http://www.answers.com/topic/learning-analogical-reasoning

It supports our belief that analogical learning is an extremely powerful way to get information into our brains.

But we think that couldn’t further from the truth.

We all know Ford’s Mustang sports car. (In fact, I bet a few of you own one.) When Ford decided to name its new sports car back in 1964, do you think they picked “Mustang” on a whim?

Not a chance.

A mustang is North America’s wild horse, which the US Congress calls “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” Horses are associated with free spiritedness, power and grace–which happen to be desirable qualities of a car.

This association is analogical; a car is not a wild horse, but it has the desirable characteristics of one.

When a toddler won’t eat her food, how do you get her to open wide? You tell her the spoon is an airplane, her mouth a hanger, and make funny noises to get her to pop the hatch. 

This association is analogical; a spoon is not an airplane, but the airplane game makes eating more fun.

And when I needed to teach a young martial artist how to improve his kicking precision, I told him his knee was the cross-hair in his video game; where he pointed his knee was where his foot would go. From then on, he never forgot how to aim. No other explanation necessary.

So what’s my point?

We use analogy for learning and thinking every day, all the time—starting at the youngest age.

And why is it so powerful?

Because when you need to learn something, whether it’s how great a car is, how fun eating Gerber is, or how to aim your kick, you don’t actually have to learn much new stuff. You already know most of what you need to already. You just need a few connections.

Why

A newsletter is your way to broadcast a message about your product or service to a crowd that has already identified themselves as interested parties. There are three primary reasons to REGULARLY send a newsletter to them:

1. Provide useful information or interesting ideas for people to chew on. The best way to be relevant is to be useful.
2. If you are useful enough, that will spread by word of mouth.
3. Keep your product/service in their minds. Coke doesn’t advertise so they can attract new customers; they advertise to keep existing ones.

How

Keep them short and focused on one point. Long, rambling newsletters are seldom read. Plus, if you put too much into one newsletter, you’ll have fewer opportunities to send more of them. (See point three above.)

Make them compelling by telling a story that makes the reader a character in that story. I recently wrote a newsletter titled “The CLARITY machine.” It drew a comparison about how Intermz.com is like the machine ophthalmologists use sharpen your vision and make the world more clear. It put the reader in the ophthalmologist’s seat by reminding them of the time when the doctor would ask, “Which is better, A or B?” Then it drove the point home that Intermz does the same thing for your learning; you can switch between lenzes until your topic of interest becomes clear.

You can read the whole newsletter at:

http://www.intermz.com/blog/2008/08/16/the-clarity-machine/

When

As regularly as you can. Humans are wired to look for patterns, and when they see one, they lock into it so they can anticipate what will happen next. We are actually pattern recognition machines. If you give them the “next,” which is the next newsletter, it will reinforce your presence in their minds. This all sounds very pop psychology, but it’s true. Repitition is the key to remembering. (Of course, Intermz is the key to learning

Good luck and go get ‘em.

Learning is all about CLARITY. Insight is all about CLARITY.

Intermz is all about CLARITY.Why is that important? Because, like we mentioned before, accumulating insight is how you get ahead in this information economy.

Do you remember going to the ophthalmologist? (You know, the eye doctor?)

She sits you down in a chair and you look at letters on a wall through this big, funny-looking machine.

She asks, “Which is better, A or B?” while quickly changing the machine around until the letters get clearer.

What is she doing? She’s trying to figure out what lenses makes the world most clear to you. She is helping you to find CLARITY.

Intermz is exactly this kind of machine.

But instead of letters, you are looking at a topic you want to know more about. A topic that is unclear.

Intermz will let you flip between “lenzes” (we decided the term “lenzes” is better than “gelz”), until your topic becomes clear to you.

Imagine that.

Say you want to learn about Cooking.

Which is better, “Cooking in termz of Cars, or Cooking in termz of Music?”

Which is better, “Cooking in termz of Music, or in termz of Chemistry?”

Which is better, A or B? Until it Cooking becomes crystal clear.

Now imagine being able to do that with ANYTHING you want or need to learn.

Like a job skill.

It’s all about clarity.

Intermz is the clarity machine.

And it’s coming soon.

Best,
Ted Pin

The first is a comment a mentor/partner-in-crime made about the sexification of IT. Don Berndt is a lauded IT researcher and professor at the University of South Florida (the school from which I graduated) who’s been involved in many fascinating areas of work like artificial intelligence, behavioral psychology, and market prediction.

He observed that while professionals like lawyers and doctors may have a nice set of interesting stories to tell, on a day-to-day basis, their work can be rather boring and repetitive. While I cannot speak from first hand experience, my wife does emphasize how much of her job is simply mundane paper work, and a good friend of ours, a newly-minted Harvard law graduate, related how many hours she spends reviewing stacks of text. Don suggested that they may have more good stories, but they also go through a lot more of the pedestrian stuff to get there. He went on to say that for many IT folks, each day is interesting to them.

I have to agree with him.

I get to do things I find highly interesting or challenging almost daily.

Of course, the problem of making it interesting to other people still remains.

The second morsel is the reaction I got from a few of my IT coworkers when I asked them if it were possible to make IT dinner conversation: a vehement amalgamation of “no way,” “not in your life,” and emphatic ha-ha-ha’s. What struck me was the intensity of the response. It was almost a mixture of arrogance and defensiveness.

So my question to you is: Could it be that IT people don’t–at least subconsciously–want people to understand their work so that it can remain the esoteric, black-box art that perhaps attracted them to that profession in the first place? Some IT people are the same people who went to coffee shops in high school at 2AM to differentiate themselves from the popular crowd. I was one of them.

It’s no mystery that the people who are attracted to IT are those who are, firstly, not all that interested in spending tons of time connecting with other people, and, secondly, spend unusual amounts of time learning about and perfecting their craft. (See Asperger’s and IT: Dark Secret or Open Secret?) But these same qualities can generate a kind of elitism among some IT folks. A kind of “We run your lives from behind a curtain with our complex and brilliant systems. Don’t bother to ask us how we do it–you wouldn’t understand.” By not bringing our “craft” down to earth and making digestible by the masses, we maintain this sheen of magic and impenetrability around our work.

I realize I am being a bit harsh, but I wanted to suggest the possibility that resistance against making IT sexy may come partly from the very members of the field. So much of identity is not about what you do, but that other people don’t do what you do. In truth, the obsessive qualities that might make IT folks hard to relate to also help them to truly excel at their technical work. My friend, Brenda, said, “I was more concerned with the function of work than the people I worked with.” Despite all that, believe me, I’d rather have a socially inept but exacting person run my website server than a social butterfly–if it goes down at 4AM, who is more likely to be there?

The first person, let’s call her Helen, was a graduate student studying ecology. We talked about animal population characteristics for a few minutes. Then I told her I worked in IT for a large mortgage bank. Shockingly, she asked for more detail. So I explained a little bit about what I did in the most introductory way I could: I build computer systems that handle mortgage fraud and risk. With the mortgage crisis dominating the news, I figured framing my job that way might elicit a strong response. Instead, she smiled a very genuine “Ah, cool” combination and we proceeded onto the next topic.

Second shot. Another graduate student, Dan. He studies mathematical models that describe how plants propagate. (Related to emergence theory.) A highly technical person, Dan would certainly be interested in the cooler aspects of IT. I spent a good 10 minutes (significant at a party) probing him about his work, which he was more than willing to talk about. I made sure I did the Covey’esque-thing of making deposits into his emotional bank account so that when it was my turn to talk, he would oblige me with the same attention. He finished his rundown with some admittedly interesting anecdotes about plant propagation patterns, then inquired about what I was doing.

I hit him with the best story I had (even though it wasn’t exactly what I did).

“Do you know what the number one item that men, aged between 30 and 35, buy on Thursdays after work with a bag of diapers?”

“No, what?”

“A six pack of beer. So, grocery stores put diapers and beer on opposite sides of the store so you have to walk past all the other stuff. The work I do on mortgages is similar to that.”

“Oh, wow.”

At this point I expected him to ask how IT systems figure that stuff out. But he didn’t. He made eye contact with some other friends and politely moved on.

Was it something I said?

I’m not sure if it was a failure or just a lack of success, but what I got out of it was that my big guns didn’t work on a technically savvy person who, theoretically, should have been receptive to my work. So either my big gun wasn’t big enough, or something else was awry.

Do you think I could have done something differently? Got any tips for next time?

(Wine picture from oodora.com.)

1. Learn to learn.
2. Learn to teach.
3. Teach to learn.
4. Teach to teach.

Learn to learn. Learning is a skill. Figure out how to do this well, and everything gets easier.

Learn to teach. Take on the skills and responsibility of teaching others what you know and believe–then teach them what you know and believe.

Teach to learn. Two reasons here: First, teach others how to learn so that everything can get easier for them. Second, teach with the purpose of learning for yourself because the act of teaching teaches you twice as much as what you pass on.

Teach to teach. This is where the process comes full circle; show people how they can teach so that they can complete the growth-circuit and illuminate the world.

Not surprisingly, television and video games, which typically do not engage people in creative play, stunt the development of executive function; video games set all the rules for you and television provides no means for interactivity at all.

The entire NPR story, plus Q&A between parents of young children and developmental psychologists can be found at:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=76838288#73598288

So before you go out and buy your children that XBox 360 they’ve been wanting, consider the long term effects of choosing that type of play over more traditional, more flexible types that rely on the creativity, and self-regulation, of your growing child. Self control is the bed rock for good management and leadership and the play that your child engages in now could help determine how influential he or she becomes as an adult.

These walls drastically reduce the speed and quality at which you can learn new things. Children can learn with stunning speed because their brains are hardly myelinated (extreme brain elasticity), but also because they have few preconceived notions of how things should be. They have little reason or motivation to force particular ways of thinking onto new information. Children simply allow the information to come in.

This may all sound like abstract psycho-babel, but you can identify the times in which you put up walls against learning what you want to. Ask yourself this question. When I am looking at new information, do I say to myself, however quietly:

1. That doesn’t make sense.
2. That’s not possible.
3. Nothing I know fits with that.
4. If I consider this new information, will I look stupid?

Those thoughts are the result of internal resistance to new information. (You can, of course, ask those questions of information that you’ve investigated thoroughly.) Children, incidentally, rarely allow such internal questions, if they occur at all, to stop them from learning. Children do not need to all new information to immediately fit; they can just accept it. And they are not afraid of looking stupid by embracing new data. We adults, on the other hand, often are; we believe maturity comes from stability of mind.

How do you deal with these internal walls? I use a twofold approach:

• Take a cue from children and flip your resistance on its head:
  1. “That doesn’t make sense,” to “That’s interesting.”
  2. “That’s not possible,” to “That’s amazing!”
  3. “Nothing I know fits with that,” to “Maybe I’ve been wrong all along…”
  4. “If I consider this new information, will I look stupid?” to “Would I be stupid not to investigate this new information?”

• Convince yourself that this new information or new skill/activity is not new at all; pretend you’ve been doing it since you can remember.

This second technique, of convincing yourself the new is not new at all, is a bit tricky but is probably the most effective technique I have ever used to learn or do anything I want to. Why? Familiarity with anything, by definition, means you have less skepticism and reservations about it, which precludes the necessity of having internal resistance. Here’s an example of how I applied this technique.

Three years ago, a friend and I decided to go sky diving for the first time. Most of the other first-timers were full of butterflies and anxiety. A few practiced their jumping motions incessantly and were probably thinking what would happen if they didn’t perform the motions just right. Instead, I went through the prescribed motions just twice, and reminded myself I’d done all of this before (which was a complete fabrication). I thought about what a nice ride I was going to have because I didn’t need to think about my technique. On the way up to 13,000 ft., I imagined how easy all my previous jumps had been (although I’d never jumped before). When the airplane door opened, and my tandem instructor and I approached the leap, it all seemed so natural; no butterflies, no anxiety, no problem.

This technique of self-deception to create familiarity is a bit subtle and requires some control over your fear of losing control. But the technique is astoundingly effective because: fear and anxiety makes people hesitate; hesitation is what makes learning and doing so difficult; quelling anxiety by feigning familiarity reduces hesitation and accelerates learning.

In the end, the essence of these techniques is realizing that removing internal obstacles is much easier than overcoming them (the typical technique). Don’t try to break down your walls; put them on wheels and truck them out!