Beyond Lazy Learning — The Keys to Gaining and Retaining Knowledge
Episode Stats
Summary
Ever wondered why, after hours of reading and highlighting, you still feel unprepared for that big test? Or why, shortly after a work training, you can t remember much of what was said and how to apply it? Whether you're a student studying for exams, an employee trying to learn the ropes at a new job, or someone who's into personal study, learning effectively is hugely important in increasing your capacity and knowledge. Unfortunately, most of what people do to learn simply doesn't work. To unlock the superior research-backed strategies that will help harness the potential of your brain, Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology and the author of Outsmart Your Brain, explains why the default way that our brain wants to learn doesn t work, and how you can approach learning by both reading and listening more effectively.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Ever wondered why, after hours of reading and highlighting, you still feel unprepared
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for that big test? Or why, shortly after a work training, you can't remember much of
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what was said and how to apply it? Or why you have trouble comprehending a difficult
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book? Whether you're a student studying for exams, an employee trying to learn the ropes
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at a new job, or someone who's into personal study, learning effectively is hugely important
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in increasing your capacity and knowledge. Unfortunately, most of what people do to learn
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simply doesn't work. Here to unlock the superior research-backed strategies that will help
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harness the potential of your brain is Daniel Willingham, professor of psychology and the
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author of Outsmart Your Brain. Today on the show, Daniel explains why the default way that
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our brain wants to learn doesn't work and how to approach learning by both reading and listening
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more effectively. We discuss how to get more out of your reading, including whether you
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should highlight, whether speed reading is effective, the optimal method for taking notes
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during a lecture, the best way to cement things into your memory, and much more. After the show
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is over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash learn. All right, Daniel Willingham, welcome to the
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show. Thank you so much for having me. So you are a professor of psychology who has published a book
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on learning better, and it's called Outsmart Your Brain. And you start the book off by arguing that to
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learn how to learn better, you first need to understand the default way our brain wants to
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learn and why that's not effective. So how does our brain want to learn things and why doesn't that
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work? You know, even before you start thinking about the default way your brain works, you have
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to recognize that learning is actually a multiple stage process. This is something a lot of people
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don't think about, but it's self-evident when it's explained. When you're learning something and you
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fail to learn, the problem may not be in terms of getting things into memory. That's where people
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usually lay the blame. But it could be you were trying to learn something by reading and your
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reading wasn't very effective, or you were trying to learn someone was explaining something to you and
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your listening wasn't very effective, and so on. There are a bunch of little sub-steps to learning.
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So that's the first thing I always encourage people to do, especially people who say like,
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oh, I'm terrible at learning. What I point out is there may be a lot of it that you're doing pretty
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well, and then there's just one little piece that needs some tweaking. And so it may be easier to
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address than you think. But in terms of that stage of trying to get things into memory, the big mistake
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that people tend to make is they tend to do something that feels easy and that also feels in the moment
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like it's working well. So students, when they're studying, do a lot of rereading of their notes and
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a lot of rereading of the textbook. And as they're doing that, the content becomes more and more
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familiar to them. It's the same feeling you get when you see a movie for the second time. You're like,
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yep, yep, I know all this. I've seen all this. Very familiar. And so it feels like you know it,
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but that's actually not the kind of knowing that the student is going to need for the test.
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They need to not only say like, yes, I've seen this before. They need to actually be able to
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explain it. So that's one example of a way that people approach learning tasks that feels easy and
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also feels in the moment like it's doing you some good, but is not really optimal.
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I like the analogy you give in the book. The way we often approach learning is sometimes how we
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approach pushups. We know that if we want to get better at pushups, we need to do more pushups.
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But what we typically do is like, well, I'll do pushups for my knees and it feels like I'm doing
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pushups and I'm getting stuff done and it's easy, but you're actually not going to get stronger just
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doing knee pushups. Exactly. It's just as you say, like we, a lot of times we recognize in physical
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exercise, you need that challenge. And even at the time, like it feels hard, it's not going well,
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but you know, in the long run, this is the right thing to do. Same thing applies when you're trying
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to learn. You need to have the right kind of challenge in order for your brain to get exercised
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and to benefit. Okay. So learning is hard if you want to actually learn and know the information
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then be able to apply the information in a meaningful way. But our brain wants to do knee
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pushup versions of learning. So let's dig into how we can learn better and overcome our brain's natural
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tendency to want to do knee pushups versions of learning. And a way, a big way a lot of people learn
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is through reading. So what's the lazy way our brain wants to approach reading to learn?
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So if you think about how you learn to read, you learn to read, I mean, most people learn to read
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in the very early grades of school and you learn to read with material that is intended to be very
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easy to comprehend. And when you do leisure reading, it's also intended to be pretty easy
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to comprehend. Leisure reading by definition is reading that you choose to do. If it's very
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difficult, you're just going to drop the book. So it's usually in narrative form. The author is sort
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of coming to you to lead you along. The reading we do to learn is usually not organized that way.
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It's organized hierarchically rather than in story format. And you're, of course, reading for a
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different purpose. You're not reading for the sake of sort of being entertained. You're reading new
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content that's probably challenging and you're reading it for the purpose of learning. So the
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thing that your brain does is it falls into the same reading mode that you were in when you're reading a
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story. I'll sometimes ask my students who struggle with difficult reading, like, well, tell me what you
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do to read. Like, how do you begin? And they just look at me like it's a very, like, I sit down and open
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the book. Like, what are you talking about? And that's what you do when you're reading a story.
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There's no need to prepare. But when you're reading something difficult, you should prepare a little
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bit and deploy some strategies. Okay. So what are some reading strategies that you can do to get more
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out of your reading to learn? Yeah. So the first thing you want to do in terms of preparation is
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think about what your goal is. There's research showing people really do read differently when they
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do this little preparation to think about what am I hoping to get out of this. Then the second
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thing you can do is look at the headings and subheadings of whatever it is that you're going
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to read. That'll give you some sense of what it's about. And then generate a few questions based on
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that quick skim that you're doing. And then as you're reading, so that's the preparation. This
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shouldn't take, you know, if you're reading a chapter, this should be less than five minutes. I mean,
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probably less than three minutes really. It's not a big deal, but you're sort of setting yourself up
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in this way. The second thing you want to do is as you're reading, we all know it's hard to focus
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attention, especially when something is complicated. Just as your brain doesn't respond well to here,
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you have to remember this. Your brain doesn't respond really to the command you give it. Now,
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I want you to understand what you're reading and I want you to continue to pay attention.
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Your mind drifts. And so, instead of giving it the command, now listen, pay attention,
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give it a concrete task to do. You're much more likely to stay with it if you're trying to do
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something like answer a question. So, in that quick skim that you did, looking at the headings
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and subheadings, you're thinking about your goal. And then you're also thinking, here's some questions
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I expect to be answered by the time I've finished this chapter. Then as you're actually reading the
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chapter, you can think to yourself, okay, am I finding the answer to those questions?
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Those may turn out to be bad questions. So, like, should I revise them? What's a better question?
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And what's the answer to that one? That'll help you stay on task and especially it will help you
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sort of think about the deeper meaning. A lot of times when people read, they're kind of reading
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one sentence at a time and they're not really coordinating the meaning of the different sentences
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and paragraphs to put it all together into a bigger picture. That's what answering those
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questions is going to help you do. As you were talking, this reminded me of Mortimer Adler's
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how to read a book approach. He has different types of reading. There's inspectional reading,
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where it's that what you're talking about. You look at the chapter, look at the headings,
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kind of get an overview of what it's like, and then you kind of get into the deeper analytical
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reading where you have the framework. With that inspectional reading, you've developed questions
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that you're going to have, and then you can dig into that analytical reading and then the synoptical
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reading where you try to figure out the main thesis and try to compare and contrast.
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There are lots of versions of this. So, for school children, SQ3R may have been something that
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some of your listeners are familiar with. But whatever they are, most of the reading strategies
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have these two main elements where you do some sort of a preview to get a big picture idea and then
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as you're reading, you've got something to keep you engaged. And it's usually
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bearing questions in mind and trying to find the answers to them.
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Something you highlight in the book is that highlighting, that's a typical approach people
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use when they're reading to learn. Highlighting doesn't work. What's going on there?
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So, to be clear, highlighting is okay if you've got a lot of expertise in the topic. So, if you already,
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you know, when I'm reading cognitive psychology, for example, I will often highlight. And it's fine
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because the main problem with highlighting is if you're new to the subject, you're probably not
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highlighting the right stuff. And one of the really clever experiments they did on this with college
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students, the researchers went to the college bookstore and they bought multiple copies of some
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textbooks in some big classes like Poli Sci 101 and Economics 101. And they bought multiple copies
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of the textbook and then they were used copies and they just looked at what people had highlighted.
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And what they found was students were highlighting completely different things. So, the original intent
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of the study was we're going to look at what students highlight and then we're going to ask the
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professor, are the students highlighting the right things? But they couldn't even do that because
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there was no consistency in what students highlighted. Actually, I take that back. The
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one consistency in that study was if a word was bold-faced, everybody highlighted it. So,
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they sort of doubled down on the emphasis the author had put in there. So, yeah, you don't want to
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highlight. And the alternative strategy is taking notes. Taking notes has a couple of advantages.
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One is that you can edit them later and you can go back and as your understanding gets deeper,
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you can revise what you've taken notes on. The other thing is that notes are much better suited
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to answering those deep questions, thinking about those deep questions, because you can pull together
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things that were, you know, a couple of pages away. And this often happens when there's something
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complicated. You know, the author is bringing multiple points of view and different types of evidence to
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something. And so, you may want to relate something that was on page 75 to something that's on 78.
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And of course, that's easy to do when you're taking notes, but highlighting is very poorly suited to
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So, yeah, I do a lot of reading for my work. I read all the books to prep for the podcast. And I
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highlight. I do highlight. I have my own little system where something's really important. I'll put a
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star by it. But I think the thing that helps a lot that I do that's beyond just highlighting is after I'm
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done with the book, I've got to create the outline for the conversation. And so, I go through and I
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have to synthesize those highlights. And that takes some time. And that's how I remember this stuff. I think
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it's that trying to craft the conversation for the podcast allows me to digest the information.
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And the other thing, Brett, that I would point out is that you have a lot of experience and have
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developed, I'm imagining, a lot of expertise in figuring out from an unfamiliar text what is really
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going to be important. What's the main message here? What's going to be interesting to my listeners?
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It's a little bit like magazine fact checkers. Most of us are not very good at fact checking,
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right? That's why fake news proliferates on the internet. Fact checkers are really good at this.
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And they've developed strategies through experience that make them so good at it. So, I wouldn't
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necessarily suggest that a novice try to do what you do. Because in general, experts do something
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different than what beginners are capable of doing.
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Another tactic people use when it comes to reading is speed reading, because they want to
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get a lot of information in. Is speed reading effective?
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Speed reading is skimming. There's been research on this for years and years and years. And virtually
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any task, you can do it faster and not do it as accurately, or you can take a whole lot more time
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and do it more accurately. And it doesn't matter whether you're talking about, you know, throwing
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clay pots or reading or driving or anything else. This is pervasive in psychology. It's called speed
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accuracy trade-off. And so, that's what people are doing when they're speed reading. They're skimming.
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And I think you can use that as a strategy on and off, depending on the situation. So, in my experience,
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if I get one of those like airport pop nonfiction books, right, the business books where everything's
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formatted for skimming. So, you can read the headline and the bullet points, and then you
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can decide whether or not you want to dig deep into the anecdotal stories that they put in there.
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I think those books are great for that skimming approach. But then if it's like a really hard
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philosophical treatise, you can't do that. I just got done reading Kierkegaard's
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unscientific postscript. You could not speed read that thing because you'd miss it. So,
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I think you can, you got to be strategic about when you do the skimming.
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Yeah, absolutely. And another function of skimming, sometimes you're looking at a book,
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like you don't want the whole message. There's, you're doing research on something and there's
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a particular nugget that you want and that you think is you're going to find in this book. And
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that's another time skimming would make a lot of sense.
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Okay. So, let's do a recap here. The lazy way to approach reading for learning is to approach
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reading like you're, you know, reading for pleasure on a Saturday afternoon, where you
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just jump in and think you can just follow it like you're following a story. But when
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you're reading for learning, you need to do a little bit more prep work. You want to figure
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out like what you want to get out of the reading, maybe formulate some questions, look at the
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headings and the subheadings of the chapter you're about to read. You just got to engage
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with it more. But another way we learn is by listening. And here too, there's also a lazy
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way that we typically approach learning by listening. What does that look like?
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Yeah, it's very similar to what I was saying about reading that you figure I'm listening
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like I can listen the way I always listen. But listening, usually when you're having a
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conversation, listening is not that demanding because one of the conversational conventions,
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it's sort of understood that if I'm talking with someone, first of all, there's usually not
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very much planning on the part of the person I'm talking to. They're sort of thinking of
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things as they come to mind. And if they do refer back to something that they mentioned
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10 minutes ago, they'll usually remind me of it. So, the demand that's placed on my working
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memory, how much stuff I have to keep in mind at once, how much I have to juggle that stuff
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is pretty minimal. And again, most of the time when you're listening to conversation, it's
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pretty light. You're not trying to learn anything new. The same is true even in a movie. Again,
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like reading narrative, when you're watching a movie, it's designed to be entertaining and easy
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to digest. When you go to a presentation, when someone is trying to teach you something,
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it can feel like a movie. It feels like you may be in an audience. And so, it feels like a
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performance. But it's very likely if you're there to learn something serious,
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the person who's speaking is not an expert in communication. This hasn't been carefully crafted
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the way a movie has been crafted. And it also doesn't have the characteristic of the person
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just talking off the top of their head. It is planned and organized, but it's not planned and
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organized in a way that's terribly effective for learning. And so, listening in these circumstances
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really takes a lot of work. Once again, just as with a textbook chapter or with a chapter that's
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to teach you something, there is an organization that organization carries meaning. But in a
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presentation, the organization is frequently not very obvious. So, it's organized hierarchically.
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There'll be maybe three to seven main points. And then under each of those main points, there's
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several types of evidence. There's a couple of examples and so on. And it's up to you to sort of
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figure out that organization. Why is the person talking about this now? Oh, this is supposed to
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help me understand this key conclusion. So, listening is actually, when someone is trying to teach you
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something, listening is actually quite challenging. But the brain goes to that place of, I'm just listening.
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What's hard about that? Okay. So, what you need to do is, as you're listening, figure out the hierarchy
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that the presenter has in his head. Maybe he's not presenting it very well in a hierarchy, but there
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is a hierarchy going on. You got to figure that out. That's exactly the way I think of it. Yeah.
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It's like, when you're this, and maybe your listeners have experienced this, when you're
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trying to teach something to a group and you've prepared a presentation, it's obvious to you because
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you know this stuff, right? And so, you've got this organization in your head, but it's very hard
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to communicate that organization. One of the things that makes a good speaker a good speaker is that
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they are sort of leading you along and doing things like saying, remember I said there were going to
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be three reasons this is true? Okay, now we're done with reason number two. Now we're going to move on
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to reason three. That kind of signposting when you're a speaker, lots of evidence indicating that
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really helps your listeners understand. But if you're listening to somebody who's not doing that,
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it's kind of up to you to make the inferences that are going to help you understand the organization.
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And so, it sounds like when you're asking questions in a lecture setting, the most useful
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questions are going to be clarifications about the hierarchy, right? So, maybe you're trying to
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figure out the presenter's hierarchy that he's got in his head. Maybe something's not translating,
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So, one thing that people do during lecture settings to learn is take notes. But again,
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there's a lazy way our brain wants to take notes when we're listening to a lecture.
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Yeah, the lazy way is just writing down word for word snippets of what the speaker has said.
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Because you sort of figure, you know, I'm getting their exact words and that's got to be good,
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right? But what this does is it really saves you having to listen deeply and process what they're
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saying. Because, I mean, we all know if you're an adept typist, you can essentially turn into someone
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taking dictation and you're really not thinking deeply about what the meaning is of what you're
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writing down. You're just writing down what appear to you to be key phrases. And it's tempting to go
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into that mode because when you're listening and you're trying to take notes at the same time,
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that's very difficult. You're really in, and we've all felt it, when you're taking notes,
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you usually feel like you're in mental overload and you can't really keep up. And so, ideally,
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what you would do is you would listen, think carefully, and then paraphrase what's being said.
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Write it down in your own words. Write down your own understanding. That's going to lead to much
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better notes. But that's much more demanding than just writing down what the speaker said.
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So, it's just with practice, you have to do it. And I think one of the bits of advice you give is when
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you go into a lecture, you have to decide what's your strategy going to be for this lecture. Is it
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going to be more, I'm just going to get facts down? Because maybe there's a class where it's very
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fact-based. And that's important to get all as many facts as possible. But then the class might
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be more you making connections. And that would require you to think more about what you write
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Absolutely. Yeah. Think about what your goal is. If you're there, you know, you're at a training or
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something, you know, like, I'm here to learn this specific skill. And that should really guide how
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you're thinking about the content and the notes that you take. We've all also found ourselves at
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meetings where you're asking yourself, why am I here? Why am I supposed to listen to this
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presentation? Like, here's an accounting guy and I'm in operations. But it's worth thinking about
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that. Like, what, you know, and it's actually worth asking in advance. Like, what am I bringing
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to the table here? What do you want me to take back to my group? And then think about note-taking
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through that lens. It could be like a lot of what this person is saying is not relevant,
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but you really better be alert because at minute 22, he's going to talk about stuff that does bear
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on your group. And you want to be there and be present for it and be ready to take good notes on
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it. If someone's taken like a study skills class, one thing you've probably encountered with note-taking
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is these different note-taking systems that are out there. And you say, actually, they're probably not
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that useful. I mean, they're okay. So, what the research literature on this looks like is,
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in the end, not that helpful because there are lots of these different systems and they typically
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compare use of the system. Like, you know, you instruct students in how to take notes with the
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Cornell system or whatever it is. And then the comparison group is students who have received
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no instruction in note-taking at all. And what you consistently find is some instruction is better
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than no instruction at all. And I think that what the comparison I'd like to see is just a few words
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to students about how to help them be mindful about how to take good notes. My concern with systems
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like the Cornell system and so on is they're very demanding of attention. It gives you one more
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thing to think about. Okay, now, so this is a summary. Now, in the system, I'm supposed to write
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those at the bottom of the page or whatever. So, you know, I think you, you know, there's a steep
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learning curve. And I think you, of course, people can learn it, but I think you'll probably
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get more bang from your buck just being thoughtful about what notes are for and having a few tricks
00:23:09.260
up your sleeves about how to take good ones. We're going to take a quick break for your
00:23:13.620
words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so the easy way or the lazy way to listen
00:23:24.520
when you're learning is to listen to a lecture, like you're listening to a conversation with a
00:23:30.480
friend. Instead, what you're saying is we got to do, you got to think about the organization of what
00:23:34.660
the person or the lecturer is trying to say and like, try to figure out how things fit together.
00:23:39.460
I mean, then also the lazy way to take notes is to just jot everything down verbatim. And a better way
00:23:46.320
is to actually think about what's being said and paraphrase what's being said in your own words.
00:23:51.160
And yeah, like you said, you don't recommend like a specific note-taking system, but there's a few
00:23:55.220
tactics you recommend to make note-taking more effective or more efficient. You recommend
00:23:59.180
developing a shorthand system for your notes or abbreviations you're going to use in all your
00:24:04.180
note-taking. So it can allow you to focus on what's being said and not so much on like what you're
00:24:08.740
writing. You just do that shorthand. Here's a common debate. What does the research say about
00:24:13.720
typing your notes on your computer versus handwriting them? Is one method better than the other?
00:24:19.080
Yeah, very complicated topic because it's a little, I mean, it's a little bit like trying
00:24:25.420
to figure out whether smoking causes cancer. It seems straightforward at first, but the, you know,
00:24:30.600
the straightforward thing to do is just look at students who handwrite their notes, look at
00:24:34.560
students who type their notes, and then see who's, you know, doing better on tests. But of course,
00:24:39.340
that's going to be correlational evidence. And so you don't know whether students who are just good
00:24:43.880
students prefer one method or another. So that's not wholly satisfactory. The other thing you can do
00:24:49.780
is you can make people type notes or handwrite notes, but then I maybe am doing something I don't
00:24:55.940
really want to do, and that's kind of messing things up. So the data are kind of squishy right now.
00:25:02.640
The dominating factor and what I end up recommending in the book is that I think the potential for
00:25:09.760
distraction, if you're typing notes, kind of overwhelms everything. If you're on a laptop,
00:25:15.620
you have access to the internet. Most students are not able to resist checking, you know, email,
00:25:23.140
checking social media, whatever, doing other things during moments that they perceive to be a little
00:25:28.080
bit boring or something. And that's why I went to a no devices policy in my classes about seven years
00:25:34.640
ago. And I'll say things have changed a little bit. When I first instituted this policy, my students
00:25:41.140
were initially kind of angry at me, wanted to hurt me. But then by the end of the semester, they were
00:25:46.940
saying, okay, actually, I kind of see, I kind of see why you did this. I get it. More recently, my students
00:25:52.580
have, they get it immediately. And in fact, a few have said to me, you know what, like I'm on my phone
00:25:59.020
all the time. And so having someone in a position of authority say to me, you may not be on your phone
00:26:05.460
for the next 75 minutes, I actually kind of welcome that. So we've taken our lecture notes,
00:26:11.400
we've taken notes while reading, but our note taking doesn't stop there. And you argue that
00:26:16.120
you have to organize those notes. So what does a good organizational process look like?
00:26:22.060
I think what you wanted, this goes back to what we were talking about before, the presentation that
00:26:26.920
you were, whether it was a college lecture or something else, the presentation that you
00:26:30.800
were present for was almost certainly organized hierarchically. And so you want to go back and
00:26:36.440
recover that organization. And the strategy I recommend is very simple. When you're in a lecture,
00:26:43.740
try to put a star, as I think you said you do when you read, put a star next to major points. And this,
00:26:51.220
usually the speaker is going to make this clear. You can tell from their body language, you can tell from
00:26:56.580
they're probably going to repeat it, it's the kind of thing that would be on a slide. So you put a star
00:27:01.300
next to it. And then later, when you're at home, look and see each point that's in your notes. Think
00:27:08.720
about which of the main points of the lecture it relates to, and consider how it relates. And that's
00:27:16.440
how you can recover this hierarchical organization. The other thing that this process, so one thing this is
00:27:22.120
really good for is to make sure that you're understanding. It's also very good for memory.
00:27:27.040
Thinking about meaning is very helpful for memory, and this is really going to get you thinking deeply
00:27:31.940
about meaning. And we'll also reveal to you if there are any holes in your notes. So you may realize,
00:27:38.520
like, oh, I'm pretty sure he said there were going to be three reasons that thus and so is true.
00:27:42.700
I've only got two of them. And that alerts you, I need to go back and talk to the speaker or whoever
00:27:48.000
and see if I can find out what that third missing piece is.
00:27:52.280
The strategy I used when I was in law school, law school, I really learned how to study,
00:27:56.420
learned how to read, I learned how to listen, I learned how to synthesize notes. So I go to my
00:28:01.700
lecture, you'd have to do your reading before the lecture, listen to the lecture, take notes. And
00:28:06.480
then immediately after the class, I would go to my study cubby in the library. And then I would put
00:28:12.220
those notes into my outline. I'd be creating an outline as the semester went on. And that
00:28:17.800
outline creation was really how I learned the material. And as you said, when you create that
00:28:23.700
outline, when I was creating that outline, it helped you synthesize information, see how things
00:28:27.980
connect, but then it also allowed you to see where you had holes in your knowledge. And so you'd be
00:28:32.900
like, well, I'm missing something in this point here, this element of this crime. I need to learn
00:28:38.200
more about that and go talk to the professor. Absolutely. And I'll say that when students
00:28:44.120
come to me saying like, I'm really frustrated, I'm putting a lot of work in, I can't figure out
00:28:48.000
what's going wrong. I would say, okay, like, let's look at your notes, let's talk about what you're
00:28:51.980
doing and so on. When they're studying for tests, going back to earlier in the conversation, almost
00:28:57.220
always their strategy, I was reading over my notes, we've gone over why that isn't effective.
00:29:02.360
And so one of the things I encourage them to do is do this note reorganization,
00:29:07.500
just as you've described, Brett, the strategy you use very similar to what I was describing.
00:29:13.180
And what my students say is they come back later in the semester and they say, you know,
00:29:16.640
I did that note reorganization thing. And I found like I almost didn't need to study for the tests
00:29:21.660
because this is, again, goes back to, you know, you don't need to be trying to learn something for
00:29:28.160
something to get into memory. The process of doing that deep thinking and organization is so good
00:29:34.060
for memory that when the test came around, they found like they were already 80% of the way there.
00:29:39.580
Yeah. So creating your own study guide, creating your own outline is the plyometric version of
00:29:44.620
pushups, right? It's where you explode off the ground.
00:29:50.480
So let's talk about studying again. So I think we talked about if you want to study for a test,
00:29:54.560
one thing to do is you're studying throughout the semester or throughout the whatever it is you're
00:29:59.420
doing, putting together your own outline. But then you also argue that you don't just want to
00:30:05.640
review your outline when you're actually studying for that exam or whatever it is. You need to test
00:30:10.240
yourself. So walk us through the research about testing yourself to prepare for a test.
00:30:16.280
Yeah. I mean, there are a couple of things that work here. One is probing memory is actually one of
00:30:23.760
the really best ways, if not the very best way, to cement information that's kind of in memory but is
00:30:30.920
fragile. So the way the research on this goes, this is called retrieval practice. It's also called the
00:30:36.860
testing effect if anybody wants to look it up for more information. So the way these experiments
00:30:42.360
typically work is you've got two groups of people. Everybody has some exposure to some new information.
00:30:47.920
They read something or they watch a video or something. Then one group has a second session,
00:30:53.280
a few days later, where they get the chapter again and reread it or they rewatch the video.
00:30:58.780
They know that a test is coming up, so they're trying to study. The second group, their second
00:31:04.280
session is not re-exposure to the content. They actually take a quiz on the content and they get
00:31:09.600
immediate feedback about what they got right and what they got wrong. And then a few days after that,
00:31:15.760
both groups take a test. So this is a new test. Nobody's seen the questions before. So it's
00:31:21.520
different questions than the group that took a test in session two. It's different questions for
00:31:26.280
them. And what you find is usually about a 10% or 15% advantage for the people who took a test or a
00:31:33.180
quiz in that second session compared to people who studied a second time. So there are different
00:31:38.940
theories about what's going on in memory, but the phenomenon is not debated at all. It's been
00:31:44.740
shown to work with people of all ages and all sorts of different content. There's something about
00:31:51.180
going into memory, rummaging around, looking for something that is really effective in cementing
00:31:58.800
that information in. I want to emphasize, you actually get the effect even if you don't get
00:32:03.540
immediate feedback, but it works much better if you do get that immediate feedback.
00:32:07.600
Okay. So flashcards could be a useful tool there.
00:32:10.880
Flashcards are by far the easiest way to organize it. Yeah. So, and the other aspect of this, I want
00:32:16.520
to sort of go back to what we were talking about earlier. The comparison is reading over your notes,
00:32:22.840
right? And one of the things we emphasize reading over your notes, you're not necessarily thinking
00:32:27.700
very deeply about it. You can sort of skim over, it's becoming more and more familiar. But again,
00:32:32.940
it's going to feel like things are going great. I'm really effective. And that's not what's going
00:32:38.060
to happen with flashcards. With flashcards, you're sort of confronting yourself with whether or not
00:32:43.040
you actually know the content. So you're really getting two things from flashcards. One, you're
00:32:48.300
getting this memory boost that I described, but you're also testing yourself and providing yourself
00:32:54.600
with a chance to evaluate, how's this going? Do I know this content yet or not? And that's the type
00:33:01.260
of self-testing to prove to yourself whether or not you know it. That's going to be much more
00:33:06.400
effective. The other thing I did when I was in law school is I would take practice exams,
00:33:10.800
you know, in the weeks leading up to the final exam. You have three hours to take an exam. I would
00:33:15.040
actually, like on a Saturday, would three hours to do a practice test. And I found that to be the
00:33:20.700
most useful because those tests, like oftentimes they were closed book. And so I had to like know,
00:33:25.780
if I didn't know the stuff, then I couldn't answer the essay question. And the process of,
00:33:29.880
as you said, confronting what you don't know and like working to try to retrieve it,
00:33:34.620
that's how that stuff got submitted in my head.
00:33:37.400
The only, and I agree with you, it has those advantages. The things that listeners should
00:33:43.620
think about with practice tests, the dangers of practice tests. One is that the practice test you
00:33:48.480
have may not be really representative of what the actual test is going to be. You want to be really
00:33:53.420
convinced it is. And when people look to things like Quizlet, I mean, I've looked at the Quizlet
00:33:59.540
stuff that's available for my courses. It's frequently out of date. Frequently, some of it
00:34:04.620
is just wrong. So you do want to be careful about sources that you're finding on the internet that
00:34:09.820
are supposed to help with a particular course. And the other thing to keep in mind is that when
00:34:14.040
you've got a practice test, you are just looking at a subset of the information that you're supposed
00:34:19.200
to know. So it might be, you know, 40 items or something. And, you know, you could generate 400
00:34:25.540
items. And so it could be that you kind of got lucky and that the 40 items that on the practice
00:34:31.740
test were ones that you happen to know, and you'll end up with a little bit of an overestimate.
00:34:36.660
So I think practice tests are great, especially for, as you said, sort of giving you a sense in
00:34:41.940
realistic testing conditions, how am I doing? And they're also useful if you get them from the
00:34:47.100
instructor to get a sense of what type of questions should I expect. But I think in terms
00:34:52.960
of evaluating, is my knowledge really complete? Test yourself on your entire study guide and let
00:34:59.960
that be your guide as to whether or not you're really ready.
00:35:02.900
I can see this being applicable into the working world. Let's say you have to give a presentation
00:35:06.360
to make a pitch and there's going to be questions and answers. You can work with your colleagues to
00:35:11.840
develop potential questions and answers. That's going to be your study guide. And you just
00:35:16.940
see if you can answer them without looking at your notes. That's how you can apply this to,
00:35:20.260
I'm trying to move away from just academics, but to the working world.
00:35:23.800
And I'll tell you, the way I think about this is knowing your subject matter, whatever your work
00:35:30.040
is, knowing about the content of day-to-day what happens in your office and the kinds of problems
00:35:36.360
that you concern you with, that is going to help you. And so having more of that committed to memory
00:35:41.780
is going to help. So you can apply this principle of testing yourself, not just to very formal
00:35:48.900
situations where I sit down and I'm doing nothing else. You can probe memory at any time. So like you
00:35:55.440
can hang up the phone with somebody and you've taken some notes over the course of this conversation
00:36:01.000
with information that you think you need to hold on to. You can quiz yourself on the spot and say,
00:36:06.700
okay, so what did this person just say? She just told me how to solve this problem. What is it that
00:36:11.600
she said? And you've got it written down, but you still feel like that would be a good thing for me to
00:36:15.780
just have committed to memory. You can quiz yourself at any time and it takes just seconds. Most people
00:36:21.520
have a very hard time at the office, like setting aside time to devote to learning. So just do little
00:36:28.320
bits and pieces and sort of work that into your daily workflow. Okay. And so do practice exams,
00:36:34.360
practice questions, but you also say, I think we've already talked about this. Don't just reread
00:36:38.520
your notes because that's just going to lead to overconfidence because you're like, oh,
00:36:42.000
this is familiar. I mean, you're going to confuse familiarity with actually knowing the material.
00:36:46.940
Absolutely. Really key takeaway. Well, a lot of learning requires learning from your mistakes,
00:36:52.460
but looking at your mistakes can be very unpleasant. No one likes to do that. So any advice in overcoming
00:36:59.180
the reluctance to focus on our mistakes? This is, I think everybody struggles with this and this is
00:37:06.100
something like you don't grow out of this. I mean, this is something that, you know, I'm in the
00:37:11.280
academic world. I mean, professors, you know, we submit articles to professional journals and you get
00:37:17.660
reviews from, you know, expert colleagues and people will get reviews and not read them. Like they can't,
00:37:24.540
they, you know, they just can't face it because, you know, it's something you've worked on all these
00:37:27.980
years and the reviews can be harsh. Most people do develop tricks and a lot of what they do is
00:37:35.660
sort of taking the bad news in snippets. So telling yourself, okay, you know what? The first thing I'm
00:37:42.720
going to do is I'm not going to do anything about this. I'm just going to look at it. And that's it.
00:37:50.060
That's all I have to do today is just look at it as a way of sort of creeping up on the bad feeling
00:37:56.220
that getting this negative feedback is going to entail. And then usually once you can get
00:38:01.000
yourself to kind of break the ice, you realize, okay, it's not as bad as I thought. So like the
00:38:05.880
next step is going to be, I'm going to record everything that was wrong. Then the next step is
00:38:11.220
I'm going to think about how to respond to it and so on. So that's, that's a very common strategy that
00:38:16.880
I think is effective for a lot of people is breaking it down into pieces. But I do want to emphasize
00:38:22.840
that you're right. I mean, the, the way we learn is through feedback and responding to feedback.
00:38:29.840
Yeah. You have in the book says going over exam mistakes or just mistakes in your learning
00:38:33.840
may make you feel dumb and you are going to feel dumb, but you're actually doing what smart people
00:38:39.300
do. It's true. I mean, the, yeah, the people who, people who make the fastest progress and it's so
00:38:45.800
obvious when you spell it out, the people who make the fastest progress, they're eager to get the
00:38:50.600
feedback, right? They don't want to hear so much about what they're doing, right? They've already
00:38:54.320
got that. They want to know what they're doing wrong. And you know, they want you to help them
00:38:58.880
brainstorm ways of fixing it, new things they can try. So learning also requires that you manage
00:39:05.060
your time. You have to make time for learning, but you argue instead of planning your learning by
00:39:09.220
task, like I got to learn X chapter or I need to write X essay, you recommend planning your learning
00:39:16.000
by time. So what does that look like? It really, yeah, it really is about making time for learning
00:39:21.680
because I mean, this is very common with students. They'll come home, you know, at the end of classes
00:39:26.860
and they'll say, okay, so what do I have to do, you know, in the next couple of days? Do I have
00:39:30.780
reading to do? Do I have whatever? And there are two problems with this. One is they may conclude,
00:39:35.520
well, nothing is that urgent. And so they just won't do anything that day. So they're not really
00:39:40.420
getting ahead of the game, which in calmer moments, they would probably recognize,
00:39:44.980
it's probably a good idea to do at least a little something every day. And then there's the
00:39:49.580
planning fallacy, which is familiar to most people. The planning fallacy is just that people
00:39:55.380
consistently underestimate how long it's going to take to get something done. And especially as the
00:40:01.680
project gets more complicated, that becomes more and more true. There seems to be several reasons for
00:40:07.260
it. One of the most important is that you don't anticipate that something is actually likely to go
00:40:13.340
wrong, even if it's a really weird thing. There are lots of weird things that could happen that
00:40:17.620
would interrupt your progress. So we all tend to underestimate how long things will take. And so if
00:40:23.520
you say, oh, I've got a test on Friday, but it's Tuesday, so I don't really need to start studying now,
00:40:29.220
you may be counting on, you know, being able to get it done in a certain number of hours, and that's
00:40:35.280
really a bad estimate. So instead, you want to plan by time and sort of say to yourself,
00:40:40.020
every day from, you know, six o'clock to eight o'clock or whatever it is, that's my work time.
00:40:46.160
And so the question is not whether or not to work. The question is, what am I working on during that
00:40:50.840
block of time? I think that's even more important if you're in the working world. If you feel like
00:40:56.640
there's, you know, something I want to learn how to code, or I've got, I want to acquire a new skill,
00:41:01.200
or I want to learn about a new subject, or I just want to familiarize myself with aspects of,
00:41:06.800
you know, I work at a big company, there are aspects of this organization that I don't know
00:41:10.720
as much about as probably would be good. That's going to get shoved aside. There's no time limit
00:41:15.800
on that of when you need to learn it. Everyone is sort of frantically, you know, bouncing from email
00:41:22.640
to phone call. And so the learning is just never going to happen. And so you need to set aside time
00:41:28.620
instead of telling yourself, you know, I'm going to learn about, you know, what's happening when people
00:41:34.300
fulfill orders or whatever it is that I think would be useful for me to know. You say, you know,
00:41:39.020
every day, Mondays from, even if it's 9.15 to 9.30, or whatever it is, I'm going to protect that time
00:41:44.960
on my schedule. And that's my learning time. And then you're figuring out what you want to learn
00:41:50.920
during that time. Right. So you guys block out your learning time, then create an agenda
00:41:54.820
for your learning schedule before you start. Exactly. Okay. Yeah.
00:41:58.340
Another thing that plays a role in our ability to learn is our self-confidence,
00:42:02.020
or how we think of ourselves as a learner. What role does that play? What does the research say?
00:42:07.740
The most important thing about that is it has an impact on your resilience. So if you see yourself
00:42:15.620
as someone who learns, I'm pretty good at this. I tend to have success at this. When you have a setback,
00:42:21.540
when you find something is really hard, or when you've tried really hard and thought you were
00:42:26.940
successful, and then the evidence come back, no, actually, that didn't go well at all. You thought
00:42:30.820
you learned that. You didn't. If you have this self-image of yourself as, I'm someone who usually
00:42:37.440
succeeds at learning tasks, you're not going to give up. If, on the other hand, because you'll think
00:42:42.760
like, oh, well, that's strange. That didn't work. I must not have worked hard enough, or I had the
00:42:47.660
wrong materials, or something. You'll come up with some attribution other than, I just suck at learning.
00:42:54.400
And so someone who has a bad self-image of themselves as a learner doesn't see themselves
00:42:59.520
as a learner. They're not very resilient as learners, because when they fail, they figure,
00:43:05.700
yep, this is more evidence of what I already thought was true, which is that I'm not very
00:43:10.480
good at this. And then likewise, they may not undertake learning tasks, because they think
00:43:15.400
this is not the kind of thing that I do very well. And so there's really no reason for me to try.
00:43:20.700
Well, any advice for those adults who have that negative self-image? Maybe they developed it during
00:43:26.800
high school or college, where they just kind of realized, well, I'm not a good learner. I'm not
00:43:29.920
a good reader. I've seen that a lot when I challenge people or encourage people, like, hey, you should
00:43:34.760
read this really cool book, philosophy treatise by Plato. And they're like, oh, I could never do that.
00:43:40.400
I just don't understand. How can you overcome that negative self-image?
00:43:44.420
The first thing I would point out is that a lot of times these self-images are developed
00:43:51.160
very young, surprisingly young. When I first got interested in education, I started just observing
00:43:57.460
classrooms. And I was really astonished when I was sitting in, like, first and second grade
00:44:03.420
classrooms. And I felt like I could already see the children who had already given up on school,
00:44:09.860
who had already concluded, this is a place where I don't succeed. This is a place where I just feel
00:44:15.940
shame. And teachers were telling me, like, you see it in first and second grade, like we see it in
00:44:21.360
kindergartners. And so the first thing I would invite people to consider is, like, you know,
00:44:26.220
you were really different. You know, at the time this self-image formed, you were a really different
00:44:30.680
person. And it's possible, too, that, you know, that you didn't have a very good teacher,
00:44:35.260
but you nevertheless blamed yourself for this problem. The second thing I would point out is
00:44:41.100
that everybody can learn. This is, you know, part of what it means to be human. And it could be that
00:44:47.380
when you were in school, you were making comparisons that weren't very helpful. Like, maybe your good
00:44:53.840
friend was, you know, really good at reading or whatever it was, and you were comparing yourself to
00:44:58.540
your friend. That kind of comparison is really not helpful. The only comparison that really matters
00:45:03.220
is comparing yourself to yourself, you know, and thinking about, am I making progress? Am I moving
00:45:10.360
forward? And the final thing I would point out is, as I mentioned earlier in our conversation,
00:45:15.860
it could be that you're actually already really good at a lot of the sub-steps of learning. And then
00:45:21.360
there's just one thing that's troubling you. And so a little analysis, a little self-analysis of how do I
00:45:27.660
go about learning? And what do I need to tweak? You may find, like, yeah, you've struggled in the
00:45:32.480
past, but it was for a relatively minor reason. And with a few adjustments, you're going to make
00:45:37.340
progress a lot faster than you have been. Yeah, it's good. And you also encourage people who have
00:45:41.620
that negative self-image about learning is reminding yourself that you have learned stuff outside of
00:45:46.400
school. Maybe there's something about the school setting that puts you off from learning, but you've
00:45:50.600
learned stuff. You learned how to navigate the world. So it's not out of the realm of possibility for
00:45:55.440
you. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, Daniel, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to
00:46:00.040
learn more about the book and your work? DanielWillingham.com is my website. It is
00:46:06.140
infrequently maintained, I admit, but everything I've written, actually, to which I own the copyright
00:46:13.160
is available free for download on there. So there are a number of articles about learning that people
00:46:18.300
can see there. I'm also on TikTok now, Daniel underscore Willingham, and I'm on Twitter at DT Willingham.
00:46:26.120
Fantastic. Well, Daniel Willingham, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. It's been a real
00:46:29.900
pleasure. Thank you. My guest today was Daniel Willingham. He's the author of the book Outsmart
00:46:34.440
Your Brain. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information
00:46:38.320
about his work at his website, danielwillingham.com. Also check out our show notes at
00:46:42.220
aom.is slash learn. We can find links to resources. We can delve deeper into this topic.
00:46:54.100
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at
00:46:58.160
artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that
00:47:01.940
we've written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven't done
00:47:04.900
so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
00:47:08.440
Helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show at
00:47:12.160
a friend or family member who you think we get something out of it. As always, thank you for
00:47:15.740
the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Remind you to not listen to the AOM podcast,