How we think and learn : our brain’s two modes of thinking

When trying to learn new things, it helps to understand how our brain works.

In the course Learning How To Learn, one of the most popular MOOCs on Coursera, Dr. Barbara Oakley posits that the brain has two fundamental modes of thinking by which it operates — the focused and the diffused modes.

Focused mode of thinking

The focused mode of thinking is when you concentrate intently on something you are trying to learn, solve or understand. It can be a problem or a concept which is completely new to you or one which you are familiar with.

It is also employed when your brain already has an ingrained mental path — familiar thought patterns like adding two numbers or even a few advance ideas like decision making or quantum theory — it can refer to, to understand or solve a given problem.

When you try to solve a familiar mathematical problem or try to get your head around a new concept in quantum mechanics or deliberately practice a chord progression in music — you are trying to tap into the brain’s focused mode of thinking.

Learning in the focused mode is what most people understand when they think of the term ‘learning’. That is not entirely true though.

As it turns out, the focused mode of thinking is very useful to the brain when laying a foundation for new knowledge or utilising familiar mental patterns to use to solve or understand concepts, but what about the patterns it has never ‘seen’ before? How can your brain think of ideas it has never thought before? And that is where the other mode of thinking — the diffused mode — comes into the picture.

Diffused mode of thinking

The diffused mode of thinking springs into action when our brain is in a relaxed state — when you aren’t consciously thinking of the problem you are trying to get our head around. As it turns out, even when you step back from a problem and not think about it consciously, at an unconscious level, it keeps running in the back of your mind as you go about doing other tasks.

In this relaxed state, your brain is free to wander around, explore and make new potential connections between ideas and concepts that already exist within it — and eureka!, out comes a seemingly novel solution to your problem.

Ever wondered why all your best ideas come to you when you are in a shower or taking a stroll? Ever got up from sleep and suddenly understood a complex topic you were struggling with for quite some time? Well, now you know!

As it turns out, exercise is a wonderful way to switch your mind into the diffused mode of thinking. And so is sleep. In fact, exercise and sleep help the brain develop new neural pathways which help you understand and retain information effectively.

Why you need both

Research in neuroscience suggests that at any given point in time, your brain can be in one of these two modes but never both. In that sense, the two modes complement each other.

For effective learning to occur, your brain needs to constantly be able to go back and forth between these two modes — grappling with and trying to understand or solve a problem or a concept in the focus mode while also stepping back from it for some time, to let the brain relax and assimilate these seemingly complex ideas and form new connections between related concepts in the background to help you see the problem from a big picture perspective. You can then switch back to the focused mode — where you can then pick from these newly formed connections and build on top of them.

Surrealist painters like Salvador Dali and great inventors like Thomas Alva Edison are said to have developed routines around this concept — which usually consisted of planned naps intertwined with their focused work sessions — which helped them ‘travel’ between the two thinking modes to come up with some of the greatest works of all times.

In light of this knowledge, it becomes very important for us to understand that taking regular breaks between focused learning sessions and allowing our brains to relax is a vital part of trying to reach into the depths of our mind to come up with creative ideas.

Fascinating, isn’t it?

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