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

by Benedict Carey

So the question is: 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.

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

Chance feeds the tuned mind.

Her students would write one essay, on a single topic, due at the end of the semester. But in the course of their research, they’d have five “prewriting” assignments—all on the experience of doing the research itself. One piece would describe an interview with an expert. Another piece would define a key term and its place in the larger debate (say, landfill dumping in solid waste disposal). A third piece would be a response to a controversial school of thought on their topic. Dively also required them to keep journals along the way, tracking their personal reactions to the sources they were using. Did the articles make sense? Did they agree with the main points? Was this expert or that one consistent in his or her opinions? The purpose of these steps—the prewriting and the journal entries—was to force students to carry around their topic for the entire semester, and to think about it frequently, if not continually: to percolate, in our terminology. Dively was aware that their final essays would not necessarily be more incisive or readable than her previous class’s. More time doesn’t always add up to more authoritative writing, and sometimes means sinking deeper into indecision. In this case, however, her students showed her something extra. The biggest improvement, she wrote, was that they took on “an expert persona, an authoritative presence capable of contributing to the scholarly exchange.” At the end of the semester she surveyed her students, asking about the new forma...

Percolation is a matter of vigilance, of finding ways to tune the mind so that it collects a mix of external perceptions and internal thoughts that are relevant to the project at hand. We

What does this mean for a learning strategy? It suggests that we should start work on large projects as soon as possible and stop when we get stuck, with the confidence that we are initiating percolation, not quitting.

writing about something is discovering what you think about it.

Value of journaling

“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.

Was first neglected as a rel academic research

Psychologists who study learning tend to fall into one of two camps: the motor/movement, or the verbal/academic.

The former focuses on how the brain sees, hears, feels, develops reflexes, and acquires more advanced physical abilities, like playing sports or an instrument. The latter investigates conceptual learning of various kinds: language, abstract ideas, and problem solving.

If you’ve truly mastered a skill, you “carry it with you,” so to speak.

row. Goode and Magill then rated each serve, according to its arc and placement, on a scale from 0 to 24. The winner? Team Random, by a long shot. It scored an average of 18, followed by the serial group, at 14. The blocked practicers, who’d focused on one serve at a time, did the worst, with an average of 12—and this despite having appeared, for most of the three weeks, to be improving the most. They were leading the pack going into Week 3, but come game time, they collapsed.

on subsequent tests, they recalled about 10 percent more of the names they’d studied on the interrupted schedule. Focused, un-harried practice held them back.

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.

was Schmidt and Bjork’s paper, “New Conceptualizations of Practice,” published in 1992,

“At the most superficial level, it appears that systematically altering practice so as to encourage additional, or at least different, information processing activities can degrade performance during practice, but can at the same time have the effect of generating greater performance capabilities.”

Which activities are those? We’ve already discussed one example, in chapter 4: the spacing effect. Breaking up study time is a form of interference, and it deepens learning without the learner investing more overall time or effort. Another example, explored in chapter 3, is context change. Mixing up study locations, taking the books outside or to a coffee shop, boosts retention.

“Counterintuitive as it may be to art history teachers—and our participants—we found that interleaving paintings by different artists was more effective than massing all of an artist’s paintings together.” 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. These philosophies are largely rooted in tradition, in a person’s individual experience, or in concerns about overuse. Kornell and Bjork’s painting study put interleaving on the map as a general principle of learning, one that could sharpen the imprint of virtually any studied material.

They had no sense that mixed study was helping them—and this was after the final test, which showed that mixing provided a significant edge. “That may be the most astounding thing about this technique,” said John Dunlosky,

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. Math scores, however, don’t lie.

Rohrer toyed with the idea of developing a different curriculum, one that rejected the idea of teaching in blocks (two weeks on proportions, say, then two weeks on graphs) and instead 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.

1970s, John H. Saxon was teaching math at Rose State College and growing increasingly exasperated with the textbooks the college used.

Saxon believed that we grasp a new technique more clearly when using it alongside other, familiar ones, gradually building an understanding of more abstract concepts along the way.

Mixing problems during study forces us to identify each type of problem and match it to the appropriate kind of solution. We are not only discriminating between the locks to be cracked; we are connecting each lock with the right key. “The difficulty of pairing a problem with the appropriate procedure or concept is ubiquitous in mathematics,”

test? As mentioned earlier, many musicians already do a version of mixed practice, splitting their sessions between, say, thirty minutes of scales, thirty minutes of reading new music, and thirty minutes of practicing familiar pieces. That’s the right idea. 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.

Every time I look at a list of new vocabulary words, I take that list and combine it with a list of at least as many older words.

I do one scale, two or three times, then switch to a piece I know. Then I go back and try again the portions of that just played piece—let’s say it’s Granados’s Spanish Dance Number 5—that I messed up. Play those two times, slowly. Then I’m on to a (different) scale, followed by a few bars of a totally new piece I’m working on. Enough for one pass. I take a break and play a few riffs from the first tune I ever learned, “Stairway to Heaven” (somehow it never gets old), and after that I’m ready to dive into Spanish Classical. That is interleaving.

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,

Expertise is a matter of learning—of accumulating knowledge, of studying and careful thinking, of creating. It’s built, not born.

Eleanor Gibson published Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development, a book that brought together all her work and established a new branch of psychology: perceptual learning. Perceptual learning, she wrote, “is not a passive absorption, but an active process, in the sense that exploring and searching for perception itself is active.

The participants saw, on the screen, an instrument panel, below which were the seven choices. If the participant chose the wrong answer—which novices tend to do at the beginning—the screen burped and provided the right one. The correct answer elicited a chime. Then the next screen popped up: another set of dials, with the same set of seven choices.

math class, trying to figure out what on earth “slope” means or how to graph 3(x + 1) = y? Here, too, perceptual modules have shown great promise.

The biggest difference between my approach and Kornell and Bjork’s is that 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.

I’ve used it to show that PLMs are meant for a certain kind of target: discriminating or classifying things that look the same to the untrained eye but are not. To me it’s absolutely worth the extra time if there’s one specific perceptual knot that’s giving you a migraine.

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This is no gimmick. In time, perceptual learning is going to transform training in many areas of study and expertise, and it’s easy enough to design modules to target material you want to build an instinct for quickly.

The best part is, as Eleanor Gibson said, perceptual learning is automatic, and self-correcting. You’re learning without thinking.

one. Doesn’t the body need regular downtime to heal? To relieve stress? To manage moods, make muscle, restore mental clarity? Yes to all of the above.

The preponderance of evidence to date finds that sleep improves retention and comprehension of what was studied the day before, and not just for colored eggs. It works for vocabulary. Word pairs. Logical reasoning, similar to what’s taught in middle school math. Even the presentation you’ll be giving at work, or the exam that’s coming up at school.

My own theory is that sleep amplifies many of the techniques we’ve discussed in this book. The spacing effect described in chapter 4, for instance, is especially strong with intervals of a day or two (plus sleep). Philip Ballard’s “reminiscence”—that puzzling improvement in memory of “The Wreck of the Hesperus” poem described in chapter 2—crested in the first day or two. A good night’s sleep could surely loosen the “fixedness” that makes it hard to see a solution to the Pencil Problem, discussed in chapter 6, right away. The brain is likely doing many of the same things with information while asleep as it does while awake—or at least performing complementary functions.

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. “These coaches that have athletes or other performers up at five o’clock in the morning, I think that’s crazy.” 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 and, if possible, hit the snooze button in the morning. Let the cock crow till he’s hoarse.

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.

naps of an hour to an hour and half often contain slow-wave deep sleep and REM. People who study in the morning—whether it’s words or pattern recognition games, straight retention or comprehension of deeper structure—do about 30 percent better on an evening test if they’ve had an hour-long nap than if they haven’t. “It’s changed the way I work, doing these studies,” Mednick told me. “It’s changed the way I live. 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.”

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

The latest research says exactly the opposite: that 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.

Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin, has found evidence that 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.

Yet its language, customs, and schedules—dividing the day into chunks (classes, practices) and off-hours into “study time” (homework)—has come to define how we think the brain works, or should work.

That definition is so well known that it’s taken for granted, never questioned. We all “know” we need to be organized, to develop good, consistent study routines, to find a quiet place and avoid distractions, to focus on one skill at a time, and above all, to concentrate on our work. What’s to question about that? A lot, it turns out. Take “concentration,” for example, that most basic educational necessity, that mental flow we’re told is so precious to learning. 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.

distracted—unfocused. The point is not that concentration doesn’t exist, or isn’t important. It’s that it doesn’t necessarily look or feel like we’ve been told it does. Concentration may, in fact, include any number of breaks, diversions, and random thoughts.

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