PNTV: How We Learn by Benedict Carey (#325)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, How We Learn by Benedict Carey. How We Learn, subtitled the Surprising Truth About when, where and why It Happens. Benedict Carey is one of the New York Times most emailed journalists. He's been with the New York Times as an award winning writer since 2004. This is a great book looking at some of the unconventional truths of how learning actually works, based and grounded in some really practical science. I read this book as preparation for a class I'm going to be teaching next week that we'll be sharing with our members called Learning 101, where I'll be synthesizing ideas from this class or this book, Make It Stick by Peter Brown and two of the leading cognitive sciences studying the science of learning. And then Barbara Oakley's A Mind for Numbers. Barbara taught the largest class, one of the largest classes in history, basically on how to learn. Fascinating stuff. Philosopher's Note, bunch of my favorite big ideas, five of them here. How do we learn? Well, one of the big ideas is we need to water our brains, kind of like we water our lawns. We have this idea that it's best to sit down and study in a focused, extended, super intense, concentrated time block. Well, Benedict tells us that the research is unequivocal, that if, let's just say you had three hours to study. A lot of times we think, okay, I'm just going to carve out three hours and just go hit it. Right. He says you'd be much better off even if you only had an hour and a half. You'd be much better off splitting that time into two or three segments with a day. So say you study for an hour one day and then an hour the next day and an hour the day after that. That would be way better than three hours in one day. Why is that? It's because in the process, a little bit of forgetting occurs when you're just hammering one subject for an extended period of time, kind of cramming. You run into enemy number one, which is fluency, which we're going to talk about in a moment. You feel like you really understand it, but you may or may not have reached a real deep level of mastery. But if you, if you distribute your learning, which is what this is called distributed learning, or the spacing effect, where you space out your study blocks rather than doing them intensely all at once, the benefits are huge. Your actual learning, how long you'll remember it, is significantly greater than the concentrated time. One way that Benedict uses to describe this is when he used to live in la. He's now in New York. He lived in LA for whatever, seven years. And in la, desert coastal climate, right? It's hot and it's dry, but everyone likes to have green lawns. It's a big deal. So he says, what I learned was if I watered my lawn for an hour and a half on one day, the next day it would look pretty good. It'd be pretty emerald green and looking pretty awesome. But then over the course of the week, it would start looking not so awesome. So what he learned was don't focus it and concentrate it all in one day. Spread it out half an hour, three times a week. Worked at least as well, if not better than the actually works for him better than the hour and a half. And he used less water often than that full watering, right? So this is a truth we can apply to every aspect of our lives. When we talk about movement, we talked about Katie Bowman's wisdom that it's better to take three 1 mile walks than it is to take one 3 mile walk in meditation. Matthew Ricard I share a similar metaphor. He says meditation is like watering a plant. You can't water a plant, dump water on it once a month or even once a week and expect it to really grow. Certainly not once a month. It does best with a little bit of watering every day. Same with your meditation practice, same with your studying. Give it a little bit every single day. Distributed learning, spacing effect. It's a big idea, number one. Enemy number one is fluency. So a big theme throughout this book and make it stick and a mind for numbers, is that the biggest threat to really learning something and to performing well on tests is what they call the fluency illusion. Fluency illusion, it's the sense, the illusion that you have gained mastery because it looks familiar to you. So one of the most practiced study techniques is to reread your notes or to review your high highlighting for a particular chapter or whatever it is you're trying to master, right? So when you do that, when you review your notes or you just look over your highlights, you have fluency. You have the perceived experience of expertise. It feels good, right? You feel like, hey, I got this. Yeah, I'm looking at that. I got it. No big deal. But that is an illusion. The better way to see if you have true mastery is to close the book and then to test yourself and to say, what was that chapter really telling me? Let me see if I can remember at the end of this, you can test yourself right now. You can press pause and test yourself and see what have I talked about so far? What's the big idea that I've discussed so far? The kind of essence of the book thus far. That's a lot harder than rewinding and watching it again when you have fluency. Oh, yeah, that's what he said. When you shut the book and you test yourself, you try to actively retrieve a memory that doesn't feel good. It's disfluency. But all the researchers in this field say that you need to have that level of the comfort with that difficulty. They call it desirable difficulties, which we've talked about a number of times. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole book basically on the theme desirable difficulties. So don't get swept up in the fluency illusion. Just because something comes easy to you doesn't mean you actually master it. You've mastered it. We're going to look at three ways right now on how to master this illusion. We talk about it in a little more depth in the note. But the first thing you can do is to test yourself, which I just mentioned, right? Self testing is an extraordinarily powerful way to deepen your learning. Testing is somewhat in a circular, logical fashion. Testing is a way to improve your testing by simply actively trying to retrieve information from your mind. It hurts a little bit. You're strengthening the storage of the memory and your ability to retrieve it. It's a fascinating thing and you'll perform better on future tests if you actually test yourself. Another way to engage in desirable difficulty is to teach whatever you're learning to somebody else. This is one of the absolute best ways. It's hard, right? Try you're learning something. Rather than review your highlights and your notes. Put all that away and go explain what it is you're learning to somebody else, whether it's your little brother or sister or your mom or dad or your spouse or whoever whomever teach it to them. Explain it to them like they're five, is how Barbara Oakley describes it. Talks about how Charles Darwin would do this. He would imagine someone coming into his office and he wanted to be able to explain it to them in the simplest terms possible. Teaching, again is a studying technique. It's a way to master what you're doing. And you don't have to have complete mastery in order to teach it. You get that mastery as part of teaching it. Very powerful thing. And then you also see, of course, what you don't know, which is what you don't see. If you just reread your notes. When you test yourself on it or you teach someone else, your shortcomings become glaringly obvious. And then you can go back and do something about it so you're truly prepared. Another fascinating thing is to mix up what you're practicing and studying. I talk about this a lot more in the notes, so check that out. But fascinating research on varying what you're doing. Interleaving is what the scientists call it. You don't want to do the exact same thing again and again and again and again. You, you want to vary it, you want to mix it up, interleave it. Our fourth big idea, sleeping and naps. He says the chapter on this one is called you snooze, you win. So a lot of contrarian wisdom here. Of look, a lot of things we think work actually don't, right? Pulling all nighters, not such a good idea. You want to get a good, consistent night of sleep. And naps are extraordinary. He talks about Sara Mednick, who we profiled in Take a Nap, Change youe Life, who says that she can bring people into her lab and have them learn whatever, right? Some new words or whatever they're learning. And then half of them will take a nap an hour to an hour and a half and come back and take a test in the evening. And the other half won't. And they'll come back and take a test in the evening. The group that takes a nap far outperforms the group that didn't. The science is unequivocal. Naps are awesome. Sleeping is important. It's when your subconscious mind is consolidating what you've learned in the day. Getting rid of the stuff you don't need and drilling into the stuff that is important. Speaking of going to sleep and taking breaks and letting your subconscious work, there's something called the Zeigernik effect. The Zeigernik effect. Fascinating research done in the early part of the 20th century where Bluma Zeigernik realized that waiters, for example, a waiter who has been paid has a different memory for the order than one who hasn't been paid. If the waiter has not been paid yet, it's an unfinished task, right? It's not complete yet for them. And that waiter who is an unfinished task. An unpaid bill will remember the order of the individual at the table better than someone who's been paid. The waiter who's been paid, Boom. Check the box. It's finished. Your subconscious mind can tell what's finished and what's not finished. Now you can use this to your Advantage. He says sometimes it makes sense when you're working hard, particularly if you hit a plateau or you're having a challenging time to take a break. You're not finished yet, but your mind prioritizes it and keeps that loop open and your subconscious mind can actually go to work on it. I talk about Jason Selk and his wisdom in a book called Organize Today Tomorrow, and he says you should apply this to your sleep. He says a lot of leading mathematicians and thinkers across time have thought about whatever it is they want to solve. Maybe they've run up against a roadblock or they just want to take the next step in their exploration. Even writers developing a theme on a story before they go to sleep, they can think about the unfinished part of their work. Right? Just spend a few minutes reflecting on it and then go to sleep. And Jason says, and then the Zeigernick effect goes to work. Your subconscious mind is working on these ideas while you're sleeping. Fascinating way to tap into your subconscious. Benedict has a bunch of other ways to do that and how the subconscious is working for you all the time in the book. Check it out. So Zeigrnik effect. We've got sleep and naps. Super important. Check out Sleep 101 for more on that. You need to get rid of enemy number one, fluency by creating desirable difficulties. You paradoxically want things to be a little bit harder for for you to drill in. The learning, testing, teaching and mixing it up is a good way to do that. And then water your brain. Distributed learning. Space it out, don't cram. Space it out. Give yourself more distributed. Frequent instances of learning will be way more effective. Same amount of time distributed. Way more effective than concentrated. That is a super quick look at how we learn. If you're feeling it, think about how you can reflect on it and teach some of these ideas to yourself. Explain them to yourself, Write them down, elaborate on them, or teach them to a friend or whoever. Great way to learn, great way to make it stick. And there you go. What was your favorite idea? How can you make it a bigger part of your life? Get on that. Have another awesome day. See you. Isn't it a bit odd we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course, it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up? Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101, business 101, meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern Science plus Common Sense plus Virtue plus Mastery plus Fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join.