Barb Oakley here.

I'm going to do a quick walk-through for you, so you can see

how to handle all the videos and everything you're going to be accessing on our
website. So when you first land, you'll probably find something like this on the
homepage, this Welcome to Learning How to Learn. Now if you look at the left
navigational bar, youll see video lectures, readings, and so forth. So first thing
you might want to do is go to the video lectures. Thats a key part of the course.
Now I have special powers, so I get to access everything right from the very
beginning. So youre seeing, actually, right her youre seeing, most of the
lectures for week one, week two, week three, week four, and so forth. So, now
one thing you can do is you can, once you've completed a week, see how you
can press this arrow, and press it back, so you can diminish the size of any
particular week if you want to. And then, one thing I want you do, is I want you
to look over to the right, and you'll see these wonderful little images, which
relate to, for example, PowerPoints. This is a PowerPoint for the first video. This
image right here takes you to the discussion forums. So you can see when you
click on it, you just go right to the discussion forum. Here are the captions for
the videos right here, and then you can download the videos by clicking right
here, and and then it just shows up as, as it's busy downloading. So you can,
week by week, the videos will come available and you'll be able to see them.
And so there, you're kind of getting a little preview here. And then what you can
do, is you can go over to the Reading section, and you can see that we've got lots
of good stuff for you. Here's a little bit of background about A Mind for
Numbers, the book for the course. And, of course you don't have to buy the
book, but it's nice to have in, in case you want to look into or sort of ingrain
some of the ideas more deeply. Here's one of the key aspects of the book and
also of the course which are some guidelines about, how to study and how not to
study because you can fool yourself. And then for each week, we also have a
note for readings that might be worthwhile for you. All of these readings are
optional, and, but they, they just give you some nice insights, either into more
popular articles or heavy duty articles, if you want to take a look and see what,
what you might have an interest in. Now the quizzes, as you go over here, you'll
see the quizzes. Here's the quiz, for week one is right up there and you can just
attempt quiz one whenever you think you're ready. And week by week, each
quiz will become available and then of course at the end of the last week, you'll,
you'll have access to the final. Now, here are the peer or the loop mate
assessments. So if you go and just take a look, there is, remember there's two
assessments. One is assessment one and the second is assessment two. And you
can see all the details about these 2 assessments. And down at the bottom the
page are the actual assignments themselves that you can go off to. So then,
there's a little bit here in the about section, basics about the course. So here's a
little bit of an introduction again. And it pretty much repeats what's on the
introductory page, and then a little bit more about assessments and certificates.
And of course the verified certificate is a very nice way to go if you want to

really be, show people that you've actually learned the material in the course.
Here's a nice listing of the actual course objectives, and some frequently asked
questions that relate to the course. And here's a little bit of information about us.
There's Dr. Sinowski right here, and, and me, and then we've got a number of
learning experts that we've interviewed for the course. So you'll see them as
bonus material interviews. Here's our wonderful teaching assistants. And you
can see we've got a great number of them. And then a little bit about the
Temporal Dynamics Learning Center. And, finally, our Development Team, who
have worked very hard to help make this course come to reality. And there's a
little bit here about you. Right now, I'm, when I'm making this video, there's, it's
before the class has actually started. So pretty soon this is going to be populated
with a lot of different folks from all around the world. And in, within a week or
so, we'll be giving you a survey, and then we'll let you know what the results of
that survey are, and they'll show up here. Now, an important part of the course is
the discussion forums. So the discussion forums, they're right here. Don't be shy.
And you can see, as, as I showed you earlier each of the video lectures actually
has a connection over to here, so you can go directly here from the video
lectures or you can come independently. And then also, you can go from the
quizzes, study groups and hanging out together. There's all sorts of different
aspects that you can meet people, talk to them and get some insights from them.
Here's a little bit on Talkabout. And Talkabout, you'll you'll go onto the website
and then you'll see that we actually have some sessions for you to sign up for
week by week. And you can talk about the different aspects of the course that
you find most interesting. And you'll see specifics on what to talk about, when
you arrive at the sessions. Finally, there are some worthwhile pages for you to
go explore if you want to learn a little further. Just people I've found interesting
and worthwhile and different websites and so forth. So, I think you'll find this
possibly of interest. And that, is almost all. There's a little bit about meet ups
here. You can go in and learn about meet ups and form a meet up. And that's
pretty much it for the course. So that's your pocket walk-through of our course.
What do you do when you just can't figure something out? For zombies, it's
pretty simple. They can just keep bashing their brains against the wall. But
living brains are a lot more complex. It turns out, though, that if you understand
just a little bit of some of the basics about how your brain works, you can learn
more easily and be less frustrated. Researchers have found that we have two
fundamentally different modes of thinking. Here, I'll call them the Focused and
the Diffuse modes. We're familiar with focusing. It's when you concentrate
intently on something you're trying to learn or to understand. But we're not so
familiar with diffuse thinking. Turns out that this more relaxed thinking style is
related to a set of neural resting states. We're going to use an analogy of the
game of pinball to help us understand these two thinking modes. Incidentally,
both metaphor and analogy are really helpful when you're trying to learn
something new. If you remember, a pinball game works by, you pull back on the

plunger, release it, and a ball goes boinking out, bouncing around on the rubber
bumpers, and that's how you get points. So, here's your brain, with the ears right
here, and the eyes looking upwards. And we can lay that pinball machine right
down inside it. So, there you go. There's the analogy for the focused mode. The
blue bumper bumpers here are placed very close to one another. See this orange
pattern here towards the top? It represents a familiar thought pattern. Maybe
involving something simple like adding some numbers, or more advanced ideas
like literary criticism or calculating electromagnetic flows. You think a thought,
boom, it takes off, moves smoothly along. And then, as it's bouncing around on
the bumpers, you're able to figure out the problem you're trying to solve, or. The
concept you're trying to understand that's related to something you're rather
familiar with. So look at how that thought moves smoothly around on the fuzzy
underlying orange neural pathway. In some sense it's as if it's traveling along a
familiar, nicely paved road. But what if the problem you're working on needs
new ideas or approaches? Concepts you haven't thought of before. That's
symbolized here by this neural pattern towards the bottom of the pinball
machine area. But if you haven't thought that thought before, you don't even
know how that pattern feels or where it is. So how are you going to develop that
new thought in the first place? Not only do you not know where the pattern is or
what the pattern looks like, but see all the rubber bumpers that are blocking your
access whatever direction you do decide to move in? To get to this new thought
pattern, you need a different way of thinking. And that's represented here, by the
diffuse mode. Look at how widely spaced the rubber bumpers are. Thought
takes off, look at how it moves widely, bounces around. It could travel a long
way before being interrupted by hitting a bumper. In this diffuse mode of
thinking, you can look at things broadly from a very different, big-pictiure
perspective. You can make new neural connections traveling along new
pathways. You can't focus in as tightly as you often need to, to finalize any kind
of problem solving. Or understand the finest aspects of a concept. But you can at
least get to the initial place you need to be in to home in on a solution. Now as
far as neuroscientists know right now, you're either in the focused mode or the
diffused mode of thinking. It seems you can't be in both thinking modes at the
same time. It's kind of like a coin. We can see either one side, or the other side of
the coin. But not both sides at the same time. Being in one mode seems to limit
your access to the other mode's way of thinking. In our next video we're going to
see how some extraordinary people access their diffuse ways of thinking to do
great things. Thanks for learning about learning, I'm Barbara Oakley.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Welcome to Learning How to Learn. Your brain has amazing abilities, but it
didn't come with an instruction manual. Perhaps the greatest gif that our brains
give us is the ability to learn new things everyday. On my way here, I thought
about the journey that will take us to the last day of the course and how much
we will learn along the way. Our goal is to give you a better understanding of

how we learn, so that your brain becomes a better learner. These insights are
based on solid research from neuroscience, from cognitive psychology, and also
from dozens of leading instructors and practitioners in difficult-to-learn subjects.
Whether you're a novice or an expert, you will find great new ways to improve
your skills and techniques for learning, especially related to math and science.
This course is meant to help you reframe how you think about learning, to help
reduce your frustration and increase your understanding. We approach things a
little differently. You're not expected to have an in-depth background in any
particular subject. Instead, you're expected to take these ideas and apply them to
whatever subject you're trying to learn or improve in, to help you learn more
deeply, effectively, and with less frustration. You'll hear experts from a variety of
different disciplines talking about their best tips for learning more effectively.
You can benefit from these ideas whether you are struggling in high school or
soaring through math and science at graduate levels at a university. I'm a codirector of a science and learning center that is sponsored by the National
Science Foundation, based here in La Jolla. In recent years, we've made great
strides from research, in discovering how to learn most effectively. Finding a
way to simply and effectively share these ideas with you, has been a big
undertaking, but we feel it's well worth doing. You'll see that many of these
ideas, although simple, are incredibly powerful. And along the way, we'll also
learn a lot in the process of teaching you. You'll see how you can fool yourself
about whether you actually know the material. You'll discover new ways to hold
your focus and embed the material more deeply and powerfully in your mind.
And you'll learn to condense key ideas you're learning about, so you can grasp
them more easily, master the simple, practical approaches outlined here,
including simple tips to help prevent procrastination. And you'll be able to learn
more effectively and with less frustration. This course is meant to enrich both
your learning and your life. You'll able to get what you want from this material.
So, welcome to the course, and happy learning.
[BLANK_AUDIO] So let's take a look at some famous people from history who
used their different thinking modes to help them with their problem solving. If
you look at that guy right there, he was Salvador Dali, a very well known
Surrealist painter of the 20th century. He was the very definition of a wild and
crazy guy. You can see him here with his pet ocelot, Babou. Dali used to have an
interesting technique to help him come up with his fantastically creative
Surrealist paintings. He'd relax in a chair and let his mind go free, often still
vaguely thinking about what he had been previously focusing on. He'd have a
key in his hand, dangling it just above the floor. And as he would slip into his
dreams, falling asleep, the key would fall from his hand [SOUND] and the
clatter would wake him up, just in time so he could gather up those diffused
mode connections and ideas in his mind. And off he'd go back into the focus
mode bringing with him the new connections he'd made while in the diffused
mode. Now you might think, well, you know, that's okay for an artist, but what

is it have to do with more scientific or mathematical kinds of thinking? Well, if

you look down here, this guy was Thomas Edison, one of the most brilliant
inventors ever. According to legend, what Edison used to do was he'd sit and
relax in his chair, holding ball bearings in his hand. He'd relax away letting his
mind run free, although it would often noodle back in a much more relaxed way
to what he'd been focusing on previously. When Edison would fall asleep, the
ball bearings would drop [NOISE] and clatter to the ground just as with Dali.
And it would wake Edison up and off he'd go with his ideas from the diffused
mode, ready to take them into the focus mode and build on them. So the bottom
line is, when you're learning something new, especially something that's a little
more difficult, your mind needs to be able to go back and forth between the two
different learning modes. That's what helps you learn effectively. You might
think of it as a bit analogous to building your strength by lifting weights. You
would never plan to compete in a weight lifting competition by waiting until the
very day before a meet and then spending that entire day working out like a
fiend. I mean, it just doesn't happen that way. To gain muscular structure, you
need to do a little work every day, gradually allowing your muscles to grow.
Similarly, to build neuro-structure, you need to do a little work every day,
gradually allowing yourself to grow a neuro-scaffold to hang your thinking on, a
little bit every day and that's the trick. In summary then, we learned that
analogies provide powerful techniques for learning. We learned about how the
brain's two different thinking modes, focused and diffused, each helps us learn,
but in very different ways. And finally, we learn that learning something difficult
can take time. Your brain needs to alternate its ways of learning as it grapples
with and assimilates the new material. Thanks for learning about learning. I'm
Barbara Oakley.
Welcome to Learning How to Learn. My name is Terry Sinovsky. Let me
introduce you to your brain. First some brain surgery, we take off the skull and
take out the brain. This brain weights three pounds, but it consumes ten times
more energy by weight then the rest of the body, a very expensive organ. It is the
most complex device in the known universe. All of your thoughts, your hopes,
your fears, are in the neurons in this brain. We price our abilities to do chess and
math but it takes of practice to acquire these skills and digital computers are
much better at it than we are. It came as a surprise to discover that what we do
so well and take for granted, like seeing, hearing, reaching, running, are all
much more complex problems than we thought. And way beyond the capability
of the world's fastest digital computers. What this illustrates is that we are not
consciously aware of how our brains work. Brains evolved to help us navigate
complex environments. And most of the heavy lifting is done below our level of
consciousness. And we don't need to know how it's done in order to survive.
Psychologists who study the unconscious mind have found that influences
include thought processes, memory, emotions, and motivation. We're only aware
of a very small fraction of all the activity in the brain, so we need to rely on

brain imaging techniques to guide us. Here is the activity map of someone's
brain who was asked to lie still, at rest in a brain imaging scanner. On the left is
the side view of the brain and on the right is the view from the mid-line. The
colors indicate brain areas who activities were highly correlated, as shown by
the time courses below, color coded to the brain areas. The blue areas are highly
activity when the subject interacts with the world, but turn-off in the resting
state. The red orange areas are most active in the resting state. And are called the
default mode network. The default mode network is a leading candidate for what
we call the focus mode. When you are quietly studying. The diffuse mode,
which occurs when you are not concentrating, may be, not easy to identify
anatomically, but it is likely to be a shift between the resting pattern of activity
towards a more coherent global pattern. Other brightened areas are also more
active when you are resting, and these areas can be further divided into groups
of areas that have common patterns of activity. This is a new and intense area of
research, and it will take time to sort out all the resting states, and their
functions. There are a million, billion synapses in your brain, where memories
are stored. The old view of the brain is that once it matures, the strengths of
synapses can be adjusted by learning, but the pattern of cognitivity does not
change much unless there is brain damage. But now we know that brain
connectivity is dynamic and remains so even after it matures. With new optical
techniques for imaging single connections between neurons called synapses, we
can see constant turnover with new synapses being formed and others
disappearing. This raises a puzzle. In the face of so much churn-over, how do
memories stay stable over so many years? This is a picture of one dendritic
branch on a neuron which receives inputs from other neurons. The synapses are
the spiny knobs coming off the dendrite. On the top the dendrite was imaged
before learning. The same dendrite is shown below after learning, and after
sleep. Multiple synapses that are newly formed together on the same branch are
indicated by the white arrow heads. You are looking down into the brain of a
live animal. This is really a fantastic new technique. Synapses are less than a
micron in diameter. In comparison a human hair is around 20 microns in
diameter. This new technique allows us to see how learning changes the
structure of the brain with a resolution that is near the limit of light microscopy.
This illustrates that, intriguingly, you are not the same person you were after an
night sleep or even a nap. It is if you went to bed with one brain and woke up
with an upgrade. This is a better deal that you can get from Microsoft.
Shakespeare, the great English poet, already knew this. Here is Macbeth
lamenting his insomnia. Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care. The death
of each day's life, sore labour's bath. Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second
course. Chief nourisher in life's feast. Here, Shakespeare is making an analogy
between knitted clothes and sleep that knits up the loose threads of experience
and concerns during the day and weaves them into the tapestry of your life story.
You will learn, in this first week, how to take advantage of your unconscious

mind, and also sleep to make it easier to learn new things and solve problems.
During the lectures you may ask yourself, how does the brain do this? A good
place to find out more about brain is the website brainfacts.org. Brainfacts, one
word, .org. You will find a wealth of interesting things about brains and
behavior, and in particular about learning and memory. I'm Terry Sejnowski.
Happy learning until we meet again. [BLANK_AUDIO]
Everybody has some issues with procrastination. Because if you're working on
something, it means you're not working, on a lot of other things. But some
people have more issues with procrastination than others. In this video, we're
going to give you a little insight into procrastination. Why it arises, and a
powerful little tool to help you address it.
When you look at something that you really rather not do, it seems that you
activate the areas of your brain associated with pain. Your brain, naturally
enough, looks for a way to stop that negative stimulation by switching your
attention to something else. But here's the trick. Researchers discovered that not
long after people might start actually working out what they didn't like, that
neurodiscomfort disappeared.
So it seems what happens when you procrastinate, is something like this. First,
you observe, and get a cue about something that causes a tiny bit of unease. You
don't like it, so to make the sensation go away you turn your attention from
whatever caused that unease. You turn toward something more pleasant. The
result, you feel happier, temporarily.
We're going to talk more about procrastination later on. But in the mean, time
I'm going to let you in on a handy little mental tool. This tool is called, the
Pomodoro. It was invented by Francesco Cirillo, in the early 1980's. Pomodoro
is Italian for tomato. The timer you use often looks like a tomato and really, a
timer is all there is to this elegant little technique.
All you need to do, is set a timer to 25 minutes, turn off all interruptions, and
then focus. That's it! Most anybody can focus for 25 minutes. The only last
important thing is to give yourself a little reward when you're done. A few
minutes of web surfing, a cup of coffee, or a bite of chocolate, even just
stretching or chatting mindlessly, allowing your brain to enjoyably change its
focus for a while. You'll find that using the Pomodoro technique is very
effective. It's a little like doing an intense 25 minute workout at a mental gym.
Followed by some mental relaxation. Give it a try. Next, we're going to see how
one very shy ten year old, changed her brain.
[BLANK_AUDIO] Yep, that's me when I was 10. I loved animals, handicrafts,
and dreaming. Back then, I was the belligerent queen of anti-math. I neglected,
ignored, flunked, and downright hated math and science all through grade
school, middle school, and high school. It's strange to realize I'm now a
professor of Engineering. I enlisted in the army right out of high school to study
language at the Defense Language Institute. That's me at 18, looking very
nervous and very focused while throwing a hand grenade. I only started to study

math and science when I was 26 years old, after I got out of the military. At first,
it was really hard. There were all these quick thinkers in my classes who seemed
to get everything a lot easier and faster than me. Sometimes I'd take a break for a
few months, I'd go out and work as a Russian translator on Soviet trawlers.
That's me up in the Bering Sea. And I'd come back to school and try and learn
some more. As I gained technical know-how, new doors started opening up for
me. I ended up working as a radio operator at the South Pole Station in
Antarctica. That's where I met my husband. I always say I had to go the end of
the Earth to meet that man. Here he is, after only 10 minutes outside at minus 70
degrees Fahrenheit with a 60-mile-an-hour wind. The wind chill takes it off the
charts. Now, I wasn't natural in math and science. Not at all. The way I
succeeded was to gradually begin to figure out some tricks. But let's back up a
step. In the greater scheme of all the different careers and disciplines that people
can pursue, why are those involving math and science, sometimes, a bit more
challenging? We think it may be related, at least in part, to the abstract nature of
the ideas. I mean, let's take a cow for example, out standing in a field. If you
have the word cow, you can point right to a cow to learn what that word means.
Even the letters for the word cow, C-O-W, are roughly analogous to sounds that
they stand for. But for mathematical ideas, there's often no analogous thing that
you can point to. There are no plus signs standing out in a field. No
multiplication, division, or other kinds of things that can directly equate to mini
mathematical or scientific terms. These terms are more abstract, in other words.
Well, you might say, yeah, but what about ones like love, zest, or hope? Those
are all abstract. Yes they are, but the thing is, these abstract terms are often
related to our emotions. We can feel our emotions, even if we can't see and point
to concrete examples, like we could with the cow. This means it's important to
practice with ideas and concepts your learning in math and science, just like
anything else your learning. to help enhance and strengthen the neural
connection your making during the learning process. You can see on your left
here the symbolic representation of a thought pattern. Neurons become linked
together through repeated use. The more abstract something is, the more
important it is to practice in order to bring those ideas into reality for you. Even
if the ideas you're dealing with are abstract, the neural thought patterns you are
creating are real and concrete. At least they are if you build and strengthen them
through practice. Here's a way to picture what's going on. When you first begin
to understand something, for example, how to solve a problem, the neural
pattern from is there, but very weak. Kind of like the faint pattern at the top of
our paintball machine analogy here. When you solve the problem again fresh
from the start, without looking at the solution. You, if you begin deepening that
neuron pattern, kind of like the darker pattern you see here in the middle. And
when you have the problem down cold, so you can go over each step completely
and concisely in your mind without even looking at the solution, and you've
even had practice on related problems, why then, the pattern is like this dark

firm pattern you can see towards the bottom of the pinball frame. Practice makes
permanent. When you're learning, what you want to do is study something.
Study it hard by focusing intently. Then take a break or at least change your
focus to something different for awhile. During this time of seeming relaxation,
your brain's diffuse mode has a chance to work away in the background and help
you out with your conceptual understanding. Your, your neural mortar in some
sense has a chance to dry. If you don't do this, if instead you learn by cramming,
your knowledge base will look more like this, all in a jumble with everything
confused, a poor foundation. If you have problems with procrastination, that's
when you want to use the Pomodoro, that brief timer. This helps you get going,
using brief periods each day of focused attention, that will help you start
building the neural patterns you need to be more successful in learning more
challenging materials. Next stop, we'll be talking about chunking, the vital
essence of how you grasp and master key ideas. I'm Barbara Oakley.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
When I look back on my childhood or I remember some words from Spanish or
from Russian [FOREIGN] or I bring to mind one of Maxwell's equations, I'm
drawing on portions of my brain involved in long term memory. But what I'm
trying to hold a few ideas in mind to connect them together so I can understand a
concept or solve a problem, I'm using my working memory. Obviously,
sometimes I'll bring something from my long term memory into my working
memory, so I can think about it. So the two types of memory are related. There
are lots of different ways to slice our understanding a memory, but for this
course on learning, we're going to talk about only these two major memory
systems, working memory and long term memory. Working memory is the part
of memory that has to do with what you're immediately and consciously
processing in your mind. Your working memory is centered out of the prefrontal
cortex, although as we'll see later, there are also connections to other parts of
your brain ,so you can access long term memories. Researchers used to think
that our working memory could hold around seven items or chunks, but now it's
widely believed that the working memory is holds only about four chunks of
information. We tend to automatically group memory items in to chunks so it
seems our working memory is bigger than it actually is. Although your working
memory is like a blackboard, it's not a very good blackboard. You often need to
keep repeating what you are trying to work with so it's stays in your working
memory. For example, you'll sometimes repeat a phone number to yourself until
you have a chance to write it down. Repetition's needed so that you're metabolic
vampires, that is natural dissipating processes, don't suck those memories away.
You may find yourself shutting yours eyes to keep any other items from
intruding into the limited slots of your working memory as you concentrate. So
we know that short term memory is something like an inefficient mental
blackboard. The other form of memory, long term memory, is like a storage
warehouse. And just like a warehouse, it's distributed over a big area. Different

kinds of long term memories are stored in different regions of the brain.
Research has shown when you first try to put a short term memory in long term
memory, you need to revisit it at least a few times to increase the chances that
you'll be able to find later when you might need it. The long term memory
storage warehouse is immense. It's got room for billions of items. In fact, there
can be so many items they can bury each other, so it be difficult for you to find
the information you need unless you practice and repeat at least a few times.
Long term memory is important because it's where you store fundamental
concepts and techniques that are often involved in whatever you're learning
about. When you encounter something new, you often use your working
memory to handle it. If you want to move that information into your long term
memory, it often takes time and practice. To help with this process, use a
technique called spaced repetition. This technique involves repeating what
you're trying to retain, but what you want to do is space this repetition out.
Repeating a new vocabulary word or a problem solving technique, for example,
over a number of days. Extending your practice over several days does make a
difference. Research has shown that if you try to glue things into your memory
by repeating something 20 times in one evening, for example, it won't stick
nearly as well as if you practice it the same number of times over several days.
This is like building the brick wall we saw earlier. If you don't leave time for the
mortar to dry, that is, time for the synoptic connections to form and strengthen,
you won't have a very good structure. And talk about lasting structure, look at
this part of the Acropolis here. Thanks for learning about learning. I'm Barbara
Oakley. [BLANK_AUDIO]
You might be surprised to learn that just plain being awake creates toxic
products in your brain. How does the brain get rid of these poisons? Turns out
that when you sleep, your brain cells shrink. This causes an increase in the space
between your brain cells. It's like unblocking a stream. Fluid can flow past these
cells and wash the toxins out. So sleep, which can sometimes seem like such a
waste of time, is actually your brain's way of keeping itself clean and healthy.
So, let's get right to a critical idea. Taking a test without getting enough sleep
means you're operating with a brain that's got little metabolic toxins floating
around in it. Poisons that make it so you can't think very clearly. It's kind of like
trying to drive a car that's got sugar in it's gas tank. Doesn't work too well. In
fact, getting too little sleep doesn't just make you do worse on tests, too little
sleep, over too long of a time, can also be associated with all sorts of nasty
conditions. Including headaches, depression, heart disease, diabetes, and just
plain dying earlier. But sleep does more than just allow your brain to wash away
toxins. It's actually important part of the memory and learning process. It's
seems that during sleep your brain tidies up ideas and concepts your thinking
about and learning. It erases the less important parts of memories and
simultaneously strengthens areas that you need or want to remember. During
sleep your brain also rehearses some of the tougher parts of whatever you're

trying to learn, going over and over neural patterns to deepen and strengthen
them. Sleep has also been shown to make a remarkable difference in your ability
to figure out difficult problems and to understand what you're trying to learn. It's
as if the complete deactivation of the conscious you in the pre-frontal cortex at
the forefront of your brain helps other areas of your brain start talking more
easily to one another, allowing them to put together the neural solution to your
learning task while you're sleeping. Of course, you must also plant the seed for
your defuse mode by first doing focused mode work. If you're going over what
you're learning right before you take a nap or going to sleep for the evening you
have an increased chance of dreaming about it. If you go even further and set it
in mind that you want to dream about the material. It seems to improve your
chances of dreaming about it still further. Dreaming about what you're studying
can substantially enhance your ability to understand. It somehow consolidates
your memories into easier to grasp chunks. And now time for a little sleep.
This video will be especially fun, because I have a chance now to interview my
co-instructor, Dr. Terrence Sinalski. Terrence's pioneering research in neural
networks and computational neural science, have made him a living legend. Dr.
Sinalski is an investigator at Howard Hughes medical institute, and the Francis
Quick professor at the Salk institute for biological studies where he directs the
computational neurobiology laboratory. Above and beyond all of that Dr.
Sinalski is also in the elite group of only ten living scientist. To have been
elected to all three of the national academies, in engineering, science, and
medicine. What I think perhaps is most impressive however is that Terry has
also graduated more computational neural scientists, than any other scientist. In
some sense then. This makes Dr. Terrence Sinalski a leading father figure for the
modern field of neuroscience. The ultimate goal of Dr. Sinalski research is to
build linking principles, from brain to behavior using computational models.
Today, I'm going to ask Terry a few questions about how he learns. And how he
thinks about learning, so that we all might get a better sense of how to improve
our own learning. So what do you do to help yourself learn more easily, when
your looking at something completely new? >> Well I like to get into the thick
of it. I don't get much out of just going and reading a lot of books. And, when I
was in Graduate School, I made a transition from Physics to Biology. And the
way I did it was to get into a Biology lab. And get involved in experiments. And
I, I'm a firm believer in learning by doing, and learning by osmosis from people
who are experts. >> How do you keep yourself paying attention, during
something like a boring lecture? >> I found that there isn't, a simple way to keep
yourself attending something that you're not interested in. But I have found a
little trick to waylay the, the speaker, and that is by asking a question. And the
interruption often, gives rise to a discussion that is a lot more interesting. And it
actually follows the general principle which is that you learn more by active
engagement rather than passive listening. >> So, what do you do to get into and
take advantage of diffuse mode thinking? I find that when I'm jogging, or out

getting exercise, that it's a wonderful way to get the mind disengaged, from the
normal train of thought. And I find that it's very very possible to to sort of come
up with new thoughts, new ideas. And it's almost as if your brain goes into a
new mode, you're running along, things are passing you by. And you start
thinking about what's happening. For example, things that, that your brain has
been working on, your out of conscious thoughts bubble to the surface. And
often new ideas that are going to be then helpful to you later on. The only
problem I have is remembering all those great ideas. Because when I get back
and take a shower, then a lot of them have evaporated. And that's why I, I like to
take a little notebook along with me, so I can take notes and remember what it is
that I was thinking about. >> So, do you multitask, or, or if you don't, how do
you resist the urge to multitask when you want to multitask? >> Well, I wouldn't
survive if I didn't multitask. And most of my talking with students, listening to
lectures, interacting with a lot of people who are passing through, visitors.
There's just a lot things that are bombarding you, email, texting any these are
very important things that you want to do, but if you can't juggle them, it's hard
to get through the day. However, I, I enjoy the evenings when the hubbub of the
day quiets down, and I get a chance to go into a, a more reflective mode, and
that's when I actually get my best work done. >> Do you do two things at the
same time ever? >> Well, you know, you can't actually do two things,
consciously, at the same time, because those will get mixed up. It, its is possible
with a lot of training, actually, to do two things at once, is, but it's, it's, you're not
doing it efficiently. For me, multitasking is, is being able to switch back and
forth, context switching from one topic to another. And some people are better at
that than others. In other words sometimes takes a while to get into the swing of
things if you're in, in the middle of writing a paper. For example it may take
hours before you get to the point where you can actually be productive in area,
actually able to get something accomplished. But if, if, if you can you know
after getting lay you know, into the middle of something switching from that to
another task. Is, is sometimes very difficult to do, if, if you're, if, if you're
middle of something. But, I can do that very easily. I can switch back and forth.
And I seem to be able to go back to the original task, and, and, and take up
where I left off. So, so that's one way of, of accomplishing a lot and I get I have,
fortunately I have a lot of very good students and helpers. And enormously
productive environment that I'm working in, so it's been, it's really a joy to be
here. >> How do you apply your knowledge of neuroscience, to your own
learning? Well, you know, I think there are many little ways that, I have applied
what I've actually learned in the lab, and let me give you just one example to
make it concrete. One of my colleagues at the Salk Institute, Rusty Gage, made
a very important discovery. If you read the textbooks, it will tell you that all the
neurons that you have in your brain you had a birth. And after birth, the wiring
takes place and learning, and that changes at the, the connections between the
neurons. But the, but they're the same old neurons that you had when you were

born. Some die. You know, so there is shrinkage of your, of your cortex.
However, Rusty discovered that, in an important part of your brain for learning,
and memory, the Hippocampus. And which is located right in the middle here, of
this model brain. New neurons are being born, even in your adulthood. And,
this, this is very important for learning and memory. It is obviously something
that is very, very useful to be able to have new neurons. Now here's what we
discovered together. We discovered that. If you have a animal, we use a, a rat as
our model system. And, if you give it an enriched environment, in which the rat
is able to move around, and do things, and interact with other rats. That, and
then look in the hippocampus, you find that the hip, the, the strengths of the
connections between the neurons, is much stronger there. It, it can be made by a
factor of two, much stronger than in a rat that has been kept in a cage where
there is impoverished environment. Now, and here's now the, the key, okay so
having an [UNKNOWN] environment is, is, is even as an adult is going to help
you. Right? Instead of locking yourself monk in the room you really want to be
surrounded by other people who ar stimulating you. And events that are
happening that you can actively participate in, so, so that important. Now here is
something Rusty discovered which I think is incredibly important. That in the
absence of the earth's environment exercise will also increase the number of new
neurons that are being born and survive. And, so I, am very, avid at running. I've
already mentioned that get lots of good ideas when I run, but I also, know, that
my brain is, helping me remember things, because of the fact that I have new
neurons being born, and surviving in my hippocampus. So that's one of many
examples that I can point to, in which what we've learned about neuroscientists,
from neuroscience, has really changed the way I think and its a pity if you look
at the way our, our new educational reforms and schools. What do they cut out
when they want to add a new, a, session for example learning something, for
example, how to pass a test, right. Tests are being given now to help assess, how
well the student is doing and how well a school is doing. Well, it's recess. And
what happens during a recess? Exercise. It's running around. It's exactly what
you need, what our brain needs. It needs that moment of pause of, of using your
muscles rather than your brain. To be able to process that information and to,
and, and get the neurons working on it. So I think that this is, again something
that is, should be a policy that we need to have our children out there running
around. >> Have there been any special techniques you've acquired over the
years that help you focus, learn or create more effectively. I find that, being in a,
a creative environment, where other people, are, are creative is, is, is a way of,
enhancing your own creativity. I, I think that. Although the image we have of the
creative thinker as being isolated genius may be true of some people, it's not true
of me. I really find that I have better ideas if I'm talking to somebody, and trying
to explain to them my ideas. Often, that process can, it boosts the creative
process and the facts, I think that you know, having other people around to
bounce your ideas off of is really for me a very, very important part of doing

science. >> How about test taking? Any special advice there? >> Tests are like
any other skill. You can learn them. You can learn to, to be a better test taker.
And, and you have a lot of good ideas about that. I, I v, v, discovered that the, th,
what things you need to avoid for example. Don't get hung up if you cannot
answer a question. Go on to the next, because you can always come back and in
fact, often, the answer to the problem that was holding you back may actually
pop in to your brain later on in the test. This is how our brains work, things work
along parallel tracks. How do you approach your creative work in science? How
do you keep yourself creative in the face of the onslaught of more routine day by
day tasks? >> I've been very fortunate, because I have great lab, and my students
and colleagues, keep me young in terms of learning new things, looking at
things with new perspectives. So, I think that having youth around really is a, a
great way to keep yourself youthful. >> If you had any advice for a young high
school or college student, about how to learn effectively, what would you say?
>> That success isn't necessarily come by being smart. I know a lot of smart
people who are not successful. But I know a lot of people, who are very, very
passionate. And persistent. A lot of success in life is that passion and persistence,
of really staying the course, staying working on it, and, not letting go. Not
giving up. That's really, I think the most important, quality that I see in students,
that I work with, who are successful. >> Terry, I cannot thank you enough, for
your great answers, that I think people will find very helpful. >> Wonderful,
now I want to, this is, give a little intro here. I'd like to introduce you to Francis
Crick's brain. So, I first met Francis 30 years ago, and this brain was sitting in
his office. And, Francis was a close colleague of, I, moved here about 25 years
ago, and got to know Francis much much better. And one day, we were chatting,
and Francis pointed out this brain that had been sitting there for decades and said
Terry do you know that I just recently realized that this brain is much bigger
than a real brain. And in fact you could not fit this brain in my skull if you
actually look at the relative sizes. It's, it's, this is a teaching tool for medical
students. You know, you could take apart the different parts of the brain. But it's
interesting that Francis Crick didn't realize that until much, much later, when he
actually looked at it with new eyes. And so, you know, this is something about.
Learning with fresh new eyes. >> Isn't it extraordinary, even in a Nobel Prize
winning discoverer of DNA. >> Well, there are things to discover every day
about things around us, ordinary things, that you just have to look at them with a
different set of eyes and a different perspective. [BLANK_AUDIO]
Although living brains are pretty complex, this week we've used metaphor and
analogy and zombies to help simplify matters. In essence, people have two
fundamentally different modes of thinking that, for the purpose of this course,
we've labeled focused and diffuse. We used a simple pinball analogy to help us
understand the differences between the modes. The focused mode has tight
spacing for the rubber bumpers which seems to, in some sense, help keep your
thoughts concentrated. The diffuse mode, on the other hand, has more widely

spaced bumpers that allow for more broad ranging ways of thinking. The
focused mode is centered more in the prefrontal cortex, and it often seems to
involve thinking about things you're somewhat familiar with. For example, if
you're familiar with multiplication and you're trying to solve a multiplication
problem or you're trying to find a word that rhymes with another word. You're
probably stepping along the somewhat familiar pathways of the focused mode.
But if you're trying to solve or figure out something new, it often cries out for
the more broad ranging perspectives of the diffuse mode. This mode, as it turns
out, is representative of the brain's many neural resting states. Creative thinkers
throughout history, whatever their discipline, have found ways to access the
diffuse mode, often more directly and quickly. But we all access this mode quite
naturally when we do things like go for a walk or take a shower or even just drift
off to sleep. When we find ourselves stuck on a problem, or even if we're unsure
of a situation in the course of living our daily life, it's often a good idea, once
you've focused directly on the situation, to let things settle back, and take a bit
more time. That way, more neural processing can take place, often below
conscious awareness in the diffuse mode. The thing is, it often takes time for
neural processing to take place, and time as well to build the new neural
structures that allow us to learn something new. This is why tackling
procrastination is so very important. The easiest way to tackle procrastination is
to use the Pomodoro Technique. That brief 25 minute stretch of focused
concentration, followed by a bit of mental relaxation. It's through practice and
repetition that we can help enhance and strengthen the neural structures we're
building as we're learning something new. Practice and repetition is particularly
important for more abstract topics. Memory, of course, is an important aspect of
learning. There are four slots in our working memory. Things can fall out of
those slots unless we keep repeating them to hold them in mind. In that sense,
working memory is like a not very good blackboard. Long term memory, on the
other hand, is like a storage warehouse. If you practiced and repeated something
well enough to get it into long term memory, you can usually call it up later if
you need it, although you may need an occasional bit of repetition to freshen the
memory up. It's never a good idea to cram your learning by repeating things
many times all in one day. Because that's like trying to build muscle by lifting
weights all in one day. There's no time for solid structures to grow. We've also
learned of the importance of sleep in washing away the toxins that develop
during our day's activities. You want to avoid taking tests or doing anything
difficult with little sleep the night before, because it's like trying to think with
poison on the brain. And just as importantly, exercise is surprisingly valuable in
helping improve both our memory and our ability to learn. We've had a lot of
fun while learning this week, I'll bet you'll find next week's material to be even
more exciting. I'm Barbara Oakley, thanks for learning how to learn.
[SOUND]. This week, we're going to be talking about chunks, compact
packages of information that your mind can easily access. We'll talk about how

you can form chunks, how you can use them to improve your understanding of,
and creativity with the material, and how chunks can help you do better on tests.
We'll also talk about illusions of competence in learning. This was when you're
using ineffective study methods that fool your mind into thinking you're learning
something when you're mostly just wasting your time. We'll cover what those
less effective study methods are and tell you what methods research has shown
will work better to help you in your studies. Finally we'll talk about something
called overlearning, which can solidly ingrain information in your mind, but also
can be a little like digging deeper ruts as you might spin your wheels
ineffectively in learning. You can make your study time more valuable by
interleaving, providing intelligent variety in your studies. I'm Barbara Oakley.
Thanks for learning how to learn.
[SOUND] In this video, we're going to answer the question. What is a chunk?
When you first look at a brand new concept it sometimes doesn't make much
sense, as shown by the jumbled puzzle pieces here. Chunking is the mental leap
that helps you unite bits of information together through meaning. The new
logical whole makes the chunk easier to remember, and also makes it easier to
fit the chunk into the larger picture of what you're learning. Just memorizing a
fact without understanding or context doesn't help you understand what's really
going on or how the concept fits together with other concepts you're learning.
Notice there are no interlocking puzzle edges on the puzzle piece to help you fit
it to other pieces. We talked earlier about working memory and how those four
slots of working memory appear to hang out in the part of your brain right
behind your forehead known as the prefrontal cortex. When you're focusing your
attention on something it's almost as if you have an octopus. The octopus of
attention that slips it's tentacles through those four slots of working memory
when necessary to help you make connections to information that you might
have in various parts of your brain. Remember, this is different from the random
connections of the diffuse mode. Focusing your attention to connect parts of the
brain to tie together ideas is an important part of the focused mode of learning. It
is also often what helps get you started in creating a chunk. Interestingly when
you're stressed your attentional octopus begins to lose the ability to make some
of those connections. This is why your brain doesn't seem to work right when
you're angry, stressed, or afraid. Chunks are pieces of information,
neuroscientifically speaking, through bound together through meaning or use.
You can take the letters P-O and P and bind them together into one conceptual
easy to remember chunk, the word pop. [SOUND] It's like converting a, a
cumbersome computer file into a ZIP file. Underneath that single pop chunk is a
symphony of neurons that have learned to sing in tune with one another. The
complex neural activity that ties together our simplifying abstract chunks of
thought. Whether those thoughts pertain to acronyms, ideas, or concepts are the
basis of much of the science, literature, and art. Let's say you want to learn how
to speak Spanish. If you're a child hanging around a Spanish speaking

household, learning Spanish is as natural as breathing. Your mother says, mama.

And you say, mama, right back to her. Your neurons fire and wire together in a
shimmering mental loop cementing the relationship in your mind between the
sound mama and your mother's smiling face. That scintillating neural loop is one
memory trace, which is connected of course to many other related memory
traces. The best programs for learning language, such as those of the Defense
Language Institute where I learned Russian, incorporate structured practice that
includes repetition and rote focus mode learning of the language along with
more diffuse-like free speech with native speakers. The goal is to embed the
basic words and patterns so you can speak as freely and creatively in your new
language as you do in your native language. As it turns out one of the first steps
towards gaining expertise in academic topics is to create conceptual chunks,
mental leaps that unite scattered bits of information through meaning. The
concept of neural chunks also applies to sports, music, dance, really just about
anything that humans can get good at. Basically, a chunk means a network of
neurons that are used to firing together so you can think a thought or perform an
action smoothly and effectively. Focused practice and repetition, the creation of
strong memory traces, helps you to create chunks. The path to expertise is built
little by little, small chunks can become larger, and all of the expertise serves to
underpin more creative interpretations as you gradually become a master of the
material. In other words, as you'll see later, practice and repetition in building
chunks aren't all you need to become a truly creative master of the material
you're learning. Chunking helps your brain run more efficiently. Once you chunk
an idea, a concept, or an action, you don't know need to remember all the little
underlying details. You've got the main idea, the chunk, and that's enough. It's
like getting dressed in the morning. You just think one simple thought like, I'll
get dressed, but it's amazing when you realize the complex swirl of underlying
activities that take place with that one, simple chunk of thought. Next, we'll talk
about how you can form a chunk. I'm Barbara Oakley. Thanks for learning how
to learn. [BLANK_AUDIO]
In this video, we're going to give you a little background about how to make a
chunk. If you're learning to play a difficult song on the guitar, the neural
representation of the song in your mind can be considered as a rather large
chunk. You would first listen to the song. Maybe you'd even watch someone else
playing the song especially if you were just a beginner who was learning things
like, how to hold the guitar. Getting an initial sense of the pattern you want to
master for yourself is similar for most subjects or skills. You often have to grasp
little bits of songs that become neuro many chunks, which will later join
together into larger chunks. For example, over several days, you might learn
how to smoothly place the musical passages on a guitar, and when you've
grasped those passages, you could join them together with other passages that
you've learned, gradually putting everything together so you can play the song.
In learning a sport, say basketball, soccer, golf. You grasp and master various

bits and pieces of the skills you need. You're creating little neural mini chunks,
that you can then gradually knit together into larger numeral chunks. Later you
can hit those larger chunks into still larger and more complex chunks that you
can draw up in an instant, in reaction to say to a slight, shift and twist in a soccer
ball that's coming your way. The best chunks are the ones that are so well
ingrained, that you don't even have to conscientiously think about connecting
the neural pattern together. That actually is the point of making complex ideas,
movements or reactions into a single chunk. You can see this in language
learning,. In the beginning often just saying a single word the proper nuance,
tone and accent involves a lot of practice. Stringing [UNKNOWN] sentences
together involves the ability to creatively mix together various complex minichunks and chunks in the new language. To see what I mean, try repeating the
following tongue-twister in the Indiana language of Kannada. >> Hi, I am
[UNKNOWN]. I am native speaker of Kannada which is one of the oldest
language spoken in India. Today, I'm going share you a tongue-twister in
Kannada. So let's get started. [FOREIGN] >> Not easy, is it? Unless you are a
native speaker of Kannada, but the language was learned bit by bit. Learning in
math and science involves the same approach. When you're learning new math
and science material, you're often given sample problems with worked out
solutions. This is because, when you're first trying to understand how to work a
problem, you have a heavy cognitive load. So it helps to start out with a work
through example. It's like first listening to a song before trying to play the song
yourself. Most of the details of the work out solution are right there, and your
job is simply to figure out why the steps are taken the way they are. They can
help you see the key features, and underline principles of a problem. One
concern about using worked out examples in math and science to help you in
starting to form chunks, is that it can be all too easy to focus too much on why
and individual step works and not on the connection between steps. That is. On
why this particular step is the next thing you should do. So keep in mind that I'm
not just talking about a cookie-cutter, just-do-as-you're told, mindless approach
when following a worked-out solution. It's more like using a road map to help
you when traveling to a new place. Pay attention to what's going on around you
when you're using the map, and soon you'll find yourself able to get there on
your own. You'll even be able to figure out new ways of getting there. Next,
we'll walk you through the actual steps of chunk formation. I'm Barbara Oakley.
Thanks for learning how to learn. [MUSIC] Hey little girl sometimes the times
get hard but soon the storm will pass and you'll be playing in the yard. Hey little
girl sometimes you might feel sad but some day you'll realize it really ain't that
bad. [MUSIC]
[SOUND] In this video I'm going to walk you through the basic steps behind
how to make a chunk. Every discipline is a little different. Chunking in the
subject of history, for example, is quite different from chunking in chemistry or
in karate. In my explanations here, I'm going to lean a little more towards

explaining chunking of mental ideas rather than physical body motions. But
you'll see that the two approaches are closely related. So, whether you're
learning something mental or something physical, you'll find some helpful ideas
here. The first step on chunking is simply to focus your undivided attention on
the information you want to chunk. If you had the television going on in the
background, or you're looking up every few minutes to check or answer your
phone or computer messages, it means you're going to have more difficulty in
making a chunk, because your brain is not really focusing on chunking the new
material. When you first begin to learn something, you're making new neural
patterns and connecting them with preexisting patterns that are spread through
many areas of the brain. Your octopus tentacles, so to speak, can't reach very
well if some of them are off on other thoughts using up some of the limited slots
in your working memory. The second step in chunking is to understand the basic
idea you're trying to chunk, whether it's understanding a concept such as
continental drift, seeing the connection between the basic elements of the plot
for a story, grasping the economic principle of supply and demand, or
comprehending the essence of a particular type of math problem. Students can
often synthesize the gist, that is figure out the main idea or ideas, pretty
naturally. Or at least they can grasp those ideas if they allow the focused and
diffuse modes of thinking to take turns in helping them figure out what's going
on. Understanding is like a superglue that helps hold the underlying memory
traces together. It creates broad encompassing traces that can link to other
memory traces. Can you create a chunk if you don't understand? Yes, but it's
often a useless chunk that won't fit in with, or relate to other material of your
learning. That said, it's important to realize that just understanding how a
problem was solved, for example, does not necessarily create a chunk that you
can easily call to mind later. Don't confuse the ha, of a breakthrough in
understanding, with solid expertise. That's part of why you can grasp an idea
when a teacher presents it in class, but if you don't review it fairly soon after you
first learned it, it can seem incomprehensible when it comes time to prepare for
a test. In math and science related subjects, closing the book and testing yourself
on whether you, yourself, can solve the problem you think you understand, will
speed up your learning at this stage. You often realize the first time you actually
understand something is when you can actually do it yourself. It's the same in
many disciplines, just looking at someone else's painting doesn't mean you could
actually create that painting yourself, and just hearing a song won't give you the
expertise you need to sing it in the same resonant fashion. >> [MUSIC] >> Just
because you see it or even that you understand it, it doesn't mean that you can
actually do it. Only doing it yourself helps create the neural patterns that
underlie true mastery. The third step to chunking is gaining context, so you can
see not just how, but also when to use this chunk. Context means going beyond
the initial problem and seeing more broadly, repeating and practicing with both
related and unrelated problems, so that you can see not only when to use the

chunk, but when not to use it. This helps you see how your newly formed chunk
fits into the bigger picture. In other words, you may have a tool in your strategy
or problem solving tool box, but if you don't know when to use that tool, it's not
going to do you a lot of good. Ultimately, practice helps you broaden the
networks of neurons that are connected to your chunk, ensuring it's not only
firm, but also accessible from many different paths. As you can see from this top
down, bottom up illustration, learning takes place in two ways. There's a bottom
up chunking process, where practicing repetition can help you both build and
strengthen each chunk, so you can easily access it whenever you need to. And
there's also a, a sort of a top down big picture process that allows you to see
what you're learning and where it fits in. Both processes are vital in gaining
mastery over the material. Context is where bottom up and top down learning
meet. To clarify here, chunking may involve your learning how to use a certain
problem-solving technique. Context means learning when to use that technique
instead of some other technique. Doing a rapid two-minute picture walk through
a chapter in a book before you begin studying it, glancing at pictures and section
headings, can allow you to gain a sense of the big picture. So can listening to a
very well organized lecture. These kinds of activities can help you know where
to put the chunks you're constructing, how the chunks relate to one another, just
as you see here, with the image of the man in the car. Learn the major concepts
or points first. These are often the key parts of a good instructor or book
chapter's outline, flow charts, tables, or concept maps. Once you have this done,
fill in the details. Even if a few of the puzzle pieces are missing at the end of
your studies, you can still see the big picture. So there you go. Summing it up,
chunks are best built with focused attention, understanding of the basic idea, and
practice to help you gain mastery and a sense of the big picture context. Those
are the essential steps in making a chunk and fitting that chunk into a greater
conceptual overview of what you're learning. But there's more. I'm Barbara
Oakley. Thanks for learning how to learn. [BLANK_AUDIO]
[SOUND]. In this video, we're going to talk about some essential ideas in
getting your learning on track. The importance of recall, illusions of competence
in learning. Mini-testing and the value of making mistakes. One of the most
common approaches for trying to learn material from a book or from notes is
simply to reread it. But psychologist, Jeffrey Karpickes, has shown that this
approach is actually much less productive than another, very simple, technique.
Recall. After you've read the material, simply look away, and see what you can
recall from the material you've just read. Karpickes research, published in the
Journal Science, provided solid evidence along these lines. Students studied a
scientific text and then practiced it, by recalling as much of the information as
they could. Then they re-studied the text and recalled it again. That is, they tried
to remember the key ideas, once more. The results, in the same amount of time,
by simply practising and recalling the material students learned far more and at a
much deeper level than they did using any other approach. Including simply

rereading the text a number of times. Or drawing concept maps that supposedly
enrich the relationships in the materials under study. This improved learning
comes whether students take a formal test, or just informally test themselves.
This gives an important reminder. When we retrieve knowledge, we're not just
being mindless robots. The retrieval process itself enhances deep learning, and
helps us to begin forming chunks. It's almost as if the recall process helps build
in little neural hooks, that we can hang our thinking on. Even more of a surprise
to researchers, was that the students themselves predicted that simply reading
and recalling the materials, wasn't the best way to learn. They thought, concept
mapping, drawing diagrams that show the relationship between the concepts
would be the best. But if you're trying to build connections between chunks,
before the basic chunks are embedded in the brain, it doesn't work as well. It's
like trying to learn advanced strategy in chess, before you even understand the
basic concepts of how the pieces move. Using recall, mental retrieval of the key
ideas, rather than passive rereading, will make your study time more focused
and effective. The only time rereading text seems to be effective, is if you let
time pass between the rereading, so that it becomes more of an exercise in
spaced repetition. One way to think about this type of learning and recall, is
shown right here. As we mentioned earlier, there are four so slots, in working
memory. When you're first learning how to understand a concept, or technique
to solve a problem, your entire working memory is involved in the process. As
shown by this sort of, mad tangle of connections between the four slots of
working memory. As you begin to chunk the concept, you will feel it connecting
more easily and smoothly in your mind. Once the concept is chunked, it takes up
only one slot in working memory. It simultaneously becomes one smooth strand
that's easy to follow, and to use to make new connections. The rest of your
working memory is left clear. That dangling strand of chunked material has, in
some sense, increased the amount of information available to your working
memory. It's as if the slot in working memory is a hyperlink that's been
connected to a great big web page. Now, you understand, why it is key that you
are the one doing the problem solving or mastering the concept. Not whoever
wrote the solution manual, or book, on whatever subject you're studying. If you
just look at the solution, for example, then tell yourself. Oh yeah, I see why they
did that. Then the solution is not really yours. You've done almost nothing to
knit those concepts into your own underlying neural circuitry. Merely glancing
at a solution and thinking you truly know it yourself is one of the most common
illusions of competence in learning. You must have the information persisting in
your memory if you're to master the material well enough to do well on tests and
to think creatively with it. In a related thing, you may be surprised to learn that
highlighting and underlining must be done very carefully. Otherwise it can not
only be ineffective, but also misleading. It's as if, making lots of motions with
your hand can fool you into thinking you've placed the concept in your brain. If
you do mark up the text, try to look for main ideas before making any marks.

And try to keep your underlining or highlighting to a minimum. One sentence or

less per paragraph. On the other hand, words or notes in a margin that synthesize
key concepts are a very good idea. Jeff Karpicke, the same researcher who's
done such important work related to recall, has also done research on a related
topic. Illusions of competence in learning. The reason students like to keep
rereading their notes or a textbook, is that when they have the book or Google
open right in front of them, it provides the illusion that the material is also in
their brains. But it's not, because it can be easier to look at the book instead of
recalling, students persist in their illusions studying in a way that just isn't very
effective. This is a reminder that just wanting to learn the material, and spending
a lot of time with it, doesn't guarantee you'll actually learn it. A super helpful
way to make sure you're learning and not fooling yourself with illusions of
competence, is to test yourself on whatever you're learning. In some sense, that's
what recall is actually doing. Allowing you to see whether or not you really
grasp an idea. If you make a mistake in what you are doing, it's actually a very
good thing. You want to try not to repeat your mistakes, of course, but mistakes
are very valuable to make in your little self tests before high stakes real tests.
Because they allow you to make repairs and you're thinking flaws bit by bit
mistakes help correct your thinking, so that you can learn better and do better.
As you know now recall is a powerful tool. But here's another tip, recooling
material when you are outside your usual place of study can also help you
strengthen your grasp of the material. You don't realize it, when you are learning
something new you can often take in subliminal cues for the room and the space
around you at the time you were originally learning the material. This can throw
you off when you take tests because you often take tests in a room that's
different from the room you were learning in. By recalling and thinking about
the material when you are in various physical environment, you become
independent of the queues from any one given location. That helps you avoid the
problem of the test room being different from where you originally learned the
material. I'm Barbara Oakley, thanks for learning about learning.
[BLANK_AUDIO] Mistakes are very valuable to make in that you're little, it, it.
[LAUGH]. Okay. Go back to the start of this one.
Welcome back. It is hard to learn when you're not into it. But if it's something
you're really interested in, learning is easy. Why is that? Most of the neurons in
your cortex carry information about what is happening around you and what
you're doing. Your brain also has a set of diffusely projecting system of
neuromodulators, that carry information not about the content of an experience
but it's importance and value to your future, neuromodulators are chemicals that
influence haw a neurons responds to other neurons. And today we will discuss
three of them. Acetylcholine, dopamine and serotonin. Acetylcholine neurons
form neuromodulatory connections to the cortex that are particularly important
for focused learning, when you are paying close attention. These acetylcholine
neurons project widely and activate circuits that control synaptic plasticity.

Leading to new long term memory. Neuromodulators also have a profound

impact on your unconscience mind. One of the great brain discoveries in my
lifetime has been that our motivation is controlled by a particular chemical
substance called Dopamine. Which is found in a small set of neurons in our
brain stem shown here in orange. These dopamine neurons are part of a large
brain system that controls reward learning and in particular in the basal ganglia
which is located in the green region above the dopamine neurons and below the
cortex at the top of the brain. Dopamine is released from these neurons, when
received an unexpected reward. Dopamine signals project widely and have a
very powerful effect I learned. And this is something that also affects decision
making. And even the value of sensory intputs. Dopamine is in the business of
predicting future rewards and not just the immediate reward. This can motivate
you to do something that may not be rewarding right now but will lead to a
much better reward in the future. Addictive drugs artificially increase dopamine
activity and fool your brain into thinking that something wonderful has just
happened. In fact just the opposite has just happened. This leads to craving and
dependence, which can hijack your free will and can motivate actions that are
harmful to you. Loss of Dopamine neurons leads to a lack of motivation. And
something called anhedonia, which is a loss of interest in things that once gave
you pleasure. Severe loss of Dopamine neurons causes resting tremor, slowness,
rigidity, this is called Parkinson's disease. Ultimately it leads to catatonia, a
complete lack of any movement. Dopamine neurons are part of the unconscience
part of your brain. That you learned about in the first week. When you promise
to treat yourself something after a study section you are tapping into your
dopamine system. Serotonin is a third diffused neuromaginatroy system that
strongly affects your social life. In monkey troupes the alpha male has the
highest level of serotonin activity and the lowest ranking male has the lowest
levels. Prozac, which is prescribed for clinical depression, raises the level of
Serotonin activity. The level of Serotonin is also closely linked to risk taking
behavior. With higher risk in lower Serotonin monkeys. Inmates in jail for
violent crimes have some of the lowest levels of serotonin activity in society.
Finally your emotions strongly affect learning as you are well aware. Emotions
were once thought to be separate from cognition but recent research has shown
that emotions are intertwined with perception and attention and interact with
learning and memory. The amygdala an almond shaped structure shown here,
nestled down at the base of the brain is one of the major centers where cognition
and emotion are effectively integrated. The amygdala is part of the limbic
system which together with hippocampus is involved in processing memory and
decision making as well as regulating emotional reactions. You will want to keep
your amygdala happy to be an effective learner. The emotions and your
neurologitory systems are slower than perception and action but are no less
important for successful learning. If you want to learn more about
Acetylcholine, Dopamine, and Serotonin, look them on brainfacts.org. A website

that is filled with valuable facts about your brain. I'm Terry Senofski. Happy
learning, until we meet again.
[SOUND] The ability to combine chunks in new and original ways underlies a
lot of historical innovation. Bill Gates and other industry leaders set aside
extended week-long reading periods so that they can hold many and varied ideas
in mind during one time. This helps generate their own innovative thinking by
allowing fresh in mind not yet forgotten ideas to network amongst themselves.
Basically what people do to enhance their knowledge and gain expertise is to
gradually build the number of chunks in their mind. Valuable bits of
information, they can piece together in new and creative ways. Chess masters,
for example, can easily access thousands of different chess patterns. Musicians,
linguists and scientists can each access similar chunks of knowledge in their
own disciplines. The bigger and more well practiced your chunked mental
library, whatever the subject you're learning, the more easily you'll be able to
solve problems and figure out solutions. As we'll discover soon, chunking isn't
all you'll need to develop creative flexibility in your learning. But it's an
important component. Chunks can also help you understand new concepts. This
is because when you grasp one chunk, you'll find that that chunk can be related
in surprising ways to similar chunks, not only in that field, but also in very
different fields. This idea is called transfer. For example, concepts and problems
solving methods you learned for physics can be very similar to chunked
concepts in business. I've found some aspects of language learning were very
helpful for me when I later began to learn computer programming. A chunk is a
way of compressing information much more compactly. As you gain more
experience in chunking in any particular subject, you'll see that the chunks
you're able to create are bigger. In some sense that the ribbons are longer. Not
only are those ribbons longer, but the neural patterns are in some sense darker.
They're, they're more solid and firmly ingrained. If you have a library of
concepts and solutions internalized as chunked patterns, you can think of it as a
collection or a library of neural patterns. When you're trying to figure something
out, if you have a good library of these chunks, you can more easily skip to the
right solution by metaphorically speaking, listening to whispers from your
diffuse mode. Your diffuse mode can help you connect two or more chunks
together in new ways to solve novel problems. Another way to think of it is this.
As you build each chunk, it is filling in a part of your larger knowledge picture.
But if you don't practice with your growing chunks, they can remain faint, and
it's harder to put together the big picture of what you're trying to learn. In
building a chunked library, you're training your brain to recognize not only a
specific concept, but different types and classes of concepts so that you can
automatically know how to solve quickly or handle whatever you encounter.
You'll start to see patterns that simplify problem solving for you and will soon
find that different solution techniques are lurking at the edge of your memory.
Before midterms or finals it can be easy to brush up and have these solutions at

the mental ready. There are two ways to figure something out or to solve
problems. First there's sequential step by step reasoning, and second through a
more holistic intuition. Sequential thinking, where each small step leads
deliberately towards a solution, involves the focused mode. Intuition on the
other hand often seems to require this creative diffuse mode linking of several
seemingly different focused mode thoughts. Most difficult problems and
concepts are grasped through intuition, because these new ideas make a leap
away from what you're familiar with. Keep in mind that the diffuse mode's semi
random way of making connections means that the solutions they provide
should be very carefully verified using the focused mode. Intuitive insights
aren't always correct. You may think there are so many problems and concepts,
just in a single section or chapter of whatever you're studying, there's just no
way to learn them all. This is where the law of serendipity comes into play. Lady
luck favors the one who tries. Just focus on whatever section you're studying.
You'll find that once you put that first problem or concept in your mental library,
whatever it is, then the second concept will go in a little more easily. And the
third more easily still. Not that all of this is a snap, but it does get easier. I am
Barbara Oakley. Thanks for learning about learning. [BLANK_AUDIO]
[SOUND] When you're learning a new idea, for example a new vocabulary
word. Or a new concept or a new problem solving approach. You sometimes
tend to practice it over and over again during the same study session. A little of
this is useful and necessary, but continuing to study or practice after you've
mastered what you can in the session. Is called overlearning. Overlearning can
have its place, it can help produce an automaticity that can be important when
you're executing a, a serve in tennis, or playing a perfect piano concerto. If you
choke on tests or in public speaking, overlearning can be especially valuable.
Did you know that even expert public speakers practice on the order of 70 hours
for a typical 20 minute TED Talk? Automaticity can indeed be helpful in times
of nervousness. But be wary of repetitive over-learning during a single session.
Research has shown it can be a waste of valuable learning time. The reality is,
once you've got the basic idea down during a session, continuing to hammer
away at it during the same session doesn't strengthen the kinds of long term
memory connections you want to have strengthened. Worse yet, focusing on one
technique is a little like learning carpentry by only practicing with a hammer.
After a while, you think you can fix anything by just bashing at it. Using a
subsequent study session to repeat what you're trying to learn is just fine, and
often valuable. It can strengthen and deepen your chunked neural patterns. But
be wary. Repeating something you already know perfectly well is, face it, easy.
It can also bring the illusion of competence that you've mastered the full range
of material, when you've actually only mastered the easy stuff. Instead, you want
to balance your studies by deliberately focusing on what you find more difficult.
This focusing on the more difficult material is called deliberate practice. It's
often what makes the difference between a good student and a great student. All

of this is also related to a concept known as, Einstellung. In this phenomenon,

your initial simple thought, an idea you already have in mind or a neural pattern
you've already developed and strengthened, may prevent a better idea or solution
from being found. We saw this in the focus pinball picture, where your initial
pinball thought went to the upper part of the brain, but the solution thought
pattern was in the lower part. The crowded bumpers of the focus mode in the
previous patterns you built can create a sort of rut, that prevents you from
springing to a new place where the solution might be found. Incidentally, the
German word, einstellung means installation. Basically you can remember
einstellung as installing a roadblock because of the way you were initially
looking at something. This kind of wrong approach is especially easy to do in
sports and science, not to mention other disciplines. Because sometimes your
initial intuition about what's happening or what you need to be doing is
misleading. You have to unlearn you erroneous older ideas or approaches even
while you're learning new ones. One significant mistake students sometimes
make in learning is jumping into the water before they learn to swim. In other
words they blindly start working on homework without reading the textbook,
attending lectures, viewing online lessons, or, or even speaking with someone
knowledgeable. This is a recipe for sinking, it's like randomly allowing a
thought to kind of pop off in the focus mode pinball machine, without paying
any real attention to where the solution truly lies. Understanding how to obtain
real solutions is important in learning and in life. Mastering a new subject means
learning not only the basic chunks, but also learning how to select and use
different chunks. The best way to learn that is by practicing jumping back and
forth [SOUND] between problems or situations that require different techniques
or strategies, this is called, [SOUND] interleaving. Once you have the basic idea
of a technique down during your study session sort of like, learning to ride a
bike with training wheels, start interleaving your practice with problems of
different types or different types of approaches, concepts, or procedures.
Sometimes this can be a little tough to do. A given section in a book for example
is often devoted to a specific technique so when you flip to that section, you
already know which technique you're going to be using. Still, do what you can
to mix up your learning. In science and math in particular it can help to look
ahead at the more varied problem sets that are sometimes found at the end of
chapters. Or you can deliberately try to make yourself occasionally pick out why
some problems call for one technique as opposed to another. You want your
brain to become used to the idea that just knowing how to use a particular
concept, approach, or problem-solving technique isn't enough. You also need to
know when to use it. Interleaving your studies, making it a point to review for a
test for example, by skipping around through problems in the different chapters
and materials, can sometimes seem to make your learning a little more difficult,
but in reality it helps you learn more deeply. Interleaving is extraordinarily
important. Although practice and repetition is important in helping build solid

neural patterns to draw on, it's interleaving that starts building flexibility and
creativity. It's where you leave the world of practice and repetition and begin
thinking more independently. When you interleave within one subject or one
discipline, you begin to develop your creative power within that discipline.
When you interleave between several subjects or disciplines, you can easily,
more easily make interesting new connections between chunks in the different
fields, which can enhance your creativity even further. Of course it takes time to
develop solid chunks of knowledge in different fields so sometimes there's a
tradeoff. Developing expertise in several fields means you can bring very new
ideas from one field to the other. But it can also mean that your expertise in one
field or the other, isn't quite as deep as that of the person who specializes in only
one discipline. On the other hand, if you develop expertise in only one
discipline, you may know it very deeply, but you may become more deeply
entrenched in your familiar ways of thinking, and not be able to handle new
ideas. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn discovered that most paradigm
shifts in science are brought about by either young people, or people who were
originally trained in a different discipline. They are not so easily trapped by
einstellung. Blocked thoughts due to their preceding training. And of course
there is the old saying that science progresses one funeral at a time, as people
entrenched in the old way of looking at things die off. Finally don't make the
mistake of thinking that learning only occurs in the kinds of subjects you acquire
from teachers or books. When you teach a child how to deal effectively with a
bully, or you fix a leaky faucet, or you quickly pack a small suitcase for a
business trip to Hong Kong. All of these illustrate the outcomes of important
aspects of learning. Physicist Richard Feynman was inspired in his nobel prize
winning work by watching someone throw a dinner plate into the air in a
cafeteria. And Mike Rowe of the television show Dirty Jobs and Somebody's
Gotta Do It, shows how important and exciting learning can be in a variety of
non academic disciplines. I'm Barbara Oakley, thanks for learning about
learning. [BLANK_AUDIO]
[SOUND] In this video, I'm going to synthesize some of the main ideas of this
week's videos. In other words, we'll chunk our week on chunking. Here we go.
Chunks are pieces of information, neuroscientifically speaking, that are bound
together through use and often through meaning. You can think of a chunk as a
scintillating network of neurons that compactly synthesizes key ideas or actions.
Chunks can get bigger and more complex. But at the same time, they're a single
easy to access item that you can fit like a ribbon into the slot on your working
memory. Chunks are best built with focused, undivided attention, understanding
of the basic idea. And practice to help deepen your patterns and to help you gain
big picture context. Simple recall, trying to remember the key points without
looking at the page, is one of the best ways to help the chunking process along.
It seems to help build neural hooks. They help you better understand the
material. Also try recalling material in places that are different from where you

originally learned the material, so it becomes more deeply ingrained and

accessible, regardless of what room you're in. This can be very helpful for tests.
Transfer is the idea that a chunk you've mastered in one area can often help you
much more easily learn chunks of information in different areas that can share
surprising commonalities. Interleave your learning by practicing your choice of
different concepts, approach, and techniques all in one session. Chunks are very
important, but they don't necessarily build flexibility, which is also important in
becoming an expert with the material you're learning. Illusions of competence in
learning. Learn to recognize when you're fooling yourself about whether you're
actually learning the material. Test yourself frequently. Using little mini-tests to
see whether you're actually learning the material, or whether you've been fooling
yourself, thinking you're learning when you're actually not. Recall is actually a
form of mini-testing. Try to avoid depending too much on highlighting, which
can fool you into thinking that the material is going into your brain when it
actually isn't. Mistakes are a good thing to make when you're learning. They
allow you to catch illusions of competence. Avoid practicing only the easy stuff,
which can bring the illusion that you've mastered the material. Deliberately
practice what you find more difficult to gain full mastery of the material.
Einstellung is when your initial thought, an idea you've already had in mind, or a
neural pattern you've already developed well and strengthened, prevents a better
idea or solution from being found. Or keeps you from being flexible enough to
accept new, better, or more appropriate solutions. The Law of Serendipity is
helpful. Lady Luck favors the one who tries. Just pick one tiny thing out to
learn, then another. Just keep trying and you'll be pleasantly surprised at the
results. I'm Barbara Oakley. Thanks for learning about learning.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Dr. Robert Bilder directs the consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics, which
is a team of more than 50 investigators most centered at the University of
California in Los Angeles. This consortium aims to understand
neuropsychological phenotypes on a genome wide scale. Through a combination
of human research, basic research, and informatic strategies. Basically, Dr.
Bilder is digging to create a fundamentally new understanding of how to look at
personality disorders and diseases that have an effect on personality. In this
regard, Dr. Bilder also directs and co-directs a slew of other important centers.
But of the most interest to us, Dr. Bilder is the Director of the Tennanholm
Center for the biology of creativity, one of the most important programs in the
country involved in the study of creativity. So with that, it's a pleasure to speak
here with Dr Robert Bilder. Thank you so much for joining us here today Dr
Bilder. You're one of the world's foremost experts on creativity. So I have a
question for you, sometimes my students will tell me. Now, wait a minute. Other
people have solved this problem before. So, if I think about it and figure out
how to solve this problem, I'm actually not being creative while I'm solving this
problem, because other people have already solved this problem. What are your

thoughts on that situation? >> Well, I think until you've solved the problem
yourself you haven't exercised your brain and made the unique connections in
your brain, that are needed to solve that problem. So, we could distinguish
between those things that are created for the world, which that may not be
creative with respect to everything else that's been done before. But if we think
about what's been done that's unique for you, something new for you and that
has value to you, then that satisfies a criteria for creativity. And it's important for
your, your brain to do that in order to pursue other creative problems. >> Well, I
couldn't agree more. So I, I'm glad you made that point. When you're trying to
learn something new, and you speak publicly, sometimes you, like everyone, is
criticized for it. What advice do you have for handling this kind of criticism? >>
You know, someone told me something that I'm surprised I only heard a few
weeks ago. And they said leadership is the ability to disguise panic. And I think
that if I had to think of all of the occasions i've had when i've had great concerns
about what was going on, or about handling criticisms, and I think that it may
only be through repeated experience that one learns how to cope with that a little
bit better. Always difficult but I think the only advice I can give to others is to
always adopt the same kind of curiosity about your own shortcomings and your
own difficulty getting the big picture and understanding the entire scope of the
problem that you would apply to others and to, to any problem in general. >> I
like that too, sort of be, be willing to accept discomfort sometimes because that's
necessary. You know, some people would say that it's only when you experience
some discomfort that you're actually accomplishing some kind of change. So, to
the extent that one wants to make progress, it's necessarily going to involve
some degree of discomfort. That's the nature of change. Physical change in the
brain has to involve some work and that work has to involve some, some
discomfort. But I couldn't agree more. >> I'm reminded, my old swimming
coach used to say no pain, no gain. >> [LAUGH] Yes, indeed. >> And that may
also be true of the brain. >> Sometimes those old proverbs are really so true.
You know, that's why they're proverbs. You have some very interesting insights
regarding creativity and being disagreeable. Could you give our viewers just a
little bit of insight about that. >> Sure, sure so it's interesting that when we have
studied personality it turns out that their. Our various models of personality, or
temperament or character. But they pretty much all boil down to five factors,
and these have been very reliably seen over time. And the way that I find easiest
to remember those five factors is to use the acronym OCEAN, which stands for
openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticisim. And
now that we've looked at that personality characteristics of people and then tried
to relate their personality characteristics to their degree of creative achievement.
We find that there are two correlations here one of them's not surprising at all.
Openness to a new experience is associated with great achievement. But then we
find something that's perhaps not quite as intuitive, there is a correlation also
with agreeableness but that correlation is negative. So it means that people who

are less agreeable or more disagreeable tend to show higher creative

achievement. And I think that we might consider this to be a facet of
nonconformism. Those who tend to challenge the status quo, challenge models,
and don't believe things just because other people have said them. I think that
these are our folks who are more likely to be creative achievers. I think so, too.
That's, that's a very interesting and it's a counter-intuitive finding. >> Yes.
Usually people think agreeableness is, you know, a nice, positive trait. And,
indeed, agreeableness is a nice, positive trait. yet, there are occasions when
disagreeableness. Can push the envelope, help us to challenge prior conventions
and make the kinds of pushes forward you know, that are outside the box. >> I
think sometimes it's just, it's hard to walk that fine line between being being a,
being agreeable. Because things make sense. And then sometimes stepping back
and being willing to be disagreeable because it doesn't make sense to you, and
then sometimes you find out, actually, it does make sense. But sometimes, you're
right to be disagreeable. So finding that fine line of where to agree and where to
disagree, and being willing to disagree if you think that something is not quite
right,. I think that's an important important line to find. >> Yeah, it's, it's difficult
to know how to balance the correct approach. And indeed, I think that's one of
the cornerstones of creativity, just by following from the root definitions of, of
creativity. Which typically emphasize on the one hand whatever the product is,
to be considered creative has to be new. But then it also has to be useful or
valued by someone. So, this involves a kind of attention between doing
something that may be totally driven by your own vision of things, and those
things that are going to end up being adopted or used by others. So it means that
you can create things that may be novel, wonderful, and strange. But if they're
too novel, too strange, then they're not going to be considered wonderful by
others. So finding this sweet spot in the range between what you find to be the
newest and most valuable and exciting. And what others believe is I think that's
a life long process of, of deliberation and balance. >> That's so true. I, I think
writers in particular, writers and inventors are both, they have to face what other
people's opinions of their work are. And sometimes it's just surprising what
they'll come back with, something that you thought was perfect, a real gem.
People will come back and, and give you insights that allow you to understand
that maybe your perceptions weren't quite right. >> That's right, yeah. I've gotten
that feedback you know quite routinely, and [LAUGH] may be a little defensive
at first. And then, you know try to warm up to it, and try to understand well,
what, what do they have in mind. >> Any particular tips on how you learn most
effectively? >> Well, I think people vary a lot in terms of the degree to which
they are dominated by words or images. You know some verbal versus visual
learning styles. And so I find that I do best if I can go between the two. Because
I love words and language. I was actually once accused by my students of being
a sesquipedalian and got a little plaque from them. I didn't know what
sesquipedalian meant until I got the plaque. And then anybody who watches this

can then look it up. Anyhow I love words, and so there's a nuance there that I
really like. But at the same time I feel like I don't have a complete understanding
unless i've somehow mapped it, graphed it. Or visualized it. And so I like to go
back and forth between those two kinds of approaches. The other thing that I
really like to do, and sometimes we've recommended this in exercises to
enhance creativity. Is to do a powers of ten exercise. And for those who haven't
seen it, there's a great video. You can easily get it online. Well you just look up
powers of ten video I think that will do the job. It basically starts with an
imagine of a man sitting or lying in a hammock. And then the camera zooms ten
feet above, then 100 feet above, then 1,000 feet above, it goes by powers of ten.
Ultimately you're exploring the cosmos in outer space. And then it zooms back
down into the man. Then it goes powers of ten inside the skin. Goes into the cell,
goes down and reveals the molecules, and then finally, and what's really mind
blowing, is how far you have to go when you start getting into subatomic space.
Where you're really surrounded by nothingness. More vast than the universe
itself. So I think that getting that kind of exercise, getting that perspective.
Trying to figure out what's the higher altitude view, stepping back from a
problem and thinking about well, why am I doing this? What's the bigger
picture? But then also drilling into individual facets and details, by zooming in
and zooming out from a problem. I usually find I get a much better idea of the
problem scope and different perspective on that problem. >> That is very worth
while. I've never really thought of problem solving in that perspective. I think
that's maybe a little bit what you do. A bit subconsciousness or is it just naturally
when you get away from the problem. I mean, do you get new perspective when
you're just going out for a walk. Or something like that? But that's an interesting
perspective. Zooming in and zooming out. >> I think the brain probably does
some of this spontaneously and particularly during sleep. Because if you think
about what happens during sleep. You've got a washing away of all of the
conscious, top down, cognitive control over your thoughts. And it probably
permits different neural networks to assemble themselves in ways that may
make sense spontaneously, but are free from the guided process of our top down
mind. And so I think that's one of the reason why people will awake from sleep,
dreams, or other relaxed states, when they're not thinking about problems. And
all the sudden have come up with a solution. All components were there that
required a release at least temporarily of the constraints, that would be applied to
the problem to recognize a new solution. That may be how August Keckalay
recognized the Benzine reign, from seeing that snake biting it's tail. Yeah I think
it's sometimes, I like to think of it as an octopus of attention, and turns off during
sleep. And so the tentacles of the octopus can randomly go about and that's what
helps create some of the innovative new ideas. Well, that's interesting. You were,
I think you were reading my mind because when I was thinking of August
Kekules, who dreamt about a snake biting his tail, I was also thinking of well,
what if instead of a snake biting it's tail, he imagined a spider, or it could have

been an octopus. But, then we'd have a completely different structure of organic
chemistry before us. We would never have discovered the benzene ring. >> Well
that's what they say, insights that rise from the subconscious like that, they are,
they can sometimes be invaluable. But you always gotta check' em because
sometimes they may seem right, but they're not actually right. That's right, yeah.
And there, you know, I'm mindful of speaking of spiders, the fantastic
experiments that were done in the early investigation of LSD, the hallucinogen,
where different drugs were given to spiders and see what impact it had on their
webmaking skills. And while many people felt that they became incredibly
creative while under the influence of LSD, and while many people felt they had
great insights while they're under the influence of LSD, the spiders it turns out,
made really lousy webs when they were under the influence of LSD. And I think
a lot of people who had been putting down what they were thinking about at the
time that they were doing LSD, found later, when they were no longer under the
influence, that the products that they had created were not exactly what they had
hoped. >> That's, that's, I think that's true, there's interesting perspectives from
history of different people's insights whilst under drugs and not under drugs, and
sometimes I think it's, it's actually surprisingly good. But other times, it's
surprisingly terrible. So so there's definitely a mixture there. >> This is, this is
true. I was just reviewing with a class different kinds of visual representations of
dualities or balances between opposing forces. So we were talking about the yen
yang symbol, the Tibetan eternal knot. But one of the symbols that's one of my,
one of my favorites probably because I understand it the least, is the intersecting
gyres or intersecting cones that were described by Yates and his wife George.
And those, those images were probably created while they were under the
influence of opium. >> I will definitely have to go look those up now.
[LAUGH]. >> So, Doctor Bilder, I, I, I so appreciate your, your an abecedary in
polymath. [LAUGH] So I greatly appreciate your insights here, and on behalf of
all the students of learning how to learn. I, I thank you. >> Thank you, Barb. It's
always great talking to you. [BLANK_AUDIO]
Amy Alkon, is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist radio show host,
journalist, book author and blogger. She turns reporting on evolutionary
psychology and behavioral science findings, into an art form, combining great
writing with deep, yet humorous insight. The result provides terrific and
practical advice for how ordinary people can live better lives. Amy's books, I
See Rude People, and most recently, Good Manners for Nice People Who
Sometimes Say the F word. Has helped create a new genre, of insightful humor
based on practical science. Amy may be, as the L.A Weekly put it, Miss Manners
with Things, but I tend to think of her as the literary daughter of Charles Darwin,
and Dorothy Parker. In Amy's work, she's forced to learn fast, reading a new
book every other day or so, even as she's keeping up with her voluminous
writing and radio show hosting. She has a great deal of insight about efficient
learning, so it's a pleasure to speak with her today, about her work. Hi Amy,

thanks so much for taking time from your busy schedule. We know, we both
know we're both writers, that writing is a form of learning and so what I'd like to
know is, how do use the focused and diffuse modes to help you with your
writing and with your learning. >> I'm normally very focused in my writing. It's
a very intense process for me, every hour of writing and so I need to take a break
from that, in order to really have the information be assimilated into me. And so,
what I like to do is to see that I work every day little by little. On a, on a piece of
work that I'm doing. Because then, in the background, when I'm sleeping, when
I'm washing dishes, when I'm doing something other than writing, that
information has a chance to process in my brain. And that's a very important
thing for me. I used to sometimes wait, until the last minute to start writing my
weekly advice column. And this is a huge mistake, because I would fail to take
advantage of the fuse mode, where I would have these sort of l's in my brain,
taking the information, running around, doing something with it. And processing
it, instead I would just be all last minute and I really wasn't as smart in my
writing or my thinking because of that. because I didn't have the extra time. And
it wasn't actual so much it wasn't that I spent so much time, doing extra work it
was just doing it days ahead of time that really made a difference. >> That
sounds like a lot like the way I approach writing as well. Well tell me this, what
do you do to help prevent procrastination when you have the kind of writing job
that you really rather not be doing. >> Well all writing jobs are jobs I'd rather not
be doing. It sometimes you have a beautiful paragraph, it just goes like butter,
it's wonderful, it's funny, it's all together and clear. But usually that's not the
case. And so usually knowing that, I would rather do just about anything than
write. This is the time I sit down to write and I think about lint that must be
lurking behind my furniture. So, what I do is I put on a timer. I set the timer for
an hour, I know other people use different, different times 20 minutes, the
Pomadoro but I like the hour because that gives me enough time to get into flow.
A flow state where I, maybe can lose myself in the work. And sometimes I'll get
going and I just feel dumb and like I making no progress, but I start typing and I
start thinking and eventually something will come and I usually do get to that
state where I get lost in my work and something really wonderful happens. But
you really need to put in that time like that. And not go clean behind your
furniture in order to make the work really work. >> You keep a very fast paced
reading schedule, on top of your regular work, that many people would find
daunting. How do you do it and do you have any special advice for picking out
and remembering key points in books? >> Well one of the really important
things I learned. I used to read whole books even if they were boring and
terrible. And I was reading War and Peace and every other chapter, Napoleon is
there, they're cold, they're feet are wet, and it would, these, these chapters were
just boring to me. So I realized it's okay to skip parts of books, and so now, I
approach a book like I do a buffet. And I, I take the things from it that are
important to me and I skip, I skip the parts that are not. So, when I say I read

probably a book a night, but I don't read the whole book in every case. Some of
them I just open and I see they're not worth very much and I close them right
away. But I think it's very important to even when you're reading a chapter, if
you see a story you've already read it. If you read a lot of science you, you'll
read research that you've read a million times before. I just, lop that off the
chapter and move on to the stuff that I don't know and haven't read. I think it's
really important to be a critical reader in that way. And then, the other question
you asked me. So you asked how do. What was the second question? Sorry. >>
[LAUGH] Do you have any special advice for picking out and remembering key
points in books? >> Well, there aren't so many key points in books. And
sometimes when a book is very important, your point is very important. What
I'll do is I'll write it down. It's really important, writing something down with an
actual pen and ink, remember those? it, it seems to ingrain it into your brain
better. And then what I do, and this maybe seems funny, I tape it on the wall
outside my shower. And I can see it from when I'm in there. And so, I can look
at that idea when I'm there and this is sort of a diffused mode of thinking. I'm not
really focused on it and I'm not as intense as I am when I'm reading the book,
but it's just there. So, I can think about it in a sort of less intense way and, and it
helps me ingrain an idea that maybe is a difficult idea to,otherwise, get. >> Any
particular tips on how you learn most efficiently? >> I will when I read a
passage that I don't quite get, I'll read it a few times because sometimes the first
time, you miss things or it's the language you're not used to. So that's pretty
important. Another thing I'll do, is go to other reference material. Because
sometimes someone is a poor writer, but has some really good ideas. So if I can
understand the things they don't explain well, then I can maybe understand their
idea better. >> That makes sense. finally, do you have any tips related to sleep. I
love sleep. I do about six things well, and one of them is napping. And this was
not always the case. I took a yoga class, which I, I hate yoga, I was horrible, but
the thing I learned to do was to breathe. I learned to slow down my breathing.
And so, in order to sleep. I just slow down my breathing. I'll take, ten really
really slow breaths, and I use that to slow myself down so I can fall asleep and
something very important is not to sleep for too long. Because if you sleep for
too long, you can actually get groggy. So, I set my alarm clock for about 30
minutes and about five minutes of that is getting my dog to come down, because
she sleeps with her little snout on my neck. And she's only five pounds. She's not
a Great Dane. [LAUGH] So, I, I then sleep for maybe 20 minutes, which seems
to be a very good amount of time to give you a reboot. Rather than make you
groggy. >> That all sounds great, and Amy, thank you so very much for all of
these insights. I'm sure they'll be particularly helpful for the writers among us.
So thank you so very much.
[BLANK_AUDIO] This week we're going to be talking about two seemingly
different ideas. Procrastination and memory. But the two topics are intimately
related. Why? Because building solid chunks of long term memory, chunks that

are easily accessible by your short term memory, takes time. It's not the kind of
thing you want to be putting off until the last minute. You already have one good
tool for procrastination. The pomodoro. That powerful 25 minute concentrated
period of energized focus. This week we're going to fill you in with more
information about how procrastination happens and simple ways to tackle it.
And this is key. Ways that don't take much will power, then we'll move on to
talking about some of the best ways to access your brain's most powerful longterm memory systems. I'm Barbara Oakley. Thanks for learning how to learn.
Arsenic is incredibly toxic. For centuries until modern methods of detection
were discovered murderers found it to be a very popular substance. So you can
imagine the shock at the 48th meeting of the German Association of Arts and
Sciences. In 1875 when two men sat in the front of the audience and downed
more than double of deadly dose of arsenic the next day the men were back at
the conference smiling and healthy. How is it possible to take something so bad
for you and stay alive, and even look healthy, despite the damage being done at
a microscopic level to your body? The answer has an uncanny relationship. To
procrastination that's what we're going to be talking about in the next few
videos. You've already learned one handy tool to help you with procrastination
the pomedoral that 25 minute period of uninterrupted focus followed by a bit of
relaxation. This week we're going to learn more. Understanding a little about the
cognitive psychology of procrastination, just like understanding the chemistry of
poison, can help us develop healthy preventatives. In these videos, I'm going to
teach you the lazy person's approach to tackling procrastination. This means
you'll be learning about your inner zombies. The routine, habitual responses
your brain falls into as a result of specific cues. These zombie responses are
often focused on making the here and now better. As you'll see you can trick
some of these zombies into helping you fend off procrastination when you need
to. Not all procrastination is bad. Even if you're pretty good already in handling
procrastination you'll learn some helpful insights here tha can allow you to better
prioritize your learning. The reason that learning to avoid procrastination is so
important is that good learning is a bit by bit activity. You want to avoid
cramming which doesn't build solid neural structures. By putting the same
amount of time into your learning but spacing that learning out by starting
earlier you'll learn better. First things first. Unlike procrastination which is easy
to fall in willpower is hard to come by. It uses a lot of neural resources. You
shouldn't waste willpower on fending off procrastination except when absolutely
necessary. Best of all as you'll see you don't need to. If you'll remember we
procrastinate about things that make us a little bit uncomfortable. You think
about something you don't particularly like and the pain centers of your brain
light up so you shift and narrow your focus of attention to something more
enjoyable. This causes you to feel better. At least temporarily but sadly the long
term effects of habitual avoidance can be nasty. When you put off your studies it
can become even more painful to think about studying it. You can choke on tests

because you haven't laid the firm neural foundations you need. To feel
comfortable with the material. Procrastination can be a single monumentally
important keystone bad habit, a habit in other words that influences many
important areas of your life. If you improve your abilities in this area many other
positive changes will gradually begin to unfold. Procrastination shares features
with addiction. It offers temporary excitement and relief from sometimes boring
reality. It's easy to fool yourself for example into thinking that the best use of
any given moment is. Surfing the web for information instead of actually
reading the textbook or doing the assigned problems. You start to tell yourself
stories. For example you might tell yourself that organic chemistry requires
spacial reasoning your weakness so of course you're doing very poorly at it. You
devise irrational excuses that sound superficially reasonable like if I study too
far ahead of the test I'll forget the material. If you're troubled by procrastination
you may even start telling yourself that procrastination is an innate
unchangeable characteristic. After all if procrastination were easily fixable
wouldn't you have fixed it by now? The higher you go in your studies however
the more important it is to take control of procrastination. Habits that worked in
earlier years can turn around and bite you. What I'll show you in these next few
videos is how you can become. The master of your habit. You should be making
the decisions not your well-meaning but unthinking zombies, your habits. As
you'll see the strategies for dealing with procrastination are simple. It's just that
sometimes they aren't intuitively obvious. So let's return to that story that began
this video. The arsenic eaters started with tiny doses of arsenic. In tiny doses,
arsenic doesn't seem harmful. You can even build up an immunity to its effects.
This can allow you to take larger doses and look healthy, even as the poison is
slowly increasing your risk of. Of cancer and ravaging your organs. In a similar
way procrastinators put off just that one little thing. They do it again and again
gradually growing used to it. They can even look healthy but the long term
effects, not so good. I'm Barbara Oakley thanks for learning how to learn.
[BLANK_AUDIO] Just imagine backing out of a driveway for the first time
ever in your life. For some of you, that might seem like a pretty exciting
proposition. The first time you might do this you would be in hyper alert. The
deluge of information coming at you would make the job seem almost
impossibly difficult. But, once you've chunked how to back up down your
driveway, all you have to do is think, let's go. And, off you go. Your brain goes
into this sort of zombie mode, where it is only semi aware of a few key factors,
instead of being overwhelmed by all the data. It's the same idea with riding a
bicycle. At first, it's really hard, later it's easy. Neuro-scientifically speaking,
chunking is related to habit. Habit is an energy saver for us. It allows us to free
our mind for other types of activities. You go into this habitual zombie mode far
more often than you might think. That's the point of habit, you don't have to
think in a focused manner about what your doing while you're performing the
habit. It saves energy. Habits can be good and bad. They can be brief, like

absently brushing back your hair. Or they can be long, for example when you
take a walk, or watch television for a few hours after you get home from work.
You can think of habits as having four parts.
The first is the cue. This is the trigger that launches you into zombie mode. The
cue may be something as simple as seeing the first item in your to do list. Time
to start next week's homework. Or seeing a text message from a friend. Time to
stop work. A cue by itself is neither helpful or harmful, it's the routine. What we
do in reaction to that cue, that's what matters.
Number 2, the routine. This is your zombie mode. The routine habitual response
your brain is used to falling into when it receives the cue. Zombie responses can
be useful, harmless, or sometimes harmful.
Number 3, the reward. Every habit develops and continues because it rewards
us. It gives us an immediate little feeling of pleasure. Procrastination's an easy
habit to develop because the reward, moving your mind's focus to something
more pleasant, happens so quickly and easily. But good habits can also be
rewarded. Finding ways to reward good study habits is important for escaping
procrastination.
Number 4, the belief. Habits have power because of your belief in them. For
example, you might feel you'll never be able to change your habits of putting off
your studies until late in the day. To change a habit, you'll need to change your
underlying belief. I'm Barbara Oakley, thanks for learning how to learn.
[BLANK_AUDIO] One of the best ways of being effective in your learning is to
use mental tools and tricks to inspire and motivate yourself. First, when it comes
to learning in general, you should realize that it's perfectly normal to start with a
few negative feelings about beginning a learning session.
Even when it's a subject you ordinary like, it's how you handle those feelings
that matters. Researchers have found that nonprocrastinators put their negative
thinking aside saying things to themselves like. Quit wasting time and just get
on with it, once you get going, you'll feel better about it.
If you find yourself avoiding certain tasks because they make you feel
uncomfortable, you should know there's another helpful way to re-frame things.
And that's to learn to focus on process not product. Process means, the flow of
time and the habits and actions associate with that flow of time.
As in, I'm going to spend 20 minutes working. Product is an outcome, for
example a homework assignment that you need to finish. To prevent
procrastination you want to avoid concentrating on product. Instead, your
attention should be on building processes.
Processes relate to simple habits, habits that coincidentally allow you to do the
unpleasant tasks that need to be done. For example, lets say you don't like doing
homework in a particular class. So you put off working on the homework. It's
only five questions you think. How hard could that be? Deep down, you realize
that answering these five questions could be a very lengthy job.

It's easier to live in a fantasy world where the five questions, or the ten page
report or whatever, can be done at the last minute. You're challenge is to avoid
focusing on the product, the answers to the questions. The product is what
triggers the pain that causes you to procrastinate. Instead, you need to focus on
the process or processes.
The small chunks of time you need over days or even weeks to answer the
questions or prepare for tests. Who cares, whether you finish the homework or
grasp the key concepts in any one session. The whole point instead, is that you
calmly put forth your best effort for a short period.
Now process. Notice how in this picture physicist and surfer Garret Lacy is
focused on the moment. Not on the accomplishment of having surfed that wave.
For you, one of the easiest ways to focus on process is to focus on doing a
Pomodoro, a 25 minute timed worked session, not on completing a task.
The essential idea here is that the zombie habitual part of your brain likes
processes because it can march mindlessly along. It's far easier to enlist the
friendly zombie habit to help with a process, then to help with a product.
By focusing on process rather than product, you allow yourself to back away
from judging yourself, am I getting closer to finishing? And instead you allow
yourself to relax into the flow of the work. The key is when a distraction arises
which it inevitably will. Want to train yourself to just let it flow by.
Of course, setting yourself up so that distractions are minimal is also a very
good idea. Many students find that either a quiet space or noise canceling
headphones if, if you can afford them, can be helpful when they're really trying
to concentrate. I'm Barbara Oakley. Thanks for learning above learning.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
[BLANK_AUDIO] In this video, we're going to get into the specifics of
harnessing your zombie powers of habit to help you avoid procrastination while
minimizing your use of willpower. You don't want to do a full scale change of
old habits. You just want to override parts of them and develop a few new ones.
The trick of overriding to habit is to look to change your reaction to a cue.
The only place you need to apply willpower is to change your reaction to the
cue. To understand that, it helps to go back through the four components of habit
and re-analyze them from the perspective of procrastination.
The first one is the cue. Recognize what launches you in to your zombie
procrastination mode. Cues usually fall into one of the four following categories.
Location, time, how you feel and reactions.
Either to other people or to something that just happened. Do you look
something up on the web and then find yourself web surfing? Does a text
message disturb your studying taking you 10 minutes to get back into the flow
of things even when you try to keep yourself on task?
The issue with procrastination is that because it's an automatic habit, you're
often unaware that you've begun to procrastinate. You can prevent the most cues

by shutting off your cell phone or keeping yourself away from the internet and
other distractions for brief periods of time. As when you're doing a pomodoro.
Number two, the routine. Let's say then instead of doing your studies you often
divert your attention to something less painful. Your brain wants to
automatically go into this routine when you've gotten your cue. So this, is the
reaction clue where you must. Actively focus on rewiring your old habit. The
key to rewiring is to have a plan. Developing a new ritual can be helpful. Some
students make it a habit to leave their phone in their car when they head in for
class which removes a potent distraction.
Many students discovered the value of settling into a quiet spot in the library or
closer to home, he productive effects of simply sitting in a favorite chair in a
proper time with all Internet access disconnected.
Your plan may not work perfectly at first, but just keep at it. Adjust the plan if
necessary, and savor those victories when your plan works. Don't try to change
everything at once the Pomodoro Technique can be especially helpful in shifting
your reaction to the cues.
Number three is the reward. This can sometimes require a little bit of
investigation. Why are you procrastinating? Can you substitute in emotional
payoff, maybe a feeling of pride for accomplishing something, even if it's small,
a sense of satisfaction. Can you win a small internal bet or a contest about
something you've turned into a personal game or allow yourself to indulge in a
latte or read a favorite web site, provide yourself, maybe, with an evening of
mindless television or web surfing without guilt, and will you give yourself a
bigger reward for a bigger achievement. Maybe movie tickets or a sweater or an
utterly frivolous purpose. Remember that habits are powerful because they
create neurological cravings. It helps to add a new reward if you want to
overcome your previous cravings.
Only once your brain starts expecting that reward will the important rewiring
take place that will allow you to create new habits. Many people find that setting
a reward at a specific time. For example, breaking for lunch with a friend at the
deli at noon or stopping the main task at 5 p.m., gives a solid, mini deadline that
can help spur work.
Don't feel bad if you find you have trouble getting into a flow state at first. I
sometimes find it takes a few days of drudgery, through a few cycles of the
pomodoro technique before flow begins to unfold. And I find myself starting
work on a new topic. Also remember that the better you get at something, the
more enjoyable it can become.
Number four is the belief. The most important part of changing your
procrastination habit is the belief that you can do it. You may find that when the
going gets stressful. You long to fall back into old, more comfortable habits.
Belief that your new system works is what can get you through. Part of what can
under pin is to develop a new community. Hang out with classmates, or virtually
hang out with bookmates, who may have that can do philosophy that you too

want to develop. Developing and encouraging culture with like-minded friends

can help us remember the values that, in moments of weakness. We tend to
forget. I'm Barbara Oakley, thanks for learning how to learn. [BLANK_AUDIO]
[BLANK_AUDIO] Learning for most people involves a complex balancing of
many different tasks. A good way for you to keep perspective about what you're
trying to learn and accomplish, is to once a week write a brief weekly list of key
tasks in a planner journal.
Then each day on another page of your planner journal, write a list of the tasks
that you can reasonably work on or accomplish. Try to write this daily task list
the evening before. Why the evening before? Research has shown that this helps
your subconscious to grapple with the tasks on the list so you can figure out how
to accomplish them.
Writing the list before you go to sleep, enlists your zombies, that help you
accomplish the items on the list the next day. If you don't write your task down
on a list, they lurk at the edge of the core zone slots of your working memory,
taking up valuable mental real estate.
But once you make a task list, it frees working memory for problem solving. So
let's look at one of my daily task lists. As you can see here, there are only six
items. Some are process oriented. For example, I have a paper due to a journal in
several months. So, I spend a little focus time on most days working towards
completing it.
A few items are product oriented. But that is only because they are doable within
a limited period of time. Note my reminders. I wanted to keep my focus on each
item when I'm working on it. And I want to have fun. I did catch myself getting
sidetracked, because I forgot to shut down my email.
To get myself back into gear, I set a 22 minute Pomodoro challenge, using a
timer on my computer desktop. Why 22 minutes? Well, why not? I, I don't have
to do the same thing each time.
And notice, too, that by moving to Pomodoro mode, I've switched to a process
orientation. None of the items on my list is too big, because I've got other things
going on in my day. Meetings to go to, a lecture to give.
Sometimes I sprinkle a few tasks that involve physical motion on my list, even if
it's just cleaning something. Which, I'll admit, isn't ordinarily one of my favorite
things to do. Somehow because I'm using them as diffuse mode breaks, I often
look forward to them.
Mixing other tasks up with your learning seems to make everything more
enjoyable and keeps you from prolonged and unhealthy bouts of sitting. Over
time, as I've gained more experience, I've gotten much better at gauging how
long it takes to do any given task.
You'll find yourself improving quickly as you become more realistic about what
you can reasonably do at any given time. Make notes in your planner journal
about what works and what doesn't. Notice my goal finish time for the day, 5

p.m. Doesn't seem quite right, does it? But it is right, and it's one of the most
important components of your daily planner journal.
Planning your quitting time is as important as planning your working time.
Generally, I aim to quit at 5 p.m., although when I'm learning something new, it
can sometimes be a pleasure to look at it again after I've taken an evening break,
just before I go to sleep, and occasionally, there's a major project that I'm
wrapping up, like say, this MOOC that has me running into a bit of overtime.
You might think, well, yeah, you know, but you're a professor who's shall we
say, past your youthful study days. Of course an early quitting time is fine for
you.
However, one of my most admired study experts, Cal Newport, used the 5 p.m.,
quitting time through most of his student career. He ended up getting his PhD
from MIT. In other words, this method, implausible though it may seem for
some, can work for undergraduate and graduate students in rigorous academic
programs.
Time after time, those who are committed to maintaining healthy leisure time
along with their hard work, outperform those who doggedly pursue an endless
treadmill. Of course, your life may not lend itself to such a schedule with breaks
and leisure time. You may be running on fumes with two jobs and too many
classes.
But however your life is going, try to squeeze a little break time in. One more
thing. As writing coach Daphne Graygrant recommends to her writing clients,
eat your frogs first in the morning. Try to work on a most important and most
disliked task first. At least just one Pomodoro, as soon as you wake up. This is
incredibly effective. Do you need to sometimes make changes in your plans
because of unforeseen events? Of course, but remember the law of serendipity.
Lady Luck favors the one who tries. Planning well is part of trying. Keep your
eye on your learning goal, and try not to get too unsettled, by occasional
roadblocks. I'm Barbara Oakley. Thanks for learning how to learn.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
[BLANK_AUDIO] Learning will often involves bit by bit, day by day building
of solid neural scaffolds. Rather like a weight lifter builds muscle with day to
day exercise. This is why tackling procrastination is so incredibly important.
You want to keep up with your learning and avoid last minute cramming. So
with that, here's an overview of the key aspects of tackling procrastination.
Keep a planner journal so you can easily track when you reach your goals and
observe what does and doesn't work.
Commit yourself to certain routines and tasks each day.
Write your planned tasks out the night before so your brain has time to dwell on
your goals and help ensure success.
Arrange your work into a series of small challenges.
Always make sure you, and your zombies, get lots of rewards.

Take a few minutes to savor the feelings of happiness and triumph, which also
gives your brain a chance to temporarily change modes.
Deliberately delay rewards until you've finished a task.
Watch for procrastination cues.
Try putting yourself in new surroundings with few procrastination cues, such as
the quiet section of a library.
Gain trust in your new system. You want to work hard during times of focused
concentration and also to trust your system enough so that when it comes time to
relax, you actually relax without feelings of guilt or worry.
Have back up plans for when you still procrastinate. No ones perfect after all.
Eat your frogs first every day.
Happy experimenting. I'm Barbara Oakley. Thanks for learning, how to learn.
In this video and the next, we're going to deeper our understanding of memory.
As you're probably beginning to understand, memory is only part of learning
and developing expertise but it's often an important part. It may surprise you to
learn that we have outstanding visual and spacial memory systems that can help
form part of our long-term memory. Here's what I mean. If you were asked to
look around a house you never visited before, you'd soon have a sense of the
general furniture layout and where the rooms were, color scheme, the
pharmaceuticals in the bathroom cupboard. In just a few minutes, your mind
would acquire and retain thousands of new pieces of information. Even weeks
later, you'd still hold far more in your mind than if you'd spent the same amount
of time staring at a blank wall. Your mind is built to retain this kind of general
information about a place. You can greatly enhance your ability to remember if
you tap into these naturally super-sized, visual, spacial memorization abilities.
Our ancestors never needed a vast memory for names or numbers but they did
need a memory for how to get back home from the three day deer hunt, or for
the location of those plump blueberries on the rocky slopes to the South of the
camp. These evolutionary needs helped lock in a superior where things are and
how they look memory system. To begin tapping into your visual memory
system try making a very memorable visual image representing one key item
you want to remember. For example, here's an image you could use to remember
Newton's second law. F is equal to ma. This is a fundamental relationship
relating force to mass and acceleration. And it only took humans, oh, a couple of
hundred thousand years to figure out. The letter f in the formula could stand for
flying, m could stand for mule, and a, well that's up to you. Part of the reason an
image is so important to memory is that images connect directly to your right
brain's visual spacial centers. The image helps you encapsulate a seemingly
humdrum and hard to remember concept by tapping into visual areas with
enhanced memory abilities. The more neural hooks you can build by evoking the
senses, the easier it will be for you to recall the concept and what it means.
Beyond merely seeing the mule, you can smell the mule, you can feel the same
windy pressure the mule is feeling. [SOUND] You can even, hear the wind

whistling past. The funnier and more evocative the images, the better. Focusing
your attention brings something into your temporary working memory, but for
that something to move from working memory to long term memory two things
should happen. The idea should be memorable. There's a gigantic flying mule
braying f is equal to ma on my couch. And it must be repeated. Otherwise
remember your tiny metabolic vampires, they can suck away the neural pattern
related to that memory before it can strengthen and solidify. Repetition's
important. Even when you make something memorable, repetition helps get that
memorable item firmly lodged into long-term memory. Remember to repeat not
a bunch of times in one day but sporadically over several days. Index cards can
often be helpful. Writing and saying what you're trying to learn seems to
enhance retention. For example, if you're trying to learn concepts in physics you
might take an index card and write the greek letter rho. That's a common
abbreviation for density. You'd write it on one side and you'd write the remaining
information on the other. Handwriting helps you to more deeply encode, that is
convert into neuro-memory structures what you are trying to learn. While you're
writing out the kilograms per cubic meter you might imagine a shadowy
kilogram just feel that mass lurking in an oversize piece of baggage that happens
to be one meter on each side. The more you can turn what you're trying to
remember into something memorable, the easier it will be to recall. You'll want
to say the word and its meaning aloud to start setting auditory hooks to the
material. Next, just look at the side of the card with the Greek letter rho on it,
and see whether you can remember what's on the other side of the card. If you
can't, flip it over and remind yourself what you're supposed to know. If you can
remember, put the card away. Now, do something else. Perhaps prepare another
card and test yourself on it. Once you have several cards together, try running
through them all and even mixing them around to see if you can remember
them. This helps interleave your learning. Don't be surprised if you struggle a
bit. Once you've given your cards a good try, put them away. Wait and take them
out again, maybe before you go to sleep. Remember that sleep is when your
mind repeats patterns and pieces together solutions. Briefly repeat what you
want to remember over several days. Perhaps for a few minutes each morning or
each evening. Gradually extend the time between the receptions as the material
firms itself into your mind. By increasing your spacing as you become more
certain of mastery, you'll lock the material more firmly into place. Great flash
card systems like Anki have build in algorithms that repeat in scale ranging from
days to months. Interestingly, one of the best ways to remember people's names,
is to simply try to retrieve the people's names from memory at increasing time
intervals, after first learning the name. I'm Barbara Oakley. Thanks for learning,
about learning. [BLANK_AUDIO]
Welcome back to Learning How to Learn. What would it be like if you couldn't
learn new things, you would not be able to remember new people you met, or
remember what you were told? This actually happened to a famous patient in the

annals of memory research whose initials were HM. At the age of 27, HM had
an operation for epilepsy that took out his hippocampus on both sides of his
brain. The hippocampus has a shape of a seahorse and is named from the Greek
hippos, meaning horse and kampos, meaning sea monster. The operation was a
success. The epilepsy was cured but the price was steep. HM could no longer
remember new things. He had become profoundly amnesic. Curiously, you
could have a normal conversation with HM, but if you left the room for a few
minutes, he could not remember you or what you had discussed. In the film
Memento, the character played by Guy Pearce had this form of amnesia from a
concussion. Note that he tattooed his body with messages, so that he would not
forget what he had to do. HM could learn other things, like a new motor skill,
but he could not remember having learned it. There are multiple memory
systems for different types of learning. From the studying HM and animals with
similar operations, we have learned that the hippocampus is important part of a
brain system for learning and memory of facts and events. Without the
hippocampus and its inputs, it is not possible to store new memories in the
cortex, a process called memory consolidation that can take many years. HM
could remember things from his childhood but he had trouble remembering
things that had occurred in the years just before his operation, things that had not
yet become fully consolidated. Something similar happens when you have a bad
concussion but this usually resolves, unlike HM who never improved. Memories
are not fixed but living, breathing parts of your brain that are changing all of the
time. Whenever you recall a memory, it changes, a process called,
reconsolidation. It is even possible to implant false memories, which are
indistinguishable from real ones by simply suggesting and imagining, especially
in children who have vivid imaginations. Here is a summary. The green process
of consolidation takes the brain state in active memory and stores it in long term
memory by modifying synapses on the dendrites of neurons. These long term
memories can remain dormant for a long time until the memory is retrieved and
reinstated, by the red process, in short term working memory. The reinstated
memory is in a new context, which can itself be transferred to long term
memory, thereby, altering the old memory though reconsolidation. Our
memories are intertwined with each other. As we learn new things, our old
memories also change. Like consolidation, reconsolidation also occurs during
sleep. This is why it is more effective to space learning over time, rather than
mass learning all at once. If you want to study something for an hour, you will
retain it longer if you spend 10 minutes each month over a semester than an hour
on one day. In contrast, if you wait until the day before an exam to cram the
material, you may be able to retrieve for the next day on the exam but it will
quickly fade from memory. In addition to neurons, brains have several types of
supporting cells called glial cells. The astrocyte is the most abundant glial cell in
the human brain. Astrocytes provide nutrients to neurons, maintain extra cellular
ion balance, and are involved with repair following injury. In this photo of the

cortex, the astrocytes are staying green and the neurons are blue. The intricate
arms of the astrocytes wrap around the neurons, each embracing thousands of
synapses. A recent experiment suggest that these astrocytes may also have an
important role in learning. When human astrocytes were put into mouse brains,
the humanized mice learned faster. Interestingly, when Einstein's brain was
examined to find out what made him so awesomely creative, the only difference
that could be found was that he had many more astrocytes than the average
human. Could astrocytes be the key to understanding human intelligence. Well,
the more we learn about the brain, the more may we have to rethink learning.
I'm Terry Sejnowski. Happy learning, until we meet again.
In this video, we're going to delve deeper into memory. Another key to
memorization it to create meaningful groups that simplify the material. Let's say
you wanted to remember four plants that help ward off vampires. Garlic, rose,
hawthorn and mustard. The first letters abbreviate to GRHM, so all you need to
do to remember is use the image of a graham cracker. It's much easier to
remember numbers by associating them with memorable events. The year 1965
might be when one of your relatives was born for example. Or you can associate
numbers with a numerical system you're familiar with. For example, 11.0
seconds is a good running time for the 100 meter dash. Or 75 might be the
number of stitches on knitting needle for the ski hats you like to make.
Personally, I like to associate numbers with the feelings of, when was I was or
will be at a given age. The number 18 is an easy one. That's the age when I went
out into the world. By age 104 I hope to be an old, but happy great grandma.
Many disciplines use memorable sentences to help students memorize concepts.
The first letter of each word in the sentence is also the first letter of each word in
a list that needs to be memorized. Medicine, for example, is laden with
memorable pneumatics. Among the cleaner of which are: some lovers try
positions that they can't handle to memorize the names of the carpal bones of the
hand, and old people from Texas eat spiders for the cranial bones. Time after
time, these kinds of memory tricks prove helpful. If you're memorizing
something commonly used, see whether someone has come up with a
particularly memorable memory trick by searching it out online. Otherwise try
coming up with your own. The memory palace technique is a particularly
powerful way of grouping things you want to remember. It involves calling to
mind a familiar place. Like the layout of your house, and using it as a sort of a
visual notepad where you can deposit the concept images that you want to
remember. All you have to do is call to mind the place you're familiar with. Your
home, your route to school, or your favorite restaurant and voila in the blink of
an imaginative eye. This becomes the memory palace that you'll use as your
notepad. The memory palace technique is useful for remembering unrelated
items, such as a grocery list. Milk, bread, eggs. To use the technique, you might
imagine a gigantic bottle of milk just inside your front door. The bread plopped
on the couch and a cracked egg dribbling off the edge of the coffee table. In

other words, you'd imagine yourself walking through a place you know well,
coupled with shockingly memorable images of what you want to remember. If
you're studying Finance, Sociology, Chemistry or what have you, and you have
lists to remember, you could use this same approach. The first time you do this,
it will be slow. It takes a bit of time to conjure up a solid mental image. But the
more you do it, the quicker it becomes. One study showed that a person using
the Memory Palace technique could remember 95% of a 40 to 50 item list after
only one or two mental practice walks, where the items were placed on the
grounds of the local university. In using the mind this way, memorization can
become an outstanding exercising creativity that simultaneously build neural
hooks for even more creativity. Purists might sniff that using oddball
memorization gimmicks isn't really learning. But researchers show that students
who use this kind of tricks outperform does who don't. In addition, emerging
imaging research learn how people become experts, shows that such memory
tools speed up the acquisition of both chunks and big picture templates. Helping
transform novices to semi experts much more quickly, even in a matter of
weeks. Memory tricks allow people to expand their working memory with easy
access to long term memory. What's more, the memory process itself becomes
an exercise in creativity. The more you memorize using these innovative
techniques, the more creative you become. This is because you're building these
wild, unexpected possibilities for future connections early one. Even as your
first internalizing the ideas, the more you practice this type of memory muscle
so to speak, the more easily you'll be able to remember. Where at first it may
take 15 minutes to build an evocative image for an equation and embed it say, in
the kitchen sink of your memory palace, it can later take only minutes or
seconds to perform a similar task. You'll also realize that as you begin to
internalize key aspects of the material. Taking a little time to commit the most
important points to memory. You come to understand it much more deeply. The
formulas will mean far more to you, then they would if you simply looked them
up in a book. And you'll be able to sling around those formulas around much
more proficiently on tests and in real world applications. You may say, well,
you're just not that creative, an equation or theory could hardly have it's own
grandiose motivations or persnickeity emotional needs to help you understand
and remember it. But always remember, your childlike creativity is still there
inside you. You just need to reach out to it. I'm Barbara Oakley. Thanks for
learning how to learn. [BLANK_AUDIO]
[BLANK_AUDIO] Learning to use your memory in a more disciplined yet
creative manner helps if you learn to focus your attention, even as you create
wild defuse connections that build stronger memories. Here are the key ideas
about memory we've covered. In this course, we discussed two main memory
systems involved in your ability to chunk concepts. The first is long term
memory, which is like a storage warehouse. You need to practice and repeat in
order to store items in long term memory so you can retrieve them more easily.

Practicing and repeating, all in one day, is a bad idea. You want to extend your
practice to several days. This is why tackling procrastination is important. It
helps you build better memories. Because you start earlier. The second, is
working memory, which is like a poor blackboard that quickly fades. You can
only hold about four items in your working memory. When you master a
technique or concept in some sense, it compacts the ideas so they can occupy
less space in your working memory when you do bring them to mind. This frees
your mental thinking space so that it can more easily grapple with other ideas.
We have outstanding visual and spatial memory systems. If you tap into those
systems, it will help improve your memory. To begin tapping into your visual
memory system, try making a very memorable visual image representing one
key item you want to remember. Beyond merely seeing, try to feel, to hear and
even to smell something you're trying to remember. The funnier and more
evocative the image is, the better. As always, repetition over several days is
really helpful. Another key to memorization is to create meaningful groups that
simplify the material. Try associating numbers with years or with systems you're
familiar with like running times. Many disciplines use memorable sentences.
The memory palace technique, placing memorable images in a scene that's
familiar to you, allows you to dip into the strength of your visual memory
system, providing a particularly powerful way of grouping things you want to
remember. By making meaningful groups and abbreviations, you can simplify
and chunk what you're trying to learn so you can more easily store it in memory.
And by memorizing material you understand, you can internalize the material in
a profound way. You're reinforcing the mental library you need to become a
genuine master of the material. Happy memories, I'm Barbra Oakley, thanks for
learning how to learn.
>> Dr. Robert Gamache was named by Thomson Reuters as one of the world's
most influential scientific minds for 2014. He's also currently the Associate Vice
President of Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, and International Relations at
the University of Massachusetts, while simultaneously serving as a professor in
the Department of Environmental Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Despite Dr.
Gamache long experiences in administrator, he was also the dean of the
University of Massachusetts School of Marine Sciences for close to a decade,
Dr. Gamache is also clearly a very active researcher. Of the list of the ten more
cited publications by the University of Massachusetts Lowell faculty compiled
in 2011, he was a coauthor on five of the ten, including the top three papers. Dr.
Gamache is current work relates to the problem of line shapes from molecules.
Ultimately, this work is important in understanding planetary atmospheres. In
support of missions for NASA and the European Space agency. Professor
Gamache is married to Suzanne and has two children, Justine and Peter, and a
very clever dog, Newton, who helps professor Gamache to explain Newton's
laws to his classes. With that, let's begin our questions. Dr. Gamache, I'm so glad
to have you here. And let's start with our first question, which is you're bilingual

in French and English. Can you talk a little bit about that bilingual background
and how it might inform your learning in both the sciences and, and overall? >>
Sure. There are a few interesting points of my study of French. I've had the
opportunity to work in France often, and early on I decided I would learn the
language. I was in my late 30s at the time. [COUGH] First, let me say that I'm
dyslexic and as a child I had. Really a lot of trouble learning English, spelling,
grammar, reading. I still have trouble reading. I'm a little bit slower than most
people, especially with the precision needed for reading scientific articles. But
my study of French really enforced my learning of English. And I'm really
grateful for, for that. In terms of learning, I use a bilingual as an example of why
students should study every subject every day. When I say this to students I of,
often get a very strange looks. And I explain that no, I'm not saying study for six
hours out of class every day but, you should do the homework that's needed and
spend at least 15 minutes on every subject. And I use being bilingual as an
example. When I go to France, my first couple of days I struggle to find words.
After a few days, it's kind of smooth. What's interesting is when I come back to
the United States, my first few days in the United States, I do the same thing. I'll
have a colleague or a student come in my office and ask me a question. And my
mind is just racing, looking for the English word. Thank goodness after a few
days it's, it's okay. So, why is it we can speak English without thinking? And,
you know, the answer is that we're using it all the time. So it's just there in our
brain. So the example I used for them is if you study chemistry every day, you,
it's right there in your brain. You don't have to search for things. The same thing
with work with physics, or biology, or psychology, or history, any subject. If you
study it every day, it's just there in your brain and you don't have to do a lot to
recall information. It's just there. >> You know, sometimes I think of it as like
strumming a guitar. After you strum it, it resonates and it continues to, to
resonate and send out the sound, and I almost think that that's what we're doing
with our own brains when we're just keeping something in mind, we're keeping
those neurons resonating a little bit so they don't sort of die away and, and go off
to do other things. So, I, I think that's a vitally important piece of advice. You
observe that when you first began studying in the Sciences, you stumbled across
some particularly effective techniques. Can you tell us a little bit about those
techniques? >> sure. I mean, the correct word here is stumbled. Because when I
was an undergraduate, there was on a lot of research on how we learn, and the
things I did, I just stumbled upon them. Now they are backed by research, and
you, you show a number of these things in your book and I can attest that they
work. So when I was an undergraduate I was taking physical chemistry in my
third year and I became fascinated with the fact that you could take equations,
you could take simple rules of physics. And with that, you could derive other
equations. And what I did is I started doing every problem in the textbook. At
first, it was a little difficult but with time, I could do problems as fast as I could
look at them. So, I noticed that problem solving in other courses at the same

time became easier. It was later in graduate school that I found that there was
research and this repetition actually hard-wires your brain. So in my case, I
hardwired my brain to solve problems. >> Precisely. I, I think it's almost like
again, like learning an instrument. By practicing continuously, you can bring
those, those parts of a melody to mind instantly, and, and play them and fit them
together in new ways more easily, and that can be a very effective technique for
learning. Can you talk a little bit about how some of these techniques which you
applied in science? Also can be useful in the Humanities and the Social
Sciences? >> Well, yes they are. And, you know, the interesting point is, while I
was doing this and I was hard wiring my brain to solve problems. And I mention
problem solving in other disciplines became easier. So it does spill over and, you
now, this technique is, is not unique to science. This, this would work with any
subject matter that you would like to study. So I, I do recommend this for my
science students and also for the non-scientists. It's a great strategy to develop
to, to get knowledge in a certain area. And again, one of the big benefits is it
spills over to your other studies. >> Exactly. I think it's very similar to the kinds
of techniques I used when I was learning Russian. I, I tried to do a lot of the
additional practice exercises so that I could stretch my brain a little bit and
become much more comfortable with the things that we were learning. Let me
ask you this now. What kinds of techniques did you develop to handle matters
when you found yourself getting stuck in problem solving in your studies? >>
Again, I have to say my discovery was serendipitous. When I started at UMass
Lowell, I was entering a new field. And the, the early, early stages of that meant
I had a lot of studying to do. So, I would come home from a full day at work,
and I would immediately sit down at my desk. And start studying some more.
And often I would get stuck on, on concepts or stuck on problems then I had to
take a break for dinner or a few times I had friends come over just to say hello.
And what I found was while eating dinner and conversation, suddenly the
answer would just pop up in my mind. And at the time, I would run off and write
it down like I was going to lose it if I didn't do it immediately. But ccc the gears
are always turning in the background. My wife used to joke that I have two
brains. Now when I get stuck, I deliberately take a break and try to do something
just to relax, you know, almost thoughtless, it can be as simply as bouncing a
tennis ball off the wall or something like that. After five to ten minutes, I tend to
go back to the problem with the answer. And sometimes, I have to sleep on it.
There are many mornings when I wake up and suddenly, I have the answer in
my brain. >> Isn't that funny and, and that kind of technique is so useful for so
many different areas. One thing, I love that you mention your family on your
website. It's clear your family is very important to you. How do you balance
your family life and your work life? >> Well, that balance has always been
important to me. I tell my students and my post-docs that as a scientist involved
in research, you're a little like a professional athlete. Every day you have to get
up, and do something that's going to make you a little bit better than the

competition. Young faculty members at research universities live by the mantra

publish or perish. However, this, you know, this is tremendous pressure. But, if
you're working all the time it tends not to be productive. And as I just explained
that downtime can be very beneficial. The gears are always turning. So being
with my wife, playing with my children, or playing with my dogs has, has
always given me a chance to relax my mind to refresh my mind so that when I
do go back to work, I can be productive. >> Has this balance shifted from early
student days? Do you, do you have any particular advice for students who are at
various stages in their life's careers? >> Well, the shift from the early days has
been noticeable. When I was in graduate school, I was in two programs at the
same time. So I was basically a study machine. And that down time with my
wife and my daughter, also playing ice hockey in the winter, tennis in the
summer time. That gave me a chance to, I used to say, you know, get the steam
out. It, it refreshed me enough where I could go back, and the time that I spent
was productive. Now I work as hard but, you know, I have experience so things
that, things happen faster. But, I do realize that the down time is important, and
now I actively seek it out. My advice to students has been, you know, choose a
career that you can do something that you love. When you love something, it's
always easier to learn. I've been really lucky in my 36 plus years here at UMass,
where, you know, I can't remember a single bad day. And I'm sure I probably
had one, but I can't remember it. So, you know, the key point is do something
you love, work hard at it. But it's important to have that down time. That down
time keeps you refreshed and you don't have to worry. The gears will turn in the
background. But working all the time you get burnt out and you just can't
accomplish what you can when you refresh yourself periodically. >> Well, I
think that's just fabulous advice. And one thing I, I agree heartedly with is do
something you love, but also realize that sometimes it takes a little longer to
learn to love certain subjects. So sometimes it's good to be patient too. I do have
a last question for you. How does your dog Newton help your students to learn
more effectively? >> Well, I used Newton and my previous dogs to lighten up
the classroom. A picture of Newton, you know, watching a tennis ball fall. I was
actually going to do a video where I dropped a video on his head, but my wife
wouldn't let me. I also have a picture that I use of a previous dog, Chaos, who
was a 96 pound Irish Wolf Hound mix. Sitting at a table with an Advanced
Atmospheric Dynamics book open. He's got glasses on, and he's punching
numbers into a calculator. And then I say to my students, you know, see, Physics
or science is so easy even a dog can do it. Of course, the next step is to choose
examples that can give students a real feel for the subject, and let them realize
how simple Physics, or science in general, can be. And, and that's the real art of
being a professor. Choosing these examples that, that make it easy. We have to
remember, we're not born and that includes us, knowing these disciplines.
science, or any of the course. so, you know, when, when we're doing this work
we, we, we have to lighten it up, but we have to choose these examples. Science

is compounded by the fact that people are very uncomfortable with numbers. I
use an example where I, I pass tennis balls around the class. So the student can
see, and feel, hold the ball, then I ask them, what size box could hold 10732
balls being in the United States? I get the answer in feet, and I make it a cube, so
it's easy, easy for them to give me one number and, you know, I get numbers in
the hundreds of thousands. Seldom, do I get a number that's below a hundred.
You want to guess what the answer is? >> [LAUGH] No, you go for it. >> It's
four, it's four feet. And when I say that, you know, that just drives home the
point that we really don't know numbers. So, using examples in the classroom
where they can really latch onto it is important. Because that's what helps drive
deep learning. >> That is, really the ultimate example of the kinds things that
we're talking about in this course. So Dr. Gamache, I cannot tell you how much I
appreciate your taking the time to be with us here today. And thank you so very
much. >> You're very welcome. Thank you.
[BLANK_AUDIO] For this interview, it's a pleasure to introduce you to one of
today's leading figures in learning how to learn more effectively, Dr. Norman
Fortenberry, the executive director of the American Society of Engineering
Education. Dr. Fortenberry is MIT cubed. That is, he has his bachelors, masters,
and doctorate in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Because of his interest in learning, Norman took an unusual career
path. After teaching his first engineering classes, he realized that there was the
disconnect. He knew a great deal about his research area, but he didn't know
about how to teach effectively. The reality is, that most new professors arrive at
their universities without any training in how to teach effectively. Dr.
Fortenberry wanted to do something about this problem. His work at the
National Science Foundation and the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees
for Minorities in Engineering and Science have helped create a whole network
of support for faculty in science, engineering, math, and technology who want to
help students learn effectively. In this interview, we'll get some practical ideas
from Dr. Fortenberry on how you can most effectively approach your studies.
Thank you so much for being here, Dr. Fortenberry. I'm just so impressed. I have
to ask you. Here you are. You landed at MIT, which is one of the top educational
institutions, at least technologically-speaking, in the world. And you
successfully climbed your way up the ladder all the way through to get your
PhD. Let's cut past the generalities and get to specifics. What were some of the
most, most worthwhile tricks and approaches that you used to help you study
and learn most effectively? >> Well, MIT is, is a very good institution and not
just technologically. For example, it has one of the top political science
departments in the world. But, that said, the techniques that, that I pursued, the
first and foremost was to recognize that what worked in high school will not
work in college. In high school, you're taught to, well actually, most of Pre-K,
you're taught you're to do your own work, study alone, etc. That is deadly. In
college, at least in engineering schools, the expectation is that you're part of a

group. The expectation is that there are course notes and course bibles that are
all over campus. There's an expectation that you have access to resources that if
you don't have access to, you're in deep trouble. So you have to make sure that
you live up to that expectation by making the connections to the people who
have the resources that you need to succeed. The key lesson in, in collegiate
study, at least in engineering school, is you are part of a team. And if you don't
have a team, you find a team. If you are a team, you maximize the team. But you
have to be part of the group. Engineering is a team sport. You know, all the, all
the stereotypes are about the lone engineer, the lone programmer. But it's a team
sport. And you have to find your team as quickly as possible and make sure that
the members of that team are very serious about their studies as well. >> Okay.
Your competition at MIT included some of the top students in the world. How
did your, you approach your studies so that you could find things in a way to
keep yourself from being intimidated. >> I was intimidated. I was extremely
intimidated. What it took was reminding myself and having others remind me,
my peers, some of the administrators, to remind me that I didn't suddenly
become less smart once I got to MIT. There were some extremely bright people,
but I was one of those bright people. And that I needed to build a community of
support around me. I gave support. I received support. So yes, you are entirely
intimidated. At least I was, and people I knew were. But we knew that if we
worked together as a team, we would make it through. And so, that was they key
was to remember the objective is to learn the material. The objective is to finish
the class. Even in grad school, the objective is to get the degree. And you keep
your eye focused on the prize, and you fight it out, and you get through. >>
Early on in your college career, you took a more advanced calculus course- >>
Yes. >> That most people don't usually take, at least at that stage. I understand
this set you back in your studies. >> Yes it did. >> How could you have avoided
this scenario, and how did you keep going in the face of facing failure and, and
hardship? >> Well the, the way to avoid the problem is to, is to, so this is all
about balancing ego. I should have done what the overwhelming majority of
students did, which was take the regular track calculus and not take the Calculus
with Applications, which everybody said was the hard track. But I said, but it
has application, so if I'm going to be an engineer that makes sense for me to do.
There are times when there's wisdom in the wisdom of the crowd. There are
times when being lemming is not the brightest thing in the world to do. The
challenge is figuring out which is which. But I think I could have informed my
decision by not only talking to my peers, but talking to some grad students and
some administrators, you know, counseling deans, et cetera, about that choice
and my background in calculus, which was not strong because I hadn't taken
calculus before. I was handed an AP book and that was, that was my calculus
class senior year in Louisiana. so, so the, the thing is to recognize when one is
making a reasonable choice and when one is not making a reasonable choice.
Now, how did I persist? I buckled down and studied very hard, again with the

study groups. And I spent a lot of extra time going over material, two and three
different ways to make sure that I understood it. >> Okay, so what do you do to
help prompt, sort of, what we call diffuse mode or neural resting states, the fresh
perspectives you get from those kinds of states. In your, your research, in your
work, how do you, how do you prompt those? >> Well I think it's very
important, the point that you make. One of the stories that I tell people is that,
you know, it's okay to keep your nose to the grindstone. There are plenty of
people, at that point, talking about MIT, plenty of people walking around with
no noses. But if you keep your nose to the grindstone too long, you begin to cut
into brain. And since brain is what you're trying to use, that's counterproductive.
So it is important to take a break. My breaks involve total mental turn-off. I wa,
I read cartoons in the, in the newspaper or watch cartoons on television. I watch
some of the, now, I watch some of the silliest, most inane, television shows, as a
form, without naming any names, as a form of relaxation. That allows me to turn
off my conscious brain, your unconscious work. It's a lot like taking a nap. You
know, there's so many things coming at you and pushing on you, that you have
to redirect your focus in order for your brain to work on background and come
up with the answers. So, so, I do things. Some people exercise. I used to exercise
more. I need to exercise more. But I do things that shut my brain down in
different ways. >> Well, we share a little, my guilty pleasure is, I, I love to read
the National Enquirer. [LAUGH]. >> That would work, too. >> Many of our
viewers have brothers and sisters and friends who are trying to learn new things.
So, reflecting back on your own childhood, and even your work today, how have
other people helped you in your learning? And, did, did people sometimes help
you, perhaps, by not helping you? And, do you have any practical suggestions
for our viewers, who are trying to learn how to learn? >> There's very practical
guidance on learning how to learn in, in any number of publications and online
in, in terms of a, a systematic process for acquiring information. Some things I
used with my son when he was younger, in terms of using as many different
modes of input as you can. See something. Write it out by hand so that you've
got the muscle memory, repeating it back to yourself. See it, say it, spell it,
whatever. As many input modes, you've got your auditory learners, your visual
learners. You, you saturate yourself with learning modes. That's one of the
reasons why people need to be careful when you have a faculty member or a
teacher to put something on, on overheads or, or Powerpoints these days. And
you just take their overheads and don't really study them. The, the mechanical
act of writing helps you to internalize that material, as well as going back over
the notes again, helps you to internalize that material. So, multi-mode input is
critical for learning. again, with the study groups and challenging each other,
because what you, what you think you know, you find out when you try to
explain it to somebody else, that's why teaching is one of the best ways to learn.
But even if you don't go full blown to tutoring somebody else, just in discussing
it with a set of peers and colleagues, okay, this is what I think I know. And they

challenge you. Okay, well that's not what I thought I thought, but let me explain.
And they will either, you will either validate what you thought, or you will find
a, the fallacy in what you thought. And they do the same thing. And so you help
each other by explaining material to each other. If you just write it out, yeah I've
got it. Well, you may not have it, or you may have it wrong. And so you have to
take the time to explain it, teach it, whatever, to somebody else as a way to make
sure that you, in fact, have what you think you have in terms of your learning.
>> I think active learning like this, really grappling with it and using
information that's within your own mind, that's the best way to know you've
really got it within your own mind. >> Sure. >> So, you're exactly right.
Norman, thank you so much. [BLANK_AUDIO]
Scott Young is the ultimate adventurer in learning. He's compressed the entire
four year in IT curriculum for computer science into one year of independent
learning, and is now wrapping up a year's travel, learning four different
languages, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Korean through total immersion
in each of the countries. Scott doesn't just study learning from an academic
perspective. He immerses himself in learning and perceptively observes the
results so that we can all gain from it. So, it's a pleasure to welcome Scott
Young. Scott, I'm always excited to follow your adventures. So tell me, where
are you now and what is your latest learning challenge? >> Right. So right now
at the moment I'm actually in South Korea, in Seoul not too far away from
Gangnam actually. And I am learning Korean. And this is part of a larger project
where a friend and I are traveling for a year. Staying three months in four
different countries. So three months each trying to learn the language of that
country through not speaking English as much as possible. >> Wow. I'm just so
impressed. You're sort of a Marco Polo of learning. [LAUGH] And I was also
impressed by your MIT challenge in learning. What you did was you
compressed a four year curriculum of computer science into one year of
independent learning. There are a lot of questions I have for you in relation to
that experience as well as your language learning experience. So first, can you
tell us, how do you avoid illusions of competence in learning? >> Right. Well,
I'm a big fan of trying to dive into a position where you might be wrong as soon
as possible. So, when you're just reading a lecture, reading a textbook, you can't
ever really be wrong. There's no real check on whether you know what you
know. And, I really like getting into problems as quickly as possible with a
language, trying to speak as quickly as possible. Or if not speaking quick as
quickly as possible testing my, my listening comprehension in a, in a, in a strict
way. So, with the MIT challenge I,I would work on problem sets. And I would
do my best to do the problem sets without having the solutions at hand. And try
my best on, on any problem and if I got stuck, if I couldn't finish, then of course
go to the problem and check to see the solution and learn it. But I think only if
you feel that grind a bit first, if you feel that tension, that stress that you're not
quite sure how to finish it only then will you really remember how to do the

problem for the future. So if you don't have that feeling of not being sure how to
do it and that strain, I think it is hard to really improve your knowledge. >> But
that goes right along with our own learning philosophy. In this course which is
test yourself as frequently as possible. So, one of the approaches that you had to
learning that I absolutely love is that of self explanation. Can you explain to our
viewers a little bit what you mean by self explanation? What, what is it and what
kind of benefits can you get from it? >> Right, well I got this idea reading
biography of Feynman and he was a Nobel Prize winning physicist, and I forget
the exact method that he used himself, but I remember him talking about, you
know, being a Nobel prize winner in theoretical physics. He's a smart guy, and
he was talking about a particular academic paper, a popular concept he didn't
understand. And his approach wasn't to throw his hands up and say, well, you
know, I don't get it or, it's too difficult. But he want through meticulously, not
only trying to understand everything that was in that paper, but of the papers it
sourced. He read through them very carefully and combed through them and,
and tried to make sure he understood all the supporting ideas. So, for me, I've
kind of adapted that into this idea of taking a blank piece of paper out and
writing as if I'm trying to teach someone else what this idea is all about. Or what
this process for solving a particular type of problem is all about. Or what it
means. And what I find happens is that you usually get to points where you have
some friction, where you have to be too vague or you can't really be as exact and
precise as you want to be. And those are usually the things that you don't
understand. So you can go back to your notes, you can go back to the textbook,
look up that exact spot, and figure out, oh, this is the part I'm missing. I'm
missing step three of this process. Or I don't really understand why step three
works, maybe I can ask someone, a teacher or a, or a friend. >> I think it's so
smart to go look and intuit how other very creative people have, have
approached their problem solving. And I always love Feynman's approach. He
always said that, that it's very important that, that the first rule is not to fool
yourself, but you are the easiest person to fool. So I, I, I just love how you're,
you're learning from other learners. Can you, can you one of your approaches
that I really like is that of creating vivid examples. Can you give us an example
of that? >> So, the mind doesn't learn abstract things very well. It works a lot
better when you have something very concrete, you can point to it and say, oh,
this is how it works. And, math and science is often full of things that are just
pure abstract, abstraction, they, they only connect very loosely to things we can
touch and feel. So what I try to do is find simple analogies that are, are
metaphors and try to test them or see how to make them fit with the thing I'm
trying to learn. So it's kind of like looking through your mind for examples or
stories or things that you are familiar with, and like, fitting a jigsaw piece into a
puzzle, trying to figure out, what's the right piece. So I'll give you a quick
example of that. I was learning about electricity and one of the concepts you
learn early on is voltage. Now, I didn't have a good intuition of what voltage

was. So I'm trying to make a, a mental picture of what voltage could be, and I'm
thinking about, you know, an electrical circuit. Well, it's a little bit like pipes
with water. And so if, if the electrical circuits like pipes with water, then what
are all of the components? And current is pretty easy. Well, that's like the water
flowing. I, I can get that. But what was voltage, and I was like, what was it like
pressure? But if you look at the equations for pressure and you look at the
equations for voltage, they don't really look alike so that, that felt wrong. And I
realize that, you know, if you've studied electricity, you've usually also studied
the, the, the, the gravity beforehand, and what was the same was electric
potential and gravitational potential. So, oh, voltage is like height. So I can
imagine in my head that the high voltage wires are like pipes that are physically
higher than the other pipes. So the way water when it rushes down, when it goes
down from the high level to the low level, it gives off a lot more energy because
it's falling. And that metaphor really helped me because not only was it
something concrete that I'll never forget, but it also was fairly accurate. And then
I tested out a couple things like pressure and I found, okay, this is the one that
works. And sometimes, this process can take a little bit of time. I'm recapping
this in two seconds, but it really took me about an hour to comb through the
notes to figure this one out. But. You can ask professors, you can ask, you know,
hey, is this kind of like this? And someone who really understands can help you
out. Or you can just do what I did and just try to fit different puzzle pieces and
see what fits. Because even if you don't find a good puzzle piece, you can still
learn a lot more that way. >> Oh I, I couldn't agree more. I do find that as the
years have gone by, the most creative professors who I've worked with,
researchers, are always the ones who use these kinds of analogies. And the ones
who are more pedantic, a little more by the book, often aren't as creative about
how they approach things. So I think that's a very intelligent way of, of going at
everything. Can you talk to our viewers just a little bit about motivation? How
can you develop a passion for learning, perhaps even in subjects you think you
don't have a passion for? Any suggestions for mental tools people can use to
help motivate themselves in their learning? >> Well, I love this question,
because right now I'm learning languages, and we're currently, I'm currently
learning my sixth language, Korean right now. And we're doing it in very tight
time constraints. So I've gotten a few emails from people who have, you know,
heard about the project, and they said, well, maybe you and your friend who
were doing this have this natural talent for languages and, you know, this, this
genetic gift. And I think it's so funny, because I remember, the first time I was
trying to learn a foreign language, French, I spent about the same amount of
time I'm spending here. And I barely passed the exam. [LAUGH] I got a D. And
I'm, I feel like I'm a fairly smart fellow in other things. So I didn't really let it get
to me. But I think, it's true for a lot of subjects. That, being intelligent within that
subject is often a factor, just how much exposure you've had to it. So if you're
not used to math, don't take that as a sign that maybe you're bad at math, but just

that you need to put more time in. And you'll get more motivation, it'll be even
more easy to motivate yourself, you'll have more interest once you're better at it.
And you can get better at it by, by encouraging yourself to take on little steps,
little mini projects. And once you complete that project, you build more
confidence. With more confidence, you can do more things, you can understand
more things and it becomes more interesting. And I just, I love your story that
you gave of, of learning math, because I think that's just a perfect example and
it's too bad that a lot of people just don't conceptualize the world that way. One
thing that I really like about your own story is, you failed, but you just learned
from failure. You didn't allow that to get to you. You just sort of shifted your
strategies and figured out what strategy was more successful. And I think that's a
sign of the best learners, is not to be set, set back by failure, they just learn from
it. >> Absolutely. >> So, I, I love how you've developed projects for self
education. Can you tell us a little more about what you've done this way and
how our viewers might go about developing their own projects for self
education? >> Right, so I actually got this idea from a good friend. He's also in,
I think, your recommended resources, Benny Louis. And he was someone who
told me I remember he told me in person one day, he's like, always have a
mission. And basically just this idea of, he, he would pick these three month
missions for learning languages, because that was usually how long he could
secure a tourist visa [LAUGH] to this place to try to learn as much as possible in
three months. But it really struck me how different that was from the regular
approach. The regular approach of going, and you know, I'm going to just learn
this and I don't really have any concrete goals and I don't really have any
specific motivation. And of course it tapers off and you don't achieve that much.
And what I found really helpful is making very concrete projects that are
exciting to me. Something that, you know, this is really interesting. So when I
did the MIT Challenge, just this idea kind of obsessed me. This idea of, you
know, would it be possible to learn the things that an MIT student would learn in
school without going to MIT? Or this language learning project, you know.
Would it be possible to get to a conversational level, or, or a decent amount of
level through complete immersion in four different countries in a year? So I, I
tend to pick these kind of grand projects. But I think you could pick something
very simple. You could just say, you know, I want to try learning this over a
month. And I'm going to obsess about it and make it interesting. And that's often
how you can turn something that might otherwise be dull into something that
fascinates you, because it's this specific concrete challenge. >> I like this
approach. It seems very similar to what I did with helping to create this MOOC.
So, yeah. >> Yeah. >> Any tips on effective use of online resources? Right. So,
this is I think particularly relevant to your audience, because you know, a
MOOC audience you're signed up to this through Co, Coursera and you
probably know about Coursera and edX and all of the great MOOC platforms.
And I really think these platforms are the future because they have such high

quality courses, but it's still early days. And I think that there's still a lot of
subjects that people would like to learn but maybe there isn't a mook for it. And
I think there's also some disadvantages to MOOCs. In particular if you want to
learn something a little bit more advanced MOOCs can sometimes be a bit
harder because they tend to be written for audience with no prerequisites, no
requirements. So you might feel that if you wanted to do, you know, some
physics it isn't just an intro physics class, this is a little bit harder, because you
know, they are expecting that I haven't learned calculus or I haven't learned
something different. And so what I recommend is using MIT's open course
ware's incredible. It has literally hundreds, I don't know whether it has thousands
of courses, but it has just such a huge volume of courses. And sometimes the
courses aren't really well supported, like they don't have videos, they don't have,
it's not as hands-on as, as these MOOCs. But I've found sometimes what they'll
have is they'll have the exams in the problem sets and a list of the readings, and
a link to a textbook. I can buy the textbook used on Amazon for $15 sometimes.
And I'd get it delivered, and I would do it, and honestly I felt like I sometimes
learned more from those courses than the video lecture courses. So I think if you
are willing to be bit more adventurous, there's literally almost no topic you can't
learn through this kind of structured, university-like format through the
resources available online. >> It's an explosion in learning how to learn. I mean
this, the what's available now to the public is just absolutely phenomenal. And
so anyone who has an interest in pretty much anything can, can do some great
exploration. So as our, our wrap up question here, you've written that you, you
can learn more by studying less. What do you mean by that? >> All right, so I
think you've touched on it a lot in this course that you're offering. That people
get caught up in low efficiency, low intensity studying habits, and because they
learn a lot slower with those methods they end up spending a lot more time
studying. And because they're spending a lot more times studying, which is
naturally more tiring, you go into less efficient studying methods. It's a little bit
like exercising. It's as if, you know, you're not getting the exercise results you
want, so you extend your workout from one hour to two hour. But now you're
not working out as, more intensely, so you make it four hours. And now, you
know, you really can't do more than just a light jog for four hours, or maybe just
walking. And eventually, it eats up all of your time. But you're, you're not
having the intensity that your muscles in your body really need to get physical
improvement. And similarly, I think the same is true with mental improvement.
So what I try to do is, I try to pick specific chunks of time that I'm going to
study. And they don't have to be too big. So right now, I'm learning Korean over
at least three months. And I'm actually only doing three to four hours a day. Of
studying time, which is considerably less than I would say a typical full-time
student studying Korean. But I think that I've been making quite good progress
just because the actual time I'm spending is highly focused. This kind of test
yourself feedback so that I'm using things like Anki for flashcards. And I'm

doing actual conversations one-on-one with a tutor. And these things are very
efficient, but they are also very intense. But the benefit of that is that you have
more time and you can relax outside of it. >> Great advice and as always, great
advice from you. I know I've learned a lot and really enjoyed following your
adventures and, and getting new tips on learning from you. So I thank you so
much, Scott. And we'll see you on the flip side. >> Well, thank you very much
for letting me be a part of this. I, I really hope the students taking this course
found some value in it, the video I put together.
Welcome back to Learning How to Learn. Today, we're going to talk about how
to become a better learner. As we learn more about the brain, we can become
better learners, and here are two tips for how to learn better. Tip number one.
The best gift that you can give your brain is physical exercise. We once thought
that all of the neurons in your brain were already present at birth. But we now
know that in a few places, new neurons are born everyday. One of these places
is in your hippocampus. A brain area that is very important for learning new
things, that we already discussed earlier in the course. In this experiment, a rat is
shown learning how to distinguish a picture of a flower from a picture of an
airplane. In the background is a photo of neurons in the hippocampus, with the
old neurons shown in blue, and newly generated neurons in red. As the rat learns
the task, these new neurons are recruited to help perform better pattern
separation between the two pictures. These new neurons help you learn new
things, but they will die if you don't use them. New experiences will rescue
them. Exercise, interestingly, also helps new neurons survive. Exercise is, by far,
more effective than any drug on the market today to help you learn better. It
benefits all of your vital organisms, not just your brain. It is unfortunate that
schools are dropping gym and recess to make room for more instruction. Gym
and recess are by far the most important parts of the curriculum. Here's another
tip. And this has to do with practice making perfect, but only when your brain is
prepared. There are certain critical periods in the development of your brain.
When sudden improvements occur in specific abilities, expect them to happen,
and prepare your brain for them. The critical period for first language acquisition
extends up to puberty. And after that, it is much more difficult to acquire a
second language, and nearly impossible to achieve a native accent. One of the
best studied critical periods in the brain is when binocular depth perception, or
stereopsis matures during the first two years of life. Stereopsis is the magic
behind Magic Eye pictures like the one shown here. If you stare and this image
and slightly cross your eyes, you'll see staircases pop out of the page. There is a
slight shift between the images in the two eyes and your brain interprets this
slight shift as a difference in depth. Not everyone, however, can see this. Over
5% of the population is stereo blind. If the two eyes are not properly aligned,
during the first two years of development, the neurons in your visual cortex will
fail to properly strengthen the implets from the two eyes and depth perception is
permanently impaired. Well, that's the dogma. But Sue Barry, a friend of mine

from graduate school at Princeton, was able to recover stereo vision through eye
exercises and wrote a book about it entitled, Fixing My Gaze, A Scientist's
Journey Into Seeing In Three Dimensions. Practice can repair as well as train the
brain. But this takes much longer past the critical period. This brings us to
zombies. Zombies can't learn. It is also clear from their behavior that they have
brain damage. Especially in the front of their cortex, which is the part that makes
plans. As well as in their language areas. Learning, planning, language, these are
the skills that make us human. The prefrontal cortex is also involved in complex
analysis, in social behaviors, as well as decision making, and planning. It is the
last part of the cortex to mature. So until this happens, there may be a little bit of
zombie in you. Another patient, EVR, suffered a stroke in the social parts of his
prefrontal cortex. EVR had a high IQ. And seemed normal. But, he was ruined
by making bad financial decisions and bad social interactions. He lost both his
home and his family. Good judgment takes a long time, and a lot of experience
to acquire. Learning is too important to be left behind in the classroom. Learning
to learn is a skill you can master, and you can use it to improve every part of
your life. You'll be learning even more learning tips this weeks and can follow
up on them at brainfacts.org. I'm Terry Sejnowski. Happy learning to you, until
we meet again.
[BLANK_AUDIO] This week we are going to wrap up a slew of important
ideas, and techniques that will help round out and enhance your ability to learn
well, using metaphors and analogies, to work profitable with teammates, and not
undercut your own strengths. And finally to perform well on tests. One
important thought though, before we launch into this week's videos. Learning
doesn't progress logically, so that each day just adds an additional neat package
to your knowledge shell. Sometimes you hit a wall in constructing your
understanding. Things that made sense before can suddenly seem confusing.
This type of knowledge collapse seems to occur when your mind is restructuring
its understanding, building a more solid foundation. In the case of language
learners, they experience occasional periods when the foreign language suddenly
seems completely incomprehensible. Remember it takes time to assimilate your
knowledge. You'll inevitable go through some periods when you seem to take
and exasperated step backwards, in your understanding. This is a natural
phenomenon, that means that your mind is wrestling deeply with the material.
You'll find that when you emerge from these periods of temporary frustration,
your knowledge base will take a surprising leap forward. I'm Barbara Oakley,
thanks for learning how to learn.
[BLANK_AUDIO] One of the best things you can do to not only remember, but
understand concepts, is to create a metaphor or analogy for them. Often the
more visual the better. A metaphor is just a way of realizing that one thing is
somehow similar to another. Simple ideas like one geography teacher's
description of Syria is shaped like a bowl of cereal, and Jordan as a Nike Air
Jordan sneaker, can stick with a student for decades. If you're trying to

understand electrical current, it can help to visualize it as water. Similarly,

electrical voltage can feel like pressure. A push. As you climb to a more
sophisticated understanding of whatever topic you're concentrating on, you can
revise your metaphors or toss them away and create more meaningful ones.
Metaphors and visualization, being able to see something in your mind's eye,
have been especially helpful not only in art and literature, but also in allowing
the scientific and engineering world to make progress. In the 1800s for example,
when chemists began to imagine and visualize the miniature world of molecules,
dramatic progress began to be made. Here's a fun illustration of monkeys in a
benzene ring from an insider spoof of German Academic Chemical Life printed
in 1886. Note the single bonds, or the monkeys' hands, and the double bonds
with their tiny little tails. It's often helpful to pretend that you are the concept
you're trying to understand. Put yourself in an electron's warm and fuzzy
slippers as it burrows through a slab of copper. Or sneak inside the X of an
algebraic equation and feel what it's like to poke your head out of the rabbit
hole. But just don't let it get exploded by an inadvertent divide by zero. In
chemistry, compare a cation with a cat that has paws and is therefore pawsitive.
And an anion with an onion that's negative, because it makes you cry. Metaphors
are never perfect, but then in science, all models are just metaphors which
means they break down at some point. But nevermind that. Metaphors and
models are often vitally important in giving a physical understanding of the
central idea behind the process or concept you are trying to understand.
Interestingly, metaphors and analogies are useful for getting people out of
[UNKNOWN] that is, being blocked by thinking about a problem in the wrong
way. For example, telling a simple story of soldiers attacking a fortress from
many different directions at once can open creative paths for students to see how
many low-intensity rays can be effectively used to destroy a cancerous tumor.
Stories, even if they're just used as silly memory tricks, can also allow you to
more easily retain what you're trying to learn. Metaphors also help glue an idea
into your mind. Because they make a connection to neural structures that are
already there. It's like being able to trace a pattern with tracing paper. Metaphors
at least help you get a sense of what's going on. I'm Barbara Oakley. Thanks for
learning how to learn. [BLANK_AUDIO]
[BLANK_AUDIO] This is a good place for us to step back and look again at
chunking from another perspective. Notice what we're doing here. We're
interleaving our learning by jumping back to revisit and deepen our
understanding of a topic we've already covered. There's an interesting
connection between learning math and science and learning a sport. In baseball,
for example, you don't learn how to hit in one day. Instead, your body perfects
your swing from lots and lots of repetition over a period of years. Smooth
repetition creates muscle memory, so your body knows what to do from a single
thought. One chunk instead of having to recall all the complex steps involved in
hitting a ball. In the same way, once you understand why you do something in

math and science. You don't have to keep re-explaining the how to yourself
every time you do it. it's not necessary to go around with a hundred beans in
your pocket and to lay out ten rows of ten beans again and again so you get that
ten times ten is equal to 100. At some point you just know it from memory. For
example you memorize the idea that you simply add exponents, those little
superscript numbers, when you are multiplying numbers that have the same
base. Ten to the fourth times ten to the fifth is equal to ten to the ninth. If you
use the procedure a lot, by doing many different types of problems you'll find
that you understand both the why and the how behind the procedure far better
then you do after getting a conventional explanation from a teacher or a book.
The greater understanding results from the fact that your mind constructed the
patterns of meaning, rather than simply accepting what someone else has told
you. Remember, people learn by trying to make sense out of they perceive. They
rarely learn anything complex simply by having someone else tell it to them.
Chess masters, emergency room physicians, fighter pilots, and many other
experts often have to make complex decisions rapidly. They shut down their
conscious system and instead rely on their well trained intuition, drawing on
their deeply ingrained repertoire of chunks. At some point subconsciously
understanding why you do what you do, just slows you down and interrupts the
flow resulting in worse decisions. But wait, are chess masters and people who
can multiply six digit numbers in their heads exceptionally gifted? No
necessarily, I'm going to tell it to you straight. Sure. Intelligence matters. Being
smarter often equates to having a larger working memory. Your hot rod of a
memory may be able to hold nine things in mind instead of four and you can
latch on to those things like a bull dog, which makes it easier to learn. But guess
what, it also makes it more difficult for you to be creative. How's that? It's our
old friend and enemy Einstellung. The idea you are already holding in mind can
block you from fresh thoughts. A superb working memory can hold it's thoughts
so tightly that new thoughts can't easily peek through, such tightly controlled
attention can use an occasional whiff of ADHD like fresh air, the ability, in other
words, to have your attention shift even if you don't want it to shift. If you're one
of those people who can't hold a lot in mind at once, you lose focus and start
daydreaming in lectures and have to get to some place quiet to focus so you can
use your working memory to its maximum, well welcome to the clan of the
creative. Having a somewhat smaller working memory means you can more
easily generalize your learning into new, more creative combinations. Because
your working memory, which grows from the focusing abilities of the prefrontal
cortex doesn't lock everything up so tightly. You can more easily get input from
other parts of your brain. These other areas, which include the sensory cortex,
not only are more in tune with what's going on around you in the environment,
but are also the source of dreams, not to mention creative ideas. You may have
to work harder sometimes or even much of the time to understand what's going
on. But once you get something chunked you can take that chunk and turn it

outside in and inside round, putting it through creative paces even you didn't
think you were capable of. Here's another point to put into your metal chunker. It
is practice, particularly deliberate practice on the toughest aspects of the material
that can help lift average brains into the realm of those with more natural gifts.
Just as you can practice lifting weights and get bigger muscles over time, you
can also practice certain mental patterns that deepen and enlarge in your mind.
Whether your naturally gifted or you have to struggle to get a solid grasp of the
fundamentals, you should realize that your not alone if you think you're an
imposter. That it's a fluke when you happen to do well on a test, and then on the
next test, for sure they, and your family and friends, are going to figure out how
incompetent you really are. This feeling is so extraordinarily common that it
even has a name. The Imposter Syndrome. If you suffer from these kinds of
feelings of inadequacy just be aware that many others secretly share them.
Everyone has different gifts, as the old saying goes, when one door closes,
another opens. Keep your chin up and your eye on the open door. I'm Barbara
Oakley. Thanks for learning how to learn.
[BLANK_AUDIO] This is a CT scan. If you look carefully, the shadowed
region right here reveals the damage caused by right hemisphere ischemic
stroke. Such a stroke can cause an unusual condition known as broadperspective perceptual disorder of the right hemisphere. People with this
disorder can still function, but only partially. They can retain their intelligence,
even a formidable way for solving complex math problems, if that was a skill
they'd had before. But an interesting anomaly, however, is if they make a
mistake in their calculations, concluding something nonsensical, such as that a
hot dog stand had a, a profit and loss statement with a loss of nearly a billion
dollars. It doesn't bother them. There's no big picture, click, that says, wait a
minute, that answer does not make sense. Although we need to be careful about
faulty and superficial left brain, right brain assumptions. We also don't want to
throw the baby out with the bath water, and ignore worthwhile research that
gives intriguing hints about differences between the two hemispheres of the
brain. There's a great deal of evidence from research that the right hemisphere
helps us step back and put our work into big picture perspective. People with
damage to the right hemisphere are often unable to gain ah-ha, insights. The
right hemisphere, as it turns out, is vitally important in getting into the right
track and doing reality checks. People with strokes can remind us of the dangers
of not using our full cognitive abilities, which involve many areas of our brain.
Even subtle avoidance of some of our capabilities can have a surprisingly
negative impact on our work. In some sense, when you whiz through a
homework or test question and don't go back to check your work, you're acting a
little like a person who's refusing to use parts of your brain. You're not stopping
to take a mental breath. And then revisit what you've done with the bigger
picture in mind to see whether it makes sense. As leading neuroscientist

Vilayanur S Ramachandran has noted, the right hemisphere serves as a sort of

devil's advocate to question the status quo and look for global inconsistencies.
While the left hemisphere instead tries to cling tenaciously to the way things
were. These echos the pioneering work of psychologist Michael Gazzaniga who
posited that the left hemisphere interprets the world force and will go to great
lengths to keep those interpretations unchanging. When you work in the focus
mode, it's easy to make minor mistakes in your assumptions or calculations. If
you go off track early on, it doesn't matter if the rest of your work is correct.
Your answer is still wrong. Sometimes, it's even laughably wrong. The
equivalent of calculating a circumference of the earth that's only two and a half
feet around. But these non-sensical results just don't matter to you because the
more left centered focus mode has associated with it a desire to cling to what
you've done. That's the problem with the focus, sometimes a bit left hemisphere
leaning mode of analysis. It provides for an analytical and upbeat approach, but
abundant research evidence suggests there's a potential for rigidity, dogmatism,
and egocentricity. When you're absolutely certain that what you've done on a
homework or test is fine, thank you very much. Be aware that this feeling may
be based on overly confident perspectives arising in part from the left
hemisphere. When you step back and recheck, you're allowing for more
interaction between the hemispheres, taking advantage of the special
perspectives and abilities of each. Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard
Feynman perhaps said it best when he pointed out, the first principle is that you
must not fool yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool. One of the best
ways to catch your blind spots and errors is to brainstorm and work with others
who are also smartly focused on the topic. It's sometimes just not enough to use
more of your own neural horsepower. Both modes and hemispheres to analyze
your work. After all, everyone has blind spots. You're naively upbeat focused
mode can still skip right over errors, especially if you're the one who committed
the original errors. Worse yet, sometimes you can blindly believe you've got
everything nailed down intellectually, but you haven't. This is the kind of thing
that can leave you in shock when you discover you've flunked the test you
thought you aced. By making it a point to do some of your studying with
friends, you can more easily catch where your thinking has gone astray. Friends
and teammates can serve as sort of an ever questioning larger scale defuse mode
outside your brain that can catch what you missed, or what you just can't see.
And of course, explaining to friends helps build your own understanding. The
importance of working with others doesn't just relate to learning. It's also
important in career building. A single small tip from a teammate to take a course
from the outstanding Professor Passionate, or to check out a new job opening,
can make an extraordinary difference in how your life unfolds. A word of
warning, however. Study groups can be powerfully effective for learning, but if
study sessions turn into socializing occasions, all bets are off. Keep small talk to
a minimum, get your group on track. And finish your work. If you find that your

group meetings start five to 15 minutes late, members haven't read the material,
and the conversation consistently veers off topic, you're best off to find another
group. I'm Barbra Oakley, thanks for learning how to learn.
[BLANK_AUDIO] We've mentioned it earlier, but it's worth repeating. Testing
is itself an extraordinary powerful, learning experience. This means that the
effort you put into testing, including the preliminary mini test of your recall and
your ability to problem solved during your preparations is of fundamental
importance. If you compare how much you learn by spending one hour studying,
versus one hour taking a test on that same material, you'll retain and learn far
more as a result of the hour you spent taking a test. Testing it seems has a
wonderful of concentrating the mind. Virtually everything we've talked about in
this course has been designed to help make the testing process seem
straightforward and natural, simply an extension of the normal procedures you
used to learn the material. So it's time now to cut directly to one of the final
features of this course. A checklist, you can use to see whether your preparation
for test taking is on target. This checklist was developed by legendary educator
Richard Felder. Although, it was originally developed for engineers, it's actually
suitable for many disciplines. As Doctor Felder says the answer to the question,
how should I prepare for the test, is do whatever it takes to be able to answer,
yes. Meaning, usually to most of the questions on this list. Did you make a
serious effort to understand the text? Just hunting for relevent worked-out
examples doesn't count. Did you work with classmates on homework problems
or at least check your solutions with others? Did you attempt to outline every
homework problem solution before working with classmates? Did you
participate actively in homework group discussions contributing ideas and
asking questions? Did you consult with the instructor or teaching assistants
when you were having trouble with something? Did you understand all your
homework problem solutions when they were handed in? Did you ask in class
for explanations of homework problem solutions that weren't clear to you? If
you had a study guide, did you carefully go through it before the test and
convince yourself you could do everything on it? Did you attempt to outline lots
of problems solutions quickly without spending time on the Algebra in
calculations? Did you go over the study guide and problems with class mates
and quiz one another? If there was a review session before the test, did you
attended and asked questions about anything you weren't sure about? And lastly,
did you get a reasonable night sleep before the test? If your answer is no, your
answers to all the preceding questions may not matter. Taking a test is serious
business. Just as fighter pilots and doctors go through checklists before takeoff
and surgery. Going through your own test preparation checklist can vastly
improve your chances of success. The answer to the question. How should I
prepare for the test becomes clear once you've filled our Doctor Felder's
checklist. I'm Barbara Oakley. Thanks for learning How to Learn.

Now that you've gotten some insight into how your brain works, we can give
you some final useful tricks that can empower your test taking. The classic way
students are taught to approach tests is to tackle the easiest problems first. This
is based on the idea that by the time you finish the relatively simple problems,
you'll be confident in handling the more difficult. This approach works for some
people, mostly because, well, anything works for some people. Unfortunately,
however, for many people it's counterproductive. Tough problems often need
lots of time, meaning you'd want to start on them first thing on the test. Difficult
problems can also scream for the creative powers of the diffuse mode. But to
access the diffuse mode, you need to not be focusing on what you so badly want
to solve. What to do? Easy problems first, or hard? The answer is the start with
the hard problems but quickly jump to the easy ones. Here's what I mean. When
the test is first handed out to you, first take a quick look to get a sense of what it
involves. You should do this in any case. Then, when you start working the
problems, start first with what appears to be the hardest problem. But steal
yourself to pull away within the first minute or two, if you get stuck or you get a
sense that you might not be on the right track. This does something
exceptionally helpful. Starting hard loads the first most difficult problem in
mind and then switches attention away from it. Both these activities are what
allow the diffuse mode to begin its work. If your initial work on the first hard
problem has unsettled you, turn next to an easy problem. And complete or do as
much as you can. Then move, next, to another difficult looking problem and try
to make a bit of progress. Again, change to something easier as soon as you feel
yourself getting bogged down or stuck. When you return to the more difficult
problems, you'll often be pleased that the next step or steps in the problem will
seem to be more obvious to you. You may not be able to get all the way to the
end immediately, but at least you can get further before you switch to something
else of which you can make progress. In some sense, with this approach to test
taking, you're being a little like an efficient chef. While you're waiting for a
steak to fry, you can swiftly slice the tomato garnish and turn to season the soup
and then stir the sizzling onions. The hard start jump to easy technique may
make more efficient use of your brain by allowing different parts of the brain to
work simultaneously on different thoughts. Using the hard start jump to easy
technique on tests guarantees that you will have at least a little work done on
every problem. It's also a valuable technique for helping you avoid
[INAUDIBLE] getting stuck on the wrong approach because you have a chance
to look at the problem from differing perspectives. All of this is particularly
important if your instructor gives you partial credit. The only trick with this
approach is that you must have the self discipline to pull yourself off a problem
once you find yourself stuck for a minute or two. For most students it's easy, for
others it takes discipline and willpower. This may be why test takers sometimes
find the solution pops to mind right as they walk out the door. When they give
up, their attention switched, allowing the diffuse mode the tiny bit of traction it

needed to go to work and return the solution. Too late of course. Sometimes,
people are concerned that starting a problem and then pulling away from it
might cause confusion on an examination. This doesn't seem to be a problem for
most people. After all, chefs learn to bring various facets of a dinner together.
But if you still have worries about whether this strategy might work for you, try
it first on homework problems. Also keep in mind that if you haven't prepared
well for a test, then all bets are off. Just take what simple points you can. I'm
Barbara Oakley. Thanks for learning how to learn. [BLANK_AUDIO]
[BLANK_AUDIO] If you're a stressed out test taker, keep in mind that the body
puts out chemicals such as cortisol when it's under stress. This can cause sweaty
palms, a racing heart, a knot on the pit of your stomach. But interestingly,
research finds, it's how you interpret these symptoms. The story you tell yourself
about why you're stressed makes all the difference. If you shift your thinking
from, this test has made me afraid, to this test has got me excited to do my best.
It can really improve your performance. Another good tip for panicky test takers
is to momentarily turn your attention to your breathing. Relax your stomach,
place your hand on it, and slowly draw a deep breath. Your hand should move
out, even as your whole chest is expanding outward like a barrel. By doing this
type of deep breathing, you're counteracting the fight or flight response that
fuels anxiety. This calms you down. But don't just start this breathing on the day
of the test. If you practice this breathing technique in the weeks before, just a
minute or two here or there is all it takes. You'll slide more easily into the
breathing pattern during the test. Remember, practice makes permanent. It's
especially helpful deliberately moving to a deep breathing pattern in those final
anxious moments before a test is handed out. I've gotten great tips on test taking
from top professors from around the world. And here are some of the best. Susan
Sashna Hebert, a professor of psychology at Lakehead University, advises her
students to cover up the answers to multiple choice questions and to try to recall
the information. So they can answer the question on their own first. If her
students might complain that the practice test was way easier than the real one,
she asks, what makes the two situations different? When you took the practice
test, were you at home relaxing with toons on? Taking it with a fellow student?
No time limit? Did you have the answer key and class materials at hand? These
circumstances are not exactly like a crowded classroom with a clock ticking
away and no way to access the answers. Tracy Margren, a professor of
biological sciences at Saddleback College, tells her students to face your fears.
Often, your worst fear is not to get the grade you need for your chosen career.
How can you handle this? Simple. Have a Plan B for the alternative career. Once
you have a plan for the worst possible contingency, you'll be surprised that the
fear will begin to subside. Professor Margren notes, study hard up until the day
of the test and then let it go. Tell yourself, oh well, let me just see how many
questions I can get right. I can always pursue my other career choice. That helps
release stress, so you can actually do better and get closer to your first career

choice. And Bob Bradshaw, a professor of math at Ohlone College, tells his
students about good worry and bad worry. Good worry helps provide motivation
and focus, while bad worry simply wastes energy. Here are a few final thoughts.
The day before a test, or tests, have a quick, final look over the materials to
brush up on them. You'll need both your focus mode and defuse mode muscles,
so to speak, the next day. So you don't want to push your brain too hard. You
wouldn't run a ten mile race the day before running a marathon. Don't feel guilty
if you can't seem to get yourself to work too hard the day before a big
examination. If you prepared properly, this seems to be a natural reaction,
almost as if you're subconsciously pulling back to conserve mental energy.
While taking a test, you should also remember how your mind can trick you into
thinking that what you've done is correct, even if it isn't. That means whenever
possible, you should blink, shift your attention, and then double check your
answers using a, a big picture prospective asking yourself, does this really
makes sence. There's often more than one way to answer a question and
checking your answers from different perspectives provides a golden
opportunity for verifying what you've done. If there's no other way to check,
except to step back through your logic, keep in mind that simple issues have
tripped up even the most advanced students. Just do your best. In science
classes, having your units of measurement match on each side of the equation
can provide an important clue about whether what you've done is correct. The
order in which you work tests is also important. Students generally work tests
from front to back. When you're checking your work if you start more towards
the back and work towards the front, it sometimes seems to give your brain a
fresher perspective that can allow you to more easily catch errors. Nothing's ever
certain. Occasionally you can study hard and the test gods simply don't
cooperate, but if you prepare well by practicing and building a strong mental
library, and you approach test taking wisely, you'll find that luck will
increasingly be on your side. I'm Barbara Oakley. Thanks for learning how to
learn.
This week, we've done a wide sweep through some of the deepest aspects of
learning. Metaphors and analogies aren't just for art and literature. One of the
best things you can do to not only remember but more easily understand
concepts in many different fields, is to create a metaphor or analogy for them.
Often the more visual, the better. We've learned from Nobel prize winner
Santiago Ramon y Cajal that if you change your thoughts, you can really truly
change your life. It seems people can enhance the development of their neuronal
circuits by practicing thoughts that use those neurons. Like Santiago Ramon y
Cajal, you can take pride in aiming for success because of the very things that
make other people say you can't do it. Keep in mind that when you whiz through
a homework or test question and you don't go back to check your work, you're
acting a little like person who's refusing to use parts of your brain. You're not

stopping to take a mental breath and then revisit what you've done with the
bigger picture in mind to see whether it makes sense. Overconfidence in your
results can result from using only one mode of thinking. By making it a point to
do some of your studying with friends, you can more easily catch where your
thinking has gone astray. Taking a test is serious business. Just as fighter pilots
and doctors go through checklists before take off and surgery, going through
your own test preparation checklist can vastly improve your chances of success.
Counterintuitive strategies, such as the hard start jump to easy technique, can
give your brain a chance to reflect on harder challenges, even as you're focusing
on other, more straightforward problems. Here are some last test-taking pointers.
The body puts out chemicals when it's under stress. How you interpret your
body's reaction to those chemicals makes all the difference. If you shift your
thinking from this test has made me afraid to this test has got me excited to do
my best, it helps improve your performance. If you're panicked on a test,
momentarily turn your attention to your breathing. Relax your stomach. Place
your hand on it and slowly draw a deep breath. Your hand should move outward
and your whole chest should expand like a barrel. Your mind can trick you into
thinking that what you've done is correct, even if it isn't. This means that
whenever possible, you should blink, shift your attention, and then double check
you answers using a big picture perspective. Asking yourself, does this really
make sense? And finally, remember, that not getting enough sleep the night
before a test can negate any other preparation you've done. I'm Barbara Oakley.
Thanks for learning about learning.
Welcome to the last video of Learning How To Learn. If you're still listening to
us, then you've come all the way through the course. And may remember at the
beginning, I said that brains do not come with an instruction manual. So we have
to write one ourselves. And that was one of our goals. In this final video, we
want to tell you how much we've enjoyed teaching and learning. We've learning
from you as we hoped you've learned from us. The truth is you've always been
in the driver's seat when it comes to your own learning. But now that you have a
better feeling for what's under your neural hood, you can use this to help you
lean new things all during your lifetime. >> What we're hoping is that as the
days and months will pass you'll continue to bring to mind some of the key ideas
you've learned in the course. Approaches such as switching your mode of
thinking from focused to diffused can help reduce your frustration and allow for
more creative problem solving. Strengthening your chunking can give you a
firmer grasp of the material. Even seemingly tiny changes in your daily
approach to your work. Using the pomodoro technique, for example, can make a
dramatic long-term difference in your learning and in your ultimate success. >>
Learning is so vitally important to our future that most of us spend 12 to 16 of
our earliest years of our lives in school, culminating in high school or college.
But the focus in formal education is on the product of learning, not the process
of learning. In this course, we've tried to give you a better sense of the learning

process. Although this is our last video, we hope it's not our last chance to
influence you. You have not truly learned something unless you can teach it to
others. Teach those ideas to others and you will find that they will continue to
resonate and deepen in your own mind. We hope you'll also have discovered
how powerful these ideas can be at helping you broaden your interest, passion,
and expertise. Many people believe that what they're initially, sort of, naturally
good at is what they're supposed to be doing in life. But I myself am living proof
that passions can broaden, change, and grow. The world is evolving and a broad
tool kit that allows you to learn effectively in many different subject areas is one
of the most powerful assets you can have. >> Best of luck in your life of
learning. >> Ditto that.
[BLANK_AUDIO] In this video, I'm very pleased to introduce you to Dr.
Richard Felder and Dr. Rebecca Brent, two educators who have had an
enormous impact on the landscape of education. I first met Rich and Rebecca at
the very beginning of my teaching career. I was lucky enough to attend a
workshop they taught on student centered learning. That workshop changed the
whole focus of my teaching and allowed me to understand learning in a whole
new, deeper way. I think you'll find that your own understanding of learning will
change as you listen to this interview. Rich Felder has written the best selling
book on introductory chemical engineering in the country and possibly in the
world. He's also won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American
Society of Engineering Education for his enormously influential work. But don't
make the mistake of thinking that Dr. Felder's work is only useful for engineers.
A big reason he's so influential is that the approaches he uses are applicable to
virtually any field of study. It is actually Dr. Felder's enormously gifted wife, Dr.
Rebecca Brent, the president of the education consulting firm, Education
Designs and long time director of the NSF-sponsored SUCCEED Coalition
faculty development program, who has helped spearhead the broad
multidisciplinary impact of the couples' work on education. I think you'll find
Dr. Felder and Dr. Brent's work to have as powerful an influence on you as it's
had on me. So, you've written some extraordinarily helpful advice for students
about how to prepare for tests. If you could sum that advice up in a nutshell,
what would you say? >> Let me first say something about how not to prepare
for a test, which is what, probably what about 90 plus percent of my students do
to prepare for tests. One, they may read the book. Generally, they ignore the
book, but they may read the book like a novel, just going flipping through it,
maybe they underline, which is, far as I can tell, is a singularly useless strategy
for doing anything. And then when they've done that, maybe they look through
the old homework solutions, and read through them again like a novel and then
imagine that they've studied, and that provides them with no help at all in
preparing for the test. First of all, the test is not going to be just the homework
again. It's going to be new problems that they have to solve. So, if that's how not
to do it, how do you do it? The only way that I've ever found that works to

prepare for tests is and I'm talking about problem solving tests now, the kind that
I give in engineering, is to work problems, to set problems up, not to work
through them in detail. So I tell the students, you can start with the homework
problems that you solve and then solve it again. Set up the solution without
looking back at the worked out solution that was graded and see how far you
get. If you can set it up so the only thing that's left to do is algebra or simple
math, then you're done. Then go onto another problem. Don't waste your time
doing algebra and arithmetic. You're not learning anything from that, and then
maybe go to your book and pick out another couple of problems, and try to set
those up. And the more of that you do, the better you're going to be at solving
problems, the more likely you are to to be able to solve the problems that show
up on the tests. And the other thing that I strongly advise is work with other
people. Get into a study group. Make it a serious study group and try to make
sure that at least somebody in the study group is smarter than you are and really
knows how to solve the problem. So that if you get stuck on something, this
person's likely to be able to figure it out, and all of you go marching along
together. And leave the beer and the snacks in the refrigerator. Just spend your
time working through problems, setting them up, making sure you know how to
solve it, going on doing more problems. And then, when you're either exhausted
or you've covered as much as you need to cover, you can then hit the
refrigerator. >> This is so much like what we've talked about throughout this
course as far as simply putting, you, reading a book is not putting it necessarily
in your brain. And to, to have to actively grasp the material and working with
others sometimes is a very good way to help reinforce what you're learning and
also fill in gaps in what you're trying to learn about. So, I think that's a fabulous
advice and I have to say, thank you for that wonderful check list. >> You're
welcome. >> I think there's also some things you can do when you get in the test
because sometimes it's a high pressure situation. You may feel a lot of anxiety.
And so, taking a moment when you get the test, looking through the whole thing
just to get a sense of where you're going, pick out the easy questions and start
there. And then if you get stuck somewhere, go on to something else that you,
you feel confident you can handle. Keep moving, you know, don't stop.
Sometimes when we're anxious, we, we just freeze. And keep moving, keep
working. Even if you can't get everything, go for partial credit. >> Right. >> Get
some of it, put something down and that will help you be more successful on
your test. Also I've had students who really felt rising anxiety if they got to a
question that they couldn't answer right away. If you find yourself really getting
upset, to just stop, take a deep breath, pause for a moment and then look back at
it. Just calming down a little bit can go a long way. >> Oh, it can. Well, that's
one of the things we've also talked about in the course, is breathing from the
belly to help draw in and, and really do deep breathing, that that's a very
effective technique to neuro-physiologically allow yourself to calm down. And
another interesting thing and I think for our viewers this shows a bit of the

difference in approach of different top quality educators. One thing we've talked
about is, just touch at the very beginning when you're starting to look through a
test, touch on and start working some of the more difficult problems, just until
you get stuck. So you, it takes willpower. You have to pull yourself off quickly
as soon as you can detect that you're getting stuck. But the, that actually gets
your focused attention on it, then pulls that attention away. And when you're
working another, easier problem, it allows you to, to in the background, your
diffused mode is, is working away. And so, then you revisit that more difficult
problem, you've got a little bit more going on intellectually because you've had
time to think about it. If you wait for the, the and do the hardest problems later
in the test, sometimes that can create problems. There's, so there's diff, different
approaches. And I think, different folks, if they are aware of the kinds of
approaches, it gives them more tools that they can use for their intellectual
toolkits. >> Exactly, I think that's always important, to look at all the advice,
look at all the suggestions, try things, give them enough of a try that you see
how well they work for you. So I think that's important for your students
[CROSSTALK] to always be, be doing. >> And I would extend that actually,
the, the advice you just gave, I think is life advice, not just for taking tests. I
mean, there's, there's this magical phenomenon that I've experienced many times
in my life of I'm working on something, a problem. When I was a student, it
might be a problem on a homework assignment. It could have been a problem
on a test. It could be a problem, it could have been a problem in my doctorate
research or in a, something I'm working on. When I went into research as a
faculty member, but I'm struggling with something. I can't make any headway
on it. My natural tendency is just to keep grinding on it and keep banging my
head against that concrete wall. And it doesn't damage the wall at all. >>
[LAUGH] >> It's not too good for my head. And what I found is, when out of
desperation or just because I needed a break or whatever, I stopped grinding on
it and I went off and I did something else. I took a walk, I took a nap, I went to
work on something else I was working on. And then when I came around later,
got back to work on the problem, the solution was magically there. And, you
know, I, I, I tend to believe what I've read in cognitive science about all of the
stuff going on underneath the conscious part that I'm aware of. And somewhere
in that part of my brain is somebody or something that's a lot smarter than
whatever I think of as me. And once I've gotten started on the problem exactly as
you've just described, and then I get away from it and it's like I'm turning it over
to that part of my brain which is smarter and it somehow solves the problem
when I come back. There's the solution, like magic. >> Yes, that's, that's the idea,
is basically when you purposefully pull your attention off or allow your attention
to drift off, that actually opens access to the resting, the neural resting states that
you need to be able to solve the problem. And just alluding to some of the same
life issues, sometimes my husband and I will be, we'll be thinking about a
problem that we have to solve. For example, how do we schedule interviews,

how do we and, and we'll say, you know, we don't have to solve this tonight.
And sure enough, within another day or two, the answers will come to us. >>
My mother used to call that give your subconscious an assignment. So, I often
think about that. >> Your mother was very, very smart. [BLANK_AUDIO]
[BLANK_AUDIO] Well let me ask you this, now. When you, yourself are faced
with a new concept or you're trying to figure out something brand new and it's
difficult, what advice would you have in general for learners to be able to, to
grapple with and assimilate these new ideas or solve a new area that they're first
facing? >> Well, just like with the test question that we talked about, I think
there are a lot of different ways to approach a difficult task. And in fact as we
were thinking about talking about this issue Rich and I realized that we, we
approach things differently. My I'm a rather big picture person. More of a global
kind of learner. And so, often when I'm looking at some difficult material I'll
take time if I have some thing a chapter, or some sort of text, I look through it,
I'll just skim through. I read a little at the end, I will pick up a piece here and
there and then begin to dig in a little bit deeper, but I do better when I sort of
have a general sense of what it is I'm supposed to be learning. I might skip to the
back and look at what kind of problems am I supposed to be able to solve with
this. And so when you're working in disciplines is where problem solving is an
important part that can be a way to get into it, to begin to make sense of it. >>
And the way that I differ from Rebecca is I'm a strongly sequential learner. And
so I take the first step, then the next step, then the next step. But, again, I never
learned anything passively. But anything non-trivial. If it's just a simple fact of
definition of a term I can read it and memorize it, but if it's really conceptually
difficult, whether it's a part of a problem-solving procedure, a derivation that I'm
trying to work through or anything else. The only way I learn anything is by
doing it. So, I'll read this and then I'll try to explain it to myself. or, what I, when
I've learned things best of anything at all is when I've had to teach. And I think
practically every teacher will tell you the same thing. You know, I thought I
knew this stuff. I got As in all those courses back in college. But it wasn't until I
had to explain it to these students that I was teaching that I found out that I
really didn't understand it at the level that I thought I did. And so I try to find
examples. I try to find clear ways of explaining difficult concepts. And in the
course of doing that that's when the real understanding came, and so this is
another strong argument, among other things, for working in groups. If you can
if you're working with other people and together you're trying to figure
something out and you get a certain point and then you try to explain it to the
others you're reinforcing your understanding. And they may or not, may not
understand it after your finished figuring out how to explain it, but boy do you.
And so those two pieces of advice. I learn by doing things, by trying them. If it's
a mathematical method or procedure or something in physics or in engineering,
then I try to work out the solution myself without looking back at the book, the
text, whatever it is. And when I can do it by myself without referring back, then,

obviously, I know how to do it. And then to really reinforce that understanding,
explaining it to someone else. Put those two things together, and well, at least
that's how I learned it. >> I think using your resources too. Whatever those
resources may be. You've got text, you've got things online, you have people
who really understand that difficult thing that you're trying to learn and, and so
make, not being afraid to just go out ask questions work with all the resources
you have to try to find what's going to work for you to make it clear, to make
you more confident figure out what you're doing. >> Oh, absolutely. >> Playing,
playing off of that, one of my biggest problems as a professor is getting students
to ask questions. >> [LAUGH]. >> They don't want to do it. And it's not that,
well some of us, sometimes they're so confused that they don't know what to
ask. But much more often it's a matter of fear. You know if I ask a question in
class, it could be seen by my classmates as a dumb question. And we as
instructors can make all of the pretty speeches we want about how there are no
dumb questions. All questions are good because they tea-, forget that. >>
[SOUND]. >> Right? I, the students are not buying that, and besides, to be
perfectly honest, there are dumb questions. >> [LAUGH] >> And we've all
heard them. And so the student is reasoning, if I open my mouth to ask a
question, I could be perceived as dumb by my colleagues, my classmates, my
professor. If I keep my mouth shut I'm risking nothing and so they don't ask, and
I also can't persuade most them to come to my office. I have office hours every
week, in which I tell the students, I'm there for you. I promise I will be there. I
will be welcoming of any questions that you ask. I'll find out where you're
getting stuck and you won't leave my office until you have the answer to that
question. Maybe for the same fear they don't want to come. And so, they're not
taking advantage of the resources that Rebecca was referring to. And if a student
can be persuaded to overcome that fear and just ask either in class or in the
office in five minutes they can get things cleared up that they could spend three
hours at home banging their heads against and not getting clear. Let me go back
to a couple of points I made before. The best way to get the illusion of
competence when you don't really understand something is to listen to a lecture
or to read a text, like a novel, or to read over old homework solutions. And
imagine that I you understand them. Because you don't. The best way to get over
the illusion of competence is to do it. Solve the problem, again, without looking
back at the old solution. Work out the derivation one step at a time without
looking back at the textbook or your lecture notes or whatever it is, and when
you can do it by yourself without any reference. When you can reproduce that
solution entirely by yourself then it's not an illusion of competence, clearly you
can do it because you did it, but it's not until you do it, actually unaided, that you
can rest that, okay, I'm ready for the test or whatever it may be. >> This can also
be a good time for working with your peers. Taking turns, explaining, a work,
perhaps a worked out example in the text. Explaining it step by step to each
other. When you start trying to verbalize it then you begin to see, wait a minute,

I, I, I thought I knew how they made that step, but when I try to explain it, I, I
don't. So what, what's going on? Let's look at it. So I think that working with
other people can really help you in that way too. So one of the things that you
can do to make sure you are thinking about all the different aspects of the
subject that, that you're trying to understand and it's to set it up. Look at a
complex system that might be used in a problem in your text. And then just
think, what are about all the things that the teacher might ask me to do with this
system. And in working through that you begin to think about all of the elements
that need to be in place. So that's a great way to study for a test. It's also a great
way to sort of get past that illusion of competence because as you're looking at it
and as you're working through the example and what you think you might be
asked you'll uncover somethings that maybe you don't know as well as you
thought you did.
[BLANK_AUDIO] Okay. You've written a little bit about something called the
Imposter Syndrome. What is the Imposter Syndrome and how can students
overcome it? >> Okay. The Imposter Syndrome is like a tape that plays inside
people's heads. Not just students a lot of people. And, and the tape, let's do it in a
student context, though. The tape is like this. So, the student is sitting in class,
looking around and thinking boy, these people are really good. They get this
stuff, they can ask, answer the teacher's questions. They can do the homework,
you know, they can do fine on the test. But I, the tape inside the head continues,
I'm really not. I, they, I managed to fool them all over the years, the tape goes.
My friends, my family, my teachers, into thinking that I'm this real hot shot who
belongs at this first class university. Taking Engineering, taking Science, taking
Economics, whatever I'm taking, but I know better. And, the tape continues the
very next tough question I get in class, the very next hard test that I have to take,
that's what's going to finally, once and for all, reveal me as the fraud, the phony,
the imposter that I know I am. And then, and then, what happens then is usually
too horrifying to contemplate and so, at that point, the imposter usually stops the
tape, rewinds it. >> [LAUGH]. >> And, gets it going again. And, the interesting
thing about that phenomenon is how utterly common it is, but every student
playing that tape imagines that he or she is the only one who's doing it. And the
idea that a lot of people are doing it. And, that hotshot in the front row, with the
4.0 average, the tape is playing louder than it is in anyone else's head, comes as
surprise to them. And, the reason that I'm so sure about how common this
phenomenon is, is that I've given this talk many times to students. So, I have an
auditory inflow of students that I'm giving this talk to, and when I get to the part
about they all think I belong here, but I know better, it's like I plucked a guitar
string. There's a quiver that goes over the entire audience, you now, and, and
eyes dilate and jaws go slack, you know, and then they kind of start checking
each other out. And there's this tangible relaxation that goes over the entire room
as they realize this is a just a, a scam I'm playing on myself. And it is a scam,
you know, if, if a student managed to do everything needed to get into this

college, to pass all of the entrance requirements, maybe to get through that
difficult first year. Then, obviously, they had the ability to do it because they did
it. And so, when I make that speech as I say it relaxes a lot of students, and once
you're familiar with that phenomenon what happens is imposters keep showing
up. I, in my office, not a week goes by that I don't see two or three imposters
coming into my office. And, as soon as they start talking about the problems that
they're having, okay here's another imposter. And, I reach into, the left middle
drawer of my desk and, in a file folder there. I pull out a copy of a little column
that I wrote on the imposter phenomenon and I say here, check this out you
might find it intriguing. And so, this imposter in my office, reads his or her
biography and it's high drama, you know, I get, tears from male and female
imposters. I get, you know, practically screaming. Had one, one woman student
accuse me of stealing her diary. >> [LAUGH]. >> And so, it's a really good
thing for teachers to know about, and it's a very, very good thing for students to
know about, because we're all playing it. >> It may surprise you to know that a
lot of us have that imposter feeling often. And, that's something that each of us
has, has struggled with in our whole adult lives, as well as when we were
students. And the, the power, I think, is in naming it. It's the imposter. Once you
realize that that's what you're doing, then it, it diffuses a lot of the power. You
can just remind yourself, okay, I know how to do this, I can. This may be
something new, but, I've met challenges before, I'll meet this one. I can do it
and, and go ahead and, and push on. And you'll find that as you get into
whatever the task may be that you settle down, and you realize you really can do
it. And you have resources if you have trouble. >> Right. So, and now, let's turn
to something a little different. What do you both do to avoid procrastination
when it comes to something you'd really rather not be doing? Do you ever
struggle with this? It's hard to think that these. >> Let me get, let me get to you
later on that. >> [LAUGH]. >> When, when we figure it out we'll let you know.
no, we definitely both struggle with it as I'm sure you, you knew when you
asked that question. and, we've found some strategies, for each of us that work,
but it is still something we, we struggle with. I like to, to try to schedule myself,
if I've got a big task, schedule a small amount of time everyday, to work on it, to
do just a little bit. >> Mm-hm. >> Not try to do everything all at once, but to bite
off a small, small chunk. I've also found it to be really helpful where I keep a to
do list on my phone. And I, if a break the task down into smaller pieces. What's
the very next thing that I need to do that's manageable? then, that makes it less
overwhelming, and I'm able to, to get going on it. And once you get started it's
easier to keep going. >> Oh, absolutely. >> I, this is one area where Rebecca and
I are exactly on the same page. because I use this, I use the same strategies and
there were two points in this strategy that she mentioned, which I'll just reiterate.
One, is breaking it up into small pieces. You know, if I think I've gotta write the
book, or I've gotta write the dissertation, or I've gotta write the 25 page proposal.
It's Mount Everest, and it's very hard to get myself to take that first step. But, if I

say, I've gotta write the first two pages of the introduction to this thing that I can
do. That's not that formidable. And so, if I just break it up into small pieces and
set easy targets for myself, then I can keep marching. And then, the other
suggestion that she made, which I would agree with, is make appointments with
yourself. So, if, if I work well in the morning, I'm a morning person, I, I think
well I'm clear headed then. Then, ten o'clock to ten thirty every morning on my
calendar I make an appointment with myself. I'm going to work on that proposal
for that half hour. Then, I'll stop, and I'll go back to the rest of my life. Next day,
ten o'clock, assuming I don't have oth, other obligations at ten o'clock, I'll do
another half hour on it. And ,it's incredible how stuff gets down when you can
do things on a regular basis. And, the ones that you're most reluctant to do that
you're putting off because, I don't want to do that, those are the ones that you've
gotta schedule appointments with yourself. What a lot of people do is they work
on the block of time theory. I don't have time to work on the proposal now or the
term paper now, but as as soon as it's the weekend, as soon as it's fall break or
anything like that, that's when I'll really get it done. And, it doesn't work. Among
other things, as soon as you get to this block of time, other things rush into fill it
and also it can be so long since the last time you worked on it, you forgot what
you were doing. And, by the time you figure it out and get your momentum
backup, the block of time may be over. But, this steady appointment to just do
the next chunk for half an hour, it'll get done. >> Some people find some form of
accountability is helpful, an chart where they're checking off the steps, or a
friend who, who will, check in with them regularly. How, how's it going on that
project, are you making progress? But, those kinds of things can be good
strategies, too. >> Absolutely, well I'm a big believer in the half hour chunk, that
time frame seems to work really well for me for something that I'm having
difficulty completing. And, I would like to thank you ever so much for your
incredible responses that I think people will find enormously helpful. >> It's a
great pleasure. >> Thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO]