Learn More, Study Less! by Scott Young

Author:Scott Young
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
Published: 2010-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

When you first walk through snow, every possible path is equal because they are all densely filled with powder. But after several walks through the snow, the first path you chose will become easier to walk through. This is because the compacting of snow under your feet creates a trail. Soon it is far easier to walk through one path than any other.

I can link this concept of walking through snow to classical conditioning by seeing the associations in the dogs brain. Initially, the bell could cause the dog to salivate or not (representing the expanse of snow with no trails). But after conditioning the bell with the arrival of food, the path from bell to food inevitably creates a trail through the snow. Eventually the dog will drool at the sound of the bell because that path has been so strongly conditioned.

Like most metaphors this one isn’t perfect, but it can be a useful example. Coming up with a metaphor is a matter of following three simple steps:

1) Identify the information you want to better understand or remember. In our case it was classical conditioning.

2) Find something in your experience that matches part of the idea you want to understand. Perfect matches are often impossible, so compromise with a couple imperfect metaphors instead of a complete match. In our case we used walking through snow as an example.

3) Repeat this process and check for circumstances where the metaphor doesn’t apply. With this example, walking through snow is a linear process, whereas brain neural connections have many different impulses running at the same time. Sometimes a metaphor doesn’t easily drop into your lap and requires more creative effort. Our snow-walking example fit snugly within the idea of classical conditioning. But, often metaphors require more effort in constructing.

Let’s say you were taking basic calculus and needed to understand derivative. A derivative is the result of differentiating a function and has many useful properties in mathematics.

A derivative will measure the slope at any part of the parent function. So if you have a function that rises in a straight line upwards, the derivative will be flat as the slope is the same throughout the parent function. In a curved line, the derivative will have a shape that models how the slope changes at every position on the parent function.

The problem with this explanation of a derivative is that it might be hard to remember what a derivative represents. Creating a metaphor can help because it will connect the principles of differentiation to a common experience.

A metaphor you might come up with is driving a car. On the dashboard you have the odometer and speedometer. The odometer measures how far your vehicle has traveled and the speedometer measures how fast you are going. If you graphed your odometer and speedometer over time, the speedometer should be the derivative of the odometer. The slope of your position graph would be the speed graph.

Tips for Improving Your Metaphors

The problem with both of the examples in the last section is that they are based on previous metaphors I’ve already constructed.

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