Metacognition Quotes

Lessons of the balance. 1. The relentless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, leads to pain. 2. Recovery begins with abstinence 3. Abstinence rests the brains reward pathway and with it our capacity to take joy and simpler pleasures. 4. Self-binding creates literal and metacognitive space between desire and consumption, a modern necessity in our dopamine overloaded world. 5. Medications can restore homeostasis, but consider what we lose by medicating away our pain. 6. Pressing on the pain side, resets our balance to the side of pleasure. 7. Beware of getting addicted to pain. 8. Radical honesty promotes awareness, enhances intimacy and fosters a plenty mindset. 9. Prosocial shame affirms that we belong to the human tribe. 10. Instead of running away from the world, we can find escape by immersing ourselves in it.

How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition. We know when we are angry; every emotional state comes with self-awareness attached, so that an individual can try to figure out why he's feeling what he's feeling. If the particular feeling makes no sense—if the amygdala is simply responding to a loss frame, for example—then it can be discounted. The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain.

So few people are really aware of their thoughts. Their minds run all over the place without their permission, and they go along for the ride unknowingly and without making a choice.

What Exactly Is the #5SecondRule? The Rule is a simple, research-backed metacognition tool that creates immediate and lasting behavior change. Metacognition,

It all makes more sense when I'm out here alone," he smiled. "I can talk myself into anything.

It [writing] has enormous meta-cognitive implications. The power is this: That you cannot only think in ways that you could not possibly think if you did not have the written word, but you can now think about the thinking that you do with the written word. There is danger in this, and the danger is that the enormous expressive and self-referential capacities of the written word, that is, the capacities to keep referring to referring to referring, will reach a point where you lose contact with the real world. And this, believe me, is very common in universities. There's a technical name for it, I don't know if we can use it on television, it's called "bullshit." But this is very common in academic life, where people just get a form of self-referentiality of the language, where the language is talking about the language, which is talking about the language, and in the end, it's hot air. That's another name for the same phenomenon.

Therapists instead prefer to take on YAVIS—Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent, and Successful clients.[3] They love an amenable type, someone who is curious about their internal workings and eager to plumb them, someone who’s already read articles in The New Yorker about psychology to familiarize them with the language of metacognition and congruence. Good luck if you’re a regular-ass Joe who’d rather watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Simple shifts in points of view can open doors to expansions of consciousness as easily as rigid dispositions can close hearts and minds to such elevated awareness. It generally depends on whether you allow fear and violence to rule your actions or whether you give wisdom, courage, and compassion the authority to do so.

There is nothing magical about metacognition, thought it is certainly a wonderful and marvelous ability.

Nichols credits a 1999 study by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, research psychologists at Cornell, with driving home this point. Nichols writes, “The lack of metacognition sets up a vicious loop in which people who do not know much about a subject do not know when they’re in over their head . . . and there is no way to educate or inform people who, when in doubt, will make stuff up.

As it turns out, however, the more specific reason that unskilled or incompetent people overestimate their abilities far more than others is because they lack a key skill called “metacognition.” This is the ability to know when you’re not good at something by stepping back, looking at what you’re doing, and then realizing that you’re doing it wrong.

Two Dimensions of Executive Skills: Thinking and Doing Executive skills involving thinking (cognition) Working memory Planning/prioritization Organization Time management Metacognition Executive skills involving doing (behavior) Response inhibition Emotional control Sustained attention Task initiation Goal-directed persistence Flexibility

the most fruitful time to transform pessimistic children into optimistic ones was “before puberty, but late enough in childhood so that they are metacognitive

There is nothing magical about metacognition, though it is certainly a wonderful and marvelous ability.

Metacognition is the process of stepping back from the thoughts and getting enough distance to allow us to see those thoughts for what they really are.

metacognition, which is a fancy name for thoughts about your thoughts.

The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself: and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own object.... If by this inquiry into the nature of the understanding, I can discover the powers thereof; how far they reach; to what things they are in any degree proportionate; and where they fail us, I suppose it may be of use to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension; to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities.

Actively self-reflecting on the approaches that you are taking fosters a strategic stance that is really important in life. Strategic thinking distinguishes between people of comparable ability and effort. This can make the difference between people who achieve and people who have the potential to achieve, but don’t.

interpreted literally (“‘Birds of a feather flock together’ means that similar birds form flocks”). Formal operational stage (adolescence onward). Approaching adult levels of abstraction, reasoning, and metacognition

This presumption by the professor that her students will readily follow something complex that appears fundamental in her own mind is a metacognitive error, a misjudgment of the matchup between what she knows and what her students know.

If he wasn't careful, he'd fall to chasing his own mind, trapped in the maddening game of don't think about that.

When you’re arrogant and egotistical,” says Dr. Olds, “you’re shutting out complexity, novelty, and unpredictability to preserve a distorted self-image. Any incoming information that could lead to self-doubt is stamped out. It’s a massive data reduction. Humility moves in the other direction, it opens us up and increases incoming information. As a result, there is more opportunity for pattern recognition, more dopamine, and less need for judgmental metacognition.

Studies of expert-novice differences have demonstrated that experts' performance is determined not by superior problem-solving strategies or better working memories but rather; better knowledge base that includes a large interconnected set of domain-specific schematic knowledge structures, well-developed cognitive skills (automated knowledge), and metacognitive self-regulatory skills that allow experts to control their performance , assess their work, predict its results, and generally, use the available knowledge base. From cognitive load theory American Psychologist ,45,149-158

The “Spotlight” Our immediate capacities for navigating awareness and action toward tasks. Enables us to do what we want to do. The “Starlight” Our broader capacities for navigating life “by the stars” of our higher goals and values. Enables us to be who we want to be. The “Daylight” Our fundamental capacities – such as reflection, metacognition, reason, and intelligence – that enable us to define our goals and values to begin with. Enables us to “want what we want to want.” These three “lights” of attention pertain to doing, being, and knowing, respectively. When each of these “lights” gets obscured, a distinct – though not mutually exclusive – type of “distraction” results.

The more difficult it becomes to process a series of statements, the less credit you give them overall. During metacognition, the process of thinking about your own thinking, if you take a step back and notice that one way of looking at an argument is much easier than another, you will tend to prefer the easier way to process information and then leap to the conclusion that it is also more likely to be correct. In experiments where two facts were placed side by side, subjects tended to rate statements as more likely to be true when those statements were presented in simple, legible type than when printed in a weird font with a difficult-to-read color pattern. Similarly, a barrage of counterarguments taking up a full page seems to be less persuasive to a naysayer than a single, simple, powerful statement.

Atheism will appeal to psychology and sociology to explain human behavior, which is legitimate, but what explains human psychology? Atheism can only find explanatory power in evolution such that the mind is - paradoxically - a mindless organ that is forced to act according to its chemistry and cannot act otherwise. The fact that humans are capable of recognizing depravity in others, are offended by it, seek to reform it, feel guilt, and are capable of redemptive behavior all speak against this explanation. The fact that humans are capable of meta-cognition - thinking about thinking - and are therefore able to postulate their own mindlessness is counter-intuitive to say the least.

Several researchers demonstrate the ways people fail to label trauma as such or underreport traumatic experiences. In a sample of 1,526 university students, Rausch and Knutson (1991) found that although participants reported receiving punitive treatment similar to that of their siblings, they were more than twice as likely to identify their siblings’ experiences as abusive as they were to label their own in this way. The authors reported that participants were likely to interpret parental treatment toward themselves but not parental treatment toward their siblings as deserved and therefore not abusive. Other studies similarly indicate that those reporting abuse experiences often do not demonstrate a metaconsciousness of having been abused (Goldsmith & Freyd, in press; Koss, 1998; Varia & Abidin, 1999; Weinbach & Curtiss, 1986)." KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING ABOUT TRAUMA: IMPLICATIONS FOR THERAPY (2004)

Focus intently and beat procrastination.    Use the Pomodoro Technique (remove distractions, focus for 25 minutes, take a break).    Avoid multitasking unless you find yourself needing occasional fresh perspectives.    Create a ready-to-resume plan when an unavoidable interruption comes up.    Set up a distraction-free environment.    Take frequent short breaks. Overcome being stuck.    When stuck, switch your focus away from the problem at hand, or take a break to surface the diffuse mode.    After some time completely away from the problem, return to where you got stuck.    Use the Hard Start Technique for homework or tests.    When starting a report or essay, do not constantly stop to edit what is flowing out. Separate time spent writing from time spent editing. Learn deeply.    Study actively: practice active recall (“retrieval practice”) and elaborating.    Interleave and space out your learning to help build your intuition and speed.    Don’t just focus on the easy stuff; challenge yourself.    Get enough sleep and stay physically active. Maximize working memory.    Break learning material into small chunks and swap fancy terms for easier ones.    Use “to-do” lists to clear your working memory.    Take good notes and review them the same day you took them. Memorize more efficiently.    Use memory tricks to speed up memorization: acronyms, images, and the Memory Palace.    Use metaphors to quickly grasp new concepts. Gain intuition and think quickly.    Internalize (don’t just unthinkingly memorize) procedures for solving key scientific or mathematical problems.    Make up appropriate gestures to help you remember and understand new language vocabulary. Exert self-discipline even when you don’t have any.    Find ways to overcome challenges without having to rely on self-discipline.    Remove temptations, distractions, and obstacles from your surroundings.    Improve your habits.    Plan your goals and identify obstacles and the ideal way to respond to them ahead of time. Motivate yourself.    Remind yourself of all the benefits of completing tasks.    Reward yourself for completing difficult tasks.    Make sure that a task’s level of difficulty matches your skill set.    Set goals—long-term goals, milestone goals, and process goals. Read effectively.    Preview the text before reading it in detail.    Read actively: think about the text, practice active recall, and annotate. Win big on tests.    Learn as much as possible about the test itself and make a preparation plan.    Practice with previous test questions—from old tests, if possible.    During tests: read instructions carefully, keep track of time, and review answers.    Use the Hard Start Technique. Be a pro learner.    Be a metacognitive learner: understand the task, set goals and plan, learn, and monitor and adjust.    Learn from the past: evaluate what went well and where you can improve.

Metacognitive disorders can be interpreted in terms of early, historical views in which the frontal cortex is considered responsible for abstract reasoning, planning, and problem solving (see Goldstein, 1936; Halstead, 1947). Such complex, high-level characterizations of metacognition do not lend themselves easily to contributions of specific cognitive (or brain) components that mediate performance on metacognitive tasks. As such

Students reveal their thinking through discourse and are encouraged to develop their metacognitive awareness and understanding of the inquiry process.

It is important that we know that we don’t know when we’re absorbing information. Meta-cognition is, “knowing about knowing”. The common mistake that we make is we still continue to read when we no longer understand the context.

L. L. Jacoby, C. N. Wahlheim, & J. H. Coane, Test-enhanced learning of natural concepts: effects on recognition memory, classification, and metacognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 36 (2010), 1441

The Importance of Becoming Metacognitively Sophisticated as a Learner Whatever the reasons for our not developing accurate mental models of ourselves as learners, the importance of becoming sophisticated as a learner cannot be overemphasized. Increasingly, coping with the changes that characterize today’s world—technological changes, job and career changes, and changes in how much of formal and informal education happens in the classroom versus at a computer terminal, coupled with the range of information and procedures that need to be acquired—requires that we learn how to learn. Also, because more and more of our learning will be what Whitten, Rabinowitz, and Whitten (2006) have labeled unsupervised learning, we need, in effect, to know how to manage our own learning activities. To become effective in managing one’s own learning requires not only some understanding of the complex and unintuitive processes that underlie one’s encoding, retention, and retrieval of information and skills, but also, in my opinion, avoiding certain attribution errors. In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977) refers to the tendency, in explaining the behaviors of others, to overvalue the role of personality characteristics and undervalue the role of situational factors. That is, behaviors tend to be overattributed to a behaving individual’s or group’s characteristics and underattributed to situational constraints and influences. In the case of human metacognitive processes, there is both a parallel error and an error that I see as essentially the opposite. The parallel error is to overattribute the degree to which students and others learn or remember to innate ability. Differences in ability between individuals are overappreciated, whereas differences in effort, encoding activities, and whether the prior learning that is a foundation for the new learning in question has been acquired are underappreciated.

Psychologists use the rather ponderous term metacognition to refer to an awareness of thought process, and metamood to mean awareness of one’s own emotions. I prefer the term self-awareness, in the sense of an ongoing attention to one’s internal states.

Although a child’s brain has reached 90 percent of its full size by age six, it’s far from fully developed, and there are specific parts of the brain that have the furthest to go. It is the newest brain region, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive functioning— including voluntary attention and metacognition — that still has years of growth ahead. Your child’s behavior will be marked by impulsiveness and inconsistency for quite some time to come.

He set me off on this path as a kid when he patiently explained to me the idea of “metacognition,” or thinking about thinking. It would be hard to be grateful enough.

The illusion of mastery is an example of poor metacognition: what we know about what we know. Being accurate in your judgment of what you know and don’t know is critical for decision making.

Through metacognition, we understand that subjective reality is not objective reality; that our perception of reality, and other people’s perception of reality, are colored by our respective desires, beliefs, and goals.

Metacognition is the ability to recognize that our thoughts are thoughts, and not a direct representation of reality. When faced with an angry mother, a child who has achieved metacognition can replace the idea “I am a bad person” with the idea “Mommy is treating me like I am a bad person, but sometimes she’s been wrong about things in the past.” When a wife employs metacognition, she can move from the thought “My husband is a son of a bitch” to “My husband can say mean things sometimes and it’s not okay, but I also know he’s extremely anxious in this moment

Metacognition,

One useful starting point is to stop dumping on our “childlike” emotions. They are the wellspring of our desire to connect and our need to be close. The problem is that we spend energy judging and blaming ourselves and each other for these emotions, instead of becoming as skilled as possible in expressing them. We can actually cultivate the needed capacities and skills. Mainstream psychology refers to these capacities as “emotional regulation,” broadly defined as the strategies people use to “influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions.” We regulate emotions through a variety of different methods, but two of the most adaptive ones—metacognition and mindfulness—rely on reflective functioning, or what I’ve called the feeling-with-and-thinking-about process.

A holistic approach to literacy is demanded to enhance metacognitive critical thinking abilities to consume information, counter misleading or false narratives, and further comprehend the associated issues with the technology such as bias, privacy, and security.

we can use self-observation to keep cognitive dissonance in check. To some degree, we can compensate for it by: (1) knowing it exists; (2) knowing what our bias is likely to be; and (3) applying metacognition—the “What am I not thinking about?” question. Be as detached as you can be, as if you were asked to debate both sides of the issue.

•   Everything we do, we do intensely and often spend a great deal of time analyzing our own thinking processes (metacognition) as well as larger, complex ideas.

Psychitecture is a high-level design and implementation process - creative problem-solving for the subjective experience - and when utilized persistently, it can take a mind that is like a prison and gradually transform it into a palace.

In particular, judging one’s own confidence in having seen or heard something—metacognition, or “knowing about knowing” (recall the four-point confidence scale in chapter 2)—is linked to anterior regions of prefrontal cortex.

Steve liked the idea of using the mind to study the mind, something known in psychology as “metacognition.

The teacher must thoroughly understand each aspect of adaptability in order to pass it on to students, both real world applications of adaptability as well as theory. Some aspects that are associated with adaptability include: •Cognitive ability;172 • Problem-solving skills;173 and • Metacognitive skills; these comprise the ability to critically assess your own thoughts, always questioning, “Have I thought about this or that?” As well as looking from the outside in and saying, “What consequences does my decision have?

You didn't saw what I did. Your perception is not the same with my vision. What you thought is not actually my scheme. You are not me and I am not you. Despite of differences I respect you. We are diverse and so our customs, cultures, traditions and beliefs are. Simply we can never exactly think the way as others do... at least lend your ears, use your nervous system along with metacognitive ability.

questioning is a more subtle and complex skill than many realize, involving three kinds of sophisticated thinking—divergent, convergent, and metacognitive. Some of it comes naturally to kids, but some must be learned and practiced. Since questioning seems to drop off at around age five, the innate questioning skills we start out with have long been neglected by junior high and high school. By that time, “the question-asking muscle,” as Rothstein calls it, has atrophied and needs to be built up.     Can

Children not only think better as they mature; they also become capable of thinking about their own mental processes. Memory capacity may not expand in any real sense, but children (and adults) learn how to boost their recall by various strategies, ranging from the ways in which they group or store things to the kinds of tally systems they utilize on paper or in their heads. Children also learn to think about their own problem-solving activities: How can I best handle a new challenge? Which system or which tool would be useful? Who can I turn to for help? What is relevant and what is irrelevant to a problem I am trying to solve or a principle I am seeking to discover or master? Often these lessons are learned by watching others reflect on their memories or their thinking processes, by mastering practices common in the culture, or by following oft-repeated adages; even left pretty much to their own devices, however, in seems reasonable to assume that nearly all youngsters will improve somewhat in the "metacognitive" areas between the age of seven and adulthood (which itself begins at markedly different ages across cultures).

Think of Mindfulness as an innate superpower. It’s like having metacognition, which means you have a heightened awareness of what you’re thinking in the moment, as well as a heightened awareness of your understanding of what you’re thinking, and why.

Finding a person to declare your craziest, most profound insecurities to is not exactly a picnic. But the bureaucratic idiocy of America’s healthcare system turns what should be a chore into torture. If you’re a middle-class person in America, the dance goes like this: You call your insurance provider to find a meager list of therapists who take your insurance. Most of the people on the list are licensed clinical social workers or licensed mental health counselors. They can be wonderful and very helpful, but they often have less schooling and experience than, say, psychologists and PhDs. After digging deeper, you find that some of these therapists don’t take your insurance after all; others have full client lists. And even if they do have space in the day to treat someone, they might not be interested in treating you. According to one study, a low-income Black person had up to an 80 percent lower chance of receiving a callback for an appointment than a middle-class white person. And even though intellectually, therapists tell you that anger can be a helpful and legitimate emotion in processing trauma, God forbid you actually seem angry on the phone. Several mental health professionals have told me that therapists often avoid rageful clients because they seem threatening or scary. Therapists instead prefer to take on YAVIS—Young, Attractive, Verbal, Intelligent, and Successful clients. They love an amenable type, someone who is curious about their internal workings and eager to plumb them, someone who’s already read articles in The New Yorker about psychology to familiarize them with the language of metacognition and congruence. Good luck if you’re a regular-ass Joe who’d rather watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But say you get lucky and find a licensed clinical psychologist with an open slot. The psychologist is white, of course (86 percent of psychologists in the United States are), which isn’t ideal if you are a person of color. But, fine, whatever: You just need to receive an official diagnosis for your insurance. You are certain you have complex PTSD, but he can’t diagnose you with that because it’s not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Your insurance only covers treatment for conditions listed in the DSM in order to assign a number of sessions to you. Most forms of insurance will pay for, say, only six months of therapy relating to anxiety, ten for depression, as if you should be better by then. Another consequence of C-PTSD not being in the DSM: This psychologist hasn’t been trained in treating it. He says he doesn’t believe that it’s a real diagnosis. He’d like to provide you with some questionnaires to see if you have something he can actually handle—bipolar disorder, maybe, or manic depression. This does not inspire confidence, so you leave. After some internet sleuthing, you find a woman of color who seems really cool. She’s specifically trained in the treatment of complex trauma. She has blurbs on her website that resonate with you—it seems as if she might truly understand you. But she doesn’t take insurance. (Psychologists are the least likely of any medical provider to take insurance—only about 45 percent of them do. And most of the time, the ones who don’t are the most qualified practitioners.) You can’t exactly blame her. You learn on the internet that insurance companies haven’t updated reimbursement rates for therapists in up to twenty years, despite rising rates for office rent and other administrative costs. If therapists were to rely on reimbursement rates from insurance alone, they’d wind up making about $50,000 a year on average, which is fine, but like, not great if you’re an actual doctor.

The amount of metacognition going on in an autistic mind could light up Manhattan. Just saying.

Everything we do, we do intensely and often spend a great deal of time analyzing our own thinking processes (metacognition) as well as larger, complex ideas.

Our feelings and emotions are our hurdles, hindrances, and those are the hardest things to master in oneself because we are thinking about them and getting impacted and when you do not think about them you are free from such things in your mind. So learning to think what not to think is an ability we need to develop to rise above those things.

A big part of a thought experiment is thoroughly considering the consequences and implications of certain conditions, actions or choices.

According to many experts the majority of the people won't be needed anymore for the coming society. Almost everything will be done by artificial intelligence, including self-driving cars and trucks, which already exist anyway. Some even mentioned that AI is making universities obsolete by how fast it can produce information. However, In my view, the AI has limitations that the many can't see, because on a brain to brain comparison, the AI always wins, yet the AI can only compute with programmable data. In other words, the AI can think like a human but can't imagine or create a future. The AI is always codependent on the imagination of its user. So the limitations of the AI are in fact determined by humans. It is not bad that we have AI but that people have no idea of how to use it apart from replacing their mental faculties and being lazy. This is actually why education has always been a scam. The AI will simply remove that from the way. But knowledge will still require analysis and input of information, so the AI doesn't really replace the necessary individuals of the academic world, but merely the many useless ones that keep copying and plagiarizing old ideas to justify and validate a worth they don't truly possess. Being afraid and paranoid about these transitions doesn't make sense because evolution can't be stopped, only delayed. The problem at the moment has more to do with those who want to keep themselves in power by force and profiting from the transitions. The level of consciousness of humanity is too low for what is happening, which is why people are easily deceived. Consequently, there will be more anger, fear, and frustration, because for the mind that is fixed on itself, change is perceived as chaos. The suffering is then caused by emotional attachments, stubbornness and the paranoid fixation on using outdated systems and not knowing how to adapt properly. In essence, AI is a problem for the selfish mind - rooted in cognitive rationalizations -, but an opportunity of great value for the self-reflective mind - capable of a metacognitive analysis. And the reason why nobody seems to understand this is precisely because, until now, everyone separated the mind from the spirit, while not knowing how a spiritual ascension actually goes through the mind. And this realization, obviously, will turn all religions obsolete too. Some have already come to this conclusion, and they are the ones who are ready.

On what regards the topic of reincarnation, as with most topics that are hard to understand through a metacognitive approach, try to see it from different momentums, from the most recent to the oldest, and you will notice that you have been living many lives inside the current body as well. So it doesn't matter so much who we were or the mistakes we made as much as our capacity to change. The topic of forgiveness starts fundamentally with ourselves. It is at the core of our heart that we develop the potential to change.

The Wandering Mind tracks their approaches from the outside in. It starts with monks’ decisions to concentrate on God and follows them into the successive layers of their ideas and practices, moving from the world they abandoned to the communities they joined, the bodies they trained, the books they read, the meditational memories they constructed, the metacognitive monitoring they set up inside their minds, and, finally, the fleeting moments of pure attention that some of them managed to capture.

Balance The relentless pursuit of pleasure (and avoidance of pain) leads to pain. Recovery begins with abstinence. Abstinence resets the brain’s reward pathway and with it our capacity to take joy in simpler pleasures. Self-binding creates literal and metacognitive space between desire and consumption, a modern necessity in our dopamine-overloaded world. Medications can restore homeostasis, but consider what we lose by medicating away our pain. Pressing on the pain side resets our balance to the side of pleasure. Beware of getting addicted to pain. Radical honesty promotes awareness, enhances intimacy, and fosters a plenty mindset. Prosocial shame affirms that we belong to the human tribe. Instead of running away from the world, we can find escape by immersing ourselves in it.

In mindfulness, awareness can be thought of as one’s core, which is being. This awareness can also be thought of as a witness or witnessing consciousness, sometimes also called metacognition. It is in this awareness that all cogitations and actions arise.

The cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate.

I learnt that in teaching young children the concept of number, you should start with the concrete, then move to the pictorial, before finally representing numbers in the abstract. I learnt that children should be encouraged to articulate their processes, and feed back to each other on whether they are right or wrong, and why. And I learnt that this is so children understand number concepts, not just procedures, because (though not only because) the PSLE tests understanding, not just memorisation. As I was chatting to the professor in the car as she gave me a lift to the station, she also expounded on the importance of teacher-student relationships – 'you can't touch their brain until you have touched their heart'.

Why do you think everything you think is everything everybody else thinks?

Research findings on attachment, emotional regulation, metacognition, and mindfulness all demonstrate that being able to narrate our inner experience is one of the most powerful ways we can change how we feel. Telling a coherent,accurate story about our experience directly relates to our ability to modulate and modify our emotions. Each helps the other: a coherent story helps organize emotion, and modulating our emotions helps us tell a coherent story.

When it comes to retrieval practice, spaced practice, interleaving, and feedback-driven metacognition, the combination of being research-based and classroom-proven is paramount.

Feedback-driven metacognition is another Power Tool that significantly boosts learning. It isn't new and you probably give students feedback all the time; the difference is that how you give feedback has a large impact on encoding, storage, and retrieval.

Feedback is most effective when it is the right kind (e.g., detailed and narrative, not graded), delivered in the right way (supportive), at the right time (sooner for low-level knowledge but not so soon that it prevents metacognitive processing and later for complex tasks), and to the right person (who is in a receptive mood and has reasonably high self-efficacy).

Metacognition is a very important component of cognition.

Metacognition guides our actions: knowing what we know tells us what to avoid, what to search for, or what to dive or not dive into. We can’t live without it.

metacognition.

Metacognition and the closely related mindfulness allow us to step outside of our software and analyze it, and vipassana meditation is one of the best methods for cultivating these qualities.

Thus, getting smart requires three things. First, it requires the acquisition of adaptive instincts—from our biological ancestors, from the people around us, and from our own experiences. Second, getting smart requires a facility with manual mode, the ability to deliberately work through complex, novel problems. Third, it requires a kind of metacognitive skill, analogous to the skills of a photographer. We, unlike cameras, have no masters to tell us when to point and shoot and when to be in manual mode. We have to decide for ourselves, and understanding how our minds work may help us decide more wisely, both as individuals and as herders trying to live together on the new pastures.

the more specific reason that unskilled or incompetent people overestimate their abilities far more than others is because they lack a key skill called “metacognition.

Psychologists therefore would do well to ask whether “metacognition” (thinking critically about your own thinking) is at bottom a social phenomenon. It typically happens in conversation—not idle chitchat, but the kind that aims to get to the bottom of things. I call this an “art” because it requires both tact and doggedness. And I call it a moral accomplishment because to be good at this kind of conversation you have to love the truth more than you love your own current state of understanding. This is, of course, an unusual priority to have, which may help to account for the rarity of real mastery in any pursuit.

Effective learners understand how they learn with strengths identified as metacognition, self-monitoring, and self-regulation.

The lack of metacognition sets up a vicious loop, in which people who don’t know much about a subject do not know when they’re in over their head talking with an expert on that subject. An argument ensues, but people who have no idea how to make a logical argument cannot realize when they’re failing to make a logical argument. In short order, the expert is frustrated and the layperson is insulted. Everyone walks away angry. Even

Figure 1-9. Four principles. To serve memory and use, I’ve arranged these principles and practices into a mnemonic –STAR FINDER. In astronomy, a “star finder” or planisphere is a map of the night sky used for learning to identify stars and constellations. In this book, it’s a guide for finding goals, finding paths, and finding your way. First, we can get better at planning by making planning more social, tangible, agile, and reflective. At each step in the design of paths and goals, ask how these four principles might help. Social. Plan with people early and often. Engage family, friends, colleagues, customers, stakeholders, and mentors in the process. When we plan together, it’s easier to get started. Also, diversity grows empathy, sharing creates buy-in, and both expand options. Tangible. Get ideas out of your head. Sketches and prototypes let us see, hear, taste, smell, touch, share, and change what we think. When we render our mental models to distributed cognition and iterative design, we realise an intelligence greater than ourselves. Agile. Plan to improvise. Clarify the extent to which the goal, path, and process are fixed or flexible. Be aware of feedback and options. Know both the plan and change must happen. Embrace adventure. Reflective. Question paths, goals, and beliefs. Start and finish with a beginner’s mind. Try experiments to test hypotheses and metrics to spot errors. Use experience and metacognition to grow wisdom.

What is special and fascinating about self-consciousness is that it seems to include a strange loop.9 When I reflect upon myself, the “I” appears twice, both as the perceiver and as the perceived. How is this possible? This recursive sense of consciousness is what cognitive scientists call metacognition: the capacity to think about one’s own mind. The French positivist philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) considered this a logical impossibility. “The thinking individual,” he wrote, “could not divide into two, one reasoning, the other watching the reasoning. The observed organ and the observing organ being identical in this case, how could the observation be made?

Learning to change and improve a person's character requires belief in the possibility of changing something so integral as the way a person thinks. This metacognition allows even children to recognize negative, self-destructive thinking and adjust their perspective to a healthier outlook.

For example, dissonance occurs in non-human animals (e.g., Egan, Bloom, et al., 2010; Egan, Santos, et al., 2007), suggesting that the metacognitive structure of self is not necessary.

We are also the only creatures who possess the ability of metacognition. We can think about our thoughts. We can think and accept our biological limitations and realities and choose to act against them. We can choose to delay gratification, and we can choose to find solutions that make us happy in the long-term future. We can also choose to use systemic thinking instead of linear thinking when the situation asks for it.

My assessment approach focuses on self-evaluation and metacognition. I ask students to write process letters about their work, and I ask them to reflect frequently on their own progress and learning. The most authentic assessment approaches, in my view, are ones that engage students directly as experts in their own learning.

Cognitive efficiency, a cognitive ability vital for processing information without a feeling of overwhelm, fosters a learner's ability to absorb, recall, and apply knowledge effectively. Rapid learning components that contribute to cognitive efficiency include feedback mechanisms, effective note-taking, spaced repetition, metacognition, homework assignments, active recall, mnemonic devices, immediate practice sessions, and the integration of gamification elements.

Rapid learning strategies often utilize multiple techniques to address complex problems or achieve overarching goals. Applied across diverse contexts, these strategies are designed for long-term success and extended periods. Examples include active learning, spaced repetition, visualization, interleaved practice, and metacognition.

Metacognition, an integral facet of rapid learning, empowers learners to not only absorb information but to thouhtfully reflect on their learning processes. This self-awareness becomes a catalyst for continual improvement and accelerated understanding.

Lessons of the Balance The relentless pursuit of pleasure (and avoidance of pain) leads to pain. Recovery begins with abstinence. Abstinence resets the brain’s reward pathway and with it our capacity to take joy in simpler pleasures. Self-binding creates literal and metacognitive space between desire and consumption, a modern necessity in our dopamine-overloaded world. Medications can restore homeostasis, but consider what we lose by medicating away our pain. Pressing on the pain side resets our balance to the side of pleasure. Beware of getting addicted to pain. Radical honesty promotes awareness, enhances intimacy, and fosters a plenty mindset. Prosocial shame affirms that we belong to the human tribe. Instead of running away from the world, we can find escape by immersing ourselves in it.

Encouraging self-regulated learning through the development of metacognitive skills empowers students to take ownership of their learning journey, fostering independence, responsibility, and a deeper understanding of their own learning processes.