Learning How to Learn | Barbara Oakley

[Music] part of what I want to do is I want to give you some insights and learning some of it we we have to be on the same page so I may have to if you've seen some of my talks you may see a kind of a little bit of a a repeat as we're all coming onto the same page but then I am going to be um delving into new ideas and so forth now today we will be talking more from a learning perspective so uh about Things from uh as if you were a

learner on later this week I will be giving a a longer talk for three and a half hours and that's more of the perspective from the teachers so some of the material is the same whether you're a learner or a teacher but there's also much much more so I I'll be very happy to be sharing there too so I do want to just uh start out just by giving you a little sense of how important learning is and learning How to learn in the in the in the past the world economic Forum has often had

these lists of most important skills and in 2015 they had a list of the most important skills learning is not on it and in 2020 most important skills guess what nothing about learning but 2025 the top 10 skills include right towards the very top active learning and learning strategies so part of the challenge has been in the last decades people have Sort of known traditionally how you learn to some extent they really didn't know how the brain worked so interestingly one of the leaders from the world economic Forum happened to visit University of California San

Diego happened to learn about the popularity of our course learning how to learn and begin to realize hey there's lots of insights about learning that people are finding incredibly helpful I mean about um 5 million students have taken the Learning how to learn course over the last um what decade or so a little less than a decade and we get something like 7,000 people a week signing up for new information about learning by taking learning how to learn so anyway the reason that this Active Learning and learning strategies is now suddenly at the top of

the list is because the world economic Forum realizes that we know much more about how you can learn effectively so uh so it's worth it to Teach people about how to learn effectively so for me I I should back up and give you just a little sense of my own background um which you may or may not know um learning was not something I cared much about when I was a kid so I I like to learn what I felt like learning and when I didn't feel like learning I went out and I just we

lived in part of the time in rural Texas so I would just go out and ride horses I like doing that and in fact my father was in the Air Force so we moved a lot and here you see uh by the time I was about 10 years or 15 years old I lived in 10 different places so the thing about moving a lot is that mathematics is very sequential so if you if you're good at math it's easy to catch up if somebody's a little bit further ahead of you if you're not good at

math or you don't like math like me when I was a little kid it can be very hard to catch up if you move and they're far ahead of you so When I was 7 years old we lived in rural Texas Lok and my father was suddenly um given an assignment to go to MIT and and get a master's degree there so we moved to Boston Boston was very far ahead in the multiplication tables and learning math I was seven years old I got there I saw what everybody else was doing and I just thought

I can't catch up with these kids I'm no good at math so I flunked my way through elementary middle and high school math And science which is kind of ironic because I am speaking with you here today as a distinguished professor of engineering and I'm the real deal I mean I publish in top journals I uh I a fellow of top engineering societies so one day one of my students found out about my sorted terrible past as a math flunky and he said how did you change and I thought about it I mean I was

a little girl I just loved animals and knitting and weaving and I knew I Could never grow up and do anything technical but I wanted well so what do they call a person who speaks two languages bilingual what what is a person who speaks one language American right or EST say so I was a typical American in that I spoke only one language and I wanted to be able to look at the world through several perspectives now everyone in this room speaks more than one language so uh I Wanted to be like you and for

you you're like ah it's no magic you know you just do it it's not a big deal but for me it seemed magical so I couldn't afford to go to college I wasn't hanging around people who were bilingual and I thought what can I do um I I found out I couldn't there was one way to learn a new language and actually get paid to do it and that was to join the Army so that's me I'm looking incredibly nervous about to throw a hand grenade if you Knew how clumsy I was you would know

why I look so nervous but I did learn another language more or less at random I picked Russian and if I had been smart I would have learned Spanish obviously because our our son-in-law is from Chile and so our little granddaughter is growing up bilingual and uh and we're very excited about this so so I I the Defense Language Institute which is where I studied is one of the top language study Un or institutions in the world and I I learned how to learn a language and what I didn't realize at the time was that

this also gave gave me a lot of insight into how do you learn in math and science but in any case I just loved Adventures so I ended up working out at the out on on the Russian trollers in the Bearing Sea I had very good Russian drinking stories if You' like uh so so we can go out together in the evenings and uh and you can ask me about the KGB And the squirt gun so so but in any case I I also ended up at the South Pole station in Antarctica and that is

where I met my husband so I I always say I had to go to the end of the Earth to meet that wonderful man who is sitting in the corner of the room and who is uh my pillar uh who I I'm here because of the my wonderful wonderful husband hband who has been such a great support and full of great ideas over the many decades we've been married almost 40 years now So I'm very lucky but one day you know when one of my students found out as I mentioned about my uh you know

my previous sorted past he um I thought I I wrote him a little email and I said well you know this is how I learned how to learn of in in working in um in engineering and in math and then I thought well you know I love I love writing books so what I write a little book about this this will be an easy one and my husband was like Yes this is this will be a very good book to write and he was right do you know so this book you as an author are

not a authorized to pick the name of your book so I I wrote this book and uh you know penguin Random House said yes we're going to publish it they picked the name of the book and they picked the name a mind for numbers can you imagine a more boring name for a book I mean I if you do a um If you set up a Google alert on on the phrase of mind for numbers you know what comes up most often obituaries she had a real mind for numbers right but actually this book with

this information has become a worldwide bestseller selling over a million copies around the world so people are fascinated by these ideas which they find really deeply useful so what are these ideas I think what's most important is If you look at Learning grounded in Neuroscience not in Psychology speak but in actually there's great information but from psychology but if you also use insights from Neuroscience it can help you understand learning in perhaps what is the best way possible we know the brain is really complicated so it can be a little hard to understand what it's

um what's going on so let's simplify how the brain works and look at one simple fundamental building block and That is the neuron so it's so funny I look around and you can see people you're you're all just kind of like oh the neuron this is where she's going to get into the really boring scientific stuff so let's spice it up a little bit let's use a metaphor for the neuron which is is a space alien and the space alien is so this here you can see this space alien has three legs on it those

are analogous on the right you can see to Dendrites on a real neuron now I show three legs but in reality there can be dozens even hundreds of legs on a on a uh a neuron and then there's these little spikes that are are are coming out those are called dentritic spines those are like those little toes you know there's lots of Little Green Dot toes on those on the space alien so on the right those are the dentritic spines those are critical for Learning and then lastly we've got an arm that reaches upwards that's

the axelon and what neurons like to do is they like to essentially reach out and play footy with an adjoining n neuron they tickled the toe of an adjoining neuron and what that really is is sending signals that's what neurons are doing they're sending mostly electrical signals that jump that little Gap called a synapse and go on to the next neuron and when you are learning something when You're learning anything you are making connections between neurons in longterm memory so so what does that mean we have been told sadly by Educators and psychologists over the

last uh 40 50 years you don't need to remember things because you can always look them up would I speak Spanish if I just used Google Translate to look it up you have to to to really be an expert on things you have to have that neural structure within your own brain or you just don't Have it so so this is why for example I had H what education does it's always doing this pendulum thing it's like first it's like oh the only way you can remember or to learn something is to memorize it and

that went on for what a thousands of years memorization that's the heart of learning then it went the other way it was like remembering things is not important it's conceptual understanding that is what is important but this is why I had a Student come up to me i' just given a very difficult test in statistics he comes up and it's all redlined I'd handed that back to them and he's like how could I flunk this test I understood it when you said it in class and so the challenge has become that we are so overboard

into the idea of conceptual understanding as being the golden key of learning then we forget if you don't remember what you understood it doesn't Matter if you understood it so those links of long-term memory that you're forming as you're learning things are critically critically important now how do you form and strengthen those links part of it is you when you practice you're building an enhancing those connections so if you know as you're practicing more and more you are in essence strengthening those links and those those become much easier to draw to mind whenever you might

need those Ideas so so this brings me remember at the beginning when I said that um uh we were going to use a metaphor of the space alien using metaphors is a powerful tool for learning when I wrote that book of mine for numbers have you ever heard of a website called ratemyprofessors.com do they have that here uh so it's a it's a website where you can go and look at evaluations it's Often in the englishspeaking world and you can see what other people have thought thought about your professor so there's a way you can

go and look and see the top two to 300 Professor teachers who have been evaluated as top professors in the english- speaking World in dozens of different topics you know engineering English of Psy psychology economics whatever you are looking for you can find it I wrote to uh thousands of these profess of top Professors and I asked them what do you use to learn and I sent them a copy of my manuscript and they were just uh they gave me all sorts of great insights to improve that book of mind and numbers but surprisingly the

top top top professors would often say to me there's this one thing I do when I'm teaching to make things easier for my students and I encourage them to do as well and it really helps them but I don't tell my Fellow professors that I do this and that one little thing was they used metaphors and analogies to help convey ideas and to to encourage their students to more easily grasp these key ideas and they didn't tell fellow professors about that because the fellow professors would say things like Ah that's why you're so popular as

a teacher you you use metaphors you make it easy for the students and it's like well that's our job as Teachers so uh so but that's also what you can do when you're trying to grasp a difficult topic is to uh ask yourself what is something like can I create a metaphor for it so um so this you know of course let's say I'm using water to convey the idea of you know current flow for either water or for electricity so it's a metaphor you know that at a Quantum level that metaphor breaks down the

thing is every metaphor breaks down Sooner or later when it does you just throw it away and you get a new metaphor so I want to move now to a different thing so we're going to have a little test here so I'm going to ask you what is the way you use most often when you're learning something new what do you think is the most you know what is most helpful for you as you are learning something I'm going to give you four techniques and Then I will ask you to vote for one technique that

you think is the best in helping uh you to learn and maybe in helping your students to learn the first technique is rereading which I did a lot of when I was relearning in math and science or is it highlighting or underlining retrieval practice so that means like using a flash card um or or something to to see if you can retrieve the idea from your own mind or is it creating a concept map so that means Drawing out all the key Concepts that you're learning about and then connecting those ideas together so so we're

going to have a little vote now I'll ask you to raise your hand at the one technique that you think is best either for you or for your students so how many people think rereading is best okay I did lots of rereading okay how about highlighting or underlining okay it helps you focus how about retrieval Practice okay fair number and concept mapping okay okay so are you uh do you want to know what the answer is I'm going to keep you in Sy then so the answer and this has been shown in hundreds and hundreds

of studies is retrieval practice that is by far the most helpful so you might say well no we've been told for decades that concept mapping is the best here's the problem so a researcher a group a little group of researchers Came up with the idea of using concept mapping writing out the key Concepts connecting them together and they said you know they had devised this technique so they went out to everybody and said this is the best technique for learning but they never checked it they just told everybody that and everybody believed him and finally

in about 2012 a a psychologist named Jeff kpii with his um undergraduate student Janelle blunt published a study in in the journal Science one of the top uh research journals in the world and and revealed that when they did a careful analysis and study you learn best key Concepts you remember them longer if you use retrieval practice it works far better than concept mapping and all every other technique so when this paper was published the authors were allow of the concept mapping papers were allowed to rebut this study and so they published their rebuttal and

they said you know Karpicki just didn't do it right he was supposed to use four hours of re of uh um practice and training in concept mapping and that's what he should have been teaching all the students to do and then cartic was allowed to reut the rebuttal and in kpi's rebuttal he showed the quotation from the the uh concept mapping experts themselves saying it's so easy you can teach people how to do concept mapping in five minutes that's all you need to do so um since that Time uh as I mentioned there have been

lots of studies I'll show you a few of them but I want to give you a physical feel for what's happening with retrieval practice so when you're first learning something like right here right now you are getting a little bit of faint links in your your long-term memory just very faint ones about the ideas that I'm teaching about but each time you retrieve those ideas from your own mind you are strengthening those key ideas if You just write it down on a piece of paper with the key Concepts it's just like taking notes taking notes

is not what's of Great Value reviewing your notes and pulling the ideas of those notes to your mind that's what's of value for students and so um I do want to also um give you another sense so let's go back look at watch watch that so oops hang on let's get back here so notice initial Learning you got some weak links like from me or from the book you're reading or from whatever you're studying this is important when constructivists sometimes approach teaching and they'll say figure it all out yourself that's what's going to be golden

but but actually teachers matter because they help you know which way to go to lay those initial links because you can you can lay them in all sorts of different directions or you canot lay Them at all those weak links seem like they're unimportant but they're really vitally important so in any case there as I mentioned there have been hundreds and hundreds of stud iies that have shown that retrieval practice is by far the best way for learning you might say well no it's only for like memorizing anatomical terms or memorizing vocabulary in other languages

it's not true at all actually when you let's say you're you are walking along The campus here and you try to retrieve some key ideas about a marketing concept that you are trying to to learn about as a student when you are retrieving those ideas you're connecting them you're deepening you're strengthening those sets of links so using retrieval practice is critical if you only use retrieval practice for silly little things like you know I say silly but they're actually important you know like vocabulary words or or like Some of the fundamental Concepts you might teach

in whatever your you know or or learn in whatever discipline it's you it's it's the question to ask yourself you can ask yourself um what are the fundamental occurrences of the French Revolution what are the fundamental things that happened during the Russian Revolution then you can ask yourself a higher level level question compare and Contrast the Russian and the French revolutions and see what you know and so you can ask yourself retrieval questions that are simplistic or much deeper that you can contemplate as you're doing your studies or going for a walk or having a

cup of of this great Guatemalan coffee you know whatever you're doing now what happens if you um so for example let's say you have a very busy life as most of us do and you learned something but you don't have time to go back and retrieve It what happens well your little synaptic janitor will just sweep away those synaptic connections or those drid spines because you're not using them so this is why retrieval practice especially when you're first learning something can be so valuable we can also see this is you are all budding neuroscientists now

so this is a dendrite the leg of that neuron in real life and you can see all these little things hanging off it those are real Live dendritic spines this is a dendrite with its dendritic spines before learning and before sleep so I'm I'm going to show you the same living neuron after learning and after sleep can you imagine what does this look like is it going to have a fatter leg am I trying to trick you I'm very good at that so let's look at it after learning and after sleep Look at wherever those

little blue triangles are the the blue triangle on your on the left at the bottom that shows if you compare that dentritic spine with the image up above there was no dentritic spine there earlier it emerged during sleep and the upper D the upper blue triangle it shows like a thicker head on the dendritic spine this happened during the after the learning and sleep proc process so you can see neuroscientists have actually Shown that in the brain there's like a wave during sleep that circles around the brain I guess like a you could sort of

think of it like a toilet flushing right but it circles around the brain and what that is doing is that's actually physically reinforcing some links and sweeping away other links so this is why sleep is an important part of your learning process uh you don't want to neglect or say oh oh I'm just going To ignore sleep but you're going to see even more about why sleep is so important so uh so hand inand with retrieval practice or with a a retrieval practice is something called spaced repetition and this is as you can see here

you can see there's links so let's say you have five hours in a week you might there this just one way of doing things but you might do one Hour per day over five days and what's happening is you do one hour of study that lays some links but during when you go to sleep at night it reinforces those links things next day study then reinforce now our tendency as students can be to do everything on one day cram it when you cram what that does is it makes weaker links that are easier to sweep

away so sometimes really good students will cram at the last minute and if they're smart they can still do Well this is because they're um they're using links in the hippoc campus which are only temporary so what can happen is they can do well on an exam but the next semester this that Foundation has not been laid they'll forget the material and they don't do as well this is why sometimes really really smart students can do well go through uh graduate first in their class in high school go to MIT and suddenly they're Floundering because

they they've gotten used to studying at the last minute but when they're with some really competitive other students that technique doesn't work very well but they don't have good study habits yet and so then they can struggle so uh so this is actually a problem sometimes for really really smart students but I love metaphors as you can tell so a good metaphor for all of these ideas is the idea that you're laying a a brick wall When you're learning so you lay a layer of bricks mortar bricks but before you go too high you you

take your time you let that mortar dry if you don't do that if you don't take your time with your learning you can have a pretty bad foundation for learning so it can make things more difficult for you so uh so another analogy that I think is a good one is just weightlifting we can look at a we can Look at this guy and we know that he did not sit there the night before some World Championship thinking you know I'm going to cram tonight in in fact it took him a lot of time to

be able to create that muscular structure and it's similar for neural structure it's just that we can't see inside so we think we can do things at the last minute and that's um can that way lies danger but while I have you thinking About uh weightlifting and uh exercise and Athletics I do want to add something that I think is important for you uh in your life of learning and that is we know that exercise is one of the most profoundly important and useful ways that we can improve our ability to remember and to uh

to learn effectively we never knew why that was like they knew that swimmers during swimming season would get better grades even though they had less time to study why Was that now we finally understand why that is so if you look right here this is a a dendrite that leg of the neuron this is before a substance called brain derived neurotropic factor bdnf is sort of sprinkled on these neurons and bdnf is released in the brain when you exercise it's kind of like a fertilizer so let's see what happens to this dendrite when we sprinkle

this athletic fertilizer of bdnf on it look at this it's like these Dentritic spines just explode out and go okay I'm ready just learn me something because I'm hanging around here waiting to get connected into things so this is part of why exercise can be so valuable as far as helping you to be able to learn more efficient so if you struggle sometimes in your learning ask yourself let because sometimes people will be like I can't focus very well and part of that can arise because people will you they don't Have enough exercise built into

their lives so you know a little bit if you're already a good athlete no worries but if you if you don't have much exercise exerise built in you know try to enhance a little bit with uh with some additional exercise and you'll find it's helpful will it turn you into a Super Genius no because otherwise all these Olympic athletes would be super Geniuses and they're not but it will help enhance whatever you are naturally capable of Doing so I do want to give you just a little bit of uh extra insight into why sleep is

so important so it um it turns out that when you are thinking during the day these metabolites kind of toxins build up in the brain especially in the areas of your brain that are working really hard with what you're studying and what happens during sleep watch this I love this part so look at those little cells they will shrink your brain cells Shrink when when you go to sleep and this allows the cerebral fluids that are always flowing past to flow more rapidly and easily and they wash those toxins away so it's a this is

yet another reason why sleep is so valuable um Einstein interestingly he slept around nine hours a night he was a he was a very good sleeper he really liked it so I think we can but everyone is wired a little differently there are some people who have what is called the short sleep Gene so those individuals they can get by on four hours of sleep at night quite nicely I wish I was a short sleep Jean person but uh you check yourself if you're weary during the day clearly you need to get be giving a

little more sleep when you can given the fact that sometimes life throws the things at us it can be a little difficult also watch nutrition if you exercise and have a good uh nutrition it can each that enhances both of the effects so it's Like it's better than each one individually so Good by good nutrition uh I mean things like you know inure and I think this is easier to do in Guatemala where there's you know well there is fast food everywhere in the world but you also have these wonderful very nutritious vegetables and fresh

things here that it's you have a wonderful country so you can get plenty of garlic uh onions those are of a good family that give you a lot of um Nutritive um substances that your brain needs uh cabbage family sorts of things like brussels sprouts uh and so forth add some nuts to your diet fruits of course um dark chocolate of a Kind like around here can be very helpful as well but uh with all of this remember that that desserts are not a food group so try to avoid them um even though I know

it can be a little difficult here so I know most of you in this room are a little um more mature so so I want to Give you a little bit of insight into what's going on in the brain when you are trying to learn something indeed as you become older theta waves are like so they go from a frequency of around four to eight Hertz so it's like four times to eight times a second there these slow ripples that go through your brain these help synchronize your thoughts so even if the neurons are not

directly connected together it's like a Bunch of quirks that are floating on the same wave so you can connect your thoughts and you you walk into the kitchen to grab something and have you ever been like why did I walk into the kitchen what what did I want here it's because those theta waves are not actually holding the information together in your working memory as they should be so is there anything that we can do to help reconnect and build those data Waves and it turns out that there is in fact action Style video games

are one of the best ways to help you to build your um your build your cognition back to the way it was when you were younger and I'm going to show you a nature um study that uh that that found exactly these kinds of results so the study is cited in the lower right this was the cover of an article in nature which is probably the most prominent paper uh uh journal in the world and I'm Going to show you three different brains one brain is or it's like a group of average brains of people

in their 20s and other is people in their 60s the last one is people in their 60s who have had cognitive training with video games wherever you see this kind of red stuff the warm colors that means there's more activity there so so like the the red brain is that's kind of where you want to be it's a really active good cognition lots of good stuff So guess what I want you to do is guess which one is the students in their 20s which one is Stu is people in their 60s and which is people

in their 60s who have had cognitive training with video games do you have it in mind which one's which okay there we go amazing isn't it and it turns out that some of these video games are actually um under FDA approval process to help people with um enhancing their cognition as they grow Older so when people sometimes will say oh video games know that's bad kids should never do them no they should never be overdone that that's exactly right but for us older types it's not necessarily a bad thing so I want to switch to

a a sort of a different kind of thing here and then we're going to have a little activity so let's um I want to give you a sense of the different modes of thinking that people will um they Naturally use in their everyday lives so this has been these different modes have been found by Neuroscience one I'll call the focus mode it's kind of like what you're doing here you're focusing the other I'll call the diffuse mode and it's like when you're mind wandering so you're standing in a shower maybe going for a walk your

your thoughts are wandering so to better understand these two different modes what will we use I think I heard it oh video that's kind of what oh yes it is that's probably the best answer I've heard even though what I was actually looking for was the word metaphor but the metaphor we're going to use is the basis of video games so excellent excellent you were like two steps ahead of me so so um years ago they had pinball machines and those are the bases of many modern video games what you do is you Just pull

back on a plunger this ball goes bouncing around on the the rubber bumpers and that's how you get points so what we're going to do is we're going to take this video game or this this pinball machine and put it right on the human brain you ready for it okay here we go so this is the pinball machine on the brain and this is a metaphor for focused motive thinking so so you can tell it's Focus because look how close together those little rubber bumpers are When you think a thought in Focus mode like let's

say I said I want you to multiply 2 23 * 74 you might haul out a piece of paper a few of you may be could do it in your head and those thoughts would move right along Pathways you've already laid in your brain that allow you to solve that problem you've learned multiplication Pathways but what if you are learning something completely new so let's say you are Um uh you you already know how to multiply but you have not yet learned division so your instructor teaches you about division you come home that night you're

working away your parents are maybe gone you're trying to solve this problem and you realize you cannot figure out what's going on you start reading you're trying to find something you're getting more and more frustrated and what's really happening is you're trying to lay a new pattern as you can See there's a new pattern of division you're trying to lay as you're SOL in those problems but your mind can keep slithering back to multiplication because it's so you're you're so used to it you've done it a lot so what can happen is you can get

more and more frustrated and then you end up just closing the book walking away and as you walk away and start talking with friends maybe have dinner with family or whatever your mind gets off of that Problem and guess what it opens that very different much more broad ranging diffuse mode of thinking so you can't think in the careful Focus way you can when you're in the focus mode but you can at least get to that new place you want to be so that when you return to focusing it suddenly makes sense learning often involves

go back and forth between focused and diffus mode you cannot be in both modes at the same Time on the same topic unless you're taking certain forms of of drugs and I'm not suggesting that here so uh so you want to when you're stuck on something allow yourself to have the time to step back a little bit and that can really be helpful for you um as you are trying to make sense of things go to sleep for the evening um take a little walk go work on another topic maybe something a little easier this

will all help you as you are taking Your your break from that focused mode now um sometimes people will have attentional challenges so you may have an attention uh syndrome and if you think about focused and diffuse mode kind of as tables what can happen is kind of think of it like like this you're thinking and if you have attentional issues it's like you have extra holes in that table and your thoughts can fall through more easily even when you don't want them to And you're in that diffuse mode but it as it turns out

those with attentional challenges can often be more creative so it is it can be a real benefit interestingly uh meditation itself is uh is has different aspects of either Focus or diffuse meditation so this is I was teaching some monks in h Katmandu at the turar monastery and uh their leader Yong Minar PO is one of the lead leaders in the world the most studied of all monks and what they're finding is that focused Meditation that occurs during mantras you know when you're doing a mantra that's Focus mode and it enhances your ability to focus

however open monitoring types of meditation can also they can enhance your ability with diffuse mode so different types of meditation can enhance different ways of thinking but what I'd like you to do now I'd like you to take like five or six minutes and I would like you to just talk with one another I'd like you to introduce Yourselves at the table you may know your each other and maybe not and I'd like you to describe what was focused and what was diffuse mode what were the differences and if you have some examples from your

own life of focused versus diffuse modes have at it for five or six minutes and discuss these things okay so I have so start you might start formul I have more stuff I have so much more stuff I could go for the rest of The day but I don't want to do that because Carmen would get mad at me uh uh and but so I'm going to I'm going to continue on um and but this is more of a relaxed time so if you have some questions about anything I've spoken about in the past or

about what I will be speaking about just raise your hand wave it motion attracts attention and uh yes hi good afternoon good morning I was just wondering whether son has to do with your cognitive process I personally Work so much better at night but and I've heard a lot of people have the issue but I don't know there's any stud that oh yes so about 40% of people it's like their underlying genetics lean them towards being more mourning people about 30% of people are more evening they call you know night owls as opposed to morning

Larks and the rest are more balanced in between interestingly um there's a little bit of evidence that some of it may relate to Neanderthal genes coming from northern Europe like even you know you have a little sliver that comes from the because the neandertals who were there they lived during a time frame where they uh was in the far north and so light wasn't an issue for part of the year because they didn't have light uh for a good part of the year so uh so there's interesting relationships there but for sure some people just

do better at night I cannot understand those People because I'm totally a morning but it was so fun because my colleague and co-author in working on the book um learn like a Pro he is from Norway and so I would work away and just when I would stop you know like 6 or 7 in the evening in Norway that's like way into the middle of the night that's when Olaf was getting started so he would work all night on the book you know and then i' get up the next morning I'd have his stuff and

then I'd work away so it Worked out really well but um at first I was thinking about your question and there is the sun actually does affect our learning because it sets our circadian rhythms so a good thing for you to do especially if you have trouble sleeping at night try to go outside in the morning when there's slanted light coming in and that will that what that'll do is set a little trigger in your mind so that 12 hours later later you will start to feel more Tired you don't want to sit with glass

in between you and the sun want to sit outside if you can for 5 10 minutes when the sun is at a slant as it's coming up so very interesting question there uh that I've long wondered about myself so uh and it also it can depend and you can change as you get older you tend to be more of a like either or a morning kind of person um younger people especially when they're getting into adolescence tend to be U much more night owl kind of People so uh so it also depends on the time

in your life okay uh any other questions yes just of on that and because like everybody is kind of different right so I was wondering if there's like a correct retrieving technique or or something like that oh so retrieving interestingly so we've just Talked about focus and diffuse modes um the there are correct retrieving techniques and the most important one is do not be looking at what you want to be retrieving from your own mind when you are looking at it you're focusing on it when you're retrieving you're using part of that defuse mode so

closing your eyes looking away from the book uh standing going and sweeping uh making a cup of of coffee or just Something very routine being doing those kinds of things when you are retrieving um that is key another thing thing that's very important well in fact we'll talk about this in just a minute so uh but that's a good question the big thing is you want to go into your own mind which is what is diffuse mode partly is so even when you're focusing on something that you're trying to retrieve from your own mind it's

still kind of you're using a big part of the diffuse Mode um so yes I have a question if how long do you have to stay for example good question so everyone if you can just blink blink for a moment okay you open your eyes back up you were momentarily in the diffuse mode so interestingly it can be very short however if you think about those neural processes of connection those clearly can't take place in the short period of a blink of an eye so you are in the diffuse mode but usually about I I'll

Say this is rule of thumb and and we'll see a little bit more later on uh about five minutes of not focusing on things being in diffuse mode that can help you so if you're focusing then you take a little break of five minutes or so that's when you can your brain can work away in the background around and kind of consolidate these ideas and we'll see a practical way of using that in just a moment so good question um and okay so let's talk a little bit about Multitasking so multitasking here's the problem is

everybody has a friend who's a really good multitasker you know and so then they go oh uh or at least everybody has a friend who thinks they're really good multitask so um so let's talk a little bit about uh multitasking the the reality is uh there's two flavors of multitasking the first one is Task switching which means like you're Reading something then you look at your cell phone so it's kind of like you're ripping up those neural roots and replanting them in something else else the other one is like you're reading but you're also listening

to music and truly this dual tasking is something you can do at the same time there is some evidence that um when you might be studying and listening to music for some people it doesn't seem to be much of an issue it depends on how big your working Memory capacity is but it always does have at least a minor effect on your cognition so so um but on the other hand if you're studying sometimes people will like to study in a coffee house you get those clanks of you know like something you know coffee cup

hitting or something like that what that does is you're studying you're in the focus mode it momentarily takes you in the diffuse mode as if kind of like an eye blink but even more so let's say you're studying Physics and you're going along you're really focused and you're just struggling with this concept you're trying to understand it and then you get this Clank it throws you out takes you in diffuse mode for a moment you come back and you go oh that's the way it is because when you come back you land at a slightly

different lural configuration and sometimes that can make that breakthrough so for example let's say some student let's say they're studying For medical school some students have superb memories they can memorize all the an anatomical terms simple yeah and they they like something that uh one student might take weeks to prepare for a test they can sit down in a couple hours just scan it over remember it all that's easy then it comes to something like learning cardiac function cardiac function is really complex it's not just memorizing a bunch Of stuff you got to imagine in

your mind you know all what is going on where the blood flow is you know what's going on when during the the different uh parts of the process and when you're studying something like cardiac function it can actually be helpful to be in a coffee shop in particular because you're not just memorizing stuff you're trying to understand something really difficult Clank oh wait and as you're trying to put these Concepts together it draws you Out put you back and you can begin to see the big system patterns more easily so I hope that's making sense

I'm trying to kind of give a little bit of a a a feel for these kinds of things interestingly So speaking of medical school in uh in the US at least there's a Concept in medical school and uh it's called a Gunner a gunner is the super smart student who always has the answer immediately for everything so oftentimes You know you'll get these interns and residents together and the doctors will say okay who's got the answer for what the diagnosis is in this patient the Gunner is the one that goes oh I know and they

can rattle off everything they've got it they got it all memorized but here's the thing Gunners do not make good diagnosticians you're like wait but they can hear all the stuff remember it put it all together and they're you know They're very fast they should be the best of being able to diagnose all these illnesses here's what they do they remember everything they hear the words they see the pattern they make a connection and that's it click they've made the connection they made their diagnosis they can't change their mind so easily so they can make

a diagnosis but it may well not be the best diagnosis if they'd asked a few more questions and Gotten a little more insight they could have made a better diagnosis so sometimes slower learners can actually be the smarter Learners so I so as you might guess there's a kind of a a loss of efficiency when you are doing multitasking there's about a 30% if you're reading a book and then you keep looking at your cell phone you're going to be less efficient except for the 2% of people who are super Taskers that 2% of people

ruin it for all of us uh they they actually have dopamine differing dopamine that uh uh neural characteristics that make it so they can look at this look here look back and change their their thinking very quickly about these about things these individuals make super good um Emergency Room Physicians because you know when an emergency is happening they got to be here look at this make sure this is Going on they can change how they're thinking about that things they make good race car drivers good uh Master Chefs I do not want a super Tasker

though if I'm coming in with a really difficult to diagnose um illness I want somebody who's not bored by just delving very very deeply into things so it's okay if you are not this U multitasker who is very good at switching their thoughts at things but uh most students as it turns Out um are not very good at multitasking in fact the ones who can multitask best these super taskers they are often the least likely to multitask so they they can do it but they just don't do it very well those who can't multitask very

well are the ones who are most likely to multitask so uh they're also the ones who are most likely to fool themselves into thinking that multitasking works well for them so uh so just be very uh Careful there's something called illusions of competence as a learner and this often involves just that idea of you think you've got it in long-term memory and um and you can do all sorts of different things but you may well not have it in long-term memory I do have to say oftentimes when you're trying to learn something well it's a

good idea to push yourself hard and I'll give you the counter example of this so that actually represents me as a little girl I found out so my parents wanted me to learn how to play the piano and I found out though you know I was a song kid I found out if I just played anything on the piano they thought I was practicing so I learned songs so well a song that I could play it over and over again and I could put my comic books on in front of my music and I could

just read my comic book and uh of course the long and the short of it was I never learned how to play The piano well so so it is important to push yourself when you're learning don't just be comfortable with wherever you're at this sometimes they'll say oh you should be in a flow State flow states are great that's where you feel you can really do it and you're flying along but there for when you already are a master of the material and uh but learning itself you want to always be pushing yourself what's the

hardest thing so so how to to Ensure that you're actually doing this it it can be valuable to avoid the biggest challenge in learning which is procrastination so procrastination happens because when we even just think about something we don't like or don't want to do it activates a part of the brain the insul cortex that experiences pain and we often just you know don't feel so good as a result so what we can do is we can think about something we don't like or don't want to Do like whatever topic you don't want to be

learning um or your taxes or whatever you don't want to to be doing you feel uncomfortable so you change your thinking to something more pleasant and the result you feel happier almost instantly do do it once or twice no big deal do it very often and you can actually think you can't do something because I mean we've all experienced known students um who just can't succeed in whatever that Subject is and it's not because they didn't have the capability to do it it's just because they put it off until the last minute and few people

can learn in that stressful kind of situation so the best uh I'm an engineer now it's just jump to the chase what is the most effective way to to help you get past procrastination it's the Pomodoro Technique this was invented by an Italian Franchesco Sero in the 1980s it's super simple unless you hear about it from academics I have actually gone to a Pomodoro session you know about the Pomodoro and it was a simple 25 step process I was just like nobody's going to do the Pomodoro after academics got got loose on the on this

idea but it is truly simple all you do is you turn off all dist ractions set so no popups on your computer nothing like uh on your cell phone or whatever good luck if you have A two-year-old at home and then you just set a timer for 25 minutes work focus on it as intently as you can for those 25 minutes so that means like if you're working on it and you suddenly think oh I want to go see what's on television this evening you just keep your focus right back because the reality is anybody

can do 25 minutes of focus and when you're done give yourself a nice relaxing little break for five minutes or so so what is this Doing it's a clever way of focus plus uh plus a little bit of a five minute diffuse mode break so your focus and then you're giving yourself what is your tendency going to be to do during that 5 minute break you will um want to pick up your phone right but if you pick up your phone you're focusing again even if you tell yourself I'm just going to uh you know

I'm just G To take a peek oh wait no he answered oh I better reply and you're going right back into Focus mode and you're writing over what you've just learned so five minutes of nothing yeah I mean you can sweep the floor maybe listen to a little music uh or just something relaxing that can really be uh super helpful for you so I would say hide your cell phone right or do well maybe not do this kind of thing but you know you want to try to avoid having your cell phone Around except there

are techniques some people will actually use these kind of containers to uh lock up their cell phones and that can work there's also all sorts of websites that you can use to keep an eye on how much time you're spending on surfing the web or whatever there's there are some really good apps out there uh you see Forest on the right uh which is if you it's an app that encourages you to do pomodoros you plant A tree if you complete a Pomodoro you uh kill a tree metaphorically at least if you don't so um

I also sometimes just advise people if you have something like two and a half hours do four pomodoros and at half an hour break after that so um I think we're we're probably add a we've got eight minutes left so I want to H ask if you have some questions because I probably have a slide that can show you some answers related to whatever the Question is uh so do does anyone have any questions this time sometimes students oh I can't focus for 25 minutes you think it's still good for them to dry 15 yes

yep yep what the Pomodoro can do is it helps enhance your ability to focus longer so if you start with shorter periods the challenge has been today there is some evidence that with this uh I mean the way that social media is Built is it's built to be addictive and to cause you to jump you know and and de and desire quick changes that attract your attention so you you watch all the social media and you're getting trained to continue to desire these little dopamine hits of uh pleasure when you are quickly switching to something

new but you can retrain your brain to to get back into being able to focus uh for longer periods of time that's the great thing about the human brain is you're Pretty flexible so if you really have trouble with longer periods starting with shorter pomodoras is perfectly fine and there's nothing magical about that 25 minutes of a typical Pomodoro I mean no one did some extensive studies from Neuroscience what they did do is there's one study that does show that after 20 minutes of work on something do you know when you start something there's this

like pain in the brain that you're overcoming after about 20 minutes that Pain goes away so that's why a Pomodoro can be very helpful for you as far as uh you get started and then have you ever noticed just getting started is 3/4 of the battle and you get going and then you start enjoying it one thing I do find is if I have something really really new that when I first start trying to do pomodoras on it it's Agony for the first few days but I I just told myself 25 minutes today and then

the next day and then I find by after the Third fourth fifth days I'm kind of like oh really I can only do 25 minutes you know and and I keep working on longer and I'm actually enjoying it more so your own mind it's it's just that 25 minutes uh starting to get into the new subject um and getting started in the subject which is really helpful um one thing I've also found is um does anyone uh have challenges with a messy house messy House so if you just set yourself like doing a Pomodoro each

day on you're just cleaning something you just you know and you just clean that whatever that is and that's all you have to do and I generally I'll pick one thing so it might be I might working on a bureau or one room or something but I remember when I started first started doing this my husband after a while was kind of like are you running a temperature how you know are you doing okay cuz starting To look clean around here which is unlike you so no he wasn't like that but he was it was

uh quite noticeable so pomodoros are great for uh not only for learning but for productivity of All Sorts even at the home so um other questions other questions yes what be your advice to incentivize this recing method learning in a non School environment I want to teach my managers to keep learning but there's no incentive to Keep learning it's quite difficult to make them recall things because there's we used to it oh so incentives are always important so you might build into their their um okay so let's let me see if I can show you

this one okay so you can create okay what I want you to do so um look okay hang on just a sec let's Okay oops no okay so see where that is pointing up in the upper leftand side this is a way of creating groups you can create groups within your business and Ask your individuals to go in in and create retrieval practice flashcards on whatever you want and share them with the group and you can take a look at what they're creating so you could use this as a way of you know monitoring whether

they're doing retrieval practice this is a I love this it's called I do recall and let me show you kind of how it so you can make these flash cards and they're really cool so here's a flash card I'm Just creating a flash card this is on a subject I'm learning more about default mode Network so I'm creating flashcards I can I can test myself I can download ebook notes cut and paste from ebooks and from my notes to them easily create a flash card from my ebook book notes that I've you know my key

notes and uh so there's one it's called the pedagogy delusion which is like you're fooling yourself that you're actually Teaching and um uh but also you can do things like upload PDFs and and easily create a flash card and what's great is you can when you're checking whether you know the answer to it and you can even go and like this is my favorite neuroscientist you can go and look at the um the YouTube scripts and create notes from those YouTube transcripts so I mean it's like any way you want to do it soon they

will be uh Rolling out a new device or a new way of doing things that uses chat GPT to see what is um like if I uploaded a PDF what are the key insights I should be getting from this PDF and it creates the cards for me so I mean um okay there is so much in learning from chat GPT that is going to help us as Learners and as Educators I just have you been have you all been using cha gbt I love it so for example so people were like oh it's not creative

it's not People well actually they did studies on students uh or and they found out what normal everyday people create you know when they're being creative uh like when you're having students get together and create uh ideas that chat GPT is far more creative and Innovative in the ideas it has so just like Gary Casper off uh he was the first Chessmaster to be beaten by you know artificial intelligence but what he says is the best chess Players they have it in their mind but they also get insight and advice from Ai and that's what

we will be doing in the future is coming up with you know these kinds of great uh I did so I was asked to give a talk on pathological altruism for teachers for a conference in November or no October and so so I uploaded a paper I'd written uh on pathological altruism I asked Cloe 2 which is a you know chat GPT website where you can upload more uh more Extensive materials I asked it to come up with an abstract for a talk I would give for teachers on this proceedings of the national Academy of

Science paper that I wrote that abstract was so good it gave me ideas for how I could better do the talk so it was really quite marvelous um so if you happen to be you know teaching uh there's all sorts of great retrieval practice apps so you can encourage your you know people at your work to use these but if you happen to Also be teaching live and in class perek and nearpod allow you to push out retrieval practice questions and also get feedback back um that you can show anonymously to the class or to

your work for example um about how well they're actually retrieving some of these ideas good question any other questions have I have I given you enough today I so much more like a comment related to exercise and also you have the heran Slide he also talks about the breath and how breath breathing and breathing exercises can improve your focus and your attention as well that is so um that's exactly right and so let's look at a little bit of breathing so I can show you um come back here okay so I'm gonna this is kind

of um come back here is okay so when you're nervous you often breathe from the top Of your so huberman is great because he gives you insight into what's going on um you know sort of how to conduct your life integrating breathing um into it in a way that can enhance your uh a lot of of different things going on in your life but there's a wonderful book by James Nester I believe it's called and it's called breath but this book is um it talks about for example the American Indians how it was common throughout

the Americas for parents like mothers would block the nose of or they block the the mouth of the child to ensure that the child always breathe through their nose because it can be more helpful but in any case when you're really nervous you tend to breathe only from the top of your chest instead of like so you'll be like kind of panting up here instead of breathing and it so try try putting your hand on your stomach and now what I want you to do is I want You to breathe in such a way that

what what will happen it's something like like you want to draw that air all the way down so that is actually like pushing in the bottom of your lungs against your belly and you can almost feel your belly kind of expanding out a little bit so the idea is to draw your air all the way down so that you're actually your it it pushes against your stomach and your Stomach expands when you are doing this belly breathing you're drawing air much more deeply and it can help you so you're not so nervous because when you

let's say you have to get up and give the speech of your lifetime and you're in front of of thousands and you're like you start breathing really from the top of your your uh chest and you're not drawing oxygen in and you think you're Panicking because it's a stressful situation but you're actually panicking in large part because you're not drawing in enough oxygen you're not getting enough air so pulling that deeply into your chin chest you know with your breathing can be very very helpful and so this little guy right here he's trying to show

don't breathe from the top of your chest kind of breathe deeper and uh that will help you be more relaxed with your whatever you're trying To do so good question okay well I think we're about uh wrapped up here feel free to come up and ask me any more questions if you might like and all I can say is I uh I love UFM I love everything that it stands for and it's an honor for me to be able to share here with you thank [Applause] [Music] you