How We Create Mental Models
Part 3
Much about reality can be understood from within the context of mental models that break down into further lower-level mental models. When we go about our day, we are constantly fitting both what we perceive through our senses and what we discover in our thoughts into the larger web of mental models already organized in our heads. For most, this happens without a 3rd-person-like awareness that it is happening. The quicker we are at adapting our models whether to scrap them for an updated version or to tweak and prune them, the better understanding of reality we will have.
Put another way, the size of both the quantity and quality of our models is equivalent to each of our own capabilities to correctly perceive and improve the world around us.
In the pursuit of that effort, this article will be a bit different from the previous two in the series in that we will be talking more about how the brain learns new ideas and builds new models, as opposed to the strategy of applying these models to develop our better understandings and better solutions.
What I’d like to do, is to answer the question “How do I learn most efficiently and how can I build my mental models so they are accurate, memorable, and ultimately usable?”.
Let’s delve into the inner workings of the mind and memory in the context of our overall strategy. This will be more an exercise in understanding how to build your models most efficiently and less in the anatomy of the brain or the “Why?” question behind the brain’s learning and memory capability.
AHA Moments: The Summit of Innovation
Understanding how to learn efficiently requires a bit of an understanding of the how the human brain learns, stores new information, and retrieves old information from memory, all to be compared and assimilated with new information. A little bit of an understanding because that is all I believe you need to produce good results for using your mental models for improvement, which is the scope of this series.
To introduce the main idea of this article, I’d like to do a brief exercise.
Think back to your last great idea. When did you last experience an AHA moment kind of feeling? Do you happen to remember what you were doing when it occurred? My own experience would suggest to me that it won’t have been when you were bent over a study table, focusing on something. Instead, it probably occurred while you were doing just about nothing that involved intensity of though. Maybe you were running through a park for exercise, waiting to fall asleep, or even taking a shower.
What you are experience here are two different ways the brain engages in learning and discovery termed the Focused and Diffused modes of learning. Both involve engagement from different areas of the brain.
Focused thinking is the kind of thinking people are most familiar with, probably due to the fact that it is the kind of thinking you choose to engage when you decide to do something like hunker down and study for a math test. Done free from distractions, you focus intently on learning and understanding the material in front of you.
This mode is associated with the need for quiet and also a point of exhaustion after which your brain can no longer effectively focus. At that point, you take a break and come back later. Other situations that involve Focused mode could be concentrating on map directions or trying to make the right move in a complex board game.
The other mode of thinking is the opposite.
Diffused thinking is engaged in the space between our focused study times. You much less choose to engage diffused mode and more likely find yourself in it when you are doing something far more absent-minded, such as taking a walk or maybe sitting on a park bench.
Diffused mode is associated with AHA moments wherein an excellent idea pops into your brain, seemingly from nowhere.
What science has come to understand about these moments is that your brain is interleaving well-established previous knowledge with knowledge you learned from your more recent focused mode time. The interleaving occurs both some in the conscious mind and some in the unconscious mind. It produces possibilities, some completely wacky and some surprisingly excellent.
The focused mode is very much about the here and now of the material. There is not much room for creative thought, and so it will have a much harder time achieving both the wacky and the excellent.
Making Memories
I’d like to ask you another question to illustrate a few points about how your memory works. Where is your knowledge when you are not presently thinking about it?
For a moment, try to think back to your favorite birthday memory. What is the first flash of memory that comes to mind?
Immediately when I wrote the question above, a memory that came to mind for me was from my 10th birthday. I was told by an Aunt that double digits where lucky. Where was this memory before I just thought about it? I haven’t thought about it for years. And that is probably because I haven’t thought about how I would answer the favorite birthday question for years.
So where did it come from?
There is a concept of working memory in the brain which is the opposite of long-term memory. Working memory is what we can hold in the conscious mind at one time. Its capacity has been found not to be very large, which is easily shown by the short amount of numbers in a sequence each of us can remember. Research has shown that about 4 pieces of information at once is the average limit. The working memory is what we actively engage in our focused mode.
Long-Term memory is far more extensive and potentially limitless, although memories do fade from it in time. Our birthday memories were stored somewhere in our long-term memory until we each recalled it into working memory to answer the question.
Etching Mental Models into our Brains
In trying to help ourselves produce better and more creative solutions, the important concepts I’d like for us to consider are the focus and diffused modes of thought and the working and long-term types of memory. The goal is to build the quality and quantity of our models in the sturdiest way that we can.
What we want to achieve for ourselves is an accurate model built into working memory in focused mode and persisted to the long-term memory in an accurate format so that when we recall it, it is as good as the last time we had it in working memory. On top of that, we want conditions that are suitable to diffused mode before and after our focused-mode time, so that we can mix and match our models in conscious and subconscious mind and produce those creatives AHA moments.
Let’s move on to two strategies that are necessary to help best solidify information from working memory to long-term memory. These are “Chunking” and repetition. These strategies, including memory and the modes of thought, are discussed in detail by Barbara Oakley’s course Learning How to Learn, which I would highly recommend.
Chunking
We have said that working memory is one of the bottlenecks to learning at a larger volume and a faster pace because of its limited size. All information must flow through working memory and be processed into some memorable format before it can get into long-term memory. The memorable format is your mental model. The more “processed” it is which is to say the more it is well-organized and structured into a usable piece of information according with your previous knowledge, the easier it will be to pass it into long-term memory and to recall it later.
“Chunking” is the term used to describe this organization of information by some order, level, or use case. You’ll find that many courses and instructional content (including this series!) are pre-chunked into a digestible format that will best help you retain the material. However, part of chunking is based on what the learner already knows, so it is often helpful for them to skim material, build a working high-level understanding of the material, and chunk it on their own terms as able before starting to study.
What we want to do is develop a 10,000-foot view. The idea is very similar to building our wide mental models from the previous article of this series.
Repetition
As for our second strategy, the idea behind repetition is that understanding something in working memory is not the same as persisting it to long-term memory. It is only the beginning of it.
You can build an organized understanding of a concept but without revisiting it, the long-term copy of it will be brittle and under-formed. Recalling it will be difficult even though strangely perhaps a month ago you understood this concept very well when you engaged your focused mode with it. This is because there is a difference between understanding something and recalling that understanding in a usable form.
Properly storing your organized knowledge into long-term memory takes repetition and revisiting of the material spaced out over some time in the amounts of days or weeks. The spacing is necessary because the actual step where the information is stored into long-term memory is one that happens subconsciously and does not involve working memory. It is as if our working memory which contains your well-defined and well-understood mental model only creates a vague, initial blueprint in your long-term memory, and the heavy lifting is done by our subconscious while our focused mode is elsewhere. Our subconscious inscribes the material into the long-term memory becoming etched more and more deeply with each repetition and re-visitation of the mental model. In fact, the blueprint in the long-term memory produced by working memory will disappear rather quickly without this reinforcement.
What I do is write my well-defined understanding or my model as a drafted or versioned copy in a notebook to revisit and reversion over time as I better understand the subject. This way, I both create repetition and make space for improvement of the model as I discover new things about it.
Mental Model Library
The long-term aim of your studies should be to produce a library of mental models or chunks that can be recalled to aid your endeavors. The more concrete and focused these models, the more effective you will be in finding solutions in particular domains. The more varied and diverse your models, the greater creativity you will bring to your solutions as you cross domains.
Use chunking and repetition in your construction of your mental models to better create them in working memory and to cement them into long-term memory. Then, test your recall abilities by going over your versioned models and improving them over time.
That concludes our strategy for thinking in a model-centric way to produce more creative solutions. In the next article, we will circle back to our mental models and take a look at how I break down certain situations into lower-level models and then build them back up using different ones to create better solutions.
Over the next few days, spend some time observing the origin of your AHA moments. Do they come from anywhere in particular such as something you were thinking about earlier? Don’t worry if they are not particularly noteworthy ideas. An AHA moment could be as simple as an insight about how to better arrange your schedule.
In Part 4 of the series, I share a few examples of situations I have broken down into mental models. If you missed Part 2 on wide mental models and cross-discipline insight, be sure to have a look.
Thank You for Reading!
Glossary of Terms and Relationships
Focused Mode of thought is engaged when you quietly focus on one area of studyDefused Mode of thought is engaged in the spaced between focused thought when you are doing something else and thinking about many different things at once in a random fashionShort-Term Memory is working memory associated with the amount of information you can work with in your head at one time. Research has shown it is four pieces of information on averageLong-Term Memory is where all your memories are stored for posterity after passing through short-term memoryChunking is a strategy for effective use of the short-term memory to comprehend and learn by breaking knowledge into sections of related material and some recognizable order between sections like Beginner, Intermediate, AdvancedRepetition is what is required to solidify mental models and ensure they are memorable
Citations
[1] Dr. Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrance Sejnowski (2015) https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
