The Science Of Successful Learning Habits | Peter C Brown

Peter C Brown is a writer, retired management consultant and the author of Make It Stick; The Science Of Successful Learning. No matter what your goals in life, your capacity to learn effectively is the foundation upon which everything is built. Whether you're learning Archery or Law, Economics or Knitting, your capacity to consume and recall information mediates your ability to progress. Today we learn what science tells us is the most effective method to learn. Florida International University Law School implemented the Make It Stick approach and went from typically 4th or 5th in The Bar Exam to placing 1st Place in 5 out of the last 6 exams. Teacher or student, you should listen to this. Make It Stick The Book: http://amzn.eu/2JY3yHB - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Hello friends. This week, I'm very happy to say that we are going to learn how to learn. Peter C. Brown is the co-author of Make It Stick. That book is about as seminal as you can get in the world of learning to learn. No matter what your area of pursuit in life, it's pretty likely that being able to expedite your capacity to intake information and then recall it at will is probably going to be pretty useful. And that doesn't matter if it's learning a new subject or learning a new physical skill.

• 0:40Chris Williamson?

  If it's knitting or archery or law, all of them require you to be able to remember and recall what it is that you're trying to learn. And Peter manages to lay out a really good framework for doing that today. In other news, the Modern Wisdom YouTube channel has now crossed 1,000 subscribers and has nearly hit 2 million watch minutes, which is pretty crazy in the first two months of it being up. So if you haven't already, please head to YouTube, search Modern Wisdom Podcast and give it a subscribe. It would be a massive help.

• 1:20Chris Williamson?

  Also, if you haven't already, whatever platform you're on, whether it's TuneIn FM, I'm not even sure if that's a podcast listening platform, we are everywhere, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, wherever you're listening, please try and give us a five star rating. I don't really know if it helps, but it strokes the ego a little bit, so do it if you can. But now we're going to learn how to learn. Peter Brown, bring it on.

• 2:00Chris Williamson?

  Mr. Pete Brown, welcome to Modern Wisdom.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Thank you, Chris. It's great to be here.

• 2:05Chris Williamson?

  How are you today?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  I'm doing just dandy. It's the middle of summer here in Minnesota. It's a nice time to be here.

• 2:16Chris Williamson?

  Lovely. I've recently, recently returned from the States and the, the weather was fantastic, but apparently I've missed the one warm week that we get in the UK as well. So I should have doubled down, I should have doubled down and just stayed home.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  I guess.

• 2:30Chris Williamson?

  I understand. So I want to get straight into it. Can you define to me what learning means?

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Yes. For me, I define learning as picking up knowledge or skill that resides in your memory and is available to you when you need it later to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity.

• 3:01Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that sounds like a very, a very curated definition. Was that something that you came upon easily? Or is that something that you had to develop through a lot of, a lot of thinking, a lot of conceptual deconstruction?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  No, I just made it up, but it's because I made it up when I started working on writing the book, Make It Stick, because I felt that I owed the reader a definition of what we're talking about with learning. And I figured, well, I'll just try that and see if it holds up. And it held up fine.

• 3:31Chris Williamson?

  Was there a satisfactory definition in advance of that?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  No, I'm sorry, but I might have a problem with my headphones because that kind of comes on and off.

• 3:41Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay. I'm not too sure what's going on there. That might be, that might be on my side.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Okay, so ask the question again.

• 3:50Chris Williamson?

  Was there an existing definition of learning that you were happy with? Or was that one that you've just created? Did that need to be there as far as you were concerned?

• 4:01Speaker 01

  I felt we owed the reader a definition for writing a book about learning. We owed the reader a definition of what learning is. So I sort of thought about it a little bit and I wrote that and I thought we'll start with that and see if it holds up as we go through the book and it held up fine. Some people in science, the sciences, refer to learning as three things. One being encoding, which is when you first encounter material and it's encoded as traces in the hippocampus. Consolidation, this is the process by which it moves, it migrates over hours or days into other parts of the brain where long-term memories are stored.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  And retrieval, being able to recall it again later. So the scientists think of it as that's learning for them. For me, you learn it and you remember it and you can recall it when you need it.

• 5:00Chris Williamson?

  I understand. So can you give us a little bit of background to the book Make It Stick and why you were compelled to write that?

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. I've been retired for some years. I made my living as a marketing and planning consultant at corporations here in Minnesota. I had turned to writing books and I was between book projects. Now I'm sitting down with my brother-in-law, Henry Rodiger. Henry Rodiger, who goes by Roddy, is internationally preeminent in the field of memory and learning. He's a cognitive psychologist. He was telling me that he was just coming to the end of a 10-year study of what strategies lead to better retention of the new material.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  And he had a team of cognitive psychologists at 11 different universities doing this work with their doctoral students and post-docs. And over a decade of such studies, they were coming to some findings that were counterintuitive. And he said, "I've been trying to figure out how to get this out to a broader, general audience and maybe we should collaborate on a book." So that's how I got into it. I'm not a scientist. But I was very taken by what they were finding. So Roddy Henry Rodeger and one of his colleagues, Mark McDaniel, who is also a cognitive psychologist, they're both at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, the two of them and I collaborated on this book.

• 6:35Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so I guess you've got the you've got the cognitive firepower in there on those guys' sides, you know, 10 years and 11 facilities that have been used for that particular study. It's not as if you're it's not as if you're short of of research on that side.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  No, and the book is based on decades of research and reaches far beyond the work of that team. But you're right, it's it's firmly grounded in the empirical evidence, but I tried to write a book that was highly anecdotal and engaging to read so that people would stick with it. And we could tell stories that illustrated what the science shows about how learning works. So that gave it a different kind of twist than the than the typical scientific study publication.

• 7:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, for sure. I think in order to get the wider population to be able to buy into books like these, you need to bring it back down to earth. There needs to be some tacit examples and some things that people can relate to everyday life, talking about standard deviations away from the norm and, you know, statistical modeling.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Whatever that means, right?

• 7:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it doesn't it doesn't light it doesn't light anyone's eyes. Well, it lights some people's eyes. Perhaps your two co-authors would be would get would get turned on by that. But I guess for the for the normal reader, that's not going to be that's not exactly going to light light the fire in their belly, so to speak.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  It wouldn't keep me up at night. It'd put me right to sleep.

• 8:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, agreed, agreed. So you've got the existing research there. Did you think that writing a book on the science of learning was was important to to publish to the sort of wider wider audience?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Well, I thought so, and they did too. And I think the reason it struck home with me is because I have a bachelor's degree from college. I'm not a, I don't have a graduate degree, you know, higher training. I've always been someone who's taken an interest in things and then gone about learning about them, figuring them out. And what their research showed is that the way a lot of people, particularly students, go about learning is by review and rereading and trying to push stuff into their brain. But what is far more effective is trying to get it out of the brain. It's the tinkering, the trial and error, the experimentation,

• 9:15Speaker 01

  the learning from the turns and setbacks that you get. And I just felt very much personally affirmed by what the research showed, and I thought I would really enjoy getting my hands on this. And because I felt it was very important, but I also felt it was really interesting.

• 9:34Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's superbly fundamental, isn't it, that no matter what discipline it is that you're studying in, that the science of learning to learn is foundationally ahead of all of the things, ahead of everything that you're trying to do. You need to be able to know how to learn, because it's universal, right? It's ubiquitous.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  It is. And from the moment we leave the womb, children are experimenting, touching, tasting, trying things. And when we get older, we lose some of that. And I think the traditions of our schools are such that learning involves an expert who imparts knowledge to students. And in fact, it doesn't really, it's not really very effective.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  I think athletes know this when they go out on the field and they have a coach. And the athlete knows that she or he has to figure this out and the coach can give feedback and they could work at it. But most students, including athletes who walk into a classroom, expect the learning to be imparted to them. And learning is not imparted. Learning is something that's really acquired, unless, you know, in extraordinary circumstances where you have some tremendously significant, emotionally significant event happen, then yeah, you will remember that. But the kinds of things that we're trying to build in the way of mental understanding, mental models and mastery, you have to acquire.

• 11:11Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. So, did you have a look at, or can you give us some of the typical approaches of an unlearned learner, as I'm going to call someone, someone who's unenlightened as to perhaps what is, what the research suggests? Did you have a look at what's the typical approach?

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Well, in surveying students, college students, by far and away, the major study strategies are rereading material, underlining and highlighting, and note-taking, that kind of thing. But the science shows that what's far more effective after you've heard a lecture or read a passage is to turn aside and then to give yourself a little quiz, what were the big ideas in this material? Try to recall it and try to say to yourself, this relates to what I already know in the following ways, or if I were to put this in my own words, here's how I would do it. It's engaging the mind in the material.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  So, I summarize all of Make It Stick with three ideas. The first one is the one I've just described. Learning happens when you struggle to get the learning out and apply it, not when you continue to re-expose yourself to it. It's about getting it out. The second big idea... For me is we try to make learning simple for students. But actually, there are some kinds of difficulties that are desirable. An example of a couple, one would be when you practice a motor skill like your golf putt

• 12:59Speaker 01

  or you practice something you're learning like solving a mathematical problems. It's good to practice a little and then space it out and come back to it at a later time when it's it takes more effort to recall what was the formula and how to successfully apply it. And that kind of spaced practice feels like you're not getting it because your performance is rough. But the actual effort involved in recalling that new material from your long-term memory strengthens the connections to it, helps it reconsolidate, helps bring forward the most

• 13:41Speaker 01

  important points and makes it easier to recall again later. So spacing out your practice is better than practicing things in a massed fashion. That's a desirable difficulty. It doesn't feel good.

• 13:57Chris Williamson?

  It definitely doesn't.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  No. Another desirable difficulty is mixing the practice of similar problem types. So if you're, let's take the math example, if you're practicing learning how to find the volume of a cube and a wedge and some other kind of that series of different solids. The typical way that you would do that with a math book was you'd you'd look at eight different wedges and you'd apply the formula eight times and then you'd move on and do these other different kinds of solids. And during practice, you do very well, you get in tests that you do about 90%. But if in fact, once you've learned each of the formulas, your practice problems were in random sequence.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  You would only do about 50% right, and you wouldn't feel too good about that. But a week later, you will have remembered that same 50%. You would do extremely well on a test compared to the others who've gone from 90% down to 23% because they didn't mix it up. And when you get a test where it's mixed up, they can't remember which formula went with which problem. Yes, of course. So this notion of mixing your practice, which does not feel good, is very powerful for improving your ability to recognize the kind of problem you're facing and picking the kind of solution that's going to be correct. That's interesting. So there are other kinds of desirable difficulties.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  And so the notion of if it's clear as a bell, I'm sure I'll remember it, you know, is not really true. If you have to reconcile different ideas between the lecture and the book chapter or what have you, that mental effort is what's going to make it stick. That's interesting. So that's the second big idea, that some difficulties are desirable. Okay. And the third? Number three, the number three is that our intuition leads us astray. So our intuition is, when I reread it many times, I get very fluent in it. I'm on top of it. I can do that and take a test the next morning.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  I pull an all-nighter and I can get a great grade on the test. It doesn't stick, though. What happens if you're tested again a week later, you've lost about half of it. Our intuition says if we practice our 20-foot putt over and over again, we see improvement. And it's true, you do. But that improvement leans on short-term memory. The skills have not been consolidated in long-term memory. That takes overnight or it takes days. So you walk off the golf course thinking you've really done a service to yourself on your 20 foot putt, but much better would be to do a few 20 foot putts than do other strokes and then come back and mix it up. And it doesn't feel, you don't see that same

• 16:48Speaker 01

  kind of improvement, but your brain is getting better at judging distances and the motor skills required, you know, to, to make a good stroke. So our intuition leads us astray and it causes us to spend time in strategies that are not paying us back.

• 17:05Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So, I mean, that's a, to me, conceptually makes sense, but is quite a, probably quite a big departure away from anecdotally what I would have thought good learning should be done. You know, the, the kind of, um, the force it down your throat, so to speak.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 17:27Chris Williamson?

  Approach, you know, the, the, the really drill it into you, stick to one task for a long time. I know if you, um, if you listen to the podcast that I did with Dr. Ewan Lawson, we discuss in that about multitasking and the Pomodoro technique, deep work and trying to focus wholly on one task. It's not too far of a jump to think that instead of just focusing on revision, you should drill that down again to just focusing on one topic within your revision, right? And I think that, that could quite erroneous, erroneously be one step too far in terms of the, um, how specific you're being with your revision,

• 18:12Chris Williamson?

  with your revision time. So let's go from the start. Can you explain how learning and memory or learning and recall relate to each other?

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. Well, memory has two components. Actually, my co-author Roddy Rotiger is, his field is memory and, um, he's really written the, a lot of the breakthrough material on memory, including discovering this whole field of false memory. But in any case,

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Long-term memory is in different parts of the brain than short-term memory. So when we're talking about short-term memory or working memory, it's the list you go to the grocery store, you maybe remember it long enough to pick up the things and then maybe you might or might not remember you needed to stop by the dry cleaner on the way home, but that's gone.

• 19:05Chris Williamson?

  Is there a time, is there a approximate time limit usually on that? 24 hours or?

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Not particularly, but I don't, I don't think so. I think it's, depends on whether you're trying, if you're making an effort to remember it for longer.

• 19:18Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  For example, you're, you rent a bike and it's got a four-digit combination lock and you're trying to remember those four digits. Well, you can give yourself a tool to do that. I was with a friend in Adelaide, Australia, and she said, "I can't, I can't even remember my PIN number on my card. How am I going to do this with my bike?" Well, what are, what are the numbers? She said, "It's 5268." And I said, "Well, break it into 52 and 68. What can you do with that?" "Oh, 52 is easy. That's the cards in a deck of cards. And 68, oh, that's the swirly girly," she said. So she still remembers this four-digit number years later. So there are devices you can use, you know.

• 20:01Chris Williamson?

  What a piece of information to keep, to keep in your mind.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, but long-term memory is different from short-term memory and that is, it needs to migrate to another part of the brain and be connected to the other things that you know. So the two aspects of long-term memory are, one, that it gets thoroughly embedded in the brain and connected to many different points of knowledge. If you can attach a visual image, like a medical school student I was talking to who was trying to remember stuff, medical stuff, and he said, "I realized after reading the research that if I paused and made a mental picture of the organ I was reading about

• 20:47Speaker 01

  and thought about its connections, that I could remember that whole thing better." Well, you get more different connections in the brain. Which become routes to finding it again later and recalling it. So it's partly about having having it thoroughly embedded in your brain. And it's partly about having the cues you need to find it later when you want it. A lot of things that we've learned in life, we can't recall because we've reassigned the cues to other things in the meantime.

• 21:15Chris Williamson?

  In terms of cues, what do you mean by cues?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Well, what I mean, Chris, is when you come to LA and you rent a car, you have to create new cues to remember to stay on the right side of the road. The cues, if you are going to take your A levels, for example, in psychology, as was the case of a psychology professor at Oxford that we talked to. He took his students, who students were had mastered the content. But the pressure on the A levels, you don't know which materials you're going to be asked to write. And then in each of the ones you're asked to write, there's, you know, multiple paragraphs. I'm sure you know this better than I, but.

• 21:58Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  So he took his students to coffee shops and he'd say, okay. And imagine that you're walking into the coffee shop and you're going around the perimeter of the shop and they will attach meaning to the different parts of the furnishings or the layout that give them cues, a name of something that cue that next paragraph in their write up. So when they learn what the subject is they have to write about, they say, okay, that was at the such and such, you know, pastry shop.

• 22:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  And I was sitting there and I can see I came in, oh yeah, I called that fern, you know, something or other. And on they can go, they have the cues. So under pressure, when we tend to kind of freeze up in being able to recall material, that's a sort of mnemonic device.

• 22:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Those are cues by which you can bring it up.

• 22:51Chris Williamson?

  It's the it's the beginning of the deck of cards that starts to tumble into the rest of the knowledge, right?

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 22:56Chris Williamson?

  So I can certainly draw a parallel between that and my learning style. So to give you a little bit of a little bit of context for myself, my learning style from probably my GCSEs, so 15 and 16, was to write summarized notes and to then completely verbatim. Record in my mind what the notes were on the page. So I would know that top left, starting at the top, it was this particular bit, then this, then I could see when I got into the exam, I could actually feel in my mind where, let's say that I'd written a word incorrectly and I'd crossed it out. I'd be like, okay, so it's three pages in, it's that, oh, there's that, there's the word that's not written correctly. And those sort of cues, I'm aware

• 23:39Chris Williamson?

  that that, you know, had I have, had I have been able to read your book before I went to university, I'd have probably had, probably had a much easier time of it. But it was kind of, for me, I guess I was, I was, I was using recall, but that was blunt force, like just complete force verbatim.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:59Chris Williamson?

  And that wasn't using the desirable difficulties spacing. And that also wasn't using point number three either. So, you know, I think I'd maybe, I'd maybe focused on the recall and I was, I'd discovered myself that using recall was a good way for me to at least, it's, it's pointless learning something if you then can't, if you can't then pull it back out, as you say, you know, it's almost as if you haven't learned it.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is pointless. And so we had an email from someone recently who'd read the book and said, I'm, you know, I've developed a new way of taking notes and I'd like to know what you think of it. He said, instead of trying to capture everything that the lecturer tells me, if I've read the material and I hear the lecture, I start, have been writing questions in each area so that when I go back to review my notes, I'm actually requiring myself to recall from memory and look up if I can't recall it, what the material is. That's pretty kind of, you know, that's a clever way of doing it because that's what you're going to have to do at test time.

• 25:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  And then the other issue about memorizing notes or memorizing a text is temptation.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  To memorize terms and as opposed to concepts. So it's always important when you've read something or taken the notes to be able to elaborate on them to explain why is this important? What would happen if this weren't true? How does it relate to what I already know?

• 25:43Chris Williamson?

  I guess that's the difference between pure recall and comprehension there, right?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Yes, and which leads ultimately into conceptual learning, right?

• 25:52Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that's interesting. So I had a question that I wanted to ask, and we've led on to it pretty perfectly here. Is it possible to learn something but not remember it?

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Well, sure, there's all kinds of things we've learned that we don't, that we can't recall.

• 26:07Chris Williamson?

  Functionally, does it exist if we can't recall it?

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that you've learned that you can't recall until you get some kind of a clue. You see someone out of your past, or you start talking to someone about past things, and all these memories start flooding back. Or you catch a smell that's particular to a place you were when something happened, and the memories start flooding back. So that's maybe a little different from what you're asking.

• 26:35Chris Williamson?

  No, I think, I think that's right. I think you, I think you're correct. What you, what we've fallen back to here is the cues, right?

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Right, exactly, right. I, I had this problem in 1998. My wife and I spent a year in Italy, and we'd go and take lessons on the language. And the only non-English language I had in me, and I didn't have much of it, was four years of French. And so my brain kept presenting the French whenever I was trying to say something in English.

• 27:04Chris Williamson?

  But she's not going to go down very well within Italian.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  It didn't go down, but it startled me. Well, I understood it better after I wrote this book, that I'm, I'm cueing, you know, a foreign word for whatever. And then I discovered after a year in the country and getting mildly able to get by with a language, that I could differentiate between the French and the Italian on, on demand. But that was because I got more diverse cues, I suppose.

• 27:35Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 27:37Chris Williamson?

  That's really interesting. So, okay, we've understood that recall, would you, is it fair to say that recall forms the foundation for learning, or that the ability to?

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:48Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So, without the capacity for recall, the learning, any learning that you build on top of that from comprehension to further, what was the terminology that you used?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Conceptual knowledge.

• 28:01Chris Williamson?

  Conceptual knowledge, right, okay.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  So, here's an interesting thing, that let's take, or you can take hitting a fastball, you don't play baseball over there, but take some kind of a soccer move, or take, you know, driving a stick shift car. You get into a car, you're a brand new driver, you gotta adjust the seat and adjust the mirror, you gotta look here and look there, you gotta push in the clutch and push in the shifter and let out the clutch while you're putting on the gas, a very complicated set of moves, and look and steer out into the roadway and move along. Well, you and I do that without any thought whatsoever, I mean, we're thinking

• 28:46Speaker 01

  about the luncheon we're about to arrive at. So, there's a lot of learning, in particular procedural learning, that the recall is, the procedural learning is kind of chunked, like scientists actually call it chunked in a part of the brain, and it's available to us just like that, without having to think, now, how, what do I do with the shift lever? What do I do with my feet? It's there. And when you get to people who are at a very high level in the sciences, for example, or any field, musicians, whatever, they have spent enough time with the fundamentals of physics, or energy.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Transfer, or whatever those things are, that they just invoke this law or that law subconsciously as they're looking at a situation. So those of us who don't have that knowledge, we have to think through every darn step. We have to think through every part of that shifting and driving sequence. But with practice, especially if it's spaced out, it becomes second nature to us and then we possess it and then that becomes a mental model that we can build on and connect it to other abilities or other bodies of knowledge.

• 30:02Chris Williamson?

  I understand. So time under tension there to a degree is going to be an important factor that trying, you know, cramming and rushing your learning together is not giving you enough time to allow that to settle and then to come back to it, right?

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Well, that's exactly right. So it isn't just spacing out the practice of something with intervals between so that you're a little rusty, so it's a little more difficult to do, and that difficulty actually strengthens.

• 30:29Chris Williamson?

  Desirable difficulties again, right?

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. But it's also true that in a course, if you're, let's say you're a professor in a course, it's better to introduce a lot of the material earlier in the course and come back to it and distribute it over the period of the course because when learning is distributed like that, it sticks better and it has more opportunities to connect with the other related material instead of doing it in blocked fashion or in a silo.

• 31:02Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  You know, first we're gonna do this, then we're gonna do that.

• 31:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so you kind of look, you take an overview of the entire map and then you begin to move through the map piece by piece?

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Right, and so if you're managing your time, I know I'm gonna have a test next Thursday on such and such, you don't wanna say Wednesday's my day, I'm dedicating to that. You're better off dedicating some, a little, a little bit of time each day between now and then because that, distributing that out over time is gonna help your brain do what it does well. Our brains are such that... If we go to bed pondering a challenge or a problem, the brain, we've discovered, is working at that through the night and it will throw out irrelevant stuff and try to connect this to other stuff. It's a remarkable thing. So you are kind of empowering your

• 31:57Speaker 01

  brain to take some responsibility for learning this material if you start it early and come back to it from time to time, instead of trying to force it into your brain.

• 32:08Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'm afraid that eighteen years of full-time education led me to do everything last minute. So I'm probably patient zero for how bad you can be at cramming. But, you know, I can certainly appreciate the times when I have spent a little bit more time over stuff and I have distributed it throughout my week or however it may be. I'm right in thinking, I read a study recently that talked about the capacity for problem solving before and after a night's sleep versus if you had one five-hour chunk or two two-and-a-half hour chunks spread over two days. And the difference between the group that had the sleep in between and was their brains were allowed to reset and look

• 32:51Chris Williamson?

  at the problem with fresh eyes, the capacity for them to complete the problem was so much, so much more impressive than the group that just had one go at it for five hours, which to a degree almost sounds counterintuitive because you think, oh, well, I've got to get back into the same headspace and I've got to get myself up to speed again when I start. Yeah, I've got to recall all this stuff that I did that I might have forgotten. But almost slightly counterintuitively, it doesn't seem to be that way. It seems to be that, like you say, distributing it is.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. There's a really interesting study of.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Medical residents who are learning to reattach tiny vessels with a surgical stitch. And the way in this country they do that, they go away for a day. And there's four lessons. The first, they get a video and then they're given a little bit of rubber tubing called a Penrose drain and they're shown how to pass their stitches through and tie surgical knots. And then they see a video and they're given some synthetic tissue and they practice that. Then they're seeing a video and they get given a turkey thigh. So there's four videos, four sessions, one day. At the end of the day, they are supposedly on top of this, this skill.

• 34:04Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  So in this, in the study, half the group did it that way. There were 38 of them. And the other half came in and did the first video and practice and then they went away for a week and they came back the second week for the second video and practice. And I'm thinking those, those doctors sitting there thinking, well, I'll see if I can remember. What was that last week?

• 34:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  A whole week, my life is busy, you know? And they struggled to kind of recall what it was and they had this next lesson and they went away for a week. So it went like this, four weeks. So they had the exact same training, but those whose learning was spaced out over four weeks, Farouk exceeded the others in all expert measures. And they were then, they had the surprise test. They were given a rat that had a severed aorta and their challenge was to save the rat, to reattach the aorta. And all of those whose learning was spaced out succeeded. And a large percentage of those whose learning wasn't spaced out were not able to save their rat.

• 35:02Chris Williamson?

  Unlucky if you're a rat.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Unlucky if you're a rat, unless you get with the right guy.

• 35:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I want the dispersed guy, I want him.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  But that's, that's just a great example of this, the simple power of exposing your brain to something and working with a little bit, then going away and coming back later and making that effort to recall. And then adding in, you know?

• 35:29Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So we've got, we've got recall. We understand the importance of that. Moving on to the second, the second key concept that you had, which was desirable difficulties and the spacing out effort. Can you explain how someone can apply that? How can you, how can you force desirable difficulties into a studying practice?

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Well, let's take a subject. I mean, you can, you can.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  A study, let's say, there was a great study of, of, uh, well, I don't want to use, I'll use one, uh, where people were identifying, learning to identify birds. And, uh, so they had, uh, I don't know, four or five different families of birds. And they were given exemplars, uh, of each of the families. So they'd be given a bunch of thrashers, uh, to learn, then they'd be given a bunch of, um, you know, I'm not a bird guy, maybe raptors or whatever the different groups were, okay? Yeah. And, uh, and then, um, and then they were challenged, they were shown a bird they

• 36:41Speaker 01

  hadn't studied, and they were challenged to identify which family they belonged to. And the interesting thing about birds is, within these families, there's no single characteristic that is true of all birds within a family. So you're looking at a, a sort of a, a group of different kinds of characteristics that generally would come to define a family. Okay. So those who, who learned it in this way, looking at many types of one and many, many examples of another as it were, didn't learn them nearly as well as those who had the different exemplars shown them in random order. So this is a study, uh, if you were studying, you'd study it in random order, and they learned far better.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  They learned, they were better able to identify the unifying characteristics as well as the differentiating characteristics, uh, of those birds. And in other kinds of, um, say motor skills, learning in the same, um, way of mixing up the, the particular problems that you're trying to do, or the motor skills movements, they become much better at transferring that skill to an unfamiliar situation. So, what, if you're in a study situation where you've got a group of different types of problems that you're trying to master, uh, you can take it upon yourself.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Use flashcards to mix up your exposure.

• 38:08Chris Williamson?

  In a randomized order.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  In a random way, right.

• 38:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that's interesting. So neurologically, there must be something going on within the brain that this particular mix-up of recall, of recall requirements, that must help to embed the learning somehow.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Yes. So I'll say that one of the differences between cognitive psychology and neuroscience is that the cognitive psychologists do these empirical studies. If this happens, what is the result? And they learn from that. The neuroscientists then are saying, well, how does that work in the brain? What is going on in the brain? And so those two fields are coming together, but there's a long way from, aren't really understanding exactly how this works. But I'll give you a very brief example. These were elementary school children who were tossing beanbags into baskets.

• 39:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  And 12 weeks, every day at gym for 12 weeks.

• 39:12Chris Williamson?

  That is a boring 12 weeks.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, they are pretty young kids. They like tossing the beanbags.

• 39:21Chris Williamson?

  Fair enough. They're easily pleased.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  One group tossed every time into a four-foot basket. The other group tossed sometimes into three-foot and sometimes into five-foot, never into four-foot. At the end of 12 weeks, they're all tested on the four-foot basket. And those who were best able to hit the four-foot basket were the ones that had practiced on three feet and five feet, but never on the four feet.

• 39:44Chris Williamson?

  That's so interesting.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  And so the reason for that, the speculation, you know, what the scientists believe is the reason for that, is that These four foot, the three foot and five foot challenges required variation in judging distance and the motor response to it. And gave them a more complex, the really interesting thing for me was that they believe that this skill of the three and five foot tossers was encoded in a different part of the brain where more complex motor skills are encoded than those who just repeated the four foot toss over and over and over again.

• 40:26Chris Williamson?

  One was a little more robotic and didn't require the

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:31Chris Williamson?

  The extra comprehension, right? The conceptualization.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 40:36Chris Williamson?

  That's really interesting. That's a fascinating study. So I, I think what you've done there is you've touched on what, again, is that cognitive bias that we sometimes have to presume that because we're able to recall, you know, if we stick to one thing for a night and you're able to recall that one thing, you're like, yes, I've got some work done. It's planting a flag in the ground that, okay, I can remember this one thing. Whereas the desirable difficulty, which is potentially a better route to learning longer term, in the short term can actually make you feel like you're doing less work, right? Or like you're making less progress. So, oh, well, I can't really in full recall any of these individual parts, but across

• 41:19Chris Williamson?

  the whole, the amount that you've learned, in quotation marks, has increased. Is that fair to say?

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Yes, it is. I think you do, you are more easily discouraged when you do that. There, I just must say, in any of these things that you're going to try to practice in a random order, you want to try, you know, you want to try your 20 foot putt a few times. You kind of get a sense of what you're trying to do. You want to find the volume of, of the spheroid, a few different ones, a few times. So you get a sense of what that is. And then the practice is mixed up. So don't keep doing the single one until you've got it nailed, so to speak. Interrupt it, interrupt it and move on to the others and come back to it later.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  It, it won't feel as good. But just going back to my own personal experience, struggling with the Italian language.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  We got over there the first of the year and by the fall of that year, I was with some young Italians. We had befriended from the school and we were chatting in Italian. And I heard myself using idioms that I didn't know I knew. And these had come to me through stopping. I rode my bike around a lot and I'd stop at the town water pumps to get water. And I'd try to chat with the people who were hunting birds or whatever, you know. And there was always a struggle and a frustration, but the brain's working at it.

• 42:55Chris Williamson?

  Probably for both, probably for both parties as well. Probably a frustration for them as well as for you.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sure of that.

• 43:02Chris Williamson?

  Darned Americans.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  So you can't give too much weight to your frustration. You just need to kind of trust your brain. Then your brain's working at making sense of it as long as you give it the challenge.

• 43:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Okay. So I guess that sort of touches on the, one of the third main concepts, isn't it as well that to, you don't really know. I guess using your own judgment for how your learning is going, sometimes you kind of just need to stick to the program, right?

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Well, right. A really important thing that is these cognitive psychologists talk about is what they call a metacognition, which is thinking about your thinking. And that is, we're easily duped into thinking we're on top of something that we've got it. And so what's important is to test yourself from time to time. Do you really have it? Can you really do it? Can you really explain this? And so self-testing has a couple of benefits. One is you learn whether your judgment of what you know and can do actually is accurate. And it helps you focus where you need to bring it up a little bit.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  But the other is the fact of recalling this stuff is a great way to strengthen your retention of it, your mastery and retention of it. So as a study strategy, self-quizzing is potent in several ways.

• 44:31Chris Williamson?

  Does a

• 44:34Chris Williamson?

  Go on.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Excuse me. Well, I was just saying, when we're talking in schools with professors and teachers, one of the fundamental things that is highly effective is for the instructor to incorporate frequent, low-stakes quizzing in the course. Low stakes, so that people aren't freaked out by...

• 44:59Chris Williamson?

  No pressure.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. You just really dial down the pressure and have the experience and ultimately the habit of recalling from memory what this stuff is. And if you can do that in a course where you're reaching back to earlier material as well as more recent stuff, that stuff gets brought forward and better connected. It's a very potent and not very difficult strategy for helping students get to the middle and the end of their course on top of the material.

• 45:30Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. There's a program that I know a lot of my friends who are doctors, medical students use called ANKI. I'm not sure if you've...

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, ANKI's terrific. Yes.

• 45:40Chris Williamson?

  So, ANKI's cue cards, right? Randomized cue cards, mostly with multiple choice questions. And would that fit into your model of consistent, low-level testing?

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Yes. ANKI is great. Yeah.

• 45:53Chris Williamson?

  I wish, I wish that I'd known about ANKI while I was at, while I was at university. I think it might have made my, my last-minute procrastination tactics a little bit less... A little bit less proliferative.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  One of the nice things about ANKI and some other online stuff is that you can have it, you can set it up to, to come to your phone periodically.

• 46:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they get, they get reminders. We'll be sat at dinner and I'll look over to one of the guys and they'll have his, he'll have his ANKI cue cards out because his reminders popped up.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Well, if you were in our household, if you were doing anything other than practicing what he's supposed to learn, he'd get a steep scolding from my wife for having his phone at the dinner.

• 46:31Chris Williamson?

  Oh, no. That's a, that's an undesirable difficulty right there.

• 46:41Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so we've got the capacity for recall, we've got the desirable difficulties, and we've got kind of trying to, trying to ignore what your brain is telling you about how your learning is going.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it helps if, if you can think about stuff you've struggled with, that you've had these kind of breakthrough moments. It might be, I think of, of people on BMX stunt bikes. I think of people doing video games, trying to find their way to the next level, trying this, trying that, you know, and oh yeah, this is what I did last time that worked, kind of thing. All the different ways that we're not thinking of as academics, but in our lives, where we go through these kinds of spaced and episodic exposures to something we're trying to master. And then at some point, you realize it's coming to you. You know, you've kind of got it.

• 47:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  That's going to be the same with the semantic material in a, in a class or with the motor skill stuff, when you're trying to learn how to stitch up a rat or trying to, you know, do a one touch pass.

• 47:55Chris Williamson?

  Fire a bow or...

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:58Chris Williamson?

  Okay, I understand, I understand on that. Um, did you, in the book, did you touch on anything to do with the focus and diffuse mode networks? Did you look at, did you look at that much at all?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  I don't think I've heard of that.

• 48:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay, okay. So there was this two, so there's a, a course from Coursera, which is a massive open online course, and it's called Learning How to Learn. And I had, I had a little bit of a look through that before I, before I knew we were going to have our podcast today. And with that, they, they're focusing a lot on the focus and diffuse mode networks. What they were talking about there was, it seems to me, the longer term, the ability to recall over time, and this, as you say, this more open mode of thinking, as opposed to a more procedural. Mode of thinking that when you're learning something and you go away and then you come

• 48:52Chris Williamson?

  back, you often have a very open mind to what the what the solutions may be. We've discussed it previously. I've said I did a podcast on meditation not very long ago with Corey Allen. And one of the one of the things that I wish wouldn't happen, but I also appreciate does is when I sit down to meditate and I quieten my thoughts. That's often when I have some of my best ideas of the day, which is terrible because I'm trapped in this. I'm supposed to be trapped focusing on clearing my mind. And I've got all of these really good, like awesome ideas coming to me. And I think, God, I just can you not happen when I'm not meditating? Can the meditating just be allowed to continue on its own?

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, I've had that experience. But of course, this is the brain offering you some ideas. And if I understand this difference between the focus and diffuse, I think one of the one of the astonishing things in writing is when your mind presents a metaphor for something that helps make clear this other thing, you know, this notion of the similarities between things that your brain recognizes. And so this is one of the things I believe from what I've read about sleep that begins to happen when you

• 50:18Speaker 01

  think about struggle a little bit with a problem, maybe a conceptual problem in the evening. And in the night, the brain will kind of look around and see what do I know that's similar to this? Are there models that are like this? Or is it like this other thing? And you can get some great breakthrough ideas that way. So maybe in the in the meditation. Where you're just giving your brain, you're trying to focus on the mantra, but you're also focusing on your breathing and your relaxation. And it's a very freeing thing. And if the brain is presenting you with images and ideas,

• 51:02Speaker 01

  I can only think that that's constructive.

• 51:05Chris Williamson?

  You know, I agree. I couldn't agree more. I think one of the examples that was used was Newton. And it was that he would sit in his chair with ball bearings in his hand. And he would wait, he would wait until he just fell asleep. And the ball bearings would drop from his hand and crack on the floor and it would wake him up. And that was the moment at which, for him, he often had a lot of breakthroughs. And you know, if it's, if it's good enough for Newton, it's probably good enough for us.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Well, that's, that happens for me when I get, when I get frustrated with my writing and I get on the bike and I head up the hill. And I just smell the smells and look at the horizon and I bike along. And all of a sudden, you know, my brain starts giving me ideas. I'll get this like aha moment. This is, this is what, what I could do about that problem. And then I can come back and work on it.

• 51:53Chris Williamson?

  Do you think it's difficult to, as someone who is learning or trying to be productive or writing or whatever it might be, do you think it's difficult to learn when enough focused time is enough and it's time to move on to, or it's, it's time to take a, as you say, like a planned break to give yourself that room to breathe? Because you know, you need to spend some time under tension, exposed to the material or exposed to the particular physical practice or whatever it might be. But then also you need this time away from it as well. Do you think it can be a difficult scheduling problem for people to know when enough is enough?

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sure it can be. I don't know, I don't know of research into that question. My own human nature tells me you need to have, you need to mix it up. You need to get out of your chair or get out and get some exercise and then come back to it. But I don't, I'm not aware of research on it. One of the things that was a pleasant surprise for me when I was working on this book. I hadn't been aware of the search tool Google Scholar where you can search for published research. You know, you could put in a term and see where research has been done and thumb through the different published studies.

• 53:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of useful. I suppose most everybody else knows about it, but I didn't, and I found it very helpful. But I, you know, to me intuitively, yeah. But of course, I'm saying intuition leads us astray with learning.

• 53:24Chris Williamson?

  So you've got to be careful on both sides of the fence, right?

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, there's one thing, you know, one of the things about being a non-scientist, writing this book with two scientists, was I was, I tried to be, I tried to take liberties in relating the science to stories of real people and incidents in their lives and so forth, and drawing parallels. But stay within the strict limits of what the empirical research shows us and where we're drifting into speculation to say this is speculation, but it might be because of such and such.

• 54:01Chris Williamson?

  I understand, yeah. So we've gone through the three key concepts that you've got there. The capacity for recall, the desirable difficulties, and then ignoring the, ignoring the cognitive biases to, to one degree or another.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Or cutting yourself some slack if it feels difficult, thinking you're not getting it. Eh, cut yourself some slack. You think you're not getting it, but you probably are.

• 54:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay. So are there any other elements that you think that people need to be able to understand when it comes to learning? Is there anything that we haven't gone through yet?

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Well, there is this theory of a growth mindset that has been introduced by cognitive psychologist at Stanford University in California named Carol Dweck. And she's done some work that

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Where she studied with, she, she got, she took an interest in why do some people become helpless when faced with a difficult problem? And so she did some work with some low performing New York middle school, junior high school students and gave them a little seminar on how the brain works. And then half the students she took aside and talked about memory. The other half she took aside and said, a lot of people think that their abilities are set at birth by the gift of their genes, but in fact, when you work hard to learn something, you are building new connections in the brain and over time, you're actually increasing your intellectual abilities through these challenges, these mental challenges.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  She sent them all back into class. She didn't tell the teachers about these two different subgroups. And the students who had been taught that they have some influence over their intellectual abilities by picking tougher problems and persisting at them, began outperforming the other students. And she, Dr. Dweck developed this, this sort of duality of a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. And the people with a fixed mindset tend not to pick problems they won't do well at because it'll indict their sense of, their native ability, whereas those who have a growth mindset, when they encounter a difficult problem, try a little harder, try a different way, you know, carry on forward and do better.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Now, so there's an issue here, I think, when we're saying that some difficulties are desirable, that's not, doesn't sound like good news to students.

• 56:30Chris Williamson?

  No, I mean, especially, you know, a lot of students want the easiest path possible, right? I mean, we all do. We're all.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  We all do.

• 56:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. We all want to get as much as possible for as little as possible, right? It's human nature.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  I think we all agree on that. So I think, I think that there's more research that needs to be done about whether a belief in and an understanding of this ability to improve your brain is actually a motivator for people. But the fact remains nonetheless, that when you learn new things, especially you rise up the complexity of the topic you're dealing with, you are increasing your intellectual ability. And there's that many more things that you now have the ability to learn because you have places to attach them. You can't learn something new if you don't have something to attach it to that you already know. So I think there's, the field of motivation is

• 57:28Speaker 01

  one where there's some interesting work being done. And it's one that I think it helps for people to keep in mind that you need to, you need to be a kind of a coach to your own brain saying, I know this doesn't feel too good, but guess what? It's really going to pay off.

• 57:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I totally get that. It's a weird, a weird analogy that I can draw between this and a recent podcast that I did with some CrossFit coaches from the UK. And in it, I was asking about mental toughness in sport. And I was talking to them about how they prepare for these competitions. And during these CrossFit competitions, a lot of the athletes are very, very heavily mediated by their capacity to suffer discomfort. And again, with that, it's a lot to do with mental state. So I was asking the guys, you know, how do they prepare in an appropriate way? And what they said was, how many events is it over a weekend? Is it seven events over a weekend? Okay. Well, during your prep for

• 58:29Chris Williamson?

  it, do 20, do 20 events over a weekend. And then when you get there, you realize I've, I've prepared so much further above and beyond where I needed to, to bring it back to. But you're right. The difference between an athlete that's doing that and typically how someone will be learning, even if they're being taught by a lecturer or a teacher or on a formal course at university or whatever it might be, the coach is Mediating that impression of how the training is going, right? It's very rare. I don't think I ever once spoke to a lecturer at university or spoke to my tutor and said, my learning is going slowly. I just perceived that as a byproduct of, oh, well, like, learning isn't easy and I need to just, you know, get my head in the book a little bit more until it sticks.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:15Chris Williamson?

  I think that the paradigm, the environment that students exist in is very different to that typically of someone perhaps who's doing sport, that, you know, your coach can see when you are and when you're not getting it. Whereas

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:31Chris Williamson?

  there's a lot more, a lot more variables that could, well, does your lecturer think that your test scores during the buildup to exams are low because you're not working hard enough? They don't really know. They don't see you practice. Do you know what I mean? And the practice is a lot less visual as well. It's a lot less easy for them to work out. So, yeah, I think the, um, the concept of desirable difficulties is it's something that shy of definition as, as we've done today, is probably going to be really hard for people to actually work out where it's right.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Yes, I don't think it, it has to be real hard. Um, I have a couple of thoughts. One is that

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  we're encouraging teachers to help students construct their own understanding of the material as opposed to lecturing, here's what the material is and trying to impart the lecturer's understanding. So that means the classrooms become much more involved in exercises that engage the students and working through and figuring stuff out. And so that's one thought.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  I've lost the other one, so I might just have to go. Where did you end up with your comment?

• 1:00:49Chris Williamson?

  It was about, it was about CrossFit and it was about having a high level of difficulty than you need. So you're, you're, train hard, train hard, perform easy.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, I think, I don't know, it's gone. Sorry.

• 1:01:03Chris Williamson?

  That's okay. That's totally fine. We'll get it in a bit. But no, I think you're totally right. I can definitely say, you know, I enjoyed my time at Newcastle University, but the course that I was doing quite often, we'd have 200 to 250 people in a lecture theatre. And that was for a lot of the, a lot of the modules that I took. And in terms of comprehension and that two-way communication with the person who is disseminating the course information, it was non-existent. Like, you can't, you can't ask questions in a room of 200 people. You can, I mean, they could barely, barely keep us awake, because it's such a big room and so unengaging, and so on and so forth. So, yeah, the implications for teachers here are almost as wide as the implications are for students, right?

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Right. I think that's right. And I think that the revelation for the teacher is, it's really about learning. It's not about teaching. This is about learning. This is about how you can help students become the learners, not you be the teacher. And the

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Oh, God, I had this other thought came and now it's gone back again. It's just making me, yeah, I don't know.

• 1:02:16Chris Williamson?

  It's all this, it's all this talk of, it's all this talk of recall. It's ruining your capacity for recall.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  I think my short-term memory is not, it's my working memory. It's just a little fried right now.

• 1:02:28Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's fine. That's totally fine. Maybe you should go away. Maybe you need to go away and come back to it.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Probably need to do that.

• 1:02:37Chris Williamson?

  I think we've laid out some, some quite nice concepts there. We've gone through, what does learning mean? How do learning and memory relate? What does recall mean? The desirable difficulties and giving yourself a little bit of a break and, and not, I think, I like the, the third key concept that you've got there, because I think that's the one which will mediate all of the rest. That if you don't believe that you're making progress, you're, you're going to fall back into the typical brute force, one concept at a time approach. And I think that the, all of the others are reliant on you having faith in the learning process working.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Right. So I got my idea back. So I have, yeah, so I have two thoughts. One, One is that often an instructor, when instructor is teaching you about a topic, the information is arbitrary. The student doesn't know why it's important or what it connects to and so forth. So it's really important for instructors to, when they lay out something new, say, to explain, here's how this relates to where we've been and where we're going. Here's how it connects to what we already know, so that the students have a way of connecting to it and grabbing hold of it.

• 1:03:58Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  And making sense. Now, the other side of that is, I think students have an opportunity, if they're not getting it, to say to the instructor, I'm not getting it. I don't quite understand how this relates. Could you give me an example of how this is true elsewhere or in another topic, or something to help me understand it?

• 1:04:19Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  And then I can practice at, you know, building that learning. A dialogue, I think, is, we're just used to a kind of a, I'm the expert, you're the student, I'm gonna tell you how it is, you're gonna take notes, then we're gonna have a test.

• 1:04:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's definitely my functional experience of learning.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Chris Williamson?

  That it's very much a one-way street and that there will be, it almost felt sometimes like lecturers knew that they had to ask a particular number of questions and that that was just a hurdle they had to overcome, the same as saying the next slide. It wasn't something which was being done to actually embed the learning.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, which I think, I think that's really interesting. The implications for teachers and lecturers, I mean, you know, in an ideal world, every university course would probably start with two weeks on learning how to learn, right?

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  I think every incoming student at a university should have a course in that, how learning works and how to manage your time and, you know. I was in Florida International University in Miami where they'd red make a stick and sat down at the law school and they've completely restructured their orientation and their management of students through the two-year law school. Around these principles, they've gone from typically fourth or fifth place in the bar exam in Florida as a school to placing first place five out of the last six exams. But it's by this conscious effort is when the students come in, let's talk about these

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  principles and how they work and having experience with it. I just was having correspondence with someone in Ecuador who was saying, I would like to have a simple classroom experience. And my co-author Mark McDaniel said, well, they're learning vocabulary. He said, well, here's what you could do. You could give them half the vocabulary in a sheet to memorize and you could give them the other half of the vocabulary in flashcards to learn and then have a test and see for themselves which ones they learn better.

• 1:06:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  And they'll, you know.

• 1:06:31Chris Williamson?

  I think that getting students to buy into the process is, is super, super important. That you're right, that there's more difficulty going to be through this particular style of learning. It's going to feel less immediately gratifying, right? Because you can't straight away recall big chunks of concepts and you need to have faith, you need to trust the process. It's what we say about when, when we talk to powerlifting coaches and stuff like that and some of the athletes aren't happy with where their lifts are at and they don't feel right and they say, look, just trust the process. Have faith, have faith in the fact that you have outsourced the specific task of programming what is to be done and when to someone who knows what they're talking about.

• 1:07:15Chris Williamson?

  And it is your job to do what they say, what they tell you to do and not vice versa. You shouldn't be questioning it. Obviously, there needs to be a back and forth, as you've said, and you know, you need to at regular points reassess where your, where your learning is at and how your learning's progressing, but stick to the program, I think.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Right. Not only stick to the program, but I think. Have have two goals. One goal is to master the content or the skill and the other is to learn how to be a superior learner so that when you get out of whatever this program is and you find something else you want to do, you know you have the habits that will make you highly effective at mastering that and that will make you a competitor out in this crazy world, give you a great advantage.

• 1:08:03Chris Williamson?

  For sure. I mean, it's a principle that's completely, as we've said at the start, it's ubiquitous, right?

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:08:09Chris Williamson?

  If you can, if you can learn well, then it's the, the first domino has fallen on every single, everything. And that goes from, as you've, you know, you've used a wide range from physical pursuits to intellectual pursuits, specialists, you know, it, it's, it's definitely, definitely something very crucial. I think, you know, I, I wish that I'd had a better comprehension of time management when I was at university and of how learning works and of the strategies that I could have implemented. I think had I have had that, it would have made my life a lot easier. I by luck managed to fall on at least one of the three key concepts that you have put in here. And I genuinely think that's probably the majority of what's carried me through, carried me through my university degree. So,

• 1:08:54Chris Williamson?

  you know, it's, it's fortunate that I stumbled upon that kind of just through trial and error. But if people can implement all of these, I think they'll, they'll have a much easier and much, much more comprehensive learning experience.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Well, I hope that some of your listeners tumble to it and give it a shot.

• 1:09:12Chris Williamson?

  I'm sure that they will. So can you-

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Make it stick.

• 1:09:14Chris Williamson?

  Make it stick indeed. Can you tell the listeners where they can find you online?

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Well, there's a website, makeitstick.com, all one word, make it stick.

• 1:09:26Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  The book is Make It Stick, The Science of Successful Learning, is published by Harvard University Press. It's available on Amazon. It's being translated into 14 different languages. So if you have listeners who prefer to read it in a language other than English, some of those are already out and others will be out soon.

• 1:09:47Chris Williamson?

  So some of your Italian friends can, can pick up on you.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  I'm going to make them learn English.

• 1:09:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's it. That's it. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Of course, they already have it.

• 1:09:57Chris Williamson?

  That's fantastic. Peter, I'll make sure that links to the book and to your website will be in the show notes below. So if anyone does want to get hold of the book, I highly recommend it and they can grab that through the show notes in the links. I'm sure that we're going to become inundated with some questions and stuff like that. So if we do have something, I'll fire them over to you and I'll be able to answer those on future episodes as well. But I really appreciate your time. I think.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  I appreciate yours, Chris. It's really been fun chatting with you.

• 1:10:27Chris Williamson?

  It's been fantastic. I really do think that will have helped some people in reframe their, their approach to learning. The, we keep coming back to it, but I do think that you can't emphasize it enough that the capacity, your understanding of how to learn is the fundamental case of what is going to restrict your ability to learn anything. Like it's, and I think it, I think it's a really fundamental task and hopefully as well, over the coming years, as you say, universities and institutions have started to latch on to the idea that this is important. And if you can continue singing that song, then maybe, maybe university won't be quite such a daunting and difficult task for some people in the future as well.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  I think the wind will be at your back if you do.

• 1:11:11Chris Williamson?

  That's the plan. Well, Peter, thank you very much again, and I appreciate.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Thank you very much, Chris.

• 1:11:15Chris Williamson?

  Cheers. Thank you very much. Bye bye.