Heroic Interview: Learning How to Learn with Barbara Oakley

You're listening to Learning how to Learn, an Optimal Living interview with Barbara Oakley and Bryan Johnson. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today, I'm thrilled to be chatting with Barbara Oakley. I met Barbara when I was first introduced to her book, A Mind for how to Excel at Math and Science, Even if you flunked algebra, which is really a book about how to learn, which is the class that she taught at Coursera, continues to teach at Coursera, which has just blown me away. Over a million students have taken this class, Learning how to Learn. I highly recommend both the book and the class. I haven't taken the class yet, but I can only imagine it's as good as the book. And Barbara, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat today, and I'm excited to explore some of my favorite ideas.

Well, it's such a pleasure to be here, Brian. And so I'm excited to speak about some of these ideas. Could people find them so helpful?

Yes. Over a million of them and counting.

That's right.

So good. Well, let's start with the two modes of learning. It's an idea that you come back to many times in the book, and I love the way you describe it. So can you walk us through the focused versus diffused modes of learning and why it's important for us to understand the two?

Well, first, I'll take a step back a little bit. See, I was a miserable failure at math and science. I kind of flunked my way through elementary and middle and high school math and science. So it's kind of bizarre that I'm a professor of engineering now. But when I got out of the service, I was in the Army. I enlisted right out of high school, and I studied language. I ended up working as a Russian translator up on Soviet trawlers on the Bering Sea. But what I found was the that, number one, it was difficult to get a job as a Russian linguist. And number two, that there were a lot of great jobs, you know, just related to having a good background in science, technology, engineering, or math. So one of the things I struggled with was I decided I would try to retrain my brain. I was age 26, and I was going to try and learn math and science. And it seemed like an absolutely ridiculous proposition. And I remember sitting there with my textbooks and I'd look at them and I'd start working on a problem and I'd get so frustrated that I'd, like, take a fork and I'd stab the page of the book. I was Just like, I can't do this. And what I really didn't understand at that time, but I now understand, I wish I'd known it back then was that your brain has two kind of fundamentally different modes of operation. Two really different ways of perceiving the world. One is the focus mode, and the other is like this sort of more laid back, what I call the diffuse mode. And it's actually a whole series of at least a couple dozen neural resting states that we know of now nowadays. But what happens is when you're learning something new and something difficult, you actually need to tog and forth between these two different ways of perceiving the world. That first mode is like when you focus your attention, boom, it's on, right? And you're focusing and you're stepping sequentially through a problem, and then you get stuck. And the reason you get stuck is often that you're sort of using an inappropriate approach, but you can't back away enough to realize that it's inappropriate. So you just kind of keep pounding at it. And you're pounding, usually incorrectly. And that's why you get frustrated. And so the best thing to do to kind of release this other mode is to go, well, for one thing, you can turn your attention to something completely different, or you can go for a walk, you can take a shower, you can go ride in a car, you can go for a run, all sorts of things where you're not particularly focusing on anything special. That is what allows your brain to get into this very neural or very different set of neural operation. It's almost like all these different webs come available in this diffuse mode of thinking. And that can allow you to look at a problem in a new way. And often that's how you come to the solution.

So it's the toggling between those two that we want to practice and master, right?

And so that means that if you come up to a problem or you're trying to learn a new concept and you get frustrated and you can't figure it right out, welcome to the human race. It's very typical. And all that means is you've got to switch your attention off it. That the key. You gotta, you want to pursue it. It's like, I can't let go. If I let go, I'm giving up. But you have to get your attention off it in order to allow these other kinds of neural modes to take over and work in the background while you think you're not paying attention.

And how long do you recommend those breaks to Be.

Oh, it depends. It all depends on you and what you're studying, what you're doing. For me, if I'm studying one thing or when I used to be studying one thing, if I got stuck and I really got stuck, I might have to go to sleep in order to really get my attention off it. Or I might take an hour or two to work on something completely different. It depends on how stuck I am. Or I might go out for a walk. It's really important also to get good exercise when you're trying to learn and improve your ability to learn. And remember, exercise is actually fantastic at helping your learning abilities. And we all too often, because it's not emphasized in the educational systems, we sort of forget that that also plays a role in our ability to learn.

Well, that's amazing. Let's just go into that. I'd love to hear more there. I'm a big fan of John Ratey and his work in Spark where he talks about some of the science around enhancing creativity. Can you talk to us more about what's going on, why exercise is so important? What type of exercise you recommend?

Well, it's funny, I work with, in fact, my co instructor in the massive open online course, the mooc, Learning how to Learn is Terence Sinowski. He's the Francis Crick professor at the Salk Institute. He, along with others at the Salk Institute, did some of the original studies where they were looking at mice and mice's ability or a mouse's ability to learn and remember new patterns. And what they found was that when a mouse, there's sort of two ways. Well, I'll back up a second here. We used to think that you had all the neurons that you were going to have when you were born. And gradually you just sort of, as you aged, your neurons would begin to die off and you get dumber and then you die. And that's a pretty negative way of looking at life. And fortunately it was completely wrong. And now we realize that new neurons are being born in the, the hippocampus every day. And these new neurons that are being born are actually the ones that are often helping you to learn and remember better. There's two ways you can allow those new neurons. They're like little sprouts and they're trying to flourish. And there's two ways you can allow them to flourish. And one of them is to be exposed to new environments that like, you know, you've got to be aware because who knows what could be going on in those new environments. And even if they're exciting and enriching. That helps those new neurons to survive and thrive. But the other way that they survive and thrive is simply if you have a good exercise program. So, for example, in these early studies, what Terence Nowski found and his colleagues was that mice who were allowed to exercise their new neurons survived and thrived and helped them to learn and remember a lot better. So it's pretty much the same for us. There's lots of research going on, there's little by way of definitive answers. But a reasonable exercise program, even if you just go out and walk every day or you have a running regimen or you lift weights or something that kind of keeps you fit, there's usually proponents in research for that particular approach. And in any case, most approaches to good exercise programs are going to be beneficial for your learning and memory purposes.

That's amazing. So on a macro level, find a program that really works with us. And then what about even before you want to learn a subject or perform in a certain way? Do you recommend kind of getting the system going with a little exercise?

Within a couple of days of starting an exercise program, you will notice, and it's been noticed, that there are really quite marked improvements in people's ability to learn and remember. So I'd say if you're planning to learn it or to learn something new, just start it right out with an exercise. You'll do better.

That's great. Yeah. I notice even if I take a day or two off, which now I just move consistently on a daily basis, but in the past, on that second and third day, I would feel a different tempo cognitively and it's just been fascinating. So it's a huge part of my work is to encourage exercise. And I love your perspective on that. Let's come back. We talked about the two modes, focused versus diffused. I love another distinction you make in pairs. The working memory vis a vis long term memory and the metaphor you used of the jugglers versus storage. Can you talk to us about that a little bit?

Well, working memory is like the material that you can hold temporarily in your mind. So let's say that I tell you give you a sequence of five or six memory numbers. That's working memory as you're holding that sequence of numbers in your mind and you probably haven't transferred it into your long term memory unless you repeat it a lot of times or come up with some way handy mnemonic to help you remember that. But at any rate, we used to think that you had seven slots in your working Memory, so to speak. In other words, you could hold. Easily holds like seven numbers, something like that. But now we're beginning to understand it's more like maybe four slots in working memory. Now, there's good news for people who have rotten working memories. If you're one of those people, you're introduced to somebody and zip, their name just goes right by you, right? Or you're thinking about something and then it's like, oh, that was something shiny, and you're distracted. There goes a squirrel. It turns out that if you're one of those kind of people, you don't have a steel trap mind. You can't keep things in mind very easily. That in all likelihood means that you're more creative. Because if you are able to hold those things in your working memory, like a steel trap, that means that there's no extra room for anything else to, like, squeeze in there. But if things are always falling out of your working memory, the interesting thing is other things slip in there instead. You can't help it. And that's the provenance. That's where your more creative part of you comes from. So I really like that people often that some of their worst traits or their. What they think of are their worst traits. They're actually, if you really understand what's going on, they're some of their best traits. So do you have to work longer and harder to put something in your memory? Yeah, you do. But the trade off is well worth it. That means you're very much more creative. There's another thing that people often feel that sometimes people will. They'll be intimidated by another person who thinks a lot faster than they do. So, for example, in meetings, there may be the one. There's the one guy or gal who instantly grasps everything, and then they leap right ahead with these new conclusions. And you're sitting there going, gosh, I just barely understood what they were talking about. And it can be really demoralizing sometimes to see these sort of speedy thinkers. But here's the good news. It's kind of like the difference between a race car driver and a hiker. They both have completely different experiences over the same terrain, right? A race car driver, whoomp. They go by really fast, and they get there very quickly. But a hiker, they can reach out, they can touch the pine needles, they can smell the beautiful air, they can see the rabbit trails. They see things in a completely different way than the rapid thinker. And more than that, they aren't as likely to jump to conclusions. And that's a Big problem with people who think really fast. They just jump to conclusions and they move right on. And some of the. One of my heroes in science is Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who won the Nobel Prize for his work. He's known as the father of modern neuroscience. And what Ramoni Cajal said was, hey, look, I was not brilliant. I was just really persistent. But I worked with really brilliant people. And what I found was basically he could outclass them because he was flexible and he didn't jump to conclusions.

I love that. And I just love your emphasis on us discovering just our individuality, what makes us who we are and seeing the strength and what we might perceive as weaknesses. And I want to share that quote from Cajal rather. I love it. I actually captured it. The deficiencies. Cajal said deficiencies of innate ability may be compensated for through persistent hard work and concentration. One might say that work substitutes for talent, or better yet, that it creates talent. Just his demonstration of that is, as you share in your book, just so inspiring.

Yes, there's hope for all of us, even if we're just ordinary thinkers.

Oh, it's so good. And we always have the choice to develop our dedication and persistence and tenacity and all that good stuff. Let's talk about one of the things that gets in the way of that. And you do such a great job of walking through it in A Mind for Numbers, procrastination. And there are so many ways we can approach it, but let's just start generally. And then I have one thing in particular I want to make sure we talk about. But can you talk to us about procrastination and how it's. I think you described it as the number one keystone bad habit that we want to address, why we need to pay attention to it, and maybe some ideas on how we can do so well.

Everybody procrastinates. I mean, if you're working on one thing, that always means you're not working on dozens of other things. So. But some people have more issue with procrastination than others. And actually most people have at least some problems with procrastination. And here's what people often don't understand about procrastination. When you think about something you really would rather not do, it activates a portion of the brain, the fusiform gyrus related areas that is affiliated with experiencing pain. So you think about opening a math textbook or something like that, and then boom, it hurts. It actually feels like, ow. So what do you do? There's like two ways to solve that Number one is if you crack that book open anyway and you just keep right on working, after about 20 minutes, the pain will disappear. But the other way is you just switch your attention to something else and boom, that pain just goes away instantly. So you do that once or twice. It's no big deal, but you do it very often, and that is procrastination. So the best way is. The Italian Francesco Cillo came up with this wonderful technique in the 1980s. It was called the pomodoro technique. And all you really need to do is take a timer, any timer it will do, set it for 25 minutes, turn off all distractions, because your mind will say, I just want to see if I get that one little phone call. Or I want to take a peek at the Internet and see if something's going on. But no, you have to. No distractions, because the whole purpose of. Of this is to build your attention and just keep it there for 25 minutes. Now, if you have trouble with that to start with, you can always set it for a little shorter time. But the whole idea is you want to keep it going. As long as you set that timer, you keep your attention going. If you're distracted by something, for example, a thought that says, I can't focus for 25 more minutes, you just let it go right by and you keep right on working. And when you're done, alarm goes off. And what do you do? You relax a little bit for about what, five, ten minutes or whatever. You know, it may be that you only have that to do, so you don't need to do another pomodoro. But. But relaxing is getting that diffuse mode activity where you're just do whatever you want, be a little mindless, and the learning or whatever you're doing will actually continue to take place while you're not thinking about it, while you're relaxing a little bit. So. And that's actually an important part of continuing to learn. So the pomodoro technique is incredibly effective for learners, but it's also effective for any kind of productivity needs.

So good. And you just hit on exactly what I was hoping we would talk about. The procrastination and that the pain is in the anticipation. And I just love the research you cited in the book about how that pain goes away once you engage in the activity. It's just fascinating. And what a cool distinction. And really important, too, to step all the way back. We all procrastinate. I find that so empowering. And we had a chat. I chatted with Piers Steele last week about his work on procrastination. And the fact that we all procrastinate, I think reduces some of the stress we feel when we do. But then just building the discipline. And I loved your pomodoro technique. Throw a tomato at it is a joke we use on our team. And then one of the other fun phrases you use is you call that tendency that we all have to kind of do the fun shiny thing for first zombies that are kind of coming to the party, right. And wrangling those zombies and doing the work and then rewarding ourselves. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Sure. But I also have to go back and say you called it procrastipane, and I just thought that was such a great phrase, sort of, that you procrastinate because it's painful to think about. And that captured it so beautifully. But zombies, I refer to zombies as sort of habits. So when your mind gets into this zombie mode, right? I mean, let's say you're in a car and you go to back up. If you're backing up a car, it's just not a big deal. Once you've learned how to back up, you kind of put yourself in zombies mode and it just says back up. And then you turn and you talk to people as you're backing up. But the first time you ever backed up your car, it was hard. If you were looking all around, you were definitely not in zombie mode when you were doing it. So zombie mode is something you kind of want to take advantage of when you can, in that you. You want to try to avoid overusing willpower when you're trying to not procrastinate, right? And so what you want to do is kind of get into this idea of, oh, I'm going to do a pomodoro. And I'm just used to this habit of I turn on the timer and I work through it and then I reward myself and it becomes a habit. And then that can just. Once you create habits that you can sort of surf off of, it really reduces your need to use willpower to kind of gut through and do difficult things. And it allows you to slide through using habit more often. And that actually can leave you feeling more refreshing, refreshed.

So good. And the distinction that you talk about that I love in the habits research is willpower is finite. Use it wisely to create habits that then run on autopilot that don't require further willpower, such that you can then use the willpower to build even more Habits that help. Right? That kind of cascading spiraling up of goodness.

Right, exactly right. I think the big thing that I avoided earlier, early in my life was I always had this fear, which I don't know whether it was well founded. Probably for me at the time it was that if I became the perfect person in that I was highly productive at every step in my life, that I would just turn into this sort of robot who was always on and always working 24 hours a day. And now what I've come to discover is I try to be really productive when I am working. And it's not like I'm 100% productive every day, but I try to cut it off and make sure that there's only certain times in my day where I have to be where I want to be productive. And there's some days where I'm not productive it all and that's okay. And somehow I've not become the zombie or the robot that I feared. Instead, I've got more freedom.

I love that. And it brings us back to your two modes of really embracing the need to oscillate and be on and then deliberately train the recovery time as well. And that diffuse time I've experienced the same thing where just the sense of needing to be on and then that I never really had the fear of being a robot. I was actually kind of a cool excited about that. But now it's the embrace of wow. That structure creates the freedom for us to really be present when we're on and to really be present when we're relaxing. I love your distinction on that. I also love the way you describe process versus product. Can you talk to us about what to do vis a vis a results focus? We talk about my work product, process versus product a lot. And I love the way that you bring it home and I'm excited to hear you share your ideas on it.

Well, there's an individual by the name of Robert Boyce who he did a lot of research on highly productive faculty and what distinguished highly productive professors from not highly productive professors. And part of what he figured out through his years of research was there was a difference between how some people, the productive people, viewed their work as more of a process. So if we equate that in pomodoro terms, the pomodoro says, I'm just going to get into the flow for 25 minutes. I'm going to get into the process. I do not have to complete a task. I'm not going to do all these homework problems. I'M not going to finish this big report for my boss. I am just going to work as intently as I can for 25 minutes. That's a process orientation. If you get away from the product orientation, which is, I've got to finish this report, then it's. It makes it a lot easier somehow. Just getting into the process instead of the product helps you get into that flow and then it becomes much more fun.

That's amazing. Another great way to reduce the procrastination. Right. We don't need to get some product done. You just need to get the work put in right in that pomodoro or whatever the measure is. Process versus product. That's really, really cool distinction.

Yes. And what that does is it helps you to relax into it because you're no longer thinking about that painful thing, which is the task itself. I mean, you're just on the task and so it's tricking your brain, which is a fun thing.

Yeah, that's great. And whether you do it right in quotes or perfectly and all the other things that can come up when we're just exclusively focused on the product, it's like, look, let me just show up and celebrate the fact that I put in another X minutes of effort. And then the compound effect of that over time is obviously extraordinary. Another great idea that you talk about, and this is in the context of test taking in a mind for numbers, but of course it applies to every stressful event we experience in our lives, is how to deal with stress and the fact that the biological underpinnings are influenced by how we perceive them. Can you describe that for us?

Well, there's a lot going on there, and part of that deals with context with which we view the world. And that goes back into that wonderful cognitive behavioral therapy approach of how do you label things? How do you think about things? If you. If you put a label on yourself and say, oh, I was so stupid, that actually activates neurobiological pathways that sort of resonate and they're not really very healthy for you. And there's so many ways you can view things in a context that's counterproductive and actually harmful and causes you to experience and feel stress. So there's many things that you can do to handle. This one is Dr. David Burns fantastic book, the Feeling Good Therapy. And he is. It's just a marvelous approach to getting a better handle on your own negative thoughts about yourself, but also doing little things like trying to reframe your thoughts. If you're trying to do something that's very difficult. For example, you want to work towards some degree program or something of this nature. One thing to do is to reframe that in the context of. Of where you've been that has been rather negative and keep sort of have a picture in mind of what you want to be. So the perfect person for this was an old student of mine. He'd worked in a chicken farm for a number of summer. Number of months in the summer in Maryland. And it was. Was really hot and it was one of those terrible places where they have hundreds of thousands of chickens and it's just sweltering and the chickens are not very happy. And it was really one of the most unpleasant experiences of his life working there. And now when he was going through to become an engineer, whenever things got tough, he would recollect that experience in the chicken farm and say, I never want to go back there. And that was his motivator. So he'd reframe and say, look, I'm going to go into a better world than that one. And I think those of us who have come from difficult backgrounds and difficult circumstances, perhaps students who have come from. Escaped from difficult countries where the situation is very hard for them, and they come here, they actually have a valuable trait or a valuable characteristic that they can draw on. That is, they can say, I know what it is like to have things very difficult and I want to make things better. And they can reform frame. And so the more whatever your experiences are, even if it's, I was really, really sick that time, and I don't ever want to be sick. Like, you know, I'm feeling a lot better now. So no matter how bad it is right now, it's better than when I was really sick. It can help reframe and kind of motivate you through those tough times that we all go through.

I love it. And so much power in the reframe kind of in general. And then when we're facing certain experiences, and then you also talk about even saying to yourself, I'm excited. Right. And that this stress that I'm feeling right now is actually helping me. Right. It's not a sign that something's wrong with me. It's actually really helping me perform at my best. Right.

Oh, that is super helpful. I can't tell you how often I do that. When I about to go on stage or something, I'll be like, oh, I'm feeling excited, not nervous. No, but it does work.

Oh, yeah. When I first encountered that in Kelly McGonagall's upside of stress. And I love the way you described it in A Mind for Numbers as well. But just the difference between. Because I, you know, sensitive guy, and I'd feel those nerves. And I always thought something was wrong with me and to be able to. And I learned this before I read the. The context in Kelly's work. But to see the research on the significant change in performance, let alone the enjoyment of the experience, by simply saying, wow, this isn't a sign that things may go wrong. This is a sign that I care. And let me say to myself, I'm excited. And then we know scientifically that that's going to do everything I want. Right. To boost my performance in that moment.

That's exactly right. I love that work. I think the Upside of Stress is a great book and it's a big thing for us is. Or that I have found is when I'm really stressed out. And for example, public speaking always used to be my real problem. But if I controlled my breathing, that made an enormous difference. And the whole key is to breathe out from the lower part of your chest, not the upper part. But if you can put your hands on your stomach and kind of feel them go up and down as you're breathing, or in and out as you're breathing, that can calm nerves faster than virtually anything. And it all gets down into the autonomic reflexes and so forth. But it works. It's really helpful.

And do you have a particular breathing pattern that you practice or recommend in terms of a count or anything like that?

No, I don't do that. I just put my hand or I just become very aware of breathing way down low into my chest and slowly and low. And see, if you breathe in the upper part of your chest, you're not drawing it all the way down in. And what happens for me at any case, and I think it happens for a fair bit of people, when you get nervous, you're breathing in a very shallow fashion. You're not actually taking well, you're taking in air, but you're often not, like, letting it out. And so you're not getting enough air because of that. And not getting enough air starts making you feel more frantic and your voice goes up and you get really scary sounding. But if you start breathing from deep down and do it before, as you start to feel those nerves coming on, it's 30 seconds to show time. All of a sudden you're like, oh, my word. When you do this, where you're paying attention to your breathing, it's like magic. And it can make you so you can go on and you're not just shaking all over the place or anything like that. And it's a great technique.

It's amazing. And then to say to ourselves, that reframe of I'm excited, I don't need to calm down per se. I just need to get my physiology in the controlled state and then channel that into that excitement to go out and do something that we care so much about. Right.

That's exactly. Well, it does make me laugh because I was such a terrified public speaker. And here I am with an audience of Terry Sinowski and I have what, a million, well over a million students now. And just when I first began getting in front of the camera, it was so funny because I'm just down in the basement, my husband's filming me and I'm thinking, who's gonna see this? And I was like a deer in the headlights. And. And then I'd flub words and stuff and then I'd get my diva moments. Oh, I just can't do this. My husband's like, you know, get your butt back in here. Yeah, of course you can do it. Yeah. But now it's funny because I'm so used to it that it's really not nearly like it was originally. But people can sure do way more than they think they can. And I'm living proof.

Yeah, I just love your humble and grounded and soft spoken wisdom. I want to ask one more question if we can, and then wrap up with a final question. But as you talk about your teaching and your harnessing the stress energy in a positive way with the huge impact you have now, you talk about how teaching is actually one of the best ways to learn. Can you briefly reflect on that?

It's just darn true. Sometimes people think, well, I really need to understand it in order to teach it. But actually, you just don't know a lot of college professors because the first time you teach anything, that's when you begin to realize you didn't really understand it. But often just that process of trying to explain to other people's other people what you're trying to understand is the first time you begin to truly grapple with the material and understand it well yourself. And that's why when you're studying with friends and you try and explain back and forth what's really going on, that is incredibly helpful because you're sort of chunking the material, you're synthesizing it into an easily digestible way of understanding it that you can actually even convey to someone else. And that is the key to good learning.

So good. And you share this story of Charles Darwin and how he, when he was trying to articulate his ideas, would imagine someone coming in who knew nothing about it and could he articulate it in a meaningful way? Then you use the fun phrase from Reddit of explain like I'm five. And I think for people listening today, there's both the general learning, then there's also using this wisdom that we're talking about now in a practical sense in our general everyday lives and sharing that. It's one of the things my wife and I do a lot is just explaining the ideas. And I know we're going to talk about the ideas you and I just explored. And that is such a beautiful way to deepen our understanding. And I love the way you capture that. So thanks for sharing. On that note, and then I like to conclude these chats with the question of if you could only teach or share one piece of wisdom and it could be about learning or it could just be generally, what would that one piece of wisdom be for people who are passionate about optimizing their lives?

If you want to understand something really difficult that you're reading in a paper, in a book, on a page, on a website, the best way to grasp it is to read it through and then look away and see what major points you can read recall. That's the key. Don't sit and highlight, don't reread it a bunch of times, don't, don't sit and do concept mapping like teachers will sometimes tell you to do. Just look at it carefully and then see what you can recall and that will build your understanding far better than any other technique.

So good. I've been practicing that a lot since reading your book and it's, it's incredibly helpful and challenging, which is the point, right?

Yes.

You get that workout for the brain. We covered so much. I appreciate you again taking the time and I just really appreciate your, your humility and your, as I said, your soft spoken wisdom. It's, it's really inspiring for me. So thank you for who you are and all you do and I'm thrilled that we're connected.

Well, thank you, Grant. It's been a pleasure.

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