17 Dec 2025 · 6 min
Brian Johnson explains the fluency illusion, where reviewing highlights feels like learning but creates false confidence. Real mastery comes from desirable difficulties: self-testing, teaching others, and mixed practice. These strategies strengthen memory and improve test performance.
Hey, this is Brian with a quick note before we jump into today's show. If you haven't signed up for the Optymyze premium membership yet, A, what are you waiting for? And B, you can now get the first 30 days of optimizing for free. Just cruise on over to Optimize me and sign up. Over 10,000 people now start their days with Optymyze so they can actualize their potential, including best selling authors, leading entrepreneurs and even NCAA championship teams. Two of them. So again, 30 days of free optimizing at Optimize Me. If you're already a member, thanks for your support. Now for the show, You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another micro class. This one's on learning enemy number one. It's inspired by how we learn. Benedict Carey. Awesome look at the surprising science of how we learn best. Learning enemy number one is called the fluency illusion. The fluency illusion is what cognitive scientists who study learning describe it as. This is the basic idea. Let's just say that you've got your test coming up, right? And you got your book and you got all these highlights that you made in the book. And then you've got your notes over here, right? Boom, boom, boom. And you're reviewing that. That's how most people study. You're just reviewing your highlights, you're reviewing your notes and you feel a sense of fluency. You feel a sense of connection. You feel like you got it, right. You're reviewing this like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's easy, no problem. Got it. Then the test comes and you didn't get it as well as you wanted to, right? Benedict says this is the number one reason why people struggle on tests. It's not anxiety, it's not whatever else you attribute it to. It's this. The fluency illusion. What we need to do is introduce what researchers call desirable difficulties. We need to make it harder. So the idea in this scenario would be take your books and take your notes, close the book, get rid of the notes and then test yourself. They go through a bunch of different ways you can add desirable difficulties. Let's talk about testing yourself. You close your book, you get rid of your notes and you ask yourself, what's the most important thing from that chapter? Can you write it down? Can you reflect on it? Oh man, that feels disfluent. You pop the bubble of this fluency illusion, all of a sudden it's hard. And that difficulty is really, really good for you as you. The technical way that they describe testing is active retrieval. As you actively attempt to retrieve information from your brain, you somewhat surprisingly, strengthen the actual memory trace. As you're trying to pull it out, you actually make it stronger. It's really, really cool. And you know what? You don't know you're not just scanning this. Oh yeah, I got it. No, you didn't get it. You couldn't remember it. You couldn't articulate it. Test yourself Huge way to add desirable difficulty Another way to do it is to teach other people, right? That's a good way to test your fluency illusion. If you really know this stuff so well, go explain it to someone like they're five years old, is how Barbara Oakley describes it, citing Reddit.com go teach somebody what you know. That again, is a great way to strengthen this so we can turn that upside down on test day, right? And then another way to add desirable difficulty is to mix it up. Check out the note where I talk about that some more. But fascinating research on how varying your practice increases performance. Basic idea here is you want to introduce desirable difficulties. Do not get caught up in the fluency illusion. Quit thinking that highlighting and reviewing your notes is the best way to learn. It's not. Have fun with that. Have another awesome day. See you. 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