How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

by Benedict Carey

Each stage somehow complements the others’ work.

Notice, for example, that the longest stretch of Stage 2 sleep is just before waking. Cut that short and you miss out on the period when your brain is consolidating a skateboarding move, a difficult piano fingering, or your jump shot. “The implication is that if you are preparing for a performance—a music recital, say—it’s better to stay up late than get up early,” Smith told me.

The same logic applies to REM. The largest dose is in the early morning, between those chunks of Stage 2. If you’re prepping for a math or chemistry test, an exam that’s going to strain your ability to detect patterns, better to stay up late

Deep sleep, on the other hand, pools in the front half of a typical night’s slumber, as you can see from the diagram. That’s the slow wavelength you want when preparing for a test of retention, like new vocabulary, or filling in the periodic table. Arrange your studying so that you hit the sack at your regular time, get a strong dose of the deep stuff—and roll out of bed early for a quick review before dawn.

With naps of an hour to an hour and half, we’ve found in some experiments that you get close to the same benefits in learning consolidation that you would from a full eighthour night’s sleep.”

To sort all that variety, sleep might absolutely evolve distinct stages to handle different categories of learning, whether retention or comprehension,

the research thus far suggests that each of sleep’s five stages helps us consolidate learning in a different way.

Learning crests during waking hours, giving way to sleep at the moment of diminishing returns, when prolonged wakefulness is a waste of time. Sleep, then, finishes the job.

unconscious downtime clarifies memory and sharpens skills—that it’s a necessary step to lock in both. In a fundamental sense, that is, sleep is learning.

sleep brings about a large-scale weakening of the neural connections made during the previous day.

Tononi argues that the primary function of sleep is to shake off the trivial connections made during the day and “help consolidate the valuable inferences that were made.” The brain is separating the signal from the noise, by letting the noise die down, biologically speaking.

evidence of “crosstalk” between distinct memory-related organs (the hippocampus and the neocortex, described in chapter 1) during sleep, as if the brain is reviewing, and storing, details of the most important events...

Mapping the local environment—its every gully, clearing, and secret garden—was your geometry.

“cognitive niche”

What is concentration, exactly? We all have an idea of what it means. We know it when we see it, and we’d like more of it. Yet it’s an ideal, a mirage, a word that blurs the reality of what the brain actually does while learning.

Concentration may, in fact, include any number of breaks, diversions, and random thoughts.

The brain has not yet adapted to “fit” the vocabulary of modern education, and the assumptions built into that vocabulary mask its true nature as a learning organ.

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.”

You want to find your way back to meaning, and that’s what we think helps you to extract these very

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.

there’s so much about learning that we can’t control.

About the only thing we can control is how we learn.

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.

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.

Forgetting is as critical to learning

Brilliance is an idol, a meaningless projection, not a real goal.

The best self-quizzes do two things: They force you to choose the right answer from several possibilities; and they give you immediate feedback, right or wrong.

“You don’t fully understand a topic until you have to teach it.” Exactly right.

Distracting yourself from the task at hand allows you to let go of mistaken assumptions, reexamine the clues in a new way, and come back fresh.

Deliberate interruption is not the same as quitting. On the contrary, stopping work on a big, complicated presentation, term paper, or composition activates the project in your mind, and you’ll begin to see and hear all sorts of things in your daily life that are relevant. You’ll also be more tuned into what you think about those random, incoming clues. This is all fodder for your project—it’s interruption working in your favor—