Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential

by Barbara Oakley

Soon, evidence began to mount of other treatment programs that did more harm than good or, at the very least, did no real good despite sizable expenditures.

McCord would go on to become the first female president of the American Society of Criminology. She bravely disputed the effectiveness of all sorts of revered helping institutions—boys’ clubs, summer camps, young offender prison visits, D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), and other popular programs. And she began a process, still slow to take hold in social science, of taking more careful stock of whether a social program actually does what it sets out to do.15

We may want students to find success through conventional pathways, but we need to accept that conventional pathways can be very problematic—sometimes for reasons we don’t yet understand. All of this can stifle the spirit of society’s most visionary and creative individuals.

As Joan McCord’s work shows, sometimes we can feel so certain that our approach is correct that we don’t examine other possibilities. Part of learning well is being able to remain open to others’ ideas and to intentionally work to create situations where we can discover whether we are wrong.

PATRICK TAY

Singapore is also unusual in that it has no natural resources other than a deep ocean harbor. The city-state doesn’t even have enough fresh water for its population. Some precious water is imported across the causeway from the occasionally less-than-friendly Malaysia. More water is obtained through clever, Singapore-developed desalinization processes that are now used worldwide.

Singapore is a career bellwether for what is happening in much of the developed world. Emphasis on education has led to a workforce weighted toward professionals, managers, and executives. As general demographics have skewed older, so, too, has the labor force. Looming continuously is the specter of job obsolescence. Hard-won techniques, technologies, and even relationship skills can gradually lose their value. People must master new software, different equipment, novel management methods, and even different ways of interacting with others. Traditionally, careers have been stepping-stones where you lingered at each step.

Thanks in part to Patrick’s lobbying, Singapore is practical in how it approaches funding. Through the SkillsFuture program, every Singaporean who’s above twenty-five years old receives five hundred Singapore dollars in a virtual credit account. This money is then used to offset training expenses in anything they might want, not just what their company wishes.

Second-skilling is a good idea in today’s swiftly changing career environment. A second skill can allow you to be more nimble if the unexpected arises in your day job.

It’s easy to fall into a rut of thinking that you can only do what you’ve done in the past. But enormous change and growth is possible if you open your mind to the potential.

learning lifestyle is something that can be nurtured and grown in communities, nations, and cultures.

However, one aspect of Singapore that can be difficult for Westerners to wrap their minds around is the level of competition. High population densities in places like Singapore and elsewhere in the East mean that, whatever you are doing, you can find yourself competing with hundreds of thousands or even millions of other people—often with goals identical to yours.

Create vivid mind-map sketches that bring the material to life. Memorize by using visual association. Use pockets of time that are often neglected, such as sitting on a bus. Practice over and over again until you can work a tough problem with ease. Visualize your successful future with whatever you are learning.

Children who use the mental abacus can gain such fluency with mental mathematical processes that they can even do Flash Anzan while simultaneously playing the language game shiritori, which involves saying a word that begins with the final kana character of the previous word. It seems the verbally oriented shiritori and the math of Flash Anzan use different parts of the brain.6

Cognitive load theory, first developed in the late 1980s and increasingly supported by recent neuroimaging research, posits that if you overload working memory, the brain simply can’t process the information.

Basically, it seems that chunking—those solid, well-connected neural patterns developed through practice and procedural fluency—really does seem to offload thinking processes from the working memory area (centered in the prefrontal cortex) to other parts of the brain. This leaves working memory with a lighter load, giving it space to handle new thoughts and concepts.

Whenever you are trying to learn a difficult new topic or skill, focus on deliberate practice with the toughest parts of the material. Break whatever you are learning into tiny chunks—a little part of a song on the piano, a word or verb conjugation in Spanish, a side kick in Tae Kwon Do, or a homework solution in trigonometry. Practice that chunk of material until you have created a solid “neural chunk”—a pattern that you can easily call to mind and accomplish. Once that chunk is mastered, however, don’t fall into the trap of repracticing it just because it’s easy and feels good—instead, keep the bulk of your focus and practice on what you find most difficult.

Adam suggests reading books and taking courses and seminars to keep yourself prepared, no matter what twists or turns your career may take. “The only way to ensure your skills don’t become obsolete is to always keep learning,” he notes. Learn more about your area of expertise, but also learn about things outside your area of expertise. Be open to learning even nonacademic topics, just as Adam learned magic and DJing. These two skills, which are completely unrelated to Adam’s college degree in mathematics, have contributed a lot to his career by teaching him how to effectively engage with audiences.

When you might be struggling to hold something difficult in mind as you are trying to understand it, remind yourself that your struggles may well arise in tandem with your creativity. You wouldn’t want to trade your creative streak, even if it does mean that sometimes you need to work a little harder!

You only have so much cognitive energy. Be selective about what you choose to become expert in—you don’t want to be typecast as an expert in areas you do not want to spend time on.

Beatrice Golomb.

Beatrice was the first researcher to publish findings revealing that cholesterol-lowering statins, which sometimes prolong life, can also pose problems such as muscle pain and memory issues.6 But getting those facts into publication wasn’t easy for her—journal reviewers felt uncomfortable approving findings that ran counter to the expectation that statins were a largely unalloyed good.

If you are learning something new and difficult, explore boot camp–like experiences to make new connections and immerse yourself in the new ideas. No matter how smart you may be, give yourself the time you need to truly learn the discipline.

“Daphne Bavelier,”

We’re beginning to learn the elements of a cognitively winning game system. Art, music, and story can create the kind of immersion and engagement that produces ideal conditions for neural plasticity. A good game, in other words, creates a sort of neural retooling kit to mold and shape cognition. There’s also evidence that video games may combat the ill effects of ADHD, depression, dementia, and autism.

We know that some fourteen hundred new neurons are born every day in the hippocampus. There’s only modest decline in this neural birth rate as you age.25 But unless the brain continues to encounter novel experiences, many of these new neurons will die off before they mature and hook into the larger neural network, rather like vines that languish and die for want of a trellis.

Day-to-day activities as simple as talking, knitting, or shooting hoops keep us in mental as well as physical shape by retaining abilities we already have. But when we go a bit beyond our familiar comfort zone by learning something that challenges us, it helps build a synaptic reserve. This reserve is increasingly important as you age.

The focused mode is primarily centered in the prefrontal cortex—the front part of your brain. The diffuse mode, on the other hand, involves a network that connects more widespread areas of the brain.9 The widespread nature of diffuse thinking is why it is often related to the unexpected connections that lie at the heart of creativity.10 Activities involving the diffuse mode, like walking, riding a bus, relaxing, or falling asleep, are more likely to lead you to creative ideas that arise from seeming nowhere.11

A little intermittent background noise can allow us to more easily alternate between focused and diffuse modes. This is especially useful with learning that encompasses new concepts, approaches, or perspectives.

Mentors can be invaluable in your career and personal development. People don’t need to even know that you consider them to be mentors for them to be of value in your life. Look for ways to make yourself somehow useful to the mentor, just as they are for you, to make such relationships flourish.

Consider learning opportunities as an important factor

when making career and job decisions. How supportive is the new environment of new learning?

Remember that the new forms of learning allow you to take charge. MOOCs are an important new resource for achieving your learning goals, whether they demand technical skills, soft skills, or even skills about learning itself!

It can be shocking to realize how high school skills have atrophied or were barely there in the first place. Online learning provides a great way to refresh old learning, bone up on the skills you need for a critical test, or simply gain foundational skills.

Life holds many—sometimes too many—learning opportunities. If you are just getting started in the world of MOOCs, note that they can be addictive. If a subject interests you, you can audit a course to browse the material when and where you want, without the pressure of assignments and deadlines. Certificates can be great for motivating yourself. But use common sense to balance learning and certificates with professional obligations and family life.

There are smart online education companies that are beginning to make sense of the multiplicity of ways of learning. If you go to the online company Degreed, for example, you’ll see ways to input your own learning from hundreds of different platforms like Khan Academy, Coursera, and Udacity, as well as from books, TED talks, articles, and university coursework and degrees. Degreed’s motto is “A million ways to learn—one place to discover, track, and measure all of it.”

There can sometimes be great value in striking off on your own and not following traditional approaches. Even though it may be intimidating, look for opportunities to bring your own unique insights and fresh ways of doing things into your work or your hobby.

Another valuable tool to decide what MOOC to take is this: Research has shown that if you watch a professor on a video for about thirty seconds, you can get a very good sense of how effective that professor actually is as a teacher.

Here’s a dirty little secret about learning that you’ve probably always known, but that nobody really talks about: Even just thinking about learning something you aren’t partial to, like studying math, activates the insular cortex—a pain center of the brain.6 Humor can counterbalance this pain—it activates the brain’s opioid reward systems.7 (Yes, humor is like drugging yourself—but in a healthy way.) Humor has an incongruity that makes unexpected neural connections—different types of humor can activate very different parts of the brain.8 Perhaps, then, humor is the neural equivalent of letting the parts of your brain that are actively involved in learning relax for a moment as other parts of your brain take over to handle the joke. Whether or not this is true, a number of studies have shown that humor is helpful in learning.

Your first impression about whether an instructor is effective is usually spot-on. Look for an instructor who shows unexpected flashes of humor—it’s a clue that you’ll probably enjoy the time you’re putting into learning.

The best video editors, it seems, have an intuitive feel for the underlying neurocircuitry that keeps people’s attention on the video. They do just enough to enhance the message being conveyed, stopping short of distracting from it. Because motion attracts our attention—especially unexpected and looming motion—it is super important in learning online, just as it is in learning in general. This is why some award-winning teachers leap onto desks—and why some of the worst professors inflict death by PowerPoint, with a slew of lifeless images.13 Unfortunately, despite its importance, video editing is like the ugly stepsister of the MOOC production process—frequently treated as an afterthought.

My prediction is that future MOOCs will make much more use of metaphorical visual effects, because MOOCs that use these techniques will tend to be more successful. For you, whatever you’re learning, see whether you can make a metaphor to help yourself understand the most difficult topic—you’ll be surprised at how much it can bring the key idea to life.

My own sense from interacting with hundreds of thousands of students around the world is that perhaps only 5 to 10 percent of learners are highly self-motivated.

Learning with others can enhance your entire experience—that’s why discussion forums and social media can be so worthwhile. Family and friends are often overlooked as learning buddies, but especially when it comes to MOOCs, they can be the most fun!

Over the past century, IQs as a whole have improved dramatically. This rapid IQ ramp-up is dubbed the Flynn effect, after James Flynn, the New Zealand social scientist who discovered it. It’s real, not a statistical fluke—most people back in the early 1900s didn’t have anything like the learning opportunities we have today to increase our cognitive skills.

Under the title “Key Mindshift Ideas,” make a list of what you thought were the key points of this book. (This will help you to chunk and remember those ideas.) Do you think others’ lists would look like yours? Why might other lists differ?

Ericsson and

Pool, 2016.