There are many software tools for study, learning, attention programming, and memory prosthetics.
Flashcard apps (Anki)
Iterated reading apps (Supermemo)
Notetaking and annotation apps (Roam Research)
Motivational apps (Beeminder)
Time management (Pomodoro)
Search (Google Scholar)
Mnemonic books (Matuschak and Nielsen’s “Quantum Country”)
Collaborative document editing (Google Docs)
Internet-based conversation (Internet forums)
Tutoring (Wyzant)
Calculators, simulators, and programming tools (MATLAB)
These complement analog study tools, such as pen and paper, textbooks, worksheets, and classes.
These tools tend to keep the user’s attention directed outward. They offer useful proxy metrics for learning: getting through 20 flashcards per day, completing N Pomodoros, getting through the assigned reading pages, turning in the homework.
However, these proxy metrics, like any others, are vulnerable to streetlamp effects and Goodharting.
Before we had this abundance of analog and digital knowledge tools, scholars relied on other ways to tackle problems. They built memory palaces, visualized, looked for examples in the world around them, invented approximations, and talked to themselves. They relied on their brains, bodies, and what they could build from their physical environment to keep their thoughts in order.
Of course, humanity’s transition into the enlightenment and industrial revolution coincided with the development of many of these knowledge tools: the abacus, the printing press, cheaper writing implements, slide rules, and eventually the computer. These undoubtedly have been essential for human progress.
Yet I suspect that access to these tools have led us to neglect the basic mental faculties our ancestors relied on to think and learn about scholarly topics. Key examples include the ability to hold and rehearse an extended chain of thought in your head, the ability to visualize or imagine feelings of physical movement, and the ability to deliberately construct patterns of thought.
These behaviors are perhaps more familiar to me than to the average person, because they are still, to some extent, expected of classical pianists like myself. We were expected to memorize our music and do mental practice, and composers are expected to be able to compose in their head. I taught myself relative pitch purely via a year’s work imagining and identifying musical intervals in my head. This allowed me to invent melodies in my head as a side effect. Those were abilities I gained well into adulthood, and I had no idea my brain was capable of that before I was pressured by my music department into figuring out how to do it.
I expect that people have great potential to develop comparable mental skills in left-brained areas such as mental calculation and logic, visualizing geometry, and recalling facts. My hypothesis is that practice at expanding these mental abilities, and doing so for practical purposes (rather than, for example, to win memorization competitions), would allow people to understand topics and solve problems that previously had seemed incomprehensible to them. I think we’ve compensated for our modern artifice by letting go of mental art, and have realized fewer gains than the proliferation of computing power would have suggested to a scientist, mathematician, or engineer of 100 years ago.
The software programs above start with a psychological thesis about how learning works, do a task analysis to figure out what physical behaviors are required to realize that thesis, and then build a software program to facilitate and direct those behaviors. Anki starts with a thesis about spaced repetition, uses flashcards as its task, and builds a program to allow for more powerful flashcard-based practice than you can do with paper cards.
Software programs might also be useful to exercise the interior mental faculties. However, the point is for the practitioner to relate with their interior state of mind, not the external readout on a screen. Just as with software programs, we need a psychological thesis about how learning works. However, instead of a physical task analysis, we need a mental task analysis. Then we need a technique for enacting that mental task more efficiently for the purposes of learning and scholarship.
For example, under the thesis of constructivism, students must actively “build” their own knowledge by actively wrestling with the subject. Testing is a useful way to build understanding. Under this psychological thesis, a mental activity that might support learning is having students memorize practice problems and practice being able to describe, in their own head, how they’d solve that problem. They might also practice remembering the major topics related to the material they’re covering, what order those topics are presented in, and how they interrelate in the overarching theme of the section. Being able to provoke thoughts on these topics at will, and successfully recall the material (i.e. on a walk, while driving, in the shower) would also be a form of “programmable attention,” as many software programs seek to achieve, but one that is generated and directed by the student’s own power of mind.
Another example, one getting farther away from what software can achieve, is simply the ability to hold a fluid, ongoing chain of thought recalling a topic of interest. For example, imagine a student who had thoroughly learned about the immune system. I think it is typical that students only really turn their thoughts to that topic when prompted, such as during a conversation, by a test, or while reading—all external forms of stimulation. A student might practice being able to think about what they know of the immune system at will, unprovoked. The ability to let their mind wanderamong the facts they’ve learned is not something most people can easily do, and seems obviously to me to be both an attainable and a very useful scholarly skill. But “spend some time thinking about and elaborating on what you know of immunology for the next 15 minutes, forming organic connections with other things you know and whatever you happen to be curious about” is not something that a software program can easily facilitate.
It’s just this sort of mental practice that I’m interested in discovering, learning about, and promoting. There is plenty of effort and interest in external mental prosthetics. I am interested in what we can call the techniques of mental practice.
I’ll continue fleshing it out over time! Mostly using the shortform as a place to get my thoughts together in legible form prior to making a main post (or several). By the way, contrast “constructivism” with “transmissionism,” the latter being the (wrong) idea that students are basically just sponges that passively absorb the information their teacher spews at them. I got both terms from Andy Matuschak.
There are many software tools for study, learning, attention programming, and memory prosthetics.
Flashcard apps (Anki)
Iterated reading apps (Supermemo)
Notetaking and annotation apps (Roam Research)
Motivational apps (Beeminder)
Time management (Pomodoro)
Search (Google Scholar)
Mnemonic books (Matuschak and Nielsen’s “Quantum Country”)
Collaborative document editing (Google Docs)
Internet-based conversation (Internet forums)
Tutoring (Wyzant)
Calculators, simulators, and programming tools (MATLAB)
These complement analog study tools, such as pen and paper, textbooks, worksheets, and classes.
These tools tend to keep the user’s attention directed outward. They offer useful proxy metrics for learning: getting through 20 flashcards per day, completing N Pomodoros, getting through the assigned reading pages, turning in the homework.
However, these proxy metrics, like any others, are vulnerable to streetlamp effects and Goodharting.
Before we had this abundance of analog and digital knowledge tools, scholars relied on other ways to tackle problems. They built memory palaces, visualized, looked for examples in the world around them, invented approximations, and talked to themselves. They relied on their brains, bodies, and what they could build from their physical environment to keep their thoughts in order.
Of course, humanity’s transition into the enlightenment and industrial revolution coincided with the development of many of these knowledge tools: the abacus, the printing press, cheaper writing implements, slide rules, and eventually the computer. These undoubtedly have been essential for human progress.
Yet I suspect that access to these tools have led us to neglect the basic mental faculties our ancestors relied on to think and learn about scholarly topics. Key examples include the ability to hold and rehearse an extended chain of thought in your head, the ability to visualize or imagine feelings of physical movement, and the ability to deliberately construct patterns of thought.
These behaviors are perhaps more familiar to me than to the average person, because they are still, to some extent, expected of classical pianists like myself. We were expected to memorize our music and do mental practice, and composers are expected to be able to compose in their head. I taught myself relative pitch purely via a year’s work imagining and identifying musical intervals in my head. This allowed me to invent melodies in my head as a side effect. Those were abilities I gained well into adulthood, and I had no idea my brain was capable of that before I was pressured by my music department into figuring out how to do it.
I expect that people have great potential to develop comparable mental skills in left-brained areas such as mental calculation and logic, visualizing geometry, and recalling facts. My hypothesis is that practice at expanding these mental abilities, and doing so for practical purposes (rather than, for example, to win memorization competitions), would allow people to understand topics and solve problems that previously had seemed incomprehensible to them. I think we’ve compensated for our modern artifice by letting go of mental art, and have realized fewer gains than the proliferation of computing power would have suggested to a scientist, mathematician, or engineer of 100 years ago.
The software programs above start with a psychological thesis about how learning works, do a task analysis to figure out what physical behaviors are required to realize that thesis, and then build a software program to facilitate and direct those behaviors. Anki starts with a thesis about spaced repetition, uses flashcards as its task, and builds a program to allow for more powerful flashcard-based practice than you can do with paper cards.
Software programs might also be useful to exercise the interior mental faculties. However, the point is for the practitioner to relate with their interior state of mind, not the external readout on a screen. Just as with software programs, we need a psychological thesis about how learning works. However, instead of a physical task analysis, we need a mental task analysis. Then we need a technique for enacting that mental task more efficiently for the purposes of learning and scholarship.
For example, under the thesis of constructivism, students must actively “build” their own knowledge by actively wrestling with the subject. Testing is a useful way to build understanding. Under this psychological thesis, a mental activity that might support learning is having students memorize practice problems and practice being able to describe, in their own head, how they’d solve that problem. They might also practice remembering the major topics related to the material they’re covering, what order those topics are presented in, and how they interrelate in the overarching theme of the section. Being able to provoke thoughts on these topics at will, and successfully recall the material (i.e. on a walk, while driving, in the shower) would also be a form of “programmable attention,” as many software programs seek to achieve, but one that is generated and directed by the student’s own power of mind.
Another example, one getting farther away from what software can achieve, is simply the ability to hold a fluid, ongoing chain of thought recalling a topic of interest. For example, imagine a student who had thoroughly learned about the immune system. I think it is typical that students only really turn their thoughts to that topic when prompted, such as during a conversation, by a test, or while reading—all external forms of stimulation. A student might practice being able to think about what they know of the immune system at will, unprovoked. The ability to let their mind wander among the facts they’ve learned is not something most people can easily do, and seems obviously to me to be both an attainable and a very useful scholarly skill. But “spend some time thinking about and elaborating on what you know of immunology for the next 15 minutes, forming organic connections with other things you know and whatever you happen to be curious about” is not something that a software program can easily facilitate.
It’s just this sort of mental practice that I’m interested in discovering, learning about, and promoting. There is plenty of effort and interest in external mental prosthetics. I am interested in what we can call the techniques of mental practice.
Please post this as a regular post.
Thirding this. Would love more detail or threads to pull on. Going into the constructivism rabbit hole now.
I’ll continue fleshing it out over time! Mostly using the shortform as a place to get my thoughts together in legible form prior to making a main post (or several). By the way, contrast “constructivism” with “transmissionism,” the latter being the (wrong) idea that students are basically just sponges that passively absorb the information their teacher spews at them. I got both terms from Andy Matuschak.
I second this, and expansions of these ideas.