Interview: Make It Stick with Peter Brown

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Peter Brown. Peter is the co author of a great book called Make It Stick, the Science of Successful Learning. Peter is a storyteller and a novelist who partnered with two of the world's leading cognitive scientists who have studied learning and discovered what the true science of successful learning is, which is often counterintuitive to what we think is effective learning. I'm really excited to chat, Peter. I appreciate you taking the time, and I look forward to exploring.

I'm excited to be here, Brian. Thank you.

All right, so let's start at the top. I always like to talk about the name of the book, Make It Stick. What did that mean for you before we jump into some of the details?

Well, make it stick is, I guess, how you want to go about learning something new effectively and efficiently so that you don't have to keep relearning it, encounter the new material or the new skill, and do the things to possess that in a way in which you can bring it up anytime you need it and apply it successfully.

Love it.

And one of the big points throughout the book is that a lot of the things we think work, work. We'll get into the details of some of those, but can you talk to us about that on a high level?

Well, sure. I think when we encounter something new, we're using our five senses, we're listening to things as people are listening to this podcast. We're reading material, we're watching lectures, and we think of learning as coming through that, bringing stuff in, filling the brain. And turns out that really the learning happens when we try to get new information or new skills out of the brain. I can explain that more, but I think that's a fundamental issue that 84% of college students principal study strategy is rereading notes and underlining text and reviewing that material. And that's a largely wasted effort. It turns out there are far more effective ways to lock in that learning and become versatile in applying it later.

That's fantastic. Let's jump right in there. So let's talk about the difference between fluency. What feels good. Right. And true mastery.

Well, right. One of the things that our intuition leads us astray a little bit when we're learning things. When you reread something, you become well versed in the text, fluent with the language and the flow of the argument, and it's easy to mistake that Fluency for mastery of the content. And so often students or any of us at any age will make that mistake and assume that we possess the information that we want and it is an illusion of mastery. It isn't true mastery. When pressed later to explain what the big ideas are, put them in our own words, describe how we could apply them. We come up very short. So that notion of fluency which gives us the illusion of mastery, you see it also in sports. Let's say you're practicing your 20 foot putt over and over and over again. You see improvement, you think you're getting better, but in fact the improvements in a massed practice form like that leans on short term memory and melts away. You haven't really engaged in the kind of practice that leads to long term mastery.

That's great. Well, I want to get to that in a moment with interleaving practice vis a vis the mass practice. But first I want to talk about your. The first, I think it was the first idea you shared to learn retrieve and the power of the testing effect. And you tell a story of cranberries. Can you walk us through that?

Well, as a writer, I was trying to write a book using anecdotes and metaphors that would bring life to the science. And I just was thinking of a child stringing cranberries on a str and going to hang them on the tree. And the cranberries are falling off the other end of the string because the child hasn't known to tie a knot. And this is the way it is with learning. When you encounter something new, it's retrieving that knowledge from memory, explaining it to somebody else, practicing, applying that knowledge that ties the knot, that locks that learning in and strengthens the connections in the mind. So the metaphor of the string of cranberries with no knot on the end is basically trying to visualize this notion of consuming information by reading it and listening to videos and so forth and failing to recite it back in your own words to lock that knowledge in.

That's cool. Can you go a little bit more into the testing effect as you guys describe it in the book?

Right. It turns out, I mean, we've had an assumption, most of us, that learning is something that you do, you study, you read and so forth. And that testing is something you do to like a dipstick, to determine whether you know the material. And some of the early studies tested this question by having some participants read a passage maybe eight times and compare their ability to perform on a test later to someone who'd read it only four times but had been quizzed on it at some point. And it turns out that the students who haven't read it very much but have been quizzed on it perform far better on an exam later than those who have read it many times. That the testing effect, in a sense. Excuse me, the testing effect, in essence says that retrieving learning from memory is far more beneficial for retaining that learning than is the same amount of time spent in review or rereading of that material. It's called the testing effect, but often it's referred to as the retrieval practice effect. Retrieving something from memory. Testing is kind of a touchy subject these days. So if you just think about it as practice at retrieving something from memory, the science shows in just countless studies that that's far more effective for learning than reading and review is.

I love it. Which is what 84%, as you said, of the college students out there are doing primarily. So then for kids, I can see it where, you know, integrate the quizzing and actually shut the book. And let's go through some main points. Right. Even the quizzes at the end of a chapter. Right. Would be such a good guide. It seems pretty straightforward, although often ignored, but easier to implement once we're aware. What about for the kind of normal adults? What can we do to practice the retrieval?

Oh, well, let's suppose you're somebody like me who sits down in the morning and reads a newspaper article and finds it rather compelling and goes out to see friends that evening and wants to discuss them, this article. And I'm easily able to say there was this great article, but I can't remember what it was about the article that really impressed me. Now I understand that after I've read the article and I put it aside, I might turn to my wife or I might just turn to myself and say, well, what was it about that that impressed you? What were the big ideas? And I just practice that once or twice, and then maybe over lunch I'll remind myself to go through that. And then when I go out to dinner, I can have that conversation and really express myself because I can remember what it was.

Yeah, that's great. And you just touched on another idea too, of the. I don't know what you juxtaposed it with, but what kind of cramming vis a vis spaced repetition? Can you talk to us about that right now?

I had said earlier that for me, one of the biggest ideas from the research, if not the biggest idea, is this notion that learning Happens when you work to get knowledge out of the brain as opposed to putting it in. I just want to very quickly explain why that is. We've come to understand better recently how new knowledge is encoded in the brain and consolidated into long term memory. And in fact, it takes hours or even days for new learning to get transferred from the hippocampus, part of the brain where memories are formed, into the parts of the brain that store long term learning. And in that process of consolidation, the new material is malleable, it's plastic. And the brain is trying to make sense of it, figure out how it relates to what we already know, fill in gaps, and over time, overnight, that consolidation happens. Well, when you are practicing something over and over again in a massed form, you are not giving your mind time to consolidate the gains in long term memory. So you will perhaps see improvements in your performance from that kind of practice. But you haven't really captured them. They melt away rather quickly. So that's the notion of practicing, of spacing out your practice so that you retrieve something today. You then leave it alone for a while. And when it's kind of rusty and it's hard to retrieve from memory, that's the time to retrieve it from memory. Because that effort of retrieving it makes it malleable again. And it makes the main ideas even more salient. It strengthens the connections between those ideas and the other things you already know. So that kind of spaced or difficult recalling of something is a very powerful learning strategy. Also practicing two or more things in an interleaved or mixed fashion. So you're switching between, for example, practicing finding the volume of sphere in your math class, you practice that. Then you switch at random to two or three other kinds of solid geometric shapes, a wedge or a cone or whatever. Each time you come back to the sphere, you have to recall what is the correct formula and how do I apply it. And that kind of mixed practice is, makes for much stronger learning. But in the process of doing that practice, you stumble some and you don't really feel that you're getting it. And that again is an illusion. You don't really perceive the benefits that come from that kind of extra effort.

Yeah, that's fantastic. And just as you described that just looking into my own process of distilling different books and the beauty and power of having to come back to it, you know, and creating that spaced repetition a little more than I'm doing right now. As you say, think about the long view. And our feelings aren't always necessarily the Best indicators of whether we're actually learning or not. Disfluency again and again and again. On that note, talk to us about interleaving, which is similar what you just said with the math equations and concepts. But tell us about the study about curveballs. I thought that was just fascinating.

This is a great study that was done with the Cal Poly baseball team in San Luis Obispo. They were good players, but they wanted to bring up their batting. And so they agreed to be a part of a study where half the team would practice curveballs and fastballs and change ups in a sequence fashion. So they do 40. They practice hitting 45 pitches, they'd do 15 curveballs, then they'd practice 15 change ups and then they'd practice 15 fastballs. So they could really focus on nailing each of those pitches, if you will. And they did that over a number of weeks. I don't remember how many weeks it was in the study. The other half of the team also swung at 45 pitches and they were the same three different types of pitches. But they never knew which pitch was going to be next, whether it was going to be the change up the curve ball or the fastball. During practice, they didn't do nearly as well as those players who knew that the next pitch was change up or whatever it was. But later when they're tested on the field, those whose practice had been interleaved, if you will, or done in a random sequence, performed much better. They got better at identifying what kind of a pitch was coming their way in the microsecond that you have and then making the swing to connect with that pitch. So it doesn't matter if you're talking about a motor skill or you're talking about semantic knowledge like identifying bird species or identifying the works of different impressionist artists, you learn them better when the exemplars are mixed up. You get better at identifying the unifying characteristics of a particular bird species or a particular painter's works and the differentiating characteristics. But you don't have feel like you're learning it better when it's mixed up because you work at it harder and it feels messy, which it is. But in fact, as we have seen through study after study, the learning is much stronger. So it's counterintuitive. But yet again, it's this idea that mental effort builds mental ability. And that's a very important idea, that notion of takes mental effort to build these connections in the brain and build the mental models that becomes second nature to us over time through use I love it.

Can you give us another example of kind of non academic example or athletic for that matter, of applying it?

Well, this notion of mixing things up. Well, I think of kids I see on stunt bikes going down a strange landscape and practicing all the stunts that they know on a stunt bike. And because the, the landscapes that they pick are mixed and the challenges come at them in a disorderly form, the skill level and their ability to switch between techniques rapidly becomes very impressive, I have to say, just watching that. But I'd have to think a little bit for some reason to come up with other examples, but they're all around us. It happens in the kitchen as you get used to the different kinds of kitchenware that you've got. And when do you want to use a glass pan, when do you want to cook in cast iron, how the ingredients work and intermix. That happens over time through experience. And we accept the kind of the disorderly method there. We don't really think about it having to be orderly. But it is a nature of life. Life is disorderly. And the way we learn so much, most of what we know in life happens through this kind of episodic, disorganized encounter with challenges that we have. Call what we know about this thing and bring it up and apply it. And the more diverse that is, the stronger we become at, the more confident we are because the skill gets better connected to all different facets of what we know. In bringing it up, identifying that problem, bringing up the solution and then applying it. I'm sorry it's so abstract, but I mean it's. If we think about the things that we know and can do and how we learn them, we see that it's all around us in nature. It's the nature of being human.

Yep. And then again it comes back to the same thing theme, deliberately repeating it, but just that disfluency. Making things harder is actually the best way to improve our performance.

Right. So one of the big ideas that I've said is getting it out of the brain instead of trying to putting it in is how you learn the other for me, the big idea is that there are some kinds of difficulties that make learning stronger. We want to make learning easy for ourselves, but in fact spacing out, retrieval practice so it's a little harder, more challenging, mixing up the problem types so that you don't know which kind is coming next. Those are so called desirable difficulties because overcoming those difficulties makes the learning that much stronger. Another example is something that scientists call generation. Generation is in their term Asking a student to solve a problem before she or he is taught the solution. Struggling with a problem, asking yourself, is it like this? Is it like that? Giving it a shot, getting it wrong, and then being shown the solution and practicing that solution makes the learning stick much stronger. It's a desirable difficulty to wrestle with it before you are taught how to do it and then to practice the correct way of doing it.

I love that phrase desirable difficulty. And I actually referenced Malcolm Gladwell's work on that and some of the research there, too. Fascinating stuff. And then you've already talked about another one of my favorite big ideas, the elaboration concept. And it's funny because when you use the example of the newspaper article or whatever article that you found interesting and how to retrieve that and space it in preparation for your discussion, then the elaboration itself, as you described it to your friends or your wife before, is in itself a way to make it stick. Right?

That's exactly right. You're doing it then. I'm reminded of a medical student named Michael Young who had gotten himself into Georgia Regents Medical School. After a hiatus, he graduated from college with a master's degree in clinical psychology and then decided he really wished he'd gone to medical school and got into medical school. He was a very hard working, persistent guy, but when he got his first midterms back, they weren't where they needed to be. And I talked with him, he said, I didn't want just anybody's opinion of what worked for studying. I wanted to know if there was any empirical literature. And he found my brother in law, Roddy Roediger, who's one of my two co authors in this book. They are the science behind much of what we wrote about, not all of it, for sure. And so Michael Young started doing retrieval practice on these big, huge stacks of slides he would get from his medical school classes. And he would only make it down about a third of the way through a slide before he had to cover it back up and retrieve that part from memory. But then he would elaborate on it. He would ask himself, where in the body is this? And how does this relate to what I know? And then he'd go on through. He brought himself up from the bottom of his class to the top of his class. By the end of his first year, he stayed there through medical school. His professors had him tutoring other students in how to apply this kind of retrieval and elaboration as a learning strategy to get on top of this huge volume of learning that a person needs to accomplish. In medical school.

That's really inspiring. I just had the, you know, the idea is pretty obvious with this podcast and all the other work that I do and anyone reading your book. It's, close it and think about what's the most important thing you've learned so far or the thing that you found most interesting. How would you describe that to yourself? Describe it to somebody else. And then even as a, my son is only three and a half years old, so he's not in this phase, but just imagining the parent deliberately asking their kid, okay, explain it to me, you know, like, I'm five years old. Explain this to me so I understand.

It and that I think it's great. And even if the child doesn't have a good explanation, struggling with that and then teaching the child what the correct answer is is a very effective way of making that learning stick. I'm reminded of a professor of biology at the Washington University. I'm sorry, the University of Washington in Seattle, Dr. Mary Pat Wenderoth. She followed the Science of learning, and I went out and talked with her as part of writing this book. She'll be lecturing to her class, and she'll pause after five minutes and she'll ask a question on the topic, and the students will turn to their notes. And Dr. Wenderoth says, Put your notes aside and imagine that your mind is a forest and the answer is in there somewhere. The more times you make a path to find it, the stronger that path will be. That's the kind of simple metaphor that really brings alive this notion of going into your mind and finding the answer and bringing it forth.

I love it. This is good. Well, the last idea I had, and I want to hear your thoughts on what we haven't discussed. In some of your favorite stuff.

You.

Use the kind of the phrase, whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right a number of times throughout the book. And you say, there's a lot of wisdom in that wit. Can you talk to us about that?

Well, this comes to us from work by Dr. Carol Dweck, a psychologist who became curious about why some people become helpless. And Dr. Dweck has come to understand that many people, many of us, have what she calls a fixed mindset. We believe that our abilities are fixed at birth by the gift of our genes. The fact is, science is showing us a couple of things. One, we've learned only recently that the brain continues to generate new neurons through most of our life. And two, we're beginning to understand how practice and effort, mental effort, makes new connections in the brain. The axons reach out between neurons, and that practice makes those neurons more powerful by wrapping them in myelination and so forth. The notion is that we have far more ability to affect our intellectual capabilities than we ever thought or realized. And this is a growth mindset, as Dr. Dweck frames it. And that is our limitations are not set strictly by our genes. That if we pursue tough challenges and persist at them, and when we don't get the results we want, we either try harder or pick a different route and continue forward, that we are building that kind of mental ability. We're building the connections, and we're building the mental models that increase our intellectual capabilities. So the notion there is that mental effort builds mental ability. And she has shown through a variety of very powerful studies that when students understand that they have some power over their mental abilities through this kind of persistence, those students will pursue tougher challenges and persist at them longer and in the end, achieve much more. She makes an important point. We need to praise. Praise not for achievement, but for effort. When we praise for achievement, the incentive is to pick the challenge we know we're going to master. When we praise for effort, that's like fuel. That just helps us go forward. And so that's the notion, really. If you think you can, you probably can. If you think you can't, it's pretty sure you can't.

So powerful. I love Carol's research, and I love the way you reflected on it. And she has a story of really embracing challenges, right? And just getting. Getting good at loving challenges rather than going for the easy thing.

Right?

So she says, you know, if you have kids, rub your hands together and say, this is challenging.

Great.

Yeah, I've been doing that now. And the other day a plumber came over and was. Was helping out with something, and he was working underneath. And our son loves to ask questions. And he's. He came. The plumber came out and he said, your son asked me. He asked me the most interesting thing. He said, was it. I can't remember the word. Was it difficult? Then he comes out and says, was it challenging?

Good for him. He's getting it. That's good.

Really good. You know, just leaning into it. It's such a. For me, as a kind of continued recovering perfectionist, it's still really the fixed mindset, you know, and that's not a fixed process. Right. Just continuing to show up and to open into that possibility that it's been fun for me to very deliberately, explicitly reframe the whole process.

It keeps us young, Brian. It keeps us young.

Yeah. This is great. Well, I love your energy. Is there anything that we didn't talk. We talked about. We simultaneously covered a lot in a short period of time and barely scratched the surface of the book.

Yeah, I think that three, for me, the three big ideas just by conclusion, are that learning happens when you work at getting it out, not trying to get it in. The second is that there are some kinds of difficulties that make it stronger and deeper and longer lasting. And the third is that mental effort builds mental abilities. That a growth mindset is a highly motivating way of looking at problems at any age. And that combination becomes very powerful.

This is wonderful, Peter. Thank you so much. I highly recommend the book Make It Stick. It's hard to imagine someone who this book would not be perfect for. If you have kids, obviously this, this is incredibly, obviously important to help them engage in their learning. You'll get a ton out of it. Then, just for all of us passionate about optimizing our lives and actualizing our potential, it's just a great resource. So find it wherever you get books. And Peter, thank you so much, Brian.

Thank you.

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