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

by Benedict Carey

we take breaks and feel guilty about it. The science of insight says not only that our guilt is misplaced. It says that many of those breaks help when we’re stuck.

To solve messier, protracted problems, we need more than a fast-acting dose, a short break here and there. We need an extended-release pill. Many of us already take longer breaks, after all—an hour, a day, a week, more—when working through some tangled project or other. We step away repeatedly, not only when we’re tired but often because we’re stuck. Part of this is likely instinctive. We’re hoping that the break helps clear away the mental fog so that we can see a path out of the thicket.

Perhaps unfinished jobs or goals linger in memory longer than finished ones.

On average, participants remembered 90 percent more of the interrupted and unfinished assignments than the ones they’d completed. Not only that, the interrupted and unfinished jobs were at the top of their lists—the first ones they wrote down.

When we think about goals, we tend to think in terms of dreams.

For psychologists, however, a goal isn’t nearly so grand. A goal is anything we want to possess or achieve and haven’t yet, whether it’s short-term or long-term, getting a Ph.D. or getting dressed. According to that definition, our heads are full of goals every waking minute, and they’re all competing for our attention.

The first is that the act of starting work on an assignment often gives that job the psychological weight of a goal, even if it’s meaningless.

The second is that interrupting yourself when absorbed in an assignment extends its life in memory and—according to her experiments—pushes it to the top of your mental to-do list.

deliberate self-interruption

This kind of interruption creates suspense and, according to the Zeigarnik effect, pushes the unfinished episode, chapter, or project to the top of our minds, leaving us to wonder what comes next. Which is exactly where we want it to be if we’re working on something long-term and demanding. The first element of percolation, then, is that supposed enemy of learning—interruption.

Having a goal foremost in mind (in this case, a drink), tunes our perceptions to fulfilling it. And that tuning determines, to some extent, where we look and what we notice. “The results suggest that basic needs and motives cause a heightened perceptual readiness to register environmental cues that are instrumental to satisfying those needs,”

Academic pursuits are goals, too, and they can tune our perceptions in the same way that a powerful thirst or a new pair of sneakers can.

“Once a goal becomes activated, it trumps all others and begins to drive our perceptions, our thoughts, our attitudes,” as John Bargh,

How, then, do we most effectively activate that goal? By interrupting work on it at an important and difficult moment—propelling the assignment, via the Zeigarnik effect, to the top of our mind.

Louis Pasteur famously put it, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

Remember, there’s an incredible cacophony of competing thoughts running through our minds at any given time. What we “hear” depends on the demands, distractions, or anxieties of the moment.

percolation as the marinating of ideas “in that place that’s not quite the conscious but not quite the subconscious.”

writing about something is discovering what you think about it.

Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.

“A varied practice schedule may facilitate the initial formation of motor schema,” they wrote, the variation working to “enhance movement awareness.” In other words: Varied practice is more effective than the focused kind, because it forces us to internalize general rules of motor adjustment that apply to any hittable target.

Molaison studies was that the brain must have at least two biological systems for handling memory. One, for declarative memories, is dependent on a functioning hippocampus. The other, for motor memories, is based in different brain organs; no hippocampus required.

Transfer is what learning is all about, really. It’s the ability to extract the essence of a skill or a formula or word problem and apply it in another context, to another problem that may not look the same, at least superficially. If you’ve truly mastered a skill, you “carry it with you,” so to speak.

It’s not that repetitive practice is bad. We all need a certain amount of it to become familiar with any new skill or material. But repetition creates a powerful illusion. Skills improve quickly and then plateau. By contrast, varied practice produces a slower apparent rate of improvement in each single practice session but a greater accumulation of skill and learning over time. In the long term, repeated practice on one skill slows us down.

Interleaving. That’s a cognitive science word, and it simply means mixing related but distinct material during study.

Music teachers have long favored a variation on this technique, switching from scales, to theory, to pieces all in one sitting. So have coaches and athletic trainers, alternating endurance and strength exercises to ensure recovery periods for certain muscles.

The mixing of items, skills, or concepts during practice, over the longer term, seems to help us not only see the distinctions between them but also to achieve a clearer grasp of each one individually. The hardest part is abandoning our primal faith in repetition.

mixed problems from previously studied topics into daily homework to force students to learn how to choose appropriate solution strategies rather than blindly apply them. To solve a problem, you first have to identify what kind of problem it is.

Mixing problems during study forces us to identify each type of problem and match it to the appropriate kind of solution.

Chopping that time into even smaller pieces, however—of fifteen minutes, or ten—can produce better results. Remember: Interleaving is not just about review but also discriminating between types of problems, moves, or concepts.

The important thing to know is that you’re essentially surrounding the new material or new skill set with older stuff, stuff you already know but haven’t revisited in a while,

interleaving is, essentially, about preparing the brain for the unexpected.

Mixed-up practice doesn’t just build overall dexterity and prompt active discrimination. It helps prepare us for life’s curveballs, literal and figurative.

That is, the brain doesn’t solely learn to perceive by picking up on tiny differences in what it sees, hears, smells, or feels.

it also perceives to learn. It takes the differences it has detected between similar-looking notes or letters or figures, and uses those to help decipher new, previously unseen material.

This “discrimination learning” builds on itself, the brain hoarding the benchmarks and signatures it eventually uses to read larger and larger chunks of information.

We do not just see, we look; we do not just hear, we listen. Perceptual learning is self-regulated, in the sense that modification occurs without the necessity of external reinforcement. It is stimulus oriented, with the goal of extracting and reducing the information simulation. Discovery of distinctive features and structure in the world is fundamental in the achievement of this goal.”

Perceptual learning is active. Our eyes (or ears, or other senses) are searching for the right clues. Automatically, no external reinforcement or help required. We have to pay attention, of course, but we don’t need to turn it on or tune it in. It’s self-correcting—it tunes itself.

PLMs build perceptual intuition—when they work.

You can play computer games all you want, but you still have to fly the plane or operate on a living human being. It’s a supplement to experience, not a substitute.

painting appears on the screen, with a choice of twelve styles below it. If I chose right, a bell rang and the check symbol flashed on the screen. If I guessed wrong, a black “X” appeared and the correct answer was highlighted.

interleaving may involve more conscious deliberation. Perceptual modules tend to be faster-paced, working the visual (perceptual) systems as well as the cognitive, thinking ones. The two techniques are complementary, each one honing the other.

PLMs are meant for a certain kind of target: discriminating or classifying things that look the same to the untrained eye but are not.

it’s easy enough to design modules to target material you want to build an instinct for quickly.

perceptual learning is automatic, and self-correcting. You’re learning without thinking.

sleep fosters profound intellectual leaps.

Sleeping and waking adjust themselves to the demands and risks of our life, not according to what the health manuals say. The other theory is that sleep’s primary purpose is memory consolidation. Learning. In recent years, brain scientists have published an array of findings suggesting that sleep plays a critical role in flagging and storing important memories, intellectual and physical.

“There is evidence, in fact, that REM is this creative memory domain when you build different associations, combine things in different ways and so on.”

The preponderance of evidence to date finds that sleep improves retention and comprehension of what was studied the day before,

It works for vocabulary. Word pairs. Logical reasoning,

Even the presentation you’ll be giving at work, or the exam that’s coming up at school. For all of these, you need to memorize the details of important points and to develop a mental map of how they fit together. The improvements tend to be striking, between 10 and 30 percent, and scientists don’...