Many students can do their math problems when they have the book out and can take their time. But then they sit down to take the exam and find that some serious difficulties arise, not only with actually answering the questions themselves, but with the actual physiological response in the body. Shortness of breath, tightening of muscles, increased heart rate and blood pressure, chills, hot sensations, and in extreme cases, diarrhea, vomitting, and tremors. Now multiplying each of these symptoms with the equally debilitating emotional responses of panic, doom, blame, guilt, shame, and the mental responses of self-defeating thoughts, inability to concentrate, and self-created distractions, you may wonder wether or not the self-diagnosed "test anxiety" is a real thing or just an excuse for knowing deep down that real learning has not taken place.
What is happening in these cases? Our brains and bodies utilize advanced diagnostic systems to test ourselves for whether or not we do what we say we're going to do, and act in conformity with our morals and beliefs. If we don't do what we say, this creates a conflict in our memory which the body must resolve, and the familiar "test anxiety" responses are the body's way of resolving these conflicts. Our brains and bodies cannot be fooled on whether we really have learned attained understanding. Learning how to listen to what the bodies are saying is an important skill for everyone, but unfortunately the current education system has left us at a pre-kindergarten level of paying attention to what our bodies are doing in regards to the way we live our lives.
I would like to offer some strategies for how learners can begin to take power over the situation, but don't expect things to be easy. Like all things worth having, it requires dedication, discipline, and persistence. The great thing is that these techniques can be adapted for customizing the brain in the skill sets we need to manifest our purpose in life.
This post will focus on the strategy of repetition to stabilize a concept or technique in the memory, thus rewiring the connections in the brain, allowing us to work on something without having to think about it, freeing our mind from the burdens of routine and opening us up to expanded possibilities. There are many ways this can be done, and learners are encouranged to elaborate on these suggestions and create their own methods, which will ultimately be the ones that work best in the end.
I first want to make the observation that the brain reorganizes and rewires itself every night when we sleep. It takes the events of the day, analyzes their content, separates the important from the unimportant, forgets the unimportant, and begins building the important content into the brain cells. But how does the brain know what is important and what is not? Is it a simple matter of our feelings and desire for what we want and what we don't? If it were that easy, we could all become geniuses by just getting passionate about something. Actually the brain uses a mathematical diagnostic system for sifting through the day's events and determining what must have been the important things whose memory must now be wired into the neural connections. This diagnostic system can be described in one word: RHYTHM.
Our brain uses the rhythms of our living patterns to determine what is important for us. The memories linked to the things we do on a regular basis are processed by the brain in the following way: the brain was acting in a certain way while we were doing these activities, certain neurons were firing with other neurons at other places in the brain. When first learning something, the information traveling from one neuron to another has to take a long path through other parts of the brain, which we experience as relating a new concept to something we already understand. The brain has built in regulators for making itself as efficient as possible, so it looks at how it was working when learning something new, and makes new connections in the neural network so that the path of information flow is shorter and more efficient. The more we do something on a regular basis, the more densely structured the neural sub-network related to this activity becomes. Eventually this manifests as true skills and abilities.
How can mathematics students make use of this principle to build learning into the brain? One possibility would be setting aside three 1-hour periods each week, and one longer 2-3 hour period, with as many 5-10 minute refreshers as possible in between. Really there is no reason why these numbers were chosen, only the guiding principle of having many short sessions, a few medium sessions, and one long session each week, so use your own judgement on how this could be done with yourself.
There are also good reasons for doing something the same way and at the same time for 3 days in a row, but it is far too much to explain in this introductory post, although I have planned a series of posts that would elaborate on this technique and its power. Learners may also be interested to experiment with other natural time cycles, such as the 7-day rhythm of the week, or the 28-day rhythm of the moon.
Why is the knowledge of programming memory through repetition so crucial for those learning mathematics? Because the secret to doing well on a test is to have the knowledge stored in a memory system. This is obvious if we allowed students to use the textbook on their tests, because the text is the memory system that completely holds the whole subject together. The goal is for learners to transfer the contents of the textbook into the structure of their own brain.
I feel that it is actually necessary to begin making mathematics students aware of these secrets of memory and the brain. A major issue that will be addressed on this blog is the purpose of the mathematics requirement in the curriculum. Are we asking math students to learn these skills because they will be expected to factor polynomials on the job some day? They know they won't be using it in that way, and without knowing that the true purpose of learning math is to rewire the brain so that problem solving becomes a habitual way of thinking, they will not do the work necessary for "long-term retention" which really means that the brain has actually changed. Perhaps some people understand this intuitively and fear turning into a nerd if their brain changes so that mathematics becomes part of its structure, the response being a sterilization of the memory which is often expressed as the intent to "forget it all after the day of the exam". If you really learned the math, it would be impossible to forget it because it is now part of your being.
There are still many veils covering the true import of learning mathematics, and this post was intended to serve as a reference point for future topics. Please check back soon for more.
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