Food For Your Mind

Food For Your Mind

Speed Reading Rules

You might want to remember the name B. F. Skinner. He was a psychology professor at Harvard from 1958 to 1974, and was cited professionally as
the most influential psychologist of the 20th century.

So what?

He showed scientific proof we can change others and improve ourselves
through Positive Reinforcement. Homo sapiens are motivated by rewards
that make us feel good – dopamine is the pleasure neurotransmitter.

Remember when your kindergarten teacher sent you home with a Gold
or Silver star on your Picasso-like first drawing, and your Mom hung it on the refrigerator?

We still need a Gold Star, a pat on the back, a few platinum words of approval,
or a prize to produce our best efforts. Why? Folks are instinctually competitive,
and simultaneously hardwired with a Fear-of-Failure.

If you and your peers do not receive Positive Reinforcement on a regular basis
for small successes, you freeze up and inhibit your creative nature and imagination.

Fear of Failure

Human are conditioned from the womb to the tomb, at home, career, school,
and by the media, that rejection, making mistakes, being wrong, and failing are the
greatest sins.

We are taught to stay within our Comfort-Zone, status-quo, and
homeostasis, and drastically fear change. Problem: life is change, and we are
wired for improvement, new knowledge and original experiences.

Yet our most powerful learning is Trial-And-Error. We must experiment, make mistakes, remember both our errors and successes, and improve our next performance.

Conditioned Negative Reinforcers

If you give someone a slight shock when they do not perform correctly, or stop
feeding an animal to punish for not obeying, they remember better the next time.
It is a negative reinforcer and produces results, but often results in resistance and
a negative attitude. Conditioned Positive Reinforcers work better.

Skinner on Learning

We are all in the business of lifetime learning of how to adapt to our environment.
All experiences change the structure and function of our brain. They create Synapses of learning, and hardwired Neural Networks of knowledge and habit.

See what you think of Skinner’s five rules of learning faster and better.

1. Search for immediate feedback (positive and negative) to
create permanent memories for learning.
2. Learn in baby-steps, not in large swallows of knowledge.
3. Repeat the directions: three-times for accuracy.
4. Start with Simple ideas, move to Harder to Comprehend,
and after greater experience, to Complex ideas.
5. Every step of the way – offer and accept Positive Reinforcement.

Now search this list of seven activities that inhibit learning and discovery.

1. Blaming others – even when we are wrong is a guaranteed we will
never stick our neck out again.
2. Bribing a team to work without collective desire or interest produces inferior results. Look for curiosity and a need to discover.
3. Condemning our results to others (or in print) is never forgiven.
4. Criticizing causes a freeze-up of our future effort.
5. Threatening is counter-productive and increases a failure mentality.
6. Punishing in any form destroys 90% of relationships.
7. Nagging: how do you feel when you are repeatedly told what and how to do an activity?

The Brain of the 20th Century

Milton H. Erickson, American psychiatrist, suggested two learning strategies
that went against the grain. See what you think.

Interrupted Practice

At home, in school and in our career we are conditioned to believe we must
complete everything we start. Sounds smart. We understand this principle
as meaning once we start a project, we must continue on it until the bitter
end. Wrong.

Dr. Erickson taught at medical schools to learn the same way your brain does.
Take small bites of the apple at a time. How do you defeat a 50-foot giant?
Start with his ankle and take one bite at a time until he disappears.

He called it Interrupted Practice. Wake up fresh in the morning and do a
high-speed practice of a new strategy or learning for no more than 10-minutes.
Have breakfast and return refreshed and do another full effect of 10-minutes.

Wait! What so great about that? The average high school student studies for
about 90-minutes before taking a break, and forgets 86% of what he learned in the
first 65-minutes before he/she finishes. College and graduate school students
study until they drop into a coma for up to three-hours at a time.

Their results are a forgetting curve of up to 90% because they do not analyze
(think) they underline, and do not synthesize (consolidate), nor summarize
new ideas into their own words. Gathering the text and ideas in one place
does not create learning, it is phony-baloney text underlining note-taking.

Coda: if you can do four separate ten-minute slots of learning in 90-minutes,
you will remember 2.5 times (long-term) more than steady-stream concentrating.

Interference

Erickson discovered by scientific research the need for Separation between the
practice (drill) of strategies, and understanding the Why of it.
Homo sapiens have a need to understand Simultaneously with learning the
skill, knowledge or experience.

So what?

It creates interference between the function of your left and right hemispheres.
Why? Don’t ask! Just let the Right-Brain use its Pattern Recognition to map
the new stuff, and later after you own the skill, permit your Left-Brain to store the
knowledge for later examination and understanding in a Neural Network.

We teach the use of a Pacer to underline the sentences you read to access your
powerful Peripheral Vision to triple your learning skills. It is a reading strategy,
and students and executives disrupt their own learning by constantly Intellectualizing the sensory process by asking questions like Why? How? What?

That is Interference. Say the magic word and win a Duck? Separation – first own
the skills, then ask deep questions about How. Forget about meaning, and first get reproduce your learning skills, strategies or knowledge. Then understanding is easy.

Endwords

To create your own unique competitive advantage over your peers, ask us how to
3x your reading, 2x your long-term memory, and discover StressBusing skills.

Speed Reading Rules

copyright © 2009 H.B.Wechsler www.speedlearning.org hbw@speedlearning.org
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