Tag Archives: Critical Thinking

19 November

Concentration

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What is concentration? Is it focus? What does focus mean? Is it an action, where the retinal image is sharp? When you are listening to music – ‘concentrating’ on it – your eyes are defocused and closed. Are your ears sharpened? So is it using your senses more acutely? What does concentration during a lecture mean? Listening, hearing and feeling intently? Then how do you assimilate knowledge? What about the thinking part of learning?

Let us analyse this differently. Is concentration the absence of distraction? So when I close the door, turn off the music, create a sensory vacuum, am I concentrating?Our mind cannot be shut, our thoughts cannot be stopped.

I would say concentration is not getting distracted even if there are distractions present. Concentration is continuing towards your goal irrespective of distractions. What prevents us from concentrating?

  1. We do not have a goal. When we study, we just read a book until we fall asleep or get distracted. Distractions can be physical / external distractions – the ones that disturb our senses – people talking, moving, watching other things like emails etc. Or they can be mental / emotional / internal distractions – when our mind starts wandering. We lose our sense of the goal.
  • So ideally, we should have a goal. We have the concept of micro-goals or ‘chunking down’ – breaking a goal into tiny sub-goals. In project management, we call these milestones. They are a measure of progress and they are a reason to celebrate small successes. I want to see my email – I decide that I will see it after I finish and understand 10 pages or even 5 pages. I should reward myself with things that I love to do – after I reach a micro-goal.
  1. Our mind plays games with us. It distracts us. We daydream. We go into flights of fancy, wishful thinking. Or we think of past incidents and try to give some meaning to of it (remember outliers and black swans). The way to handle it is not by telling our mind to shut up and focus. It is to watch the distractions and the thoughts but not get involved in it.
  • When I teach meditation in class, it is not to raise our Kundalini or attain Samadhi or to blank my mind. It is to observe our thoughts, but not get involved in them. It is like I am the station master and a thought is a train, where the engine is the thought and the bogies are the emotions. We, as station masters of our mind, do not climb the bogey and ride with the train – we wave a green flag, observe and record the train timing and go back to our room – whatever we were originally doing.

The essence of concentration is not to have so much focus that we are lost in it. It is that we are aware of what our senses are feeling and what our mind is thinking, but we are not distracted by the thinking and the feeling. Too much focus is also a strain. It does not allow us to relax and assimilate. The best way to understand a paragraph is not to focus on each word, but to focus on a sentence and gradually the whole paragraph. That requires us to broaden our vision, not narrow it.

While reading J Krishnamurthi on education, I came across advice on how to meditate. It may be worthwhile to paraphrase the same:

“To learn about meditation, you have to see how your mind is working. You have to watch, as you watch a lizard going by, walking across the wall. You see all its four feet, how it sticks to the wall, and as you watch, you see all the movements. In the same way, watch your thinking. Do not correct it. Do not suppress it. Do not say, “All this is too difficult”. Just watch; now, this morning.

“First of all sit absolutely still. Sit comfortably, cross your legs, sit absolutely still, close your eyes, and see if you can keep your eyes from moving. You understand? Your eye balls are apt to move, keep them completely quiet, for fun. Then, as you sit very quietly, find out what your thought is doing. Watch it as you watched the lizard. Watch thought, the way it runs, one thought after another. So you begin to learn, to observe.

“Are you watching your thoughts – how one thought pursues another thought, thought saying, “This is a good thought, this is a bad thought”? When you go to bed at night, and when you walk, watch your thought. Just watch thought, do not correct it, and then you will learn the beginning of meditation. Now sit very quietly. Shut your eyes and see that the eyeballs do not move at all. Then watch your thoughts so that you learn. Once you begin to learn there is no end to learning.”

29 November

Beliefs or frames of reference

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If I have put my child to sleep and am relaxing in front of the TV with a glass of well deserved Laphroig in my hand, and he comes crawling out, I get pissed off. My belief is that I need to relax. The child’s belief is that he does not want to sleep. On the other hand, when my wife points out that this is the first time he has walked. She brings in another frame of reference. From that perspective, I am happy that my child came out of the bedroom. The same event, two different beliefs / frames of reference, two different emotions.

Our parents beliefs (read rules to live by) were our own, until we started creating our own beliefs (rules) and it then became a fight as to whose beliefs (rules and frames of reference) are more important. They tried to tell us why their beliefs were important, we did not want to believe them. So we ran away to college, with the hope that we can follow our own rules but no, we now had to follow the rules of our seniors, our colleagues and our professors. A bigger prison.
Then came placement. We believed that we knew what was required for a good placement. But for some reason, the recruiters do not seem to be following our beliefs. We do not know what are their beliefs. And so placement becomes very confusing.
Same event, two different beliefs / frames of reference, I don’t get placed, some one else does.
If I do not know the recruiter’s belief or the recruiter’s company’s beliefs, then how can I be certain of placement?
Selling. I, as a salesman, believe the TV’s features are its strong points. The customer believes that the more expensive, the better his ego is massaged. I am selling features, he just wants to know the price. No sale. Why?
I did not take time to know his beliefs / frame of reference.
Any sale, whether placement, promotion or product, requires us to know the customer’s frame of reference. Our frame of reference is immaterial in this world of sales.
24 September

How to read a book (and make notes) effectively

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One of the problems we face is of information overload. We read books, handouts, newspapers, magazines and Internet articles and are expected to have instant recall of the right information at the right time.

How do we typically read?
We take a book, sit or lie, (maybe with the TV or the radio or the music system on) and read it from cover to cover. If there is less time (like the night before the exam), we read faster. Our minds wander off and we rudely pull ourselves back from that seductive wonderland, cursing the exam or the deadlines. We get irritated, do not brook any disturbance and feel a sense of achievement when we have finished the book. We remember something about it the next day but within a week, it is gone.
If we are more active, we sit upright and we highlight sections of a book. This gives better focus as our hands are busy, and at the end of it we have a fluorescent, highlighted / underlined book. But when we need the information and we read the highlighted paragraphs, do we know what we highlighted and why? We also realise that we have highlighted 50 % of the book. Do we know which book to refer? And if it was a library book?
If we are even more active, we make notes. Start from the first page and assiduously copy salient paragraphs. Better than highlighting as we are actively writing and therefore cannot daydream. Since we are copying, we are reading a paragraph twice or thrice and slowly. If time is short, we make notes faster (illegibly). Sometime we are in-the-zone and we make notes of the book without even knowing what we are writing. Reminds me of lectures – same process – at the end of the lecture, lots of notes but no remembrance of the lecture.
When I read my notes (if I can decipher my handwriting) I have no clue what it was about.
Ah yes, the internet! How can I forget the proliferation of e-books and search engines. So now I can search for anything I want, whenever I want. Does it help? When was the last time we were able to get stuff that was relevant? And if I am in an interview, do I say, “Hang on guys, while I get the answer from my mobile phone!”
Why can’t we really read?
We need to participate actively in the reading process (as opposed to passively be awash with information), analyse and categorise the data in real time such that the information makes sense and we are focussed enough to retain this information in our mind, actively looking for cross references, coincidences, linkages so that the concept stick.

We need to have a some sort of Knowledge Management System (hey! stop groaning) that allows us to keep the information in a readable, recallable format such that if we look at our notes, we can grasp the concept in its entirety, recall the salient features and delve deeper due to the references and cross references.

Sounds like an awful lot of work! Might as well just read and hope for the best. But think about the following plausible scenario:

Placements are round the corner and the chaps coming for an interview are jaded lot who just came from a set of colleges like ours, who want to go home and who need a reason to flunk us. So they ask the first candidate (poor him), a question about the latest fad, say, ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ and our colleague’s mind freezes. Man, he had just read that book and now he doesn’t remember a thing!
When he comes out, all of us crowd around him and in a daze he tells us about the interview. All of us power up our laptops and Google for ‘Blue Ocean’. Of course, this question is not asked again in the interview, but something similar and equally arcane is.

In my 20 years of experience I must have read an average of 1 non-technical book (not to mention manuals and other stuff pertaining to the job) a month, which comes to 240 odd books (actually a lot more) but for the life of me, I don’t remember most of it. That was a colossal waste of time and money.
Bottom line, if I cannot recall what I read, there is no purpose in reading.
What creates good recall?
  1. Remember doodling in class? Very enjoyable, and sometimes, part of your notes are inside that doodle. How can I make doodling a part of notes-taking? Remember the game of remembering 10 objects in a tray? If you used the ‘a-b-c-d’ concept of linked association, you could remember it. Most good mnemonics are humourous in nature.
  2. If I take one concept at a time, or one paragraph at a time and, in real time, categorise this topic and put it in conjunction with other topics, I would have made a better imprint in my mind. Add to this some colour, some squiggles, some cartoons and some highlighting, then I am interested in and looking forward to what the lecturer is going to say (of the book is talking about) so that I can make more squiggles and create something Picasso-ish (or maybe Pollock-ish).
  3. If I repeat, I remember.
  4. If my memory is refreshed, I will recall faster.
  5. I don’t need to remember every line, unless it is a drama script. If I remove everything but keywords, an article/chapter can become quite small.
  6. If I have a top level map of where I am and where I need to be, I remember the roads quite well. So a map of a book shows me how things are linked and helps me remember

If I can use sight, sound and other senses, I can recall better. My daughter creates a rap song for her history lessons, throws in some guitar chords and she remembers it all!!!

Is there a methodology to make notes in such a way that it is easy to recall?

Can this be used to take down lectures and notes from books?

I use something called mind maps . A mind map of this URL is shown here.

Freemind and XMind are pretty good Open Source software, which you can install and use to make notes. It can also be used for brainstorming, outlining a project, a project report and I even use it for presentations.

I have, at the end, included a mind map of this article. You will notice that there are more things in it, and it summarises the article quite well.

But before you jump into mind maps, there are a few things to keep in mind. If you just create a mind map of a book, it is like taking a short cut, and purposeless.

Some tips on how to read a book

    1. Approach the book outside in. This is not ‘Alice in Wonderland’ (you know, “begin at the beginning…”). Look at the cover, back cover, about the author, and read the table of contents. Close it and try to recall the table. This starts creating a map in your mind about the book and the overall territory. Read the TOC again. Think about what is different about this book. Why did this book get written (and no facetious remark, please, about making money etc.)

 

  • Understand why you want to read the book. What is it that you want from it? Is it just the concepts? Or is it to prepare for an exam? What type of exam is it? Therefore what do you need to extract from the book.

 

 

  • Get an idea of the time it will take to read the book. If you do not have enough time, what are your priorities? Do you need to read every line, every chapter? So what happens if you do not read this book?

 

All the above should take you 15 minutes maximum.

Now start with the first chapter (or the chapter you need to study)

    1. Take a guess about the chapter. Read the section headings. Look at all the diagrams. Skim very fast, without stopping.

 

  • Now read the first line of each paragraph

 

 

  • This is the time when you are going to do your first recall. Create a preliminary mind map.

 

This should take you another 15 minutes. Later this will improve to 5 minutes.

    1. Now read the details of the chapter, which are necessary and fill out your mind map.

 

  • If you have to remember stuff, create funny mnemonics.

 

 

  • Time taken for this depends on length of the chapter, the complexity and the amount of work needed.

 

Take a break. Reward yourself. Then go to the next chapter and do the same thing.

Link up all the chapters in the mind map. One advantage of this is that if you leave the book half way and come back to it, just by looking at the mind maps, you will retain the continuity.

If you can get together in a group and every one does a book and gives a presentation, you can all cover a lot of books. Share the maps.

What about those lectures?

Create a mind map during the lecture in your notebook. Do not use your laptop. Use color pencils, doodles (and save the desks).

Listen to what the instructor is saying, and THEN put the keywords down. This is important. If you don’t understand, you cannot write it down. Ask for a clarification. If we just blindly make notes, might as well bring a Dictaphone to class. Don’t worry that your mind map is a mess.

In the evening, recreate the mind map on your laptop. This is your first revision. Add in more details from the internet or the book. See if you can cross reference with other lectures or book reviews.

Revisit the map before the next class or while waiting for the instructor. This should hardly take you one minute and you will know what happened last time. If there is a spot quiz, you are ready!!

Scan the map periodically or before a test / interview.

Enjoy

Mind maps of this article

 

The above is a collapsed mind map. Here is a detailed one. Please download and view