Thoughts that Keep Me Up at Night

I started this blog in a fit of inspiration after seeing significant improvement in my sleep. Part of improving my sleep involved recording and understanding the anxious or depressing thoughts which were preventing me from sleeping and try to come up with coping techniques for these thoughts. Most of my anxious thoughts have been typical have been easy to deal with while others have been difficult to overcome. The purpose of this post will be to discuss these more difficult to deal with anxious thoughts. This post won’t be very structured or organized since organizing anxious and depressing thoughts is generally difficult.

Context

In order for what I talk about to make sense I should provide some context as to why it is significant to me.

What I want to do with my Life

I have grown up with one of my parents having a minor disability. Due to this they have had to quit their original career and start a new one at home in order to continue to be supportive of the family. So throughout my life I have seen how disability affects both individual affected by the disability and people around. Seeing this has motivated me towards pursuing a career in medical device development. Currently I working toward a degree in biomedical engineering in order to pursue this goal. My hope is to be part of team who develops something that makes a big difference in the healthcare world and improves the lives of many people.

Modern Society

At first glance modern society seems to be progressing well. Many new technologies have allowed to do things that someone 100 years ago could not even comprehend. The most disruptive of these technologies is probably the internet. With it we can communicate to anyone almost anywhere and the way people live their lives has changed dramatically. With the internet nearly everyone has access to an immense amount of information about anything. From this pool of information they can gain knowledge about the world, what skills are in demand, and how to improve themselves. There are also many advances in healthcare and disease prevention. By all means people’s lives should be improving.

Anxious Thoughts

The previous section probably sounded somewhat hopeful. So much so that you might have forgotten that this post was about anxious thoughts I was having. However the previous section only takes one glance at how things are and only shows the surface of what is happening in both my life and society.

Social Decline

You would think with all this technology people would be making better decisions, be healthier, and be happier. Nothing could be further from the truth. Over the last few decades obesity rates, depression rates, and a lot of other negative things have increased. This is in spite of all the technology we have today. Think about that for a second. With access to more information and more utilities, people today are doing worse than people who had less access to information and less utility. This makes as much sense as a someone with a calculator doing worse at math than someone without a calculator. In order for that to happen the person with the calculator would have to have immensely less ability than the other person. Applying that same concept to society at large shows that people today are less able than people in the past and increasingly so as time goes on. Not only is society becoming weaker, it is becoming weaker at a rate greater than the rate of technological growth.

Hopelessness

This idea of society declining faster than the progress of technology relates back to what I want to do with my life. Ideally I would work with a team and design a medical device that would improve many lives. However even if I am able to do this the amount of good I do could not possibly outweigh the natural state of decline that is already prevalent. What really scares me about this is that I feel everyone around me is oblivious to this concept. I might talk to someone about how std prevalence is higher in a time where we have access to condoms than it was in  a time before condoms even existed and people will just kind of laugh it off without really seeing why that is scary. Overall I am still going to try my best to improve myself and the world around me. Though I still have not really come to terms with the fact that I am almost certainly not going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things.

Learning as Effectively as Possible

Learning is the process by which someone acquires new knowledge, skills, or behaviors. Learning  occurs as part of education, training or personal development and occurs over time procedurally. There are many different types of learning such as conditioning/association, rote memorization, and Learning is a crucial part of self improvement because it is ultimately the process by which someone changes themselves. This post will mostly discuss learning in terms of the acquirement of knowledge.

Learning Process

Memory

Memory is the most essential component of an individual learning something. Memory involves encoding, storing, and retrieving information in the brain. Memory is split into categories based on how quickly these processes are carried out. Working memory involves carrying out encoding, storage and retrieval very quickly such as remembering the last sentence and how it relates to the current one you are reading. Things that are part of working memory do not last very long without rehearsal. Short term memory involves retrieving information that you recently had access to but don’t currently have. An example of this would be reciting a phone number you heard a minute ago. Short term memory usually requires you to rehearse the information a few times in succession. Long term memory involves being able to retrieve information from a long time ago. This usually requires rehearsal of that information over multiple time periods.

Association

Association is a part of learning where things are connected to one another. One example of association occurs in classical conditioning where a visual or auditory stimulus is paired with an unconditioned response to another stimulus. This is shown in Pavlov’s experiments where the delivery of food to a dog was accompanied by a ringing bell. The dog would salivate as an unconditioned response to the food but after some time would begin to salivate as conditioned response if the bell was rung without the delivery of food. Over time though the conditioned salivating from the bell would stop if food was no longer delivered in tandem with the bell. Association also happens when trying to remember something. For example remembering the last time you went to a store will lead you to remembering what you bought, how much you spent etc. So through association remembering one piece of information can lead to the retrieval of much more information.

Methods for Learning Knowledge Effectively

Spacing Effect

The spacing effect is a phenomenon observed in humans where humans are more easily able to remember something when they study it in multiple short sessions in comparison to one long session. This means that if someone dedicates three hours to trying to learn something they will more effectively learn it if they study in three single hour sessions as opposed to a single three hour study session. This is mainly due to the serial position effect where people remember the items closer to the beginning or end of a study session leaving things in the middle of the session more likely to be forgotten. So if a study session is shorter than everything studied will be closer to the beginning or end of the study session since there is less “middle time”. As a general rule 45 minutes to an hour is the longest a study session should last and anything that requires more than that amount of time should be split into multiple sessions separated by at least 15 minutes.

Forgetting Curve

The forgetting curve refers to the decline of memory retention of something over time when there is no active attempt to retain memory. After rehearsing the decline in memory retention slows down allowing the person to retain the information for a longer period of time. This shows that after each rehearsal information is retained for a longer period so rehearsal is required after longer periods of time. Exploitation of this process is called “spaced repetition”. There is a lot of spaced repetition software on the internet. The software I have found best for myself is “Anki”.

Testing Effect

The testing effect is where memory is retained more for something when you test to see if you can retrieve it as opposed to just relearning it. For example if you were to answer a question regarding the information you were trying to remember, you would retain that information longer than if you had simply reread the information. In practice this means question/answer type flash cards are more effective way to study than reading over notes.

Association

As discussed in the previous section, using association you can retrieve a lot of information by only needing to retain a smaller amount. One way to use association to be able to retrieve larger amounts of information while retaining smaller amounts is with mnemonics. Mnemonics can come in many forms such as through music (ABC song), or sentences (“Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” for the arithmetic order of operations Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, addition, subtraction). However one disadvantage of using mnemonics is that retrieving information takes more time to do since you must first retrieve the mnemonic before retrieving the information.

External Factors that Affect Learning

In addition to the techniques described in the previous section there are many factors not related to how you learn that nonetheless affect quality of your learning.

Physical Factors

One of the biggest factors affecting how well you learn is if you are getting good sleep. Sleep is an important for adequate brain function so improving your sleep can benefit learning ability. Another important factor is fitness since good health also positively affects brain function. Diet also plays a role in how well you learn with hydration and omega-3 fatty acids being especially effective.

Mental Factors

One of the biggest mental factors affecting how well you learn is motivation. The most consistent way to motivate yourself to learn is to figure how what you are going to learn is useful or necessary. Another important mental factor is metacognition which is the process of understanding how you understand something. For example if you find something new you learn makes sense try to articulate specifically why it makes sense to you. How you view the environment you are learning in is also important to how well you learn. For example if you are trying to study in the same place where you casually browse the internet you will likely feel tempted to browse the internet instead.