How We Learn (31 page)

Scientists are still trying to work out how those cells help us find our way in modern-day learning. One encompassing theory is called the
Meaning Maintenance Model, and the idea is this: Being lost, confused, or disoriented creates a feeling of distress. To relieve that distress, the brain kicks into high gear, trying to find or make meaning, looking for patterns, some way out of its bind—some path back to the campsite. “We have a need for structure, for things to make sense, and when they don’t, we’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling
that our response can be generative,” Travis Proulx, a psychologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, told me. “We begin to hunger for meaningful patterns, and that can help with certain kinds of learning.”

Which kinds?
We don’t know for sure, not yet. In one experiment, Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, found that deliberately confusing college students—by having them read a nonsensical short story based on one by Franz Kafka—improved their performance by almost 30 percent on a test of hidden pattern recognition, similar to the colored egg test we discussed in
Chapter 10
. The improvements were subconscious; the students had no awareness they were picking up more. “Kafka starts out normally, the first couple pages make you think it’s going to be a standard narrative and then it gets stranger and stranger,” Proulx told me. “Psychologists don’t really have a word for the feeling that he creates, but to me it goes back to the older existentialists, to a nostalgia for unity, a feeling of uncanniness. It’s unnerving. You want to find your way back to meaning, and that’s what we think helps you to extract these very complex patterns in this artificial grammar, and perhaps essential patterns in much more that we’re asked to study.”

When we describe ourselves as being “lost” in some class or subject, that sentiment can be self-fulfilling, a prelude to failure or permission to disengage entirely, to stop trying. For the living brain, however, being
lost
—literally, in some wasteland, or figuratively, in
The Waste Land
—is not the same as being helpless. On the contrary, disorientation flips the GPS settings to “hypersensitive,” warming the mental circuits behind incubation, percolation, even the nocturnal insights of sleep. If the learner is motivated at all, he or she is now mentally poised to find the way home. Being lost is not necessarily the end of the line, then. Just as often, it’s a beginning.

• • •

I have been a science reporter for twenty-eight years, my entire working life, and for most of that time I had little interest in writing a nonfiction book for adults. It was too close to my day job. When you spend eight or nine hours a day sorting through studies, interviewing scientists, chasing down contrary evidence and arguments, you want to shut down the factory at the end of the day. You don’t want to do more of the same; you don’t want to do more at all. So I wrote fiction instead—two science-based mysteries for kids—adventures in made-up places starring made-up characters. As far from newspapering as I could get.

The science itself is what turned me around. Learning science, cognitive psychology, the study of memory—call it what you like. The more I discovered about it, the stronger the urge to do something bigger than a news story. It dawned on me that all these scientists, toiling in obscurity, were producing a body of work that was more than interesting or illuminating or groundbreaking. It was practical, and not only that, it played right into the way I had blossomed as a student all those years ago, when I let go of the reins a bit and widened the margins. I was all over the place in college. I lived in casual defiance of any good study habits and also lived—more so than I ever would have following “good” study habits
—with
the material I was trying to master. My grades were slightly better than in high school, in much harder courses. In a way, I have been experimenting with that approach ever since.

The findings from learning science have allowed me to turn my scattered nonstrategy into tactics, a game plan. These findings aren’t merely surprising. They’re specific and useful. Right now. Today. And the beauty is, they can be implemented without spending a whole lot more time and effort and without investing in special classes, tutors, or prep schools.

In that sense, I see this body of work as a great equalizer. After all, there’s so much about learning that we can’t control. Our genes. Our
teachers. Where we live or go to school. We can’t choose our family environment, whether Dad is a helicopter parent or helicopter pilot, whether Mom is nurturing or absent. We get what we get. If we’re lucky, that means a “sensuous education” of the James family variety, complete with tutors, travel, and decades of in-depth, full-immersion learning. If we’re not, then … not.

About the only thing we can control is
how
we learn. The science tells us that doing a little here, a little there, fitting our work into the pockets of the day is not some symptom of eroding “concentration,” the cultural anxiety du jour. It’s spaced study, when done as described in this book, and it results in more efficient, deeper learning, not less. The science gives us a breath of open air, the freeing sensation that we’re not crazy just because we can’t devote every hour to laser-focused practice. Learning is a restless exercise and that restlessness applies not only to the timing of study sessions but also to their content, i.e., the value of mixing up old and new material in a single sitting.

I’ve begun to incorporate learning science into a broad-based theory about how I think about life. It goes like this: Just as modern assumptions about good study habits are misleading, so, too, are our assumptions about bad habits.

Think about it for a second. Distraction, diversion, catnaps, interruptions—these aren’t mere footnotes, mundane details in an otherwise purposeful life. That’s your ten-year-old interrupting, or your dog, or your mom. That restless urge to jump up is hunger or thirst, the diversion a TV show that’s integral to your social group. You took that catnap because you were tired, and that break because you were stuck. These are the stitches that hold together our daily existence; they represent life itself, not random deviations from it. Our study and practice time needs to orient itself around them—not the other way around.

That’s not an easy idea to accept, given all we’ve been told. I didn’t trust any of these techniques much at first, even after patting
my college self on the back for doing everything (mostly) right. Self-congratulation is too easy and no basis for making life changes. It was only later, when I first began to look closely at the many dimensions of forgetting that my suspicious ebbed. I’d always assumed that forgetting was bad, a form of mental corrosion; who doesn’t?

As I dug into the science, however, I had to reverse the definition entirely. Forgetting is as critical to learning as oxygen, I saw. The other adjustments followed, with trial and error. For example, I like to finish. Interrupting myself a little early
on purpose
, to take advantage of the Zeigarnik effect, does not come naturally to me. Unfortunately (or, fortunately) I have no choice. Being a reporter—not to mention a husband, dad, brother, son, and drinking partner—means having to drop larger projects, repeatedly, before having a chance to sit down and complete them. Percolation, then, is a real thing. It happens for me, all the time, and without it I could never have written this book.

Applying these and other techniques has not made me a genius. Brilliance is an idol, a meaningless projection, not a real goal. I’m continually caught short in topics I’m supposed to know well, and embarrassed by what I don’t know. Yet even that experience smells less of defeat than it once did. Given the dangers of fluency, or misplaced confidence, exposed ignorance seems to me like a cushioned fall. I go down, all right, but it doesn’t hurt as much as it once did. Most important, the experience acts as a reminder to check and recheck what I assume I know (to self-test).

The science of learning is not even “science” to me anymore. It’s how I live. It’s how I get the most out of what modest skills I’ve got. No more than that, and no less.

I will continue to follow the field. It’s hard not to, once you see how powerful the tools can be—and how easily deployed. The techniques I’ve laid out here are mostly small alterations that can have large benefits, and I suspect that future research will focus on applications. Yes, scientists will surely do more basic work, perhaps discovering
other, better techniques and more complete theories. The clear value of what’s already there, however, begs for an investigation into how specific techniques, or
combinations
, suit specific topics. “Spaced interleaving” may be the best way to drive home math concepts, for instance. Teachers might begin to schedule their “final” exam for the first day of class, as well as the last. Late night, mixed-drill practice sessions could be the wave of the future to train musicians and athletes. Here’s one prediction I’d be willing to bet money on: Perceptual learning tools will have an increasingly central role in advanced training—of surgeons and scientists, as well as pilots, radiologists, crime scene investigators, and more—and perhaps in elementary education as well.

Ultimately, though, this book is not about some golden future. The persistent, annoying, amusing, ear-scratching present is the space we want to occupy. The tools in this book are solid, they work in real time, and using them will bring you more in tune with the beautiful, if eccentric, learning machine that is your brain. Let go of what you feel you should be doing, all that repetitive, overscheduled, driven, focused ritual. Let go, and watch how the presumed
enemies
of learning—ignorance, distraction, interruption, restlessness, even quitting—can work in your favor.

Learning is, after all, what you do.

Appendix

Eleven Essential Questions

Q:
Can “freeing the inner slacker” really be called a legitimate learning strategy?

A
: If it means guzzling wine in front of the TV, then no. But to the extent that it means appreciating learning as a restless, piecemeal, subconscious, and somewhat sneaky process that occurs all the time—not just when you’re sitting at a desk, face pressed into a book—then it’s the best strategy there is. And it’s the only one available that doesn’t require more time and effort on your part, that doesn’t increase the pressure to achieve. If anything, the techniques outlined in this book take some of the pressure off.

Q:
How important is routine when it comes to learning? For example, is it important to have a dedicated study area?

A
: Not at all. Most people do better over time by varying their study or practice locations. The more environments in which you rehearse,
the sharper and more lasting the memory of that material becomes—and less strongly linked to one “comfort zone.” That is, knowledge becomes increasingly
independent
of surroundings the more changes you make—taking your laptop onto the porch, out to a café, on the plane. The goal, after all, is to be able to perform well in any conditions.

Changing locations is not the only way to take advantage of the so-called context effect on learning, however. Altering the time of day you study also helps, as does changing how you engage the material, by reading or discussing, typing into a computer or writing by hand, reciting in front of a mirror or studying while listening to music: Each counts as a different learning “environment” in which you store the material in a different way.

Q:
How does sleep affect learning?

A
: We now know that sleep has several stages, each of which consolidates and filters information in a different way. For instance, studies show that “deep sleep,” which is concentrated in the first half of the night, is most valuable for retaining hard facts—names, dates, formulas, concepts. If you’re preparing for a test that’s heavy on retention (foreign vocabulary, names and dates, chemical structures), it’s better to hit the sack at your usual time, get that full dose of deep sleep, and roll out of bed early for a quick review. But the stages of sleep that help consolidate motor skills and creative thinking—whether in math, science, or writing—occur in the morning hours, before waking. If it’s a music recital or athletic competition you’re preparing for, or a test that demands creative thinking, you might consider staying up a little later than usual and sleeping in. As discussed in
chapter 10
: If you’re going to burn the candle, it helps to know which end to burn it on.

Q:
Is there an optimal amount of time to study or practice?

A
: More important than how long you study is how you distribute the study time you have. Breaking up study or practice time—dividing it into two or three sessions, instead of one—is far more effective than concentrating it. If you’ve allotted two hours to mastering a German lesson, for example, you’ll remember more if you do an hour today and an hour tomorrow, or—even better—an hour the next day. That split forces you to reengage the material, dig up what you already know, and
re
-store it—an active mental step that reliably improves memory. Three sessions is better still, as long as you’re giving yourself enough time to dive into the material or the skills each time.
Chapter 4
explores why spacing study time is the most powerful and reliable technique scientists know of to deepen and extend memory.