Unable To Pay Attention, Focus, Or Care

Why is it easier to remember words in your own language than in a foreign language? Well, because when you remember a word like “dog,” you’re actually conjuring up a long-term memory of what that word means. Try to remember a nonsense word like “jarlkit” and it takes more effort since you have to use your working memory to break it down into its letter components first.

You have an enormous long-term memory but a relatively small working memory—think of it like a vast library or warehouse of data compared to one small work desk. The more you can store away in the library (with a proper filing method so you can retrieve it later!), the more space you have in working memory and the more you’ll remember overall. You want to compress skills, information, or sensations into smaller and smaller subcategories, then learn to retrieve the entire category at will.

First, identify and master the fundamental subskills of what you’re trying to learn or the units of information you’re trying to remember. You can’t learn the piano all at once—first master scales and how to read music. You can’t learn to play chess all at once—first master smaller moves and dynamics before looking at entire games. Similarly, don’t try to learn the entire anatomy of the brain, but first learn about smaller regions and how individual neurons work. This is called pretraining, and it’s a vital part of the learning process. Breaking things into smaller units in general will help your learning and also give you the proper kindling for building your chunks.

Very often, difficulty with a subject comes down to incomplete pretraining in any case: struggling with trigonometry may be because basic geometry hasn’t been mastered, and a course on genetics will be too difficult if some fundamental biology concepts are missing from your training. The popular mnemonic technique is an excellent example of chunking in action. If you had to remember a list of words or names, you could instead remember the first letter to each, then arrange those letters so that they spell a single word that’s easier to remember. Now, rather than the cognitive load of remembering all those words, you simply have one word to remember. Another technique is to group items by meaningful category. It’s easier to remember a list of animals if you know that you have three birds, three fish, and three mammals on the list.

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There really is no limit to how you chunk. In fact, the more emotionally charged or personally meaningful a particular association or way of chunking is, the better. Your brain can easily remember stories, associations, complex narratives, and more, but it finds it hard to juggle meaningless chunks that don’t connect to each other in any logical way. So help your brain out by making chunks where you can.

The Healthy Brain

Finally, when it comes to optimizing your brain’s capacity to absorb information properly, there is one point that can’t be ignored: the actual physical health of your brain itself. It might seem obvious, but it’s something many of us forget sometimes. If the tool you need to help you absorb new information is compromised somehow, then its efficiency is compromised, and it doesn’t matter how sophisticated your learning techniques are. If you have a laptop that you regularly spill coffee over, it won’t matter how great the software installed on it is—it will probably not work very well over time, if at all.

Getting enough restorative sleep, keeping good fitness overall, and eating properly are all ways to keep in good health, and your brain is naturally a part of this. But let’s look at a particularly important factor: stress. We discussed this a bit in the first chapter, but to understand why it’s so important to managing and moderating stress, we need to understand the difference between the thinking brain and the reactive brain. Your prefrontal cortex, or thinking brain, is about conscious absorption and processing of information, while the reactive brain is about instinctual, unthinking responses to that information.

The thinking brain is responsible for, well, thinking. It processes and filters the billions of pieces of information that are constantly coming at it. Importantly, the thinking brain is only 17% or so of your total cognition. When the thinking brain is in charge, it controls what information gets filtered through, allowing you to proceed through your world calmly, rationally, and deliberately. You get to control what information makes it through to your prefrontal cortex, but that’s a tough task in and of itself.

When your stress levels are high, or you’re anxious, irritable, or sad, the incoming information is passed through your reactive brain instead of your thinking brain. Your reaction can then be to ignore the unpleasant sensation, fight against it, or avoid it. Rather than truly processing the information, you respond reactively to it, sometimes with more negative emotion and sometimes with behavior that may not be in your best interest.

Every piece of new information, every new memory, must first pass through your brain’s emotional core, the limbic system. Here, the amygdala and hippocampus direct incoming information according to your emotional state. Negative emotions hog huge amounts of the brain’s resources, and you’re essentially in a survival mode. One thing you can’t do in survival mode is take in new information!

A happy, calm brain, on the other hand, will result in the amygdala routing information to your higher thinking brain instead, resulting in more clarity and better learning. This is why it’s critical to become aware of your emotional state and commit to keeping peaceful and calm. Deep breaths, visualizations, and reflection all help you step outside of the stress for a moment. People learn better when they’re calm and happy—so one of your first steps to enhancing your own learning is to spend a little time on your mindset.

But actually, everyone has an optimal level of stress and arousal that is motivating. It turns out that zero stress is not a good thing either.vents, you happen to be an expert on turtles. You are confident in your ability to answer questions about turtles. Is your current level of arousal going to be motivating? It might not be, because it’s too easy. You’ll push it to the side because you’ll be bored of it. Now what if the subject was ancient Greco-Roman wrestling? Well, you know what happens when we get too stressed or worried.

These two topics illustrate the zones of demotivation, where we are either too stressed and aroused to function or not stressed and aroused enough to care. The balance between these extremes is the sweet spot where you function at your best and are most motivated. You’re a little bit nervous but not too nervous. You’re alert but not overly stressed out. This sweet spot is where we must frame learning, otherwise we will fall prey to either one of the extremes.

A brain on excessive stress is a brain in crisis mode. A brain with a complete lack of stress is a brain that is on vacation. Neither of these are good for your mental performance.