2-3 Meditation and Mindfulness – What to Look for

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En provenance du cours de McMaster University

Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential

2799 notes

McMaster University

Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential

2799 notes

Mindshift is designed to help boost your career and life in today’s fast-paced learning environment. Whatever your age or stage, Mindshift teaches you essentials such as how to get the most out of online learning and MOOCs, how to seek out and work with mentors, the secrets to avoiding career ruts (and catastrophes) and general ruts in life, and insights such as the value of selective ignorance over general competence. We’ll provide practical insights from science about how to learn and change effectively even in maturity, and we’ll build on what you already know to take your life’s learning in fantastic new directions. This course is designed to show you how to look at what you’re learning, and your place in what’s unfolding in the society around you, so you can be what you want to be, given the real world constraints that life puts on us all. You’ll see that by using certain mental tools and insights, you can learn and do more—far more—than you might have ever dreamed! This course can be taken independent of, concurrent with, or subsequent to, its companion course, Learning How to Learn. (Mindshift is more career focused, and Learning How to Learn is more learning focused.)

À partir de la leçon

Getting Deeper into Happy Learning

Key to your ability to mindshift is being able to learn effectively. This week, we’ll dive deeper into this vital area. Getting yourself motivated to tackle procrastination can sometimes be a challenge in learning, so we’ll give you some important tips here. But we’ll also give insights into mental tricks to help you focus, relax, and reframe if stress intrudes. We’ll also show you how to avoid common learning pitfalls. Welcome and enjoy!

2-1 Week 2 Introduction1:01

2-2 The Value of a Poor Memory6:07

2-3 Meditation and Mindfulness – What to Look for4:01

2-4 The Pomodoro Technique as Working Meditation7:23

2-5 Getting Past Procrastination7:35

2-6 The Value of Procedural Fluency and Deliberate Practice6:42

2-7 Bad Grades and Barb's Hands – The Value of Mental Tricks3:48

2-8 Learning to Reframe – Put a Label on It!8:35

2-9 Integrate All Your Senses Into Learning – The Pitfalls of "Learning Styles"3:53

2-10 Can You Try to Learn Too Much?3:00

2-11 Your Social Brain5:00

2-12 Week 2 Wrap Up4:23

Optional Bonus Video: Interview with Singapore Entrepreneur Adam Khoo20:45

Optional Bonus Video: Nelson Dellis Memory Tips #24:13

Rencontrer les enseignants

Dr. Barbara Oakley
Ramón y Cajal Distinguished Scholar of Global Digital Learning, McMaster University
Professor of Engineering, Industrial & Systems Engineering, Oakland University
Dr. Terrence Sejnowski
Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Computational Neurobiology Laboratory
M.S. Orlando Trejo
Assistant Professor
Department of Electronics and Circuits, Universidad Simón Bolívar

[MUSIC]

We hear a lot nowadays about meditation and mindfulness.

So inquiring minds often want to know what effect meditation can have on learning.

First, let's back up a step.

What is meditation?

It's really just a way of bringing about different modes of consciousness

using a variety of different techniques.

For example, meditators may close their eyes and repeat a mantra,

control their breathing, or deliberately cultivate a certain emotional state.

Scientific research on meditation is still in it's infancy.

But researchers can sometimes classify meditation techniques into

two different types that seem to be fundamentally different [SOUND].

Focused attention and open monitoring.

Given what we've learned already, my guess that these two types of meditation relate

to the two different types of basic modes of the brain uses to perceive the world,

focused and diffuse.

And you'd be right.

Focused attention types of meditations such as mantra, sound or

chakra meditation appear to help enhance focus mode type thinking,

this kind of meditation sometimes seems to make people feel better.

It can help reduce feelings of depression and

anxiety, even while it builds concentration abilities.

In contrast, open monitoring types of meditation such as, vipassana and

mindfulness, appear to improve diffuse imaginative thinking.

With open monitoring, we don't just focus on one thing.

Instead we keep our attention open to all aspects of experience without judging or

becoming attached to our thoughts.

Now we know that diffuse mode thinking is more wide ranging,

your thoughts [SOUND] can bounce pretty much anywhere.

Daydreaming happens in the diffuse mode, daydreaming not only gives rise

to more random thoughts and connections that underpin creativity.

It also helps you plan for the future, since your

thoughts tend to wander towards what the future might bring, sounds great, right?

Well, not entirely.

The diffuse mode is also affiliated with anxiety and depression.

Think about it this way.

If your mind is bouncing all over the place,

it can get drawn into worry [SOUND] about, whoa, things that might go wrong.

[LAUGH] Part of the reason that building your focusing abilities may help make you

feel happier

is that it appears to suppress the diffuse mode, while it builds the focusing mode.

So what does all this mean?

It means that meditation can have surprisingly different effects,

depending on the type.

It's all very complex, and researchers are far from sorting everything out yet.

In the end, practices that encourage focusing can be a great

benefit for learning.

But having some daily time where your mind relaxes and wanders freely

is also very important, particularly if you want to encourage creativity.

From a practical standpoint then if you are a meditator you might try to

avoid feeling you should always be steering your thoughts back into focus

if you catch your mind wandering outside meditation sessions.

This might be why people find the pomodoro technique so useful for

combining creativity with productivity.

It's a sort of working meditation.

Up next, we'll look at some of the deeper

aspects of the pomodoro technique.

[MUSIC]

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