(Un)common Sense Teaching - A Conversation with Dr. Barbara Oakley

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

People don't realize that when you're trained in a discipline, it's great, you learn a lot, but it also boxes you into the dogma of the discipline and you are blind to where there are holes in how that discipline is looking at things.

Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. If you like the podcast, please don't forget to support us and share it with more people by reviewing and subscribing wherever you listen. This week, the amazing Professor Barbara Oakley is my guest, thinking with me about some big questions about learning, what it is, why we need it, and what disciplines like neuroscience and psychology can and can't tell us about how to get better at it. Barbara is an incredible, multi-talented, and multi- faceted academic and author. She is a distinguished professor of engineering at the University of Oakland with a particular interest and expertise in the complex relationship between neuroscience and social behavior. She has authored and co-authored many bestselling books, including her most recent, Uncommon Sense Teaching: Practical Insights in Brain Science to Help Students Learn, which she co-authored with Beth Rogowski and Terry Sejnowski. You can find further information and all the links to Barb's previous books, it's in the show notes. Hey, Barbara.

Well, hello, Tim.

How are you?

Well, I'm pretty darn dandy. How are you?

Amazing. Yeah, great. It is a huge pleasure to be able to chat to you about all this stuff, Barb. Thanks for taking the time. It feels like a bit of an honor to have a kind of a one-to-one conversation or maybe even a tutorial about learning to learn. Given 4 million people have taken your online course already. So I feel very privileged to be getting a one-to-one conversation about it. So thank you very much.

Oh, it's my pleasure. It's so funny because when we made the online course, my husband and I, my husband was the man behind the camera and we were like, you know, why are we doing this? Because how do we know anybody's even going to watch this? And boy, were we surprised. Even before the course launched, there were well over 100,000 people. So it was A lot of interest.

Yeah, yeah, it really was. And it— but what year was that?

Well, getting close to 10 years now. So, and the course seems it's just as popular as ever. So it's, it's kind of shocking. But for a lot of people, I guess you're just not raised with the idea that something is actually physically going on in your brain when you're learning things. It's not all just mush that magically somehow comes together when you just knock it in enough times.

Yeah, no, I mean, that was actually the kind of place I would love to start because what is it you think that has brought so many people to the course? Because it's not just from an educational perspective, I get the sense. I think people are coming from all walks of life at all times in their career, and it's not just about teachers and students coming to a course to learn how to learn. It's, you know, mid-career people who want to, might want to change in their career or, you know, so what is it you, your reflections over that nearly 10 years, what observations have you had as to why people come to learn how to learn?

I think part of it is that they sense a kindred spirit as they come aboard in that, you know, I'm not a professor of psychology who's talking with them about, you know, very good psychological theory about how they should theoretically learn just about anything. But clearly the professor of psychology has not done for the most part advanced coding or learned at very high levels in STEM and so forth. And what people really struggle with a lot of times are concepts that relate to learning within the science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines or within languages and so forth. People can find all of these kinds of concepts quite challenging. And for me, I started out just horrible at math and science. I flunked my way through elementary, middle, and high school math and science, and only in my later 20s did I step back, reflect, and realize that I'd kind of put myself in a career box by adamantly insisting to, at least to myself, that I could not learn math, anything involving quantitative skills, and so I was curious to see if I could rewire my brain. I mean, nothing could have been further from my true self, or so I thought, that was the language-loving kind of person, than becoming an electrical engineer, for example. But I think talking about these kinds of experiences in the Course, how I changed my brain from being someone who hated math and science to someone who really fell in love with it and actually became quite good at it. I mean, to my surprise, I'm now a distinguished professor of engineering, which would have shocked my parents no end since they knew how I really struggled as a young person.

Yeah.

But I think having a kindred spirit who represents to them the idea that Yes, you can, even in your adult stages, change your thinking, change what you know, change your expertise, and then we do it based on showing what's going on in your brain when you do make efforts to sort of rewire your brain, and it's not something that's like, "Oh, yeah, now we're going to make learning all perfectly easy," but if you learn a few tips and tricks, you can leverage your natural abilities much more effectively, and people just love it. So it's really quite useful, but it, it all grows from the great work of psychologists, of neuroscientists.

Yeah, no, and I mean, as you say, you've clearly embodied the journey yourself, and I heard you talking about how much you moved when you were young and the fact that that had a big impact on perhaps your your self-perception of how good at maths you could be. But then as you were talking there about the, as I understand in your book, Mindshift is what you're there talking about when in older adulthood people are coming to a, a moment where they want to make a change and, you know, understanding whether that's possible or not. And one of the things that I'm very interested in is what learning is actually. I mean, when you start really getting to the nub of it and cuz some of that there you're talking about tips and tricks about how to learn difficult concepts, but then you're also talking about major kind of life changes and developments to make an almost a frame shift in the way that you see the world or understand the world. So when you talk about learning, how would you define learning, I suppose? I mean, do you do that in the course or is that something that is just kind of, it's taken for granted that people understand learning is just, is the math stuff that you do in school or is it I don't know, is it bigger than that?

Oh, what a good question. You know, I don't know. There's even a definitional list within the Massive Open Online Course of the terms we commonly use. And I'm not sure that learning has a definition in it, which I suppose means that we take the standard dictionary perspective on what learning is. But if you look back at the history of neuroscience, for example, the big pioneer who's now known as the father of modern neuroscience was a man named Santiago Ramón y Cajal. And Cajal was a terrible student himself. I mean, he was like just the epitome of the world's— well, he clearly had symptoms of dyslexia, of ADHD. He was oppositional to the max. But he became curious as a young person, or no, around age 20 or just a bit before, and he decided to try to start changing his brain. And he began working at it. And as he began to understand how the brain works, how neurons connect, he began to also understand that you can reshape the connections in your brain, at least to some extent. By your own thinking, your own thoughts, and that you can reshape your own perceptions and attitudes and also use that reshaping of your attitudes to help you kind of carve your brain in new directions. So, in other words, it really takes, for example, if you want to speak a language, you got to practice a lot. And so the more you practice, the more you're reinforcing those new connections that you are making. And it's really that way for anything new that you're learning. You practice, you reinforce, you build those connections.

Yeah, I know that strongly living in France as a British person, and I should practice my French more than I do.

It's hard sometimes because you really have to think you have to use your working memory with that new language in a way that is very tiring. And so you can only kind of go at it for so long without getting really quite tired. But the more you do it, the better you get.

Absolutely. And one of the other questions I was interested in looking at, Terry Sejnowski's work with you as your co-writer on some of the books, and he's a computational neuroscientist. Right? And I wondered like, what's his take on this in relation to, because one of the things that I'm also interested in is the way that we use metaphors for the brain. And one of the big metaphors that often gets used is the idea of a computer, the brain as a computer, and we're doing information processing. And I, I have some issues with that kind of idea because I, it feels very disconnected and brain-based in a way that actually a lot of our learning is very context-dependent and rich and embodied and all of those things. So I wondered, like, I mean, yeah, has that been a conversation you've had between you and Terry as you've been writing some of this work?

Terry is one of the most extraordinary people I've ever met. He's brilliant, but he's also, he's very flexible and broad-ranging in his thinking. And, you know, the course wouldn't have been anywhere without our, you know, our— his work in contributing and really serving as a solid scientific underpinning for what we're doing. But Terry would be the first to say that the old-fashioned notions of what computers are and how they work are there a partial metaphor for some of the activities that take place in the brain. But what's going on now with large language models is it's almost as if in some sense what is happening with AI is they're actually looking at the real brain.

Yeah.

And saying, you know, we need to base some of our work off of a real brain instead of saying, oh yeah, computer is like a brain and our understanding of a brain we should grow from computers. Now we're beginning to instead do a reverse thing and say the other way. Yeah, yeah, this, this is really phenomenally complicated, but there are some really cool stuff that the brain can do that computers can't do. I mean, computers in the older sense, but AI— a lot of the perceptions and the insights that we're gaining in large language models grow from how the brain works. And it's not only the feedforward, but the feedback at various levels and, you know, that all build together with this parallel processing approach to allowing us to learn effectively. And I think one thing that is very cool is just how the brain has two very different systems for learning. One is that declarative straightforward learn step by step. I explain something to you, you understand it step by step, you can explain it back to me, versus that procedural, more basal ganglia-oriented system where you're learning lots of things all at once. You get a feedback. Did you tie your shoes successfully? No. Okay, well, let's go back again. We're going to try again. And there's lots of complicated things that you learn, like tying your shoe that you can't even explain to someone else, but then you can learn it. And in some ways, what's going on with some of the latest activities in artificial intelligence is like that basal ganglia procedural automatic habitual learning system that processes many inputs at once.

Yeah, interesting. It's almost exploring the environment, taking the feedback. And learning in some way, right? Interesting.

Exactly.

And I mean, that leads me onto the second question I wanted to ask you about the science of learning, 'cause I've been having some interesting conversations about that recently with some, you know, different people on different sides of the discussion about whether it's possible to actually kind of create a science of learning. And, you know, you, your expertise is very much in the science domain. You're a bioengineer, right? Is that, is that right? Or no?

My doctorate was was in systems engineering, and I did a lot of work in affiliation with the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. But yeah, it's hard to classify me as an engineer or what type, and I suppose systems is a good way to put it.

Yeah, interesting. Oh well, yeah, I can see strong links there with learning then, obviously. But I would love to ask you what your view is about the kind of the idea of creating a science behind this. Because I don't know if you know Ellen Lagemann's book, An Elusive Science, and it's, you know, there's been a lot of discussions right from the beginning that whether learning and education are an art or as a science on which you can base pedagogical decisions and, you know, things like that. So where do you come down on that whole discussion?

Oh, I think that a science of learning is possible. It's just really, really hard, and the reason for that is there's just so many levels. Let's take some kind of a bioengineering issue. You're usually working with a very small constrained set, even though it may seem large, but it's a constrained issue. Does this particular device do the job with the heart that it is supposed to be doing? So you can devise tests and you can, you know, kind of see how well it's doing. But when it comes to children in a classroom, well, first off, you know, how old are the children, the students you're dealing with? I mean, are you dealing with toddlers? Are you dealing with adults? That's a very big spectrum. And what works for one group may not work at all for another group., and then what is the makeup? Are there attentional issues, for example, in some of your sample, of one sample, but no attentional issues in another one of your samples? If you have all, let's see, Princeton students as your sample, that could be very, very different from all students at a local community college who are working other jobs and really have difficult lives. So in other words, you know, there's not only the spectrum of student abilities and student ages and so forth, but then, well, let's cut to the chase. I think a group that's doing this kind of bridging of research and policy very well is in Singapore. And what they've done is they've tried to carefully compartmentalize small-scale research that's done in a classroom of 30 or several classrooms, bridge that up to perhaps a larger group, see how effective that is with the larger group, scaling it even further and so forth. They have 4 very carefully defined layers of you know, bridging and trying to kind of figure out what's going on at that level. And I think they've done a marvelous job with an incredibly complex issue of trying to break it down, lay it out so that everyone can see who's working in research.

Yeah.

What level are they at? What are the different factors they should be being aware of that whatever research that's being done here may not be appropriate for other places. And I think that's really a model for the world to look at as far as doing good translational research. Yeah.

I actually spoke to Wei Li Lu, the Director-General of the Education Ministry in Singapore, recently on the podcast, and I didn't ask her about that explicitly. I should have done, but Absolutely fascinating because I think that, as I wanted to ask you, that translation issue is a real challenge. And, you know, I've spoken to other cognitive neuroscientists or, you know, different scientists around the area of learning, and often they're quite reluctant to make prescriptions for what should happen in a classroom because they're very acutely aware of that translation problem. Yes. Whether they're psychologists or whatever, you know, there is a challenge there. That what you observe in a much more constrained environment, bring that into a very open and complex environment as a classroom, as you say, with so many diverse contextual factors, who knows what's gonna happen? You know, it's a very different beast that you are then dealing with. So it's, yeah, fascinating to hear about Singapore, but because you talk about that in your new book in relation to psychology and neuroscientists, the kind of direct and indirect influence of those things on teaching and learning? I suppose Singapore is one example, but how do you see other ways that translation problem can be resolved to kind of bridge that gap between research and practice?

That's a very good question because sometimes I think, for example, you point towards psychologists and researchers who are very wisely reticent about, you know, over reaching, but there are some educational researchers who are not that way, and this can create real problems, you know, when a researcher can kind of dominate and assert their approaches. And these are the, the sorts of issues that I think can create real problems in education, which could be sorted out by good national policies. But sometimes people are just really loath to get into, for example, you know, the reading wars battle or the math wars battle. And they may have a sense that one side or another is really more correct, but they just don't want to weigh in because as soon as you do, then you become a target. And as Terry Smouski has told me, you can always tell the leaders, because those are the ones with the arrows in their back. So, and so I think this is why for years there's been great research out about, you know, that phonics is the way to go in the reading wars. But people just charged ahead, you know, the leaders in education charged ahead in a different direction. In any case. Um, and it was kind of sad to see.

Yeah, it is interesting, isn't it? Because I think also so many of those research insights get put into a context where perhaps there's other agendas at play, even, even around what the purpose of schooling and education is. I mean, there's very little consensus even about that in itself. You know, reading and maths is perhaps an easier thing to kind of consider because it's obviously, you know, you're looking at very specific developments in terms of what we want for our young people. But then if you go beyond literacy and numeracy, you get into a very, very gray area of inquiry-based pedagogies or direct instruction. You put all these things in the context of, well, what, what are we even doing with education? What is it for? Is it for training the skill development for the labor market or is it for human flourishing, or, you know, there are so, there's so much divergence in terms of that conversation that it's very difficult to get any kind of, you know, even people kind of agreeing on the basis for the discussion, even at the beginning, let alone agreeing on the implications of the research. So it's, it's a fascinating and complex problem, I think.

No, no kidding. You know, one thing that I think is critically important is teaching critical thinking. But it's funny, people often have no definition whatsoever of what critical thinking actually is. One university I know of, you could check whether or not your course taught critical thinking. And if you asked the university, well, what's your definition of critical thinking so I understand whether or not I can check this box? They say, we don't have one. You know, it's like that gets to the nubbin of the problem itself that you have just described.

It does. It does. And it, I mean, in a way it's the same as learning, isn't it? It's such a huge complex idea, but there's also an assumption that everybody knows what it is and that of course we must be all talking about the same thing, but actually, well, maybe we're completely, you know, we're talking in opposite universes, let alone, you know, the same ballpark. So yeah, no, fascinating. And perhaps that's a nice segue actually into some of your work, cuz I was really interested to see your other books. You know, earlier in your career around things like sustainability and altruism and kindness, your early book on the Evil Genes. There's so much interesting work there. And I wondered how has that informed the way that you think about learning and education now? I mean, there's a lot there obviously, and I'd invite people to go and, you know, look at the books, but I feel like, yeah, there will be some interesting kind of overlaps or connections that you have made then as you've gone into this kind of learning how to learn? What have you brought with you that's informed some of that work?

I think the early work underpins all of my work in education. It's funny, I was kind of wondering why my sister had some real problems with, shall we say, malevolent behavior.

Yeah.

And I tried to figure out What was her challenge? Why was she that way? And it's a tongue-in-cheek title for the book. It's— the full title is Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, and Ron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend, which she did. And I was trying to figure out what she was about, and I thought, wait, now I'm an engineering professor, I understand the science, I should be able to look at psychology research and get a sense of why she was like that. I mean, she wasn't a psychopath. She would just do nefarious things, and everyone knows someone like this who's really nice but will stab you in the back, or the boss who takes credit for your ideas, and I mean, at least if you've reached a certain age, you've always encountered is sooner or later a personal experience. And I found that the psychological research— they finally— the, the term they used was a malignant narcissist. But I found that there was no scientific research underpinning this concept. There were thousands and thousands of papers, but they all sort of circularly cited each other, and there was no scientific foundation., and so I looked at the neuroscience. I looked at underlying psychological research and so forth, and all of this sort of gave me a perspective, a very good perspective. People don't realize that when you're trained in a discipline, it's great. You learn a lot, but it also boxes you into the dogma of the discipline,, and you are blind to where there are holes in how that discipline is looking at things. By coming at it as an engineer who had no background at all in any of these things— I mean, I spent 6 years researching this book, so it really helped me to kind of pull together and begin to see the holes. And then I— someone asked me, well, you know, all people nasty. They're not all Hitlers, but yet the Germans still followed Hitler. Why? And I thought, wow, yeah. And so out of that question came the book Pathological Altruism and a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about that concept. And it's about people who have good intentions but are not really looking at the objective, or as objective as possible, outcome of whatever they're trying to do. And they can get caught up in movements and so forth and influenced by others. So finally, I got sick of looking at problematic people, you know, like pathological altruists and malignant narcissists and so forth. And I thought, oh, you know, I'm going to write a book about learning. Yeah. I'm going to get out of all this really problematic people area. And little did I know that actually that background is really helpful in understanding some trends and ways that things unfold in education is by understanding malignant narcissists and pathological altruists and so forth. And it has served me well. In allowing me to, to say, ah, okay, well, research says this is actually the best approach, but this group opposes that, and that's probably for their own reasons. For example, you know, correcting math worksheets is really a tedious chore, so it might behoove some groups to oppose this kind of thing and make it sound like they're doing good for the students when actually it's the teachers themselves who are benefiting. You know, there are reasons behind the opposition to some of these proven approaches that really do help students learn more effectively.

That's fascinating. And one of the other observations I had as you were talking there was just that there is more and more talk in education now amongst the, you know, the progressive kind of conversations within education around dispositions and character traits and human development aspects of, you know, you could, you know, you may wanna bring in personality aspects to it, or, you know, whether it's compassion or empathy or desirable traits that we want in our young people. And, you know, a lot of the narrative is kind of, for example, these kinds of competencies or dispositions will prepare them for an unknown future and for the complexity of the VUCA world. And, you know, a lot of those kinds of narratives about the future of learning and education. And so that's your background there is quite interesting in, in how that connects, because I think we're, it's quite dangerous territory when we start talking about education as a, as an intentional molding of human character traits. I think we get into some interesting and yeah, potentially concerning territory there.

Oh, very much so. Because think about it. I mean, education has a long, long history of not being able to mold character traits. You look at, you know, all the German scientists who supported what was going on with Nazism. Yeah. The thing is that when you think you are teaching about empathy and being, what you're really doing is you are only teaching to the choir. You are only reaching the people who are already empathetic, who are going to listen to your message, and you're reinforcing it. In fact, you can reinforce it so much amongst that population. For example, young girls who hear that you should really be empathetic and you, you need to work together and, you know, if something happens, look at yourself as well as the other person. And you're setting that little girl up for codependency as an adult. And people don't realize that empathy is a double-edged sword. It's not this unremitting wonderful quality. Because let's say you, you've got a, a rather bullying gang at the school, and you've got someone there who's kind of running the group was really rather a nasty bully. And you want to be accepted by someone because, you know, you feel comfortable and you empathize with how they feel for you. You want them to like you. You're putty in their hands if you are empathetic to them, if it means something to you to be in that group. And it's kind of like Teaching that empathy is an unremitting good is like declawing a cat and then throwing it out into the wilderness. So this idea of molding others is really, really problematic because, for one thing, that molding can shape people in very nefarious ways. But interestingly, telling people to be empathetic and sort of you know, to go along and so forth. That plays right into the hands of those who are more narcissistic.

It is interesting, isn't it? Because the other question is, who decides what those character traits are that are most desirable and that we should be, you know, developing in our young people? Who decides? I mean, that, you know, that is it culturally specific? Is it, you know, you get then into conversations around imperialism and whether that's a kind of a Western liberal value set that we're imposing on others, or there's a lot of questions there. And the other thing I would reflect on is what you were saying about context. I mean, you know, it's so contextual the way that you might show up or need to show up in a particular situation based on the people you are with. Like you say, if it's a particularly nefarious boss or a bully, or in that context that asks for a certain set of dispositions or ways of showing up that a different context, again, you'll have to respond in a different way. And so it's, it's dangerous, the context-free-ness of this as well.

Precisely. And to my mind, teaching about how to set boundaries about what is acceptable behavior, that is the important thing to teach, because that's really hard for a lot of kids. You know, when do you— how do you say no to people? How do you say no to the person who says, "Oh, come on, just add my name to the project, because I know I didn't do anything this, but I have all these other things going on," you know? And it's really hard to learn to say no, to set limits.

Yeah.

So yet these are the kinds of things. It's so easy to teach about, oh, be empathetic. But to set boundaries and limits, that's what needs to be taught, but it is often not.

Interesting. I wonder how much of your perspective on human nature do you think has been influenced by you spending, you know, time with the nefarious narcissist? What was it? Machiavellian narcissist? No.

Malignant narcissist.

Malignant narcissist.

It shapes, I think, anyone who's spent any or who's had their life in any way affected. Which, you know, usually this is why young people are usually, you know, they're so kind for the most part, so naive. And so they have this wonderful view of humankind, but it's not really an accurate view. And it's only the school of hard knocks that they will eventually go through will kind of reshape their perspectives to something that's more realistic.

It is, there is a kind of dominant, slightly romantic perspective on human nature that sometimes is present in a lot of the conversations around education, I think. I mean, we don't often, like you say, we don't often talk about The more nefarious ways that people show up, or as you say, the, the response to that, to set boundaries, or how would you deal with that? It's often a very idealistic view of if everybody was lovely and nice and did all these kind and generous and sharing and collaborative things, wouldn't it all be lovely? But actually, yeah, it, it, interesting. I don't know, I haven't really thought about that, but it, it can be, I think the conversations are a bit biased towards the positive idealistic view.

Well, it's extraordinarily biased, and it, it can make things difficult because, for example, well, I, I wrote a paper called Turning Student Groups into Effective Teams, and part of this paper was a sort of an essay that students should be reading that should be handed out, and it's actually a really popular essay. You can find it all over the web called Coping with Hitchhikers and Couch Potatoes on Teams. And this essay sort of says in a class there's a chance that your team could have a member on it, you know, that's one of them is going to be hardworking but maybe not that great, but they're, you know, they're trying. And one of them is going to be, you know, they're pretty smart but they're lazy. And one of them is going to try to take advantage of you, you know. And so this was just like a prototypical, you know, or just kind of a here's what could happen on your team. And when I turned that paper in, the reviewer said, oh, you can't say this. There would be students who would take advantage of other students. And I'm like, what planet did you come from? I was just shocked at that. This Pollyanna result. And of course, the paper, the essay itself is incredibly popular now because it's totally reflective of what really can go on in a classroom. But the reviewer, obviously an academic, was like, no, no, no, you can't say that.

So interesting. I mean, it's the— what is it? The free rider problem in economics, right? I mean, There it shows up in, yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. Then, all right, to, to move slightly away from that, your, your latest book is Uncommon Sense Teaching with Parentheses, right? Yes. Yes. So I would love to ask you about that. As I understand it, kind of a more of an update. Some, some of the threads you can still see through the course and you know, the other books that you've written, but there's, there's an update in terms of online learning and, and all sorts of things. That we're seeing now more and more. What was your inspiration for writing that? And particularly that I love the title, Uncommon. Why is teaching not common sense?

I think many of the great teachers of centuries past, they did have common sense. But the way that their ideas are often carried forth and brought through the centuries it's sort of winnowed out by more pedestrian types who kind of industrialize and, you know, try to quantify. And they, they often, they begin to just miss the real points of what were being made by these brilliant original thinkers. And so we get approaches to teaching that can be problematic. But in any case, what Common Sense Teaching is trying to do is to bring insights from neuroscience concrete. And there are a plethora of insights, everything from the two major different learning systems that the brain uses, the sort of automatic system versus the hippocampal declarative system. And these learn very differently. One can explain beautifully, the other can't explain. It can just do, and you're unconscious of it. These are important insights, and they're also relevant to those who are trying to understand neurodiversity. For example, those with dyslexia can often learn better through that declarative hippocampal pathway, and they can struggle with things that have to do with the automatic pathway. Like reading swiftly. That, that just doesn't work very well because that system doesn't work very well. To my surprise, if you look at a lot of the programs that teach any kind of neuroscience as part of their educational program, what they're really teaching is neuromyths. Can you imagine teaching math by saying, okay, I'm just gonna teach you what math is not, you know, because that's what Neuromyths is, is like what's wrong with ostensibly neuroscientific approaches to education. Yeah, but what is right about neuroscientifically based approaches to education? There's a lot. Just understanding how important it is to take a break, what's happening in the brain, when you focus intently and work and then you mind wander a little bit and how important it is to do that mind wandering and that that's a way of— it's almost like marinating. It's like this process that allows for easier consolidation that is sort of making more compact and elegant and accessible in the brain some of these new concepts that you're learning. All of these kinds of things grow out of our understanding of— from neuroscience of how we learn effectively. And it's so exciting. And so it was just such a treat to be able to put it together in the book. But at the same time, it was really tough because I felt like a referee trying to— oftentimes we'll say, you know, those neuroscientists. They've got all this jargon. It's just, they, they're terrible. You can't understand them. They're so highfalutin and so forth. But teachers don't understand that they've got all their jargon and it's very specific. And if you're just a parent trying to understand, you know, what are these assessments and different kinds of, you know, so trying to sort out all the different jargons and like sometimes what a neuroscientist is saying when they say the procedural learning system is completely the opposite of what a teacher is saying when they're saying procedural, following a set of procedures. They use just directly the opposite system. So trying to sort out all this jargon-related issue and make it simple and understandable for people in the book was, I think, an important part of what we're trying to do as well.

That's amazing. Yeah. It's like the translation problem is quite literally a translation problem.

No kidding.

Yeah. There's two things there I wanted to pick up on the diffuse and goal-directed point, which I'll come back to, but I want, I just wanted to ask you, as you were saying there about the neuromyths, why do you think there is that tendency to kind of overreach in terms of pulling from the neuroscience and say, and I don't know if this is the right way to describe it, but it's almost like it, we're drawing implications which are just beyond what we actually know. And we're just, you know, we're mixing a bit of ideology in there with perhaps what we would like to be true. And we're using the neuroscience to justify that. Because, so from a personal reflection, I can say that the podcasts where I've talked about neuroscience or brain-based approaches, usually the most popular. And it's so interesting to see how the, just the popularity of that kind of the reference to neuroscience is, is so strong within education. But yeah, why, why do you think it does happen so readily?

So I was working in, working with a group, and we had a bioengineering project. And so this group was working with an educator group from a top university, and the educational group asked a bioengineering group, well, what are the results that you want to find? What do you want to find? And it was basically, what do you want our answers to be? And our team had to explain, well, that's not how you do research. You let the data itself tell you what the findings are. And they were like, well, that's not how we do research. So it is shocking how often in education what can be acceptable as a research literature finding is accepted because the finding is what the editors and what the authors of the paper wanted to see. It's not necessarily at all what, you know, what the data might have led you to figure out, and I think the public And even teachers themselves kind of have a sense that there's something funky going on in educational research. Something like 0.13% of all research literature in education is replicated. That means that you can publish pretty much anything you want. You can find some journal somewhere that's going to publish it, and nobody's they're really going to go and check you, and then you can go off and say, "Hey, look, I've got a nice journal article. It's real," but it's not like that in neuroscience. I mean, it's much harder. It's not impossible, but it is harder to massage the data to tell you what you want it to find, and so I think people have a little sense of this and tend to gravitate more towards neuroscience findings just because they have a little sense that that's somehow closer to the ground and less likely to be manipulated to be what the authors wanted it to be.

But I guess the translation problem comes back in there again because the brain data may be very far removed from, as we were saying earlier, the intricate complexity of a particular context of a particular classroom. So you get this, I mean, that's the bridge, the paper that, was it The Bridge Too Far? I mean, bridging the gap between that lab-based neuroscientific research and the complex classroom. I don't know. I mean, this, it feels to me that there's a lot of space there for ideological statements that don't perhaps closely matched to the original data to happen.

You are 100% correct. And so, you know, what I'm trying to point to in what I'm writing about are just major phenomena that we see in how the brain works that are clearly relevant to the educational process, but What you do with this information as a teacher is kind of up to you. So we know that, for example, the brain will focus in a task-positive network. It sort of takes a break as the task-negative or default mode network. You know, what's the amount of time that we should spend in each of these? You know, how do they really relate to what's going on in the classroom? Well, beats the heck out of me, but what's valuable to know is if you make your students focus, focus, focus all the time, there's some indication that that can suppress the activities of the default mode network, which may in turn affect their creative abilities. That's an interesting data point. Again, it doesn't dictate any policy, but it sure is interesting for a teacher to know these kinds of things.

Yeah, absolutely. And that was my interest in that because I've heard you talk about that and I find that so interesting because also Mary Helen Immordino-Yang talks about that in her work, that the role of the default mode network. And that was fascinating for me. But I think again, and I'm guilty of this, I think people see that data and then they think, oh, well that justifies a certain type of pedagogical approach. You know, because she talks about the kind of zooming in, zooming out. So it could, as you say, if it's all very goal-directed and focused, then you are missing this kind of reflective bigger picture that happens when you kind of let some mind wandering happen. You go into this default mode network. And so perhaps more student-centered inquiry-based approaches might allow for more of that space to happen. So you can see how very quickly you bring your own ideologies of what you think might be a good thing in a classroom with young people to the table when you, when you look at the data, because the data doesn't say that, but I want that to be true. So I might use the data to justify or strengthen my case that inquiry-based pedagogies are a good way to go. It's just, it's an interesting problem I think that we face in education.

But it's important to be aware that this will happen no matter what. What research does. You can't stop people from interpreting, misinterpreting, doing whatever with your findings, but that doesn't mean that we should just stop making findings. We just have to be aware that it's— and this is why very good scientists often can be very good about, "I'm not telling you how to run your classroom.

This is just what we found." Yeah, no, it's, I mean, it's a fascinating problem because there's so much skin in the game, isn't there? With all of our children, as you were saying with your, I'm sure you have perspectives on your own children and grandchildren's education and what kind of education you'd like them to have. And everyone, everyone has skin in the game. So, you know, we all want it to be a certain way and it's, it's hotly contested. I find it so fascinating, but I'd love to ask you if I can, just to finish about your slow thinking. And hiking connection, because I'd love that one. In your TED Talk, you talk about that, and I found that so interesting. And the process of noticing as you hike through the wilderness. And I just would love to ask you finally, if you could, yeah, just say a little bit about where did that come from? Why was slow thinking something that you thought was an important thing to kind of bring into the space of education? Feels often like we are rushing to get so many places and slowing down that might be beneficial in learning as well as in life?

Oh yes, well, I think a challenge that I continued to see as a professor of engineering was that students would often charge in and, you know, take 5 classes when 4 was the usual maximum, and they're working maybe a full-time side job and I would try to tell them this is a problem, but on their side they're thinking every semester I spend longer here is a bunch of money and I'm supporting my family. I mean, they have quite legitimate concerns themselves, but at the same time, even in my own learning, I found that some people can learn really swiftly, and there's a recent paper paper that's kind of like, "No, everybody learns pretty much at the same pace." But I think— yeah, it was quite an interesting article or a research paper. But I think we've all known people who, within specific disciplines, for example, when I was a Russian translator, there were people who could pick up Russian like a sponge, and then others who, you know, it came much more slowly. I'm the kind of person, I, I don't have a phenomenal memory, so I have to practice a lot to have something sink in. If I'm reading something, I've really got to take my time to absorb it. And I became very interested in, you know, is this a phenomenon? Do other people also need to take time who turned out to be successful? And yes, it turns out there are people like this. So, for example, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the brilliant Spanish neuroscientist, he was a very, very slow learner, but yet when he grasped something, he really got it and could see it from many perspectives and levels and was able to show others. And similarly, for example, Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek, He said one of his problems was he was really, really slow. He couldn't remember things like the other brilliant people in some of his classes. He had to work much harder. But at the same time, he felt that that slowness made him really— he was looking very carefully because he was kind of walking so slowly, and he could see the crevices that others completely just hopped right over it. Oh, yeah, okay, that makes sense, and he's like, wait a minute, does that really make sense? And that's where his Nobel Prize arose from, so it's not like every slow thinker is a budding Einstein. I'm certainly not, but there, it seems that people who learn really quickly, there is also good research evidence that they tend to jump to conclusions, and when they're wrong, they're very inflexible about changing their minds. So there's to be said for learning more slowly, but yet being more flexible as a consequence.

Yeah, that's fascinating because it also connects with what you talk about, understanding is not the same as mastery. And, and as well, the kind of learning and performance conflation that we kind of understand something, we might jump to quick understanding, or we think we understand it, we think we've learned it, but actually there's, it could potentially be quite a superficial or temporary kind of retention of that. And then actually when you revisit it later, you, you realize there's less understanding and certainly a lot less mastery of the thing than, than you would've hoped.

Absolutely. And this relates to, there's almost like an intermediate step between there's sort of working memory, which is partly short-term memory, and there's long-term memory, which you hold. There's like this intermediate hippocampal step, and this is when you first— let's say you work really hard the day before and you cram all this stuff. Your hippocampus actually picks up a lot of what you're learning, and you really do learn it. You, you understand it, but you haven't placed it in the neocortex in long-term memory. It's only in the hippocampus and has much more flexible kind of pliable connections. That's why you can make these connections very quickly, but you can make them quickly, but they fall apart very quickly too. So within a couple weeks, what you crammed and learned learned, if it's not repeated, it disappears. And then in the next semester, what you had learned, truly you had learned it, even if superficially, just at a hippocampal level, it's gone because those hippocampal connections are much more evanescent.

Yeah. And as you're hiking through this wilderness, it also makes me think of the fact, as you say, you might jump over things. And you miss things. And in a way, sometimes I think our education system promotes that kind of learning. 'Cause actually even in the way that it kind of presents information and knowledge to students, it's like actually there's a, the deeper, whatever even that means, but the kind of deeper process of noticing and, and really kind of sitting with something for a longer time. It's, that's not given space in an educational setting because, you know, it's pacing guides and it's got to get through the curriculum. We've got to just the tyranny of coverage, right? We've got to cover this stuff and we've got to race through it to get to where we should be in grade 5 and then grade 6. And I think it's, yeah, it's an interesting, another interesting problem. We're full of these lovely interesting problems, aren't we, in education? But it is, yeah, no, it's fascinating stuff.

It is indeed one of the world's most fascinating areas is education.

Beautiful. Well, thank you, Bob. This has been so, so lovely. And I really appreciate your time and the work that you've done. And yeah, thank you for taking the time to chat today.

Oh, it's, it's my pleasure. And Tim Logan, I wish you the very best. This was a wonderful conversation. I really appreciated it.

Amazing. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media or within your own networks.