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Conversely the conscious mind can also make it harder to learn things. I refer to the "Inner Game of Tennis" by Tim Gallwey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie

• noobermin 11y ago
  This reminds me too of learning to draw. When I took drawing in college, we had to resist the urge to draw an apple in front of us like stick figure apples. We had a conscious idea of how an apple should look like, and we default to drawing that. Instead, we were to try to forget that it's an apple and see the shape as lines and the shade as gradient. Then, you reproduce the object better, once you learn to not lean on your conscious knowledge of what you're drawing.
  • nine_k 11y ago
    In other words, you had to switch off the visual parsing model you already had for day-to-day interactions with aples, and form another, more useful for reproducing its images. One is a 'shapes and stick figures', another is 'spots and gradients'. Still I suspect they have a similar nature.
• ninkendo 11y ago
  Interesting video. I'd be interested to see if that learning technique could be compared side-by-side with the same technique without the distractions, to see if the benefits come from distracting your conscious mind, or just from observing and mimicking the real tennis player. I've been trying to find out how I learn best, and I really think I get the best results from pure repetition and imitation (ie. being shown examples of how things are done, over and over.) It's similar to what we do when we're young (when we can't speak enough language to be properly "taught" anything), which is definitely the time in our lifespan where we absorb and internalize novel information the most. The supposed drawback to pure-imitation learning is that you don't get the "why" of what you're learning, you're just mimicking what you see. But I think our brains are really good at generalizing stimuli and making meaning on our own (or at least mine is), so if I'm able to just mimic something, I get the best of both worlds: my subconscious is busy mimicking and memorizing what I see, while my conscious mind is distracted by finding "meaning" behind the things I'm mimicking. I think this can apply for anything from learning a new programming language (just let me read examples until I "get" it) to sports, to musical instruments. I've had piano instructors try to tell me what legato is, but it's so much faster and simpler to just watch a good piano player do it, and I'll just pretend to do it too until it sounds right. Same with any youtube "how to" video. I don't want to hear anybody's explanation, just show me you doing it, and I'll mimic it the best I can. I'll figure out on my own how close my action is to yours. I wonder if there are any good sites out there that are geared towards this? A how-to site that's focused exclusively on video/text that just simply shows you how to do something, with no accompanying explanation. I know Rosetta Stone works this way, but I think it can work for more than just spoken languages.