男孩的记忆实验
The author offers a detailed account of one's digit memory improvement. The reason for our amazement is not only how they found a way around the limitations of short-term memory, but also the subject himself who starts off as a "dead-on average" , just like us.
Examples of this abound in human history where the move once dismissed as laughably impossible is an entry-level dive today.
The secret? Practice.
But how?
It's noted that the most effective types of practice all follow the same set of general principles, among which “deliberate practice” is the gold standard.
We can understand how it works by looking into some more basic types of practice,or THE USUAL APPROACH.
We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level, and then let it become automatic.
However, it has never occurred to us that once we have reached the bottleneck, automated abilities will gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve. In other words, if you're not going forward, you are going backward.
Then we have the term “purposeful practice" that Steve applied to push himself to get better. It is a step toward deliberate practice.
PURPOSEFUL PRACTICE
Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.
Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress.
Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.
After being aware that practice, the right sort though, can help ordinary people achieve awesome results, we'd better examine how exactly the amazing sorts of improvement happen. The answer is hidden in our brains, or the adaptability of our brains.
Since there is no easy way to observe the changes in our brain as it adapts to the increasing demands being placed on it, we need to use brain imaging techniques, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The idea is to see how the brains of people with particular skills differ from the brains of people without those skills and to explore which sorts of training produce which types of changes.
The best example to show how the body adapts to training comes from the amazing and awesome guys，LONDON CABBIES ！
So what sets them apart from others?
Those licensed cabbies have internalized London to a degree that Google Maps, with its satellite images, camera cars, and unfathomable memory and processing power, can only vaguely approximate.
*In the age of Internet, 要形容一个人的 mental capabilities很强，完全可以说： He outperform Google or any other search engine 这里是指 London cabbies outperform Google Maps in terms of memory and navigational skills.
在对出租车司机的研究中，结论如下：
The more time that a person had spent as a taxi driver, the larger the posterior hippocampi were.
但这个命题中，有两个干扰因素需要排除。于是作者makes a point of offering details to tie up the loose ends.
1. Does driving itself change the structure of cabbies' brains?
Solution: set controls—bus drivers
2. Is it because the taxi drivers in the studies had started out with larger posterior hippocampi that gave them an advantage in finding their way around London?
Solution: recruit 79 prospective male drivers who were just starting training and another 31 males of similar ages, with no difference in the sizes of the posterior hippocampi with the subjects. The researchers followed them all the way till they either got the license or not.
So now it is clear that purposeful practice can have an effect on certain parts of our brains engaged in the mental activities related. Meanwhile, it also shows that human body is incredibly adaptable regardless of which age group we are in. To be more precise, there may be limits, but there is no indication that we have reached them yet.
字词：
With this head start, Dario was able to improve much more quickly than Steve had, at least initially.
head start
■an advantage that someone has over other people in something such as a competition or race（竞赛或赛跑等中）先起步的优势
•You've got a head start over/on others trying to get the job because you've got relevant work experience.你比其他求职者有优势，因为你有相关的工作经验。
造句：She's got a head start over other first-graders trying to learn English bacause she has been to a bilingual kindergarten.
I made it a point to recruit only subjects who had trained extensively as athletes, dancers, musicians, or singers.
make a point of doing something 特意留心要...
to be or make sure you do sth because it is important or necessary
• I made a point of closing all the windows before leaving the house.
•She makes a point of keeping all her shopping receipts.
造句：I make a point of pulling curtains together before going to bed.
总结表达
感悟：其实我最有感触的还是Steve巧妙绕过短时记忆局限，将数字转化为长期记忆的方法。他可能并不知道自己运用了短---长的这一理论原理，更有可能的是，通过对自己记忆表现的系列监控，他发现作为跑步运动员，那些关于“计数时间”的数字他可以毫不费力的记住。这成为了他的突破点，也给与他不小的信心继续前进。当再次遇到瓶颈时，他只需要在具体的操作手段上稍微改进，目的仍然是把数串转化为他可以完全控制的“计数时间”。这样看来，每一个baby step都是有的放矢，虽然方法需要随时作出调整，但核心总是回到自己熟悉的问题上。
和Steve作对照的对象之所以没能达到他的成绩，关键在于这把可以持续为她开山的利剑没能被发掘出来。所以这就带来我的第二点启发。方法论有了，但要有一处关键血脉被打通，才能源源不断为其他知识提供动力。而这把剑哪里找？往往来自你最熟悉的，内心最有把握的东西。如果找不到呢？那就创造条件，锻造一把利剑。总有一处火光能被捕捉到的不是？
网友评论