can often
turn a dull or dry situation into a story with characters and emotions and people acting.
And we also remembers story better than we remember dry information. So uses all three
of these memory principles and at the same time it allows you to understand the idea
better. So this is a better important technique for most subjects. Being able to use
metaphors properly can accelerate your learning, accelerate your understanding. So an
example of this, so I was saying, derivatives to dogs it’s just because they start with the
letter d, that’s not a very good metaphor, doesn’t really match the deep structure though.
But consider the derivatives’, so this is from calculus, consider the derivatives and compare
to speedometer and odometer on a car so the speedometer measures how fast you’re going
and the odometer measures how far you’ve gone. This is exactly the same as derivative
how function, the derivative is the speed of the function and the function itself would be the
odometer and the derivative would be the speedometer of the car. And so creating this
connection works on both of this way. One, we match the deep structure of the idea, there’s
not just a similarity and that they both start with the same letter, that is really explain the
idea but by actually understanding, what is a derivative and what it is similar to and by
making this connection doing the speedometer and odometer of the car. We’ve explored
the deep structure of the derivative to its certain extent and compare it to something we
already know. So explore the deep structure, we understood it better, at the same time,
speedometer odometer of the car that is the vivid concrete analogy. We can imagine being
on the car, accelerating and watching our speed go up dramatically and watching our
odometer go up just a little bit. This is something that we can make very concrete we can
see. Whereas if you just understand the derivative in terms of functions and that just lying
on the graph, you maybe won’t understand it on the same level of vividness or way you can
remember that you would with this analogy. That’s a pretty simple example but it’s a
powerful one because creating a bunch of metaphors like this would mean that could
probably understand even more complex details about the derivatives. So the chain rule,
office tell rule, you can understand this things in a more detailed way then you would if you
just understood the calculations, on how you manipulates simples in order to get up. So
that’s the first thing, so that’s an example using a metaphor in this way.

How you create metaphor? So we understand why metaphors are good, we

understand why they can help you understand better but how you actually create them. So
the first way I suggest, is just to be always in the mind set of what this is remind me of. So
when you are in a class, when you’re reading a book, ask yourself this questions very
frequently, what this is remind me of, what is this like, what this is similar to. Sometimes
you drop by, sometimes you’ll find the idea, you can’t think of anything that is really similar
to very much standing or it’s under unique but if you get the habit of doing this, you just
automatically making small connections. So this is sometimes better than spending a lot of
time deliberately creating a metaphor for an idea, you just spontaneously generating
metaphors, even if not the perfect one’s, just little one’s all the time. You’ll be understand
the idea better, that’s a very deep level of processing which will be discussing later sections
and deep level processing means you remember ideas much better. That’s the first thing,
just try to be asking yourself what is this remind me of all the time, when you’re going to a
course, when you’re sitting on electro hall your taking notes, ask yourself that questions.
When you’re reading a textbook and you’re taking notes, ask yourself that question. What
this is reminds me of. Even asking when you’re reviewing things, that’s the first way.

The second way is, let’s say when we deliberately create a metaphor, I want to
remember this idea better, and how I remember it better. So the idea is to explore the deep
structure of an idea and you can do these by matching features so use an example. So One
idea you learn on economics is called Corno pricing, and basically the idea is that there are
a bunch of different firms and they are all competing to each other and they are trying to
figure out what price they should set their products in order to make the most money for
themselves. This is other basic idea in economics and the analogy is that the Corno pricing
is based on everybody decides how much their willing to sell at the same time they all
deciding how they going to produce and what they wanted to do is they don’t want to
produce too much because then the prices will going way down and not of them will going
to make much money. They don’t want the market to flood with their product but at the
same time if you really withdraw all of your, if everybody else in competing means
withholds their product. You can make a lot more money just by breaking that, that sort of
task or agreement and flooding the market with your product and making a lot of money.
So the Corno pricing is a model of figuring out, well were in the middle will this company
lies, were all we go between these. Where will the find certain equilirably point between
incredibly greedy and sort of self centered or more cooperative because both extremes
don’t make you the maximum amount of profit. So what your company do in the situation.

So I was just try to think of how can I create a metaphor for this so it’s a fairly
complicated ideas, it’s not really similar to everything else that you would encounter in life.
So whatever we start by doing is matching features. So the first part is to pick maybe a
subject matter where you think there’s an opportunities for matching. Maybe I don’t know
what the metaphor analogy is going to be at, but I can say is ah wow why you know let’s
pick this domain and try to look for something that might be kind of similar. So one thing I
tried to do is I try to think of children is playing. Because the relationship and complexity of
children interacting in a playground or something similar like that, that is something that’s
vivid, something’s very concrete it’s also a story, you can think of playing in this narrative
context as supposed to just added some ping pong balls bouncing around. That’s also
allows you to have those values from the metaphor we discussed in the first unit. But also
there’s a lot of complexities; it’s not just a simple situation which only has 1 or 2 ways you
can work. Children can play, and compete and engaged in a new different ways and that’s a
good basis for an idea. So that’s one good basis for an idea, another basis could be physic
another basis could be math, if you really understand some concepts in math. Math has
tons of great metaphor and analogies for everything else. So there’s lot of these, history and
other one, you know feuding counties, these all different good sources of analogy.
 So this one here, I’m thinking of children playing on a playground. Its good domain,
let’s think of what’s happening. So first of all let’s try to match the features so in the corno
model there’s going to be a few firms that are competing. So let’s have few kids point, so
were matching up the opportunities of few firms point there’s a kids point, so we have 4 or
5 kids point. Now in the corno model there are competing over something, they are trying
to obtain something, and then the economic model, they try to maximize their profit. So
let’s say, let’s try to leak that into something in the model of the children. Let’s say we want
to have them competing over both of you, so they want to have the most balloons possible,
remember that’s be something that the children compete over, so they’re competing over
balloons. Now that we serve to establish a base connection between, right now we’re not
really exploring the depth of the idea; we’re not exploring the deep structure but we have
something we can work with, we have certain ball of clay so we can eventually sculpt to
tool that we could benefit. So the idea is what is happening in the corno model that we can
simulate is also happening in this model. So what’s happening in the corno model is that
there’s a balance in between selfishness and cooperation and so there’s sort of two extreme
that don’t really worked out and they’re going to be somewhere in the middle, so you can
think of it. The kids are trying to steal each other’s balloons, but when they steal the
balloons and they are very aggressive about it, they end up stepping on them, they got
broke and pop because you know balloons are delicate things and if they fighting over
them, sometimes they wreck the balloons and if they’re fighting really aggressively, so they
are in the pure competition zone that we are talking about with the corno model and they
pop all the balloons and nobody has a balloon and that is not what they want. On the other
hand, they can cooperate perfectly, so decide no, we’re just going to divide the balloons
equally and not touch each other, so you have maximum balloons. But in this case and this
is sort of where, where trying to force the analogy a little bit. But in this case, one kid while
the other kid are off plane and not paying attention, go around and try to steal the balloons,
they try to steal the balloons from the other kids while they were not looking. And when he
does this he could end up with more balloons and that is just what a fair split. So this is
example or steadying the analogy. So what’s going to happen is, because each kid is
realizing that they’re not going to be perfectly cooperative against steal a little bit to each
other but they are not going to be unfolded stream and extremely aggressive that’s how
corno price model works,

Now so that was a fairly lengthy example but what it works is similar structure for
actually creating a metaphor for something. So you pick a domain, if you really have no idea
where it starts so sometimes there’ll be sorts of obvious, if you’re thinking about physics
problem then maybe there’s something in actual reality which may be example of physics,
so when I was talking about derivatives, for me the speedometer or odometer of a car are
really good analogy because that’s what the speedometer and odometer car measures.
They measure the derivatives. It’s a really good analogy because it’s not just co incidental
connection; they are actually the same thing. That’s a really good time to use analogy if
you’re trying to understand the 48 transforming in physics or in a differential equation, the
48 transform. Understanding it is the way in turning pressure weight into pitch is a very
good analogy because that is what you actually doing that’s the 48 transform actually does.
And so being able to make those connections, science will be obvious what domain you are
work with or what are good domains versus bad domains. But if you really no idea; then
just try to pick one that you think there would be something to play with it. And so as I said
children playing on a playground is a very good domain because it has a lot of things you
get the children to do which you can turn to a story which you can understand.

Feuding nations, nations fighting each other in a wars or nations cooperating with
trades, that’s another way you can think of it. This kind of relationships between the
actions and countries, that’s the way of understanding the ideas in a way that makes it a
narrative makes it more vivid and makes it more concrete. And then once you chosen a
domain, you wanted to start matching features. So starts try this line up as many elements
of the ideas you can. Keep in mind sometimes you will be able to match all of them. So I was
saying my balloon analogy kind of falls apart because the whole idea of the corno model is
everybody makes a decision about what they are going to do at the same time. Obviously if
the kids are running around in the playground and start stealing balloons other kids are
also going to start stealing the balloons and you will be get to a devolve situation where as
the corno model doesn’t work that way. If one person decides, just you know laterally they
start stealing from everyone else that of the other nation can respond or none of the other
firms can respond. So that’s a little bit harder to translating to this analogy.

So, don’t worry if you can’t always get a perfect fit, it’s more important just
recognize where it does fit. So try to have many connections as you can but if there is some
place that is missing just recognize where that connections breaks down. Now creating
metaphors like this takes practice. This is not a skilled that most people just have incurably.
You can create metaphors but often if you just not, it didn’t come to you spontaneously
most people can go to thru this deliberate process that I just describe. And this is a process
of a real example when I thought of it corno example, I don’t have an idea what a good
metaphor, so I have to create this one manually with the process I’m describing for you. So
that’s one thing, it does take a lot of practice. So if you’re using it, your finding it very slow,
it’s not very efficient in the beginning. Again use the what is this remind me of in your
courses, that’s just generally will improve your ability because you will be getting more
spontaneous metaphors but when you have to use it deliberately, it does take practice to
get good at it. So don’t expect something that will turn around your studies overnight but it
is something that can really help. And finally being able to create metaphors is kindly link
to how well you understand the idea. So I was only able to create that metaphor between
those 2 concepts because I really understood how the corno strategy or the corno pricing
model works. If I didn’t understand how it work at all then it very difficult to create that
analogy. So creating a metaphor can be a bit of self test, if you can’t create an analogy or
something, maybe you don’t understand it very well. And if you are in that case, there’s a
whole section in this course which will be coming up which is just about understanding the
ideas better. So if you are covering ideas and you can’t come up with any metaphors then
consider going to those tactics because they will focus you not on creating the most vivid
and memorable representations but just understanding it so can even get to the start. So
consider using the final technique which will be discussing later in the course. Consider
using that as a way of understanding the ideas better before using metaphors
3-3: Diagramming
Another great tool that you can use to understand the ideas better and remember
them better is to use diagrams. And this mostly works with the principle of associations. So
you create a lot of connections between ideas you will remember them better. So if you are
working on an idea and you’re not sure how to do it, consider making a diagram. If you ever
heard of my mapping before, that’s a very popular technique. My mapping is the most
specific version of diagramming. So with my mapping you pick up a central idea and you
have the branch out that works with diagramming you can choose ideas in all sorts of
manners. So it doesn’t have to be these roots and then explore the hierarchy like that you
can just create connection between different ideas. And I’m going to discuss flow based
note taking in the later chapter which is very similar to diagramming. But diagramming the
point is you are working this on your own time. So you try to understand an idea or set of
ideas better then why not create a diagram.

So the diagrams are also really good because if forces you to think about the idea in
not abstract terms. So another advantage is you draw pictures or if you are creating a little
image then you can draw diagram in a way to secure that knowledge. So let’s take a look at
some examples of diagramming so you can see how you can implement these ideas for
yourself. Let’s take a look on the example of diagramming here from computer science the
idea of the quick sort which is an Albertan for sorting a list development. Now the way this
works is that you can draw pictures in order to try to represent the idea. So in this case, I’m
trying to represent the Albertan in the picture of form so that I can see it and see how it
works. Now this is good for 2 reasons, one it helps you understand the idea better because
but you are actually seeing what’s going on instead of understanding the abstract. And
second it forms a visual memory so you have something to associate with. So here what I’m
wanted try to focus on the Albertan is focusing both the recourse nature of it by drawing
this picture within the picture. So I have this vivid element and everything smaller and
everything larger, shop table size, but I also want to create self partition. So I wanted to
show that this, actually this question process is picking a vivid and then creating a new
partition in curse on each half that you create with this new Albertan. So drawing in some
few steps can be useful and try to represent the idea the way is more vivid and also in the
way that is understanding the idea in the deeper way that you first covered is very good in
order to understand the idea using the diagram
3-4: Visualization
Another tool to remember ideas better is to simply make them less abstract. So if
you can make idea more vivid even if this is not connected to something in particular
where it explores the deep structure the way metaphor works or the way the diagram
works just even being able to visualize an idea to make a picture or mental picture on your
head, even adding sounds or feelings, that can make an idea more memorable. So this is a
good technique if you, also if metaphor if you could come up with a really good metaphor,
or even if you come up with a really good metaphor using this technique on top that it
could make it more vivid and does more memorable. So abstract ideas are hard to
remember, concrete idea are better so if you could make an abstract idea more concrete
you will remember it better.

The idea behind this visualization is simple, first what you wanted to do is, if you are
not using this tactic, sooner you can skip this step if you fairly used to it, it doesn’t have to
do it every time but you can start by doing just a simple sketch or diagram of the idea. It
isn’t give you kind of a starting point, I find some time just mentally visualizing things for a
lot of students and it’s not most obvious first step so drawing something else just kind of
roughly in the beginning can be a little bit easier than be making a mental picture. Start by
just by just of sort sketching the ideas out. And once you have something very roughly
sketch then you might want to move to just imagining your head and when you imagine
your head you can obviously make it a little bit better, closer, artistic rendering and maybe
you’re the best visual artist and you have a good visualization in your head. Create the
mental picture of the idea and then you want to add sound and color and emotion and you
want to be adding lots of things to make it more vivid, even adding smell or touch another
thing.

So the example of this when I was learning computer programming, a very common
tool you have to use in computer programming is called the function. The function is
basically set of code that you can execute which is the just little packet; you want to execute
the code. And so one way I did this is you can create a metaphor for function. A function is a
little bit like a pencil sharpener so just bear with me. A function is a contain little machine
that does something and you input into it which will be unsharpened the pencil and the
machine does something and it gives you out a return which is the sharpened pencil. So it’s
a little bit like, so that’s a little bit metaphor for what the function is so that also something
to do to visualize. We can visualize that; we can visualize what the function is doing so we
don’t just have to create this metaphor. We can also really imagine the machine of the
function doing this. So we can imagine sticking the pencil in and imagining that just being
the line of codes that’s going to be the argument for. It is the pencil going to the machine.
You can imagine the machine doing the work which is actually running the code of the
particular function. You can imagine returning the sharpened pencil which is the return
value.

Now the pencil sharpener analogy works better as metaphor but you can extend this
to be things you that aren’t even real things. You can imagine a machine that is more
complex or different in a way that you couldn’t just describe using language, you couldn’t
maybe describe using a metaphor but you can describe it as this as a weird machine that
has the multiple input points and it has different shapes for the different types of data that
fondling into this visualization, it turns this into a big system which is similar to how the
code works in the actual program and then spits on different value in the end. That is
something very difficult for even me to describe but it might be something that you can
visualize if you just have the certain to dream of like sense of the idea is. So as again start
with the diagram then move to a point where you are describing the idea in the visual way
in your head and then you wanted add sound and to another vividness to it. So as I said
with the pencil sharpener, you just imagine the boring pencil sharpener or you can imagine
this great machine doing all of these weird things and as colorful and as bright and making
sounds and smells. In doing this, will allow you to make it that much more vivid. Making the
idea more emotional, making it more colorful, making it more, larger, more gigantic, more
outplace that vividness and that sort of imaginativeness will make the idea easier to
remember.

As you can do this to a lot of idea so I remember when I was first learning how to do
a2 by 2 determinatives. So this is also this is a linear algebra, a determinative is a very good
examples of something which is very straight forward move which you often memorize. So
it is you multiply the 2 things in this diagonal and you subtract from that multiplication of A
and D, you subtract from that D and C going on this direction. And so you have 4 numbers,
one here, one here, one here, one here multiple this 2 together and you subtract from that
the multiplication of these 2 numbers together. So that’s something very abstract, very
boring and also sometimes hard to remember. So when I was first learning this for the first
time, what I would do is I will use this visualization technique. Because I couldn’t think of a
good analogy at a time since then I learned better analogy for what term it does because I
can’t think of an analogy by that time, I just wanted to remember better by making it more
vivid because it’s very abstract. So by making it more vivid what I could do is could see, ok I
can imagine myself moving my hands to the surface and by moving my hands thru the
surface it was very hot so the heat was like an additive process for me while if I move it to
this side then that was very cold, it was a subtractive process for me when I was smashing
them together. Now that may seem a little bit of exaggerated but if you were to do this, you
were to do this fully in your heads so you’re not just hearing me talked about, if you were to
do this in your head and you were to really think it thru really close your eyes, really
visualize and imagine it. You will remember its process much better that remembering rule
on paper.

Now obviously, it was something like to determine as you practice it more on your
actual studies. You probably just pick it up naturally, but using this visualization technique,
you can imprint an idea in 1 repetition. So 1 time, the first time you have saw the idea you
can imprint in your mind much, much more strongly that you could than just by skipping
over it. And so I strongly recommend using this technique, using the, making it more vivid,
more imaginative, adding sound, and adding color, adding temperature, adding this kind of
features and idea. It takes a very abstract idea and makes it extremely vivid and as long as
you are preserving the integrity of the idea. So you are not representing in it in a correct
way. Then you will be able to understand the idea a bit better, but more important you will
be able to remember it much longer. So that’s the direct technique that I strongly
recommend that you try out if you’re finding that you’re uncovering a lot of boring and
abstract details you want to remember better try using a visualization method.
3-5: Getting to deeper levels of insight
So using metaphor, diagrams and visualization is a way to remember ideas better,
sometimes you also wanted to get the deeper level of insight. So you don’t wanted just have
one understanding of an idea, you really understand how it works. And really
understanding how it works can also be benefited by having a lot of this different metaphor
and different access point. So one way that I strongly recommend if you don’t just want to
remember an idea but you need to deeply understand so particularly true of math, physics,
computer science. Disciplines, where if you form the wrong way of understanding ideas,
you create a metaphor or visualization that doesn’t correspond of how the idea actually
works, then you can answer questions or complex problems incorrectly because your
metaphor is faulty. So one way of avoiding this problem and getting a really true
representation of an idea as useful is what I called the compare and contrast method. So
remember what I was discussing how to create the metaphor that you wanted to do is to
create the deep structure of the idea, so as I was discussing the corno pricing model and
compare that to an analogy which was kids playing with balloons. So you have in one hand
on how the idea works and on the other hand how your metaphor works and you wanted
to compare this deep structure.

So in compare and contrast method is you wanted to look for a– any places you
wanted to can strengthen the metaphor, make it resemble the actual reality more. But more
importantly you also wanted to pay close attention to areas where they do not correspond
and any analogy will always have places where it doesn’t fit. So the analogy will work for
describing one feature of an idea but will it fail miserably for understanding another idea
and this makes sense because the 2 situations are not identical so they will not going to
have identical course, they’re not going to have identical situation and so you might that
happened. And so what important is not just to say that well I have to understand things
just in the pure abstract sense it’s useless to try to make metaphors and analogies. Because
that’s going to really lose a lot of benefit of the extra memory and ability you have to
remember ideas better using metaphors. The way we use compare to contrast method is
you notice where the ideas are similar but you also notice where the distance works. So you
make a point of pointing out your head, ok well, as I was saying with the corno pricing
model that one of the things that doesn’t really matchup is that when the kids are trying to
steal balloons and everybody have not divide them up equally then why would the other
kids seeing this revert their contract and also try to steal the balloons which doesn’t
happen in the corno model but would happen in the playground example. That’s the
example were they differ, were they not the same

Another example is speedometer-odometer on a car. Well in an actual function on

actual derivative we can go negative so we can have negative speed which reduces position
but speed and mileage in a car are monotonic so if you drive really fast in the opposite
direction then your position can continue to increase your odometer continues to go up, it
doesn’t goes backward down to 0. So understanding these differences between these
analogies actually allows me to understand the idea better and makes the metaphor lot
more useful, so if I’ve just said, oh derivative is like a speedometer on a car then I’ve been
missing this important point that can actually you can do negative and when it does go
negative it can actually go rewind the odometer which has something that has never
physically happens in the car. So this is something that is very important, comparing and
contrasting is way of taking a fairly week metaphor and making it much, much stronger in
giving you insight, not necessarily making it more vivid or more memorable but giving it
more insight. This is also something to do with visualization, so as I said with visualization
that imagines a computer function being likes a pencil sharpener. Now with the problem
with the pencil sharpener analogy is often the input is actually distinct from the output. So
it’s the same pencil going in and being return with the, unsharpened pencil to sharpened
pencil. But in the computer what you returning could actually be completely separate from
the unsharpened pencil, so the unsharpened pencil still unsharpened, it just give you
different sharpened pencil when you finished. So that’s an example of the visualization
context when I imagine the visualization of it, that maybe I wanted to change my
visualization, maybe I don’t want to stick my pencil and bringing out a pencil sharpener.
Maybe I wanted to putting, touching unsharpened pencil and that just magically sharpened
pencil comes out, unsharpened pencil magically sharpened pencil comes out. That’s an
example where I’m tricking the visualization so that incorporate these compare contrast
details.

Another way you can get deeper level of insight is by just creating more metaphor
more visualization. So no metaphor is going to be perfect, all of them will be going to have
flaws and weaknesses and so one way you can really strengthen your understanding an
idea is just to have lots of them. So if have a lots of different ideas, you can use compare and
contrast better on each of them, you can really get a good coverage. So my corno model
with the playground example might be good in some ways but might even bad in other
ways. So I never really touch down the idea that price and quality and profit are all
interrelated. That has nothing to do, I just use balloons as the examples and I’m not really
exploring that structured of the idea. And so by creating completely different analogy
maybe I could explore the price, quantity and profit relationship which is important on
understanding that idea. So you create several metaphors, several analogies some kind of
buffer around an idea, not only you create more association which again makes them an
ideas easier to remember but you understand it is really multi fast and multi dimensional
way, and by doing this, you will be able to use the idea in so many different context in really
full of way as supposed to, oh my analogy breaks down in this particular problem, I’m done.
You’ll understand the very well representative way and would very hard for professors or
teachers to draw a problem that you won’t be able to understand fully. So consider doing
that as well, maybe just one visualization one diagram, and one metaphor, that’s not would
be enough, maybe you want to create a lot of them. And obviously time constraints are
going to limiting you so you might not be able to make as many as you want. But going
through this process is a very good investment of your studying time, so it’s much better
than just strictly reviewing ideas when you were reading a text book. So if you were going
to do something like that just spent some time making metaphors, and just try to make as
many as you can.

Another thing we can think about is also don’t try to remember the metaphor or the
visualization or the diagram, try to remember the idea itself. So this is a little bit of a
distinction but what happens was some student is that they create metaphors and they
spent a lot of time to memorize the metaphor. The whole point of the metaphors; the whole
point of visualization is to make the underline idea easier to remember. I created tons of
metaphors and visualizations I don’t remember anymore but as long as I could remember
what the idea was, then it doesn’t matter. They’re not there to be purposeful in of
themselves. Once you planning in teaching a class and you wanted to reuse that metaphor
for something, remember the metaphor isn’t important, what is important is remembering
the core idea. So consider it like scaffolding to form our house. You put in all these logs so
you could build up the house but once you’re done, you can remove the scaffolding because
it’s not important anymore, or if the scaffolding is taken down, the concrete form is still
there because we are just using it to fill the concrete when it is still wet. Think of that as an
analogy for this as well, that you can use your metaphor as the scaffolding but then if you
forget them or to put or forget the place where to get them down, all that matters is that the
house is there or that the building and foundation is there and its integrity.

So focus on that as well, don’t try just to memorize all of your metaphors and try to
use the metaphor to remember the core idea. So when you are testing yourself of whether
you’re learning the ideas better, don’t try to see if you could just recall your metaphors, see
if you could remember the core idea
3-6: Quality or quantity?
What are the question that I would ask with the student is should they focus on
creating more metaphors or creating better metaphors? And on the last video I show you
how you could do both. So creating a lot of metaphors, seeing the idea from many different
facets, that is one way to improve your memory, another way is to just explore the deep
structure using the compare and contrast method. And the basic rule of thumb is that both
is better, so better quality metaphors and more metaphors are better because you create
more association with one and you’re understanding their better more correct association
with the other. But which one you should lean towards really depends on your classes and
in some cases, having the wrong analogy and having the wrong metaphor or the wrong
visualization can throw you off, they can make give you the wrong answer. So the degree to
which you focus on the quality over the quantity is to the degree to which this is a problem.

So as an example of this, scientist used to believe that the Adam was like the solar
system. So there was core nucleus like the sun and all these electrons were orbiting around
it. Now it turns out, this is an actually how it works in reality that the electrons are not just
little particles, little infests particles, but they are waste. And the idea of a planet just
orbiting just fixed orbit is really that is wave distributed over this volume of areas sort of
more like a cloud than like an orbit. And so because they were using the sort of wrong
metaphor that made a little bit harder to understand this new way of thinking about the
ideas because they were really thinking of them as being a cloud or something that has this
wave like property. You’re thinking of it as having a particle like property. So this sort of
distinction between the ideas can be lead to being slower and really realizing its scientific
truth. Now, the same thing in happen to your classes if you’re taking a chemistry class and
you only think of the Adam in terms of the solar system. Then you have to understand D or
P ordinals, you’re going to be confused because they don’t look like orbits around the
planet and they’re not believe in distributed that way. Then a lot of principles that apply on
the way they work will not apply at all. They’re not at all analogies to a solar system

And so in some cases having a bad analogy in this case the solar system model, it can
really hinder you in fully understanding how the problem was. So that’s where, if you’re in
the situation where those are key problem to have, where the way you need to explore the
idea needs to be very flexible, you’re not just using the formula on a certain type of problem
in all cases. You are using it on a dozen very different applications. And in those cases
where you need extremely flexible representation of the knowledge, so I would say
mathematics, physics, those kinds of classes you often need to extremely flexible
representation of the knowledge. You want to focus on quality. So it doesn’t mean you
cannot make more metaphors but your goals should be to have one or two really good
ones. So sometimes you have to go to a few ones that are really good metaphors so free find
new ones. So you describe the solar system all the way thru for the cloud model, that’s an
examples what you might go thru but your goal is to have really high quality metaphors.

In contrast, if you’re doing a class where you have to remember a lot of information
but the way you’re going to need to use the information is less flexible, so I know a lot of
people where studying in high to be classes, they have to remember a lot of terms, a lot of
the ways the body works. But they’re not going to be expected to use that in wildly creative
ways, they just expected to know it in a fairly straight forward way. So in this cases, it
sometimes need to create a lot of metaphors even if they’re not perfect, because the
chances you will going to be in a situation where your metaphor is incorrect and its going
to lead you a wrong answer is smaller, so it’s better to have just a lot of association you
actually remember more of the idea better.

So that’s the inspection that you are working on. In addition in this course, I’m
discussed this ideas, metaphor, diagram and visualization out of the content so just
something you do on its own. But in reality you probably not going to lot spend 3 hours just
creating metaphors or visualization. What this are, this are the atomic components of
larger techniques. So you can use metaphors or diagrams or visualizations while you’re
taking notes or you can use them while you are reading a text book or you can using them
while you’re finding a technique another level of method that we discuss later in the
course. So what I want you to do is practice these ideas. Figured out which one is going to
be useful to you and practice them so you get used to them. But the really core kernels of
the idea that you may use in bigger technique, it allows you to focus this powerful tool on
the things worth most important. So just doing a spread shot of using metaphors and
visualization on every idea you encounter, that’s good. But if you are spending hours and
hours of doing it, it’s probably not the best of used of your time whereas it in doing the
conjunction of the finding technique or notes compression or any other idea which is very
specific then you will be able to utilize yet the most important ways possible were you
using an idea was going the best impact.