Notebook for A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) Oakley, Barbara Citation (APA): Oakley, B. (2014). A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com { 2 } easy does it Highlight (yellow) - Page 12 Diffuse-mode insights often flow from preliminary thinking that’s been done in the focused mode. (The diffuse mode must have clay to make bricks!) Highlight (yellow) - Page 17 You have to unlearn your erroneous older ideas even while you’re learning new ones. Note - Page 17 Beginner's mind. Highlight (yellow) - Page 17 one significant mistake students sometimes make in learning math and science is jumping into the water before they learn to swim. Highlight (yellow) - Page 19 If you are trying to understand or figure out something new, your best bet is to turn off your precision-focused thinking and turn on your “big picture” diffuse mode, Highlight (yellow) - Page 19 The harder you push your brain to come up with something creative, the less creative your ideas will be. So far, I have not found a single situation where this does not apply. Ultimately, this means that relaxation is an important part of hard work—and good work, for that matter.” Highlight (yellow) - Page 20 If you watch birds, they’ll first peck, and then pause to scan the horizon—almost as if they are alternating between focused and diffuse modes. Highlight (yellow) - Page 21 as long as we are consciously focusing on a problem, we are blocking the diffuse mode. Highlight (yellow) - Page 23 when you procrastinate, you are leaving yourself only enough time to do superficial focused-mode learning. { 3 } learning is creating Highlight (yellow) - Page 30 One remarkably inventive chemist of the mid-1800s, Alexander Williamson, observed that a solitary walk was worth a week in the laboratory in helping him progress in his work. Highlight (yellow) - Page 30 Once you are distracted from the problem at hand, the diffuse mode has access and can begin pinging about in its big-picture way to settle on a solution. Highlight (yellow) - Page 32 Enlisting the diffuse mode helps you learn at a deep and creative level. Highlight (yellow) - Page 32 technical problems and their solutions may be considered a form of poetry. Highlight (yellow) - Page 33 Thiss sentence contains threee errors. The first two errors are easily discovered using a focused-mode approach. The third, paradoxical error becomes obvious only when you change perspectives and adopt a more diffuse approach. Highlight (yellow) - Page 33 start early on your assignments and, unless you are really enjoying what you are doing, keep your working sessions short. Remember, when you take breaks, your diffuse mode is still working away in the background. Highlight (yellow) - Page 34 just using your diffuse mode doesn’t mean you can lollygag around and expect to get anywhere. As the days and weeks pass, it’s the distributed practice—the back and forth between focused-mode attention and diffuse-mode relaxation—that does the trick. Highlight (yellow) - Page 35 Listen to music, especially without words Note - Page 35 This is why electronic music works for me perhaps, it activates my diffuse mode. Highlight (yellow) - Page 35 Meditate Note - Page 35 Can use meditation as a rest point between hard study sessions. Highlight (yellow) - Page 36 accepting the first idea that comes to mind when you are working on an assignment or test problem can prevent you from finding a better solution. Highlight (yellow) - Page 36 Chess players who experience Einstellung truly believe they are scanning the board for a different solution. But careful study of where their eyes are moving shows that they are keeping their focus on the original solution. Not only their eyes, but their mind itself can’t move away enough to see a new approach to the problem. Highlight (yellow) - Page 37 Closing our eyes seems to provide a micropause that momentarily deactivates our attention and allows us, for the briefest of moments, to refresh and renew our consciousness and perspective. Highlight (yellow) - Page 38 The diffuse mode not only allows you to look at the material in new ways but also appears to allow you to synthesize and incorporate the new ideas in relation to what you already know. Highlight (yellow) - Page 38 “sleeping on it” before making major decisions is generally a good idea, Highlight (yellow) - Page 38 taking vacations is important. Highlight (yellow) - Page 38 Working in the focused mode is like providing the bricks, while working in the diffuse mode is like gradually joining the bricks together with mortar. Highlight (yellow) - Page 42 It used to be thought that our working memory could hold around seven items, or “chunks,” but it’s now widely believed that the working memory holds only about four chunks of information. Note - Page 42 Another argument for meditation, frees up working memory so you can learn and do more efficiently. Highlight (yellow) - Page 43 (Techie types sometimes equate short-term memory to random-access memory [RAM], and long-term memory to hard drive space.) Highlight (yellow) - Page 44 I set my phone alarm for twenty-one minutes because turning a short power nap into a longer sleep can leave you groggy. Highlight (yellow) - Page 45 If you’re tired, it’s often best to just go to sleep and get up a little earlier the next day, so your reading is done with a better-rested brain. Experienced learners will attest to the fact that reading for one hour with a well-rested brain is better than reading for three hours with a tired brain. Highlight (yellow) - Page 49 Creativity is a numbers game: The best predictor of how many creative works we produce in our lifetime is . . . the number of works we produce. I sometimes find it excruciating to pull the trigger and expose my work to other people, but every time I do, it turns out for the best. Highlight (yellow) - Page 49 “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” I try to look at this daily, and I aim to do something fearless every day. What are you afraid of? Don’t let it stop you! Highlight (yellow) - Page 50 Redos come with the territory: If you don’t like the way it turned out—do it again! Highlight (yellow) - Page 50 Criticism makes us better: By exposing our work to others, and by externalizing it so we can inspect it ourselves, we gain unique perspective and insight and develop new and improved plans for the next version. Highlight (yellow) - Page 50 Be willing to be disagreeable. There is a negative correlation between the level of creativity and “agreeableness,” so those who are the most disagreeable tend to be most creative. { 4 } chunking and avoiding illusions of competence Highlight (yellow) - Page 55 one of the first steps toward gaining expertise in math and science is to create conceptual chunks—mental leaps that unite separate bits of information through meaning.4 Highlight (yellow) - Page 58 just understanding how a problem was solved does not necessarily create a chunk that you can easily call to mind later. Highlight (yellow) - Page 59 bottom-up chunking process where practice and repetition can help you both build and strengthen each chunk, so you can easily gain access to it when needed. And there is a top-down “big picture” process that allows you to see where what you are learning fits in.9 Both processes are vital in gaining mastery over the material. Context is where bottom-up and top-down learning meet. Highlight (yellow) - Page 62 keep your text markings to a minimum—one sentence or less per paragraph. Highlight (yellow) - Page 65 Merely glancing at the solution to a problem and thinking you truly know it yourself is one of the most common illusions of competence in learning. Highlight (yellow) - Page 66 You must have information persisting in your memory if you are to master the material well enough to do well on tests and think creatively with it. Highlight (yellow) - Page 66 Bill Gates and other industry leaders, Johnson notes, set aside extended, weeklong reading periods so that they can hold many and varied ideas in mind during one time. Highlight (yellow) - Page 66 (An important side note here is that a key difference between creative scientists and technically competent but nonimaginative ones is their breadth of interest. Note - Page 66 A reminder I must read more widely as to it be pidgeon-holed. Perhaps what one can do is force a 2:1 ratio on field of interest vs. random good book unrelated to field of interest. The 1 can and maybe should be fiction as well, as reality sometimes follows fiction, especially in science. Highlight (yellow) - Page 66 once you put the first problem or concept in your library, whatever it is, then the second concept will go in a bit more easily. Note - Page 66 Learning momentum. Highlight (yellow) - Page 69 you can reinforce a “wrong” process by doing the same problems over and over the wrong way. This is why checking things is so important. Even getting the right answer can occasionally mislead you if you get it by using an incorrect procedure. Highlight (yellow) - Page 70 you can’t learn mathematics or science without also including a healthy dose of practice and repetition to help you build the chunks that will underpin your expertise. Highlight (yellow) - Page 71 by simply practicing and recalling the material, students learned far more and at a much deeper level than they did using any other approach, Highlight (yellow) - Page 71 the retrieval process itself enhances deep learning and helps us begin forming chunks. Highlight (yellow) - Page 72 recalling material when you are outside your usual place of study helps you strengthen your grasp of the material by viewing it from a different perspective. Highlight (yellow) - Page 73 problem solving in math and science is like dance. In dance, you can feel your body hinting at the next move. Highlight (yellow) - Page 76 Rather than devote a long session to the study or practice of the same skill or concept so that overlearning occurs, students should divide their effort across several shorter sessions. This doesn’t mean that long study sessions are necessarily a bad idea. Long sessions are fine as long as students don’t devote too much time to any one skill or concept. Once they understand ‘X,’ they should move on to something else and return to ‘X’ on another day.” Highlight (yellow) - Page 79 Even if what you are studying is very advanced, simplifying so you can explain to others who do not share your educational background can be surprisingly helpful in building your understanding. { 5 } preventing procrastination Highlight (yellow) - Page 85 “The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.” Highlight (yellow) - Page 86 It’s easy to feel distaste for something you’re not good at. But the better you get at something, the more you’ll find you enjoy it. Highlight (yellow) - Page 87 Procrastination is like addiction. { 6 } zombies everywhere Highlight (yellow) - Page 95 The only place you need to apply willpower is to change your reaction to the cue. Note - Page 95 How about remove the cues entirely? Highlight (yellow) - Page 96 “If you protect your routine, eventually it will protect you.” Note - Page 96 Protect your route by doing it in same order everyday. Bring back your morning routine! Highlight (yellow) - Page 99 mental contrasting.6 In this technique, you think about where you are now and contrast it with what you want to achieve. Highlight (yellow) - Page 100 remember to contrast those great images with the real, more mundane life that currently surrounds you, or that you are emerging from. You can change your reality. Highlight (yellow) - Page 100 all it takes is one bad day to spark an important realization. Highlight (yellow) - Page 101 Learn to focus on process, not product. Process means the flow of time and the habits and actions associated with that flow of time—as in, “I’m going to spend twenty minutes working.” Product is an outcome— Highlight (yellow) - Page 102 Who cares whether you finished the homework or grasped key concepts in any one session? The whole point instead is that you calmly put forth your best effort for a short period—the process. Highlight (yellow) - Page 103 Break Your Work into Bite-Sized Pieces—Then Work Intently, but Briefly Highlight (yellow) - Page 103 If you learn under mild stress, you can handle greater stress much more easily. Highlight (yellow) - Page 103 researcher Sian Beilock describes in her book Choke, golfers who practice putting in front of others aren’t fazed later on when they have to perform before an audience in competitions. Note - Page 103 Do scary things a lot and they become less so. Be brave and do hard things. Highlight (yellow) - Page 105 The key is, when the distraction arises, which it inevitably will, you want to train yourself to ignore it. Note - Page 105 Like in meditation, if you find yourself distracted it's okay. Just bring yourself back to the task. Highlight (yellow) - Page 107 Mental contrasting is a powerful motivating technique—think about the worst aspects of your present or past experiences and contrast these with the upbeat vision of your future. Highlight (yellow) - Page 107 Multitasking means that you are not able to make full, rich connections in your thinking, because the part of your brain that helps make connections is constantly being pulled away before neural connections can be firmed up. Highlight (yellow) - Page 109 What is one of your most troublesome cues that spins you off into a procrastination response? What could you do to react differently to that cue, or to avoid receiving the cue? Note - Page 109 Being overwhelmed with too much things to do on to do list. I can just pick one randomly and do it without thinking about consequences. { 7 } chunking versus choking Highlight (yellow) - Page 114 STEPS TO BUILDING A POWERFUL CHUNK Note - Page 114 Refer here. Highlight (yellow) - Page 116 don’t feel overwhelmed with everything you need to learn about a new subject. Instead, focus on nailing down a few key ideas. You’ll be surprised at how much that simple framework can help. Highlight (yellow) - Page 119 Choking—panicking to the point where you freeze—can happen when your working memory is filled to capacity, yet you still don’t have enough room for the additional critical pieces you need to solve a problem. { 8 } tools, tips, and tricks Highlight (yellow) - Page 126 To a great degree, the highest-performing people I know are those who have installed the best tricks in their lives Note - Page 126 Making your life algorithmic in a sense, like building your life via your surroundings, food, etc in your best state of mind and finding ways to implement it so that even in the worst state of mind you can rely on automaticity to do it. In other words, hack your habits in any way you can. Highlight (yellow) - Page 129 self-experimentation can be used by non-experts to (a) see if the experts are right and (b) learn something they don’t know. Highlight (yellow) - Page 134 It’s important to transform distant deadlines into daily ones. Attack them bit by bit. Big tasks need to be translated into smaller ones that show up on your daily task list. { 9 } procrastination zombie wrap-up Highlight (yellow) - Page 146 “When I am not working, I must relax—not work on something else!” Highlight (yellow) - Page 147 You may be surprised to learn that the difference in the way that math experts (professors and graduate students) and math novices (undergraduate students) solve physics problems is that experts are slower to begin solving a problem. Highlight (yellow) - Page 148 Over the past decades, students who have blindly followed their passion, without rational analysis of whether their choice of career truly was wise, have been more unhappy with their job choices than those who coupled passion with rationality. Note - Page 148 This is interesting and a good compromise on the regular "follow your passion" spiel. Passion x rationality = this is why I love code. Highlight (yellow) - Page 148 The mistake is thinking that if we aren’t good at something, we do not have and can never develop a passion for it. { 11 } more memory tips Highlight (yellow) - Page 170 Metaphors also help glue an idea in your mind, because they make a connection to neural structures that are already there. Note - Page 170 Why you should relate things that you're passionate about to each other, even if the connection is nonsensical to most. Take advantage of built roads. Highlight (yellow) - Page 173 Repetition is important; even when you make something memorable, repetition helps get that memorable item firmly lodged in long-term memory. Highlight (yellow) - Page 173 Writing appears to help you to more deeply encode (that is, convert into neural memory structures) what you are trying to learn. Highlight (yellow) - Page 178 Although there is little research in this area,11 many educators have observed that there seems to be a muscle memory related to writing by hand. For example, when you first stare at an equation, it can appear utterly meaningless. But if you thoughtfully write the equation out several times on a sheet of paper, you will be startled by how the equation will begin to take life and meaning in your mind. Highlight (yellow) - Page 178 “I often tell my students to talk to themselves instead of just highlighting and rereading. They look at me quizzically, like I am absolutely insane (which could be true). But I have had many students come back to me later and say that it really works and that this is now one of their study tools.” Highlight (yellow) - Page 179 Here’s the bottom line. By using mental pictures instead of words to remember things, you can leap more easily into expert status. Highlight (yellow) - Page 179 learning to process ideas visually in math and science is a powerful way to become a master of the material. Highlight (yellow) - Page 179 the memorization process itself becomes an exercise in creativity. The more you memorize using these innovative techniques, the more creative you become. This is because you are building wild, unexpected possibilities for future connections early on, even as you are first internalizing the ideas. Note - Page 180 Argument to do what I did as a kid, invent wacky stories to help memorize material. Enhanced creativity will really help innovate AI. Highlight (yellow) - Page 180 One study of how actors memorize their scripts showed that they avoid verbatim memorization. Instead, they depend on an understanding of the characters’ needs and motivations in order to remember their lines. Highlight (yellow) - Page 180 remember that inner two-year-old. Your childlike creativity is still there—you just need to reach out to it. Highlight (yellow) - Page 181 Metaphors can help you learn difficult ideas more quickly. Highlight (yellow) - Page 181 Stories—even if they are just used as silly memory tricks—can allow you to more easily retain what you are trying to learn. Writing and saying what you are trying to learn seems to enhance retention. Note - Page 181 There is value in writing stories with morals and poetry that reflects life lessons! { 12 } learning to appreciate your talent Highlight (yellow) - Page 183 once you understand why you do something in math and science, you don’t have to keep reexplaining the how to yourself every time you do it. Highlight (yellow) - Page 184 Chess masters, emergency room physicians, fighter pilots, and many other experts often have to make complex decisions rapidly. They shut down their conscious system and instead rely on their well-trained intuition, drawing on their deeply ingrained repertoire of chunks.2 At some point, self-consciously “understanding” why you do what you do just slows you down and interrupts flow, resulting in worse decisions. Highlight (yellow) - Page 187 If you are one of those people who can’t hold a lot in mind at once—you lose focus and start daydreaming in lectures, and have to get to someplace quiet to focus so you can use your working memory to its maximum—well, welcome to the clan of the creative. Note - Page 187 This section is great. Didn't highlight everything. Return here and revisit the text sometime. Highlight (yellow) - Page 187 You may have to work harder sometimes (or even much of the time) to understand what’s going on, but once you’ve got something chunked, you can take that chunk and turn it outside in and inside round—putting it through creative paces even you didn’t think you were capable of! Note - Page 188 Yes, I feel I learn really slowly but when I get it I really get it. It's like there's this infection point. I keep working and I barely progress and then one day I can do backflips. It's just so demoralizing there is rarely a sign a breakthrough is coming. Highlight (yellow) - Page 188 It is the practice—particularly deliberate practice on the toughest aspects of the material—that can help lift average brains into the realm of those with more “natural” gifts. Highlight (yellow) - Page 189 At some point, after you’ve got chunked material well in hand (and in brain), you start to let go of conscious awareness of every little detail and do things automatically. Note - Page 189 Turn off your mind when performing. Highlight (yellow) - Page 189 Part of the key to creativity is to be able to switch from full focused concentration to the relaxed, daydreamy diffuse mode. Note - Page 189 I have this and must never lose this! Do the headspace on creativity exercises! Highlight (yellow) - Page 189 Focusing too intently can inhibit the solution you are seeking—like trying to hammer a screw because you think it’s a nail. When you are stuck, sometimes it’s best to get away from a problem for a while and move on to something else, or to simply sleep on it. Note - Page 189 Must always remember this. Burnout is real but don't let it scare you that you shouldn't Push the Limit. Highlight (yellow) - Page 191 People often try to stop their daydreaming, because it interrupts activities they truly intend to focus on, like listening to an important lecture. What works better for you—forcing yourself to maintain focus, or simply bringing your attention back to the matter at hand when you notice your attention wandering? Note - Page 191 This is the essence of meditation. Bringing yourself back when you notice your mind has wandered. It's really interesting how it's really a good exercise for the brain. { 13 } sculpting your brain Highlight (yellow) - Page 194 Anyone, Cajal noted, even people with average intelligence, can sculpt their own brain, so that even the least gifted can produce an abundant harvest. Highlight (yellow) - Page 195 “Deficiencies of innate ability may be compensated for through persistent hard work and concentration. One might say that work substitutes for talent, or better yet that it creates talent.”6 —Santiago Ramón y Cajal Highlight (yellow) - Page 197 Cajal looked to the abstract picture of his mind’s eye—what he could remember from his morning’s viewings—and began to draw the cells. Once finished, Cajal compared his drawing with the image he saw in the microscope. Note - Page 197 A good method to copy. Get the answers to a hard concept and try to look away and do them again and again. Highlight (yellow) - Page 197 Good chunks form neural patterns that resonate, not only within the subject we’re working in, but with other subjects and areas of our lives. The abstraction helps you transfer ideas from one area to another. Note - Page 197 Like the NN concept of transfer learning? So just get good at something, anything, and it will help you get better at other stuff too. Highlight (yellow) - Page 197 Once we have created a chunk as a neural pattern, we can more easily pass that chunked pattern to others, Highlight (yellow) - Page 197 Once other people grasp that chunk, not only can they use it, but also they can more easily create similar chunks that apply to other areas in their lives—an important part of the creative process. Note - Page 197 So writers and poets are passing on their chunks through writing so others may use them. It's quite beautiful! Highlight (yellow) - Page 198 virtually every concept you learn has an analogy—a comparison—with something you already know. Highlight (yellow) - Page 200 How can you avoid falling into the trap of thinking that quicker people are automatically more clever? Note - Page 200 They might not have grit, suffer from Einstellung, or might not be as creative. { 14 } developing the mind’s eye through equation poems Highlight (yellow) - Page 202 “What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?”—David Eugene Smith, American mathematician and educator Highlight (yellow) - Page 203 Visual complexity can be created from simple rules, Highlight (yellow) - Page 204 “A mathematician who is not at the same time something of a poet will never be a full mathematician.”—German mathematician Karl Weierstrass Highlight (yellow) - Page 204 When you see the letter a, for acceleration, you might feel a sense of pressing on the accelerator in a car. Zounds! Feel the car’s acceleration pressing you back against the seat. Note - Page 204 This is an interesting proposition, to introduce feeling in the world of thinking. It can, perhaps, be the less logical person's tool of learning in the realm of the logical. And it could also be a way to add creative material to the poet or artist. Highlight (yellow) - Page 205 One of the most important things we can do when we are trying to learn math and science is to bring the abstract ideas to life in our minds. Highlight (yellow) - Page 206 Einstein’s theories of relativity arose not from his mathematical skills (he often needed to collaborate with mathematicians to make progress) but from his ability to pretend. He imagined himself as a photon moving at the speed of light, then imagined how a second photon might perceive him. What would that second photon see and feel? Highlight (yellow) - Page 207 It may seem silly to stage a play in your mind’s eye and imagine the elements and mechanisms you are studying as living creatures, with their own feelings and thoughts. But it is a method that works—it brings them to life and helps you see and understand phenomena that you couldn’t intuit when looking at dry numbers and formulas. Note - Page 207 I could try this with ML and Deep Learning, make it a creative exercise as well as a logical one. Perhaps for every major concept an analogy, or bigger than that, a story could me made. It would scratch my creative itch, too! Highlight (yellow) - Page 207 simple explanations are possible for almost any concept, no matter how complex. Highlight (yellow) - Page 207 When you cultivate simple explanations by breaking down complicated material to its key elements, the result is that you have a deeper understanding of the material. Note - Page 208 This is also Claude Shannon's approach. Highlight (yellow) - Page 208 teachers often say that the first time they ever really understood the material was when they had to teach it. Highlight (yellow) - Page 210 why mathematicians like to teach math in an abstract way, without necessarily zooming in on applications. They want you to see the essence of the ideas, which they feel makes it easier to transfer the ideas to a variety of topics. Note - Page 210 I wish this had been explained to us while we were learning math in school. A quick overview of transfer learning and then this sentence. Highlight (yellow) - Page 211 One of the most problematic aspects of procrastination—constantly interrupting your focus to check your phone messages, e-mails, or other updates—is that it interferes with transfer. Students who interrupt their work constantly not only don’t learn as deeply, but also aren’t able to transfer what little they do learn as easily to other topics. Note - Page 211 The argument for deep learning and deep work. Highlight (yellow) - Page 211 Equations are just ways of abstracting and simplifying concepts. This means that equations contain deeper meaning, similar to the depth of meaning found in poetry. { 15 } renaissance learning Highlight (yellow) - Page 213 Persistence is often more important than intelligence. Highlight (yellow) - Page 214 links to still other fascinating topics that are of your choosing. Note - Page 214 An advantage of self-learning, you get to pick what interests you. Highlight (yellow) - Page 216 Taking responsibility for your own learning is one of the most important things you can do. Highlight (yellow) - Page 219 It’s the equivalent of a hiker who notices the scent of pine and small-animal paths in the woods, as opposed to the oblivious motorist who’s whizzing by at seventy miles an hour. Note - Page 219 Advantages of not getting through material as quick as others. Highlight (yellow) - Page 220 We’re often told that empathy is universally beneficial, but it’s not.9 It’s important to learn to switch on an occasional cool dispassion that helps you to not only focus on what you are trying to learn, but also to tune people out if you discover their interests lie in undercutting you. Highlight (yellow) - Page 221 Learning on your own is one of the deepest, most effective ways to approach learning: Highlight (yellow) - Page 221 In learning, persistence is often far more important than intelligence. { 16 } avoiding overconfidence Highlight (yellow) - Page 228 when you whiz through a homework or test problem and don’t go back to check your work, you are acting a little like a person who is refusing to use parts of your brain. Highlight (yellow) - Page 228 Michael Gazzaniga, who posited that the left hemisphere interprets the world for us—and will go to great lengths to keep those interpretations unchanging. Note - Page 228 Reminder to read The Ethical Brain by Gazzaniga Highlight (yellow) - Page 231 “The Strength of Weak Ties,” by sociologist Mark Granovetter, describes how the number of acquaintances you have—not the number of good friends—predicts your access to the latest ideas as well as your success on the job market. Note - Page 231 A reminder to socialize within your community of interest. Highlight (yellow) - Page 231 Research on creativity in teams has shown that nonjudgmental, agreeable interactions are less productive than sessions where criticism is accepted and even solicited as part of the game. { 17 } test taking Highlight (yellow) - Page 238 Testing is itself an extraordinarily powerful learning experience. Highlight (yellow) - Page 241 start with the hard problems—but quickly jump to the easy ones. Highlight (yellow) - Page 244 it’s how you interpret those symptoms—the story you tell yourself about why you are stressed—that makes all the difference. Highlight (yellow) - Page 244 “this test has made me afraid” to “this test has got me excited to do my best!” Note - Page 244 The importance of "protecting your psyche". Being psyched about something will only increase your performance. Highlight (yellow) - Page 250 writing helps to release negative thoughts from mind, making them less likely to pop up and distract you in the heat of the moment. Note - Page 250 The argument for poetry and sharing worrying thoughts to friends. { 18 } unlock your potential Highlight (yellow) - Page 255 Richard Feynman’s approach; he challenged some of the most esoteric theoretical mathematicians he knew to put their complicated theories in simple terms. Highlight (yellow) - Page 257 (Handwriting builds stronger neural structures in memory than typing.) Note - Page 257 Do you think there's a link between the shape of letters and words and what they represent? Could be why writing is more effective. There's meaning coded into words and letters.