Repetition until Your Learning Becomes Unconscious (Outsourced to Environment) While I implemented what I learned, my teacher would watch me from a distance. He let me struggle as I tried to remember what he had just shown me. The first time, applying what he taught took a lot of time and effort. So we did it again, and again, and again. Over time, I became competent and thus confident. Learning something new is all about memory and how you use it. At first, your prefrontal cortex — which stores your working (or short-term) memory — is really busy figuring out how the task is done. But once you’re proficient, the prefrontal cortex gets a break. In fact, it’s freed up by as much as 90 percent. Once this happens, you can perform that skill automatically, leaving your conscious mind to focus on other things. This level of performance is called automaticity, and reaching it depends on what psychologists call overlearning or overtraining. The process of getting a skill to automaticity involves four steps, or stages: Repeated learning of a small set of information. If you’re playing basketball, for instance, that might mean shooting the same shot over and over. The key here is to go beyond the initial point of mastery. Make your training progressively more difficult. You want to make the task harder and harder until it’s too hard. Then you bring the difficulty back down slightly, in order to stay near the upper limit of your current ability. Add time constraints. For example, some math teachers ask students to work on difficult problems with increasingly shortened timelines. Adding the component of time challenges you in two ways. First, it forces you to work quickly, and second, it saps a portion of your working memory by forcing it to remain conscious of the ticking clock. Practice with increasing memory load — that is, trying to do a mental task with other things on your mind. Put simply, it’s purposefully adding distractions to your training regimen.

To whatever extent a person's knowledge increases, his attention will be turned more towards his soul.

He has discovered that his own brain is both a broadcasting, and a receiving station for the vibration of thought, and he is beginning now to learn how to make practical use of this discovery... p. 62

As regards the sequence in the movement of man's knowledge, there is always a gradual growth from the knowledge of individual and particular things to the knowledge of things in general. Only after man knows the particular essence of many different things can he proceed to generalization and know the common essence of things.

He [Augustine] admitted: 'I am the sort of man who writes because he has made progress, and who makes progress by writing.'

His brain was his office.

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

The more extensive an author's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.

Just when you think you know something, it gets turned around and challenged in some way. But those changes are welcome because you end up learning more.

W.J. was a warm, affable man, and the two hemispheres of his brain seemed to be working fine together, although they were no longer in direct communication. One of them talked, one of them didn’t. Given the way the brain is wired, that meant the left, talking brain viewed the visual world to the right of a fixated point and the right, non-talking hemisphere viewed all the visual information to the left of the same point. Given this surgical state, I wondered: If I flashed a light over to the right, would W.J. say he saw it? Light should go to the left hemisphere, and the left hemisphere had speech; it should be easy. It was, and W.J. easily declared he saw it. A bit later, I flashed the same light over to the left side of space and waited to see if he would say anything. He didn’t. I pressed him and asked if he had seen anything, and he firmly said “No.” Was he blind on that side? Or was that simple spot of light no longer communicated to the half brain that talked? Did the seemingly mute right brain know it had viewed a light? Was it conscious? What was going on?

The longer he practised his craft, the more conscious he became of the dynamic of language, of speech and writing as events in themselves. The simplest and most obvious proposition, stated in the most elementary language, could so mutate itself in the mind of the reader that it could express the opposite of what the writer had intended. What he wrote as evidence for the defence could hang the man he was defending.

Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.

Practice is funny that way. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you've got the thing whole. Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how.

Man's wonder grows with his knowledge.