Harlan
@GullyFoyle
95 okur puanı
Haziran 2019 tarihinde katıldı
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Okuma Hedefleri
Consider what happens when you test a group of subjects by having
them read a newspaper article on something a bit specialized—say, a football or baseball game—and then quiz them to see how much of it they remember. You might guess that the results would depend mainly on the subjects’ general verbal ability (which is closely related to IQ), but
Mental RepressentationKitabı okudu
And here is the key difference between the traditional approach to learning and the purposeful-practice or deliberate-practice approaches: The traditional approach is not designed to challenge homeostasis. It assumes, consciously or not, that learning is all about fulfilling your innate potential and that you can develop a particular skill or ability without getting too far out of your comfort zone. In this view, all that you are doing with practice—indeed, all that you can do—is to reach a fixed potential. With deliberate practice, however, the goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires challenging homeostasis—getting out of your comfort zone—and forcing your brain or your body to adapt. But once you do this, learning is no longer just a way of fulfilling some genetic destiny; it becomes a way of taking control of your destiny and shaping your potential in ways that you choose.
Although the specific details vary from skill to skill, the overall pattern is consistent: Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training. The brain adapts to these challenges by rewiring itself in ways that increase its ability to carry out the functions required by the challenges.
Okur Takip Önerileri
Some of these studies have focused on purely intellectual skills, such as
mathematical ability. For example, the inferior parietal lobule has significantly
more gray matter in mathematicians than in nonmathematicians. This part of the
brain is involved in mathematical calculations and in visualizing objects in space, something that is important in many areas of math. It also happens to be a part of the brain that caught the attention of the neuroscientists who examined Albert Einstein’s brain. They found that Einstein’s inferior parietal lobule was significantly larger than average and that its shape was particularly unusual, which led them to speculate that his inferior parietal lobule may have played a crucial role in his ability to perform abstract mathematical thinking. Could it be that people like Einstein are simply born with beefier-than-usual inferior parietal lobules and thus have some innate capacity to be good at mathematical thinking? You might think so, but the researchers who carried out the study on the size of that part of the brain in mathematicians and nonmathematicians found that the
longer someone had worked as a mathematician, the more gray matter he or she had in the right inferior parietal lobule—which would suggest that the increased size was a product of extended mathematical thinking, not something the person
was born with.
Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. This is perhaps the most important part of purposeful practice. Oare’s music student shows no sign of ever pushing himself beyond what was familiar and comfortable. Instead, the student’s words seem to imply a rather desultory attempt at practice, with no effort to do more than what was already easy for him. That approach just doesn’t work.