Learning How To Learn
What I watched: Learning how to learn by Barbara Oakley. A TEDx Talk posted August 5, 2014.
How we learn best is a passion of mine. I’ve often said that my ability to self-educate is the most important life skill I’ve cultivated. And I’m continually learning how to learn better.
There are a host of pedagogical principles that teachers and educators apply when teaching their students. We are continually learning more about the learning process, especially within the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. But I contend all education is ultimately self-education. The prolific writer Louis L’Amour agreed and put it this way.
Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.
I have read more books by Isaac Asimov than any other writer. He also views education as ultimately self-education.
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
When I stumbled on Barbara Oakley’s articulate talk about what she’s discovered are the ways we learn best, it immediately caught my attention. Her focus is on how each of us as students can optimally learn various types of material. That’s the self-education part – how we take in, retain, and utilize that which we try to learn.
Oakley’s background is fascinating too, and I hope it serves as inspiration for people who might not navigate traditional schooling as well as others. As Oakley points out, learning how to learn is one of the most important skills you can develop, especially when partnered with a robust sense of adventure and wonder. Oakley also extols the wisdom of adding to one’s storehouse of knowledge and skill in multiple domains to enrich life.
Let me start with what Oakley says to conclude her talk since it echoes my long-held sentiments.
So, in closing, I would like to say that learning how to learn is the most powerful tool you can ever grasp. Don't just follow your passions; broaden your passions, and your life will be enriched beyond measure.
Absolutely. That’s really the crux of what it means to be a lifelong educated person, to learn how to learn so that we become and continue to be informed, thoughtful, and skilled as we move through our existence on this planet.
I love Oakley’s presentation style. Concise. Crisp. Clear. Well organized. She also skillfully uses analogy and metaphor to make her points.
Oakley recounts her schooling background and how at age 26 she decided to try and change her brain to be better at problem solving and learning things like math, science, and technology. Her investigations proved fruitful.
But if I knew then what I know now about how to learn, I could have learned much more easily and much more effectively.
Oakley reached out to top professors from around the world. These were academics with deep knowledge in their areas of interest and who also taught those subjects well to their students. She asked these professors how they learn and how they teach others so they can learn. During these conversations she realized these esteemed professors learned and taught similarly to the way Oakley had been doing it.
Knowing her learning and teaching techniques were like other successful professors was great insight, but Oakley wanted to know “why” these strategies worked. So, she turned to studying research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology and queried experts in those fields. She ultimately discovered the keys to learning effectively.
The brain is a complex thing, but a simplified view of its operation can be divided into two modes: focused and diffuse.
Focused mode is just what it sounds like. You engage with focused attention on whatever it is you’re doing or learning at the time. Diffuse mode is a set of relaxed neural states, essentially resting states. When you’re learning, you alternate between these two modes.
Analogy is known as a great way to illustrate something. Oakley brilliantly uses a pinball machine to explain the focused and diffuse modes.
The focused mode is tight thinking. These are thoughts you’re familiar with such as historical patterns or the multiplication table. When you’re thinking in this mode your thoughts proceed along pathways you’ve already laid out through past learning and experience.
Focused mode is useful, but if you encounter a new idea, concept, or technique that you’ve never encountered or pondered before, to best absorb these new thoughts you need to think differently to foster a new perspective. That’s where the diffuse mode comes in. In diffuse mode when you’re thinking about something new, your thinking is broader and wider ranging as you’re trying to learn or create with these new ideas. Diffuse mode allows you to come to a place where you can begin to grapple with the new stuff.
The bottom line for all of us out of this is this: when you’re learning, you want to go back and forth between these modes, and if you find yourself, as you’re focusing in on something, trying to learn a new concept or solve a problem and you get stuck, you want to turn your attention away from that problem and allow the diffuse modes, those resting states, to do their work in the background.
Using Salvador Dali as a real-life illustration, Oakley explains that when Dali became stuck on a problem he was trying to solve relating to one of his paintings, he’d sit down and relax in a chair with keys in his hand. He’d relax and reflect on the problem casually in the background. As soon as he’d become so relaxed that he neared sleep the keys would fall from his hand, the sound of which would then wake him up and he’d go back to his painting using the ideas generated from the diffuse mode in his now focused painting mode.
Another example Oakley uses to illustrate the power of alternating between focused and diffuse modes is inventor Thomas Edison. Legend claims that Edison would sit in a chair with ball bearings in his hand. He’d relax, loosely thinking about a problem. Just as he’d fall asleep, like Dali’s keys, the ball bearings would fall and he too, now snapped to alertness again, would continue to work on his problem in wide awake focused mode.
The bottom line for all of us out of this is this: whenever you’re sitting down to solve a new problem or analyze a new idea, even if millions of other people have thought the same thoughts or solved the same problems, for you, it’s just as creative as it was for famous people like Dali and Edison, and you want to use some of these creative approaches.
Oakley then turns her attention to the topic of procrastination and how some people claim they don’t have the time to engage in the back and forth of focused and diffuse modes to optimize their thinking and learning. Her description of how we procrastinate and deal with it is important.
What seems to happen when you procrastinate is this: you look at something you’d rather not do, and you actually feel a physical pain in the part of your brain that analyzes pain. So, there’s two ways that you can handle this. The first way is you can just kind of keep working a way through it. And research has shown that within a few minutes it [pain] actually will disappear. But the second way is you just turn your attention away, and guess what? You feel better, right, right away. So, you do this once, you do this twice; it’s just not that big a deal. But you do this often, and it’s actually like an addiction. It can really cause problems in how you lead your life.
The Pomodoro Technique is one way Oakley suggests you can counter procrastination. Using a timer (I’ve done this and use the clock timer app on my cell phone), set it for 25 minutes during which you turn your focused attention to the task at hand. After the 25 minutes of focused work, you do something fun. Relax for a few minutes doing whatever you find fun. I often get up and do a few pushups, go walking outside, or read a few pages of a novel.
By utilizing the Pomodoro Technique, or some variation that works best for you, you are enhancing through practice your ability to have focused attention while practicing your ability to relax which is an integral part of the optimal learning process.
Working with focused attention with intermittent periods of relaxation is the goal here, not to cram as much work as possible into those 25 minutes. Rather, simply remain in the focused state and let the work, learning, or problem solving manifest as it unfolds in its own organic way.
Some students mistake some of their worst traits for their best. Perhaps as a student, whether in formal schooling settings or when learning on your own, you can’t grasp something easily or you have a less than stellar working memory. Maybe you see other students who grasp new material well and it’s frustrating. It makes you think you’re not doing any learning at all. Oakley flips the narrative and says that this can indicate you’re simply more creative.
Because you can’t hold these ideas in mind so tightly, other ideas are often creeping in. If you have problems with the tension, you’re always kind of diverting off into some other idea, it’s similar: you are often more creative, because the new ideas are slipping in instead.
So many students and learners feel they are slow in comparison to others. Using the analogy of being a hiker, Oakley explains that perhaps others get to a point faster like a speeding race car driver, but a hiker can more fully engage with nature during their hike making the experience deeper and more profound. Slower thinkers may have to work harder to grasp new material, but the trade-offs can be worth it by gaining solid mastery of what you’re studying.
Then Oakley mentions the illusion of competence in learning. This happens when you’re studying something intently but you’re really just spinning your wheels because you’re not using effective study techniques.
Test anxiety is also definitely a thing, but that anxiety can clue us into the fact that we have yet to master the material and we can use that as impetus to learn in better ways.
Researchers are finding that exercise is also an incredibly effective learning factor.
Exercise within a matter of a few days can increase our ability to both learn and to remember, and researchers are beginning to understand the neurophysiological pathways that allow this to occur.
While we all might think we hate tests, testing yourself repeatedly is a valuable learning strategy. Mini tests. Self-made flashcards. Studying in different places. All are helpful.
When you do homework (assigned or self-assigned), never just work on the homework once. Oakley offers that you would never sing a new song once and think you knew it. So why should you feel that once you learn something new that you truly know it. Repeat the homework several times over several days “until the solution flows like a song from your mind.” (I love that imagery.)
Regarding recall, when we’re reading something in a book or learning some other way, simply highlighting the material or going over it another time can be spinning one’s wheels. The most effective way to learn is to look at a page, or whatever learning vehicle you’re using, then look away and ask yourself in the moment what you can recall. This technique builds profound neural hooks that help you to better understand the material.
Oakley concludes that one must not fall prey to the belief that understanding the material alone is enough to build true mastery. While understating is important, only when it’s coupled with practice and repetition in a variety of circumstances will you truly gain mastery.
Let me conclude with how Oakley concludes, something I mentioned earlier in this post. It’s a valuable chunk of wisdom worth repeating and that we’d all be better off accepting.
So, in closing, I would like to say that learning how to learn is the most powerful tool you can ever grasp. Don't just follow your passions; broaden your passions, and your life will be enriched beyond measure.
Happy learning! May your life continually be enriched.