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

by Benedict Carey

we work more effectively, scientists have found, when we continually alter our study routines and abandon any “dedicated space” in favor of varied locations.

integrating learning into the more random demands of life can improve recall in many circumstances—

How to integrate the exotica of new subjects into daily life, in a way that makes them seep under our skin.

As scientists put it, using our memories changes our memories.

(the sketches had no accompanying words). The average score was 27. Ten hours later, however, their average was 32; a day later, 34; by four days, it was up to 38, where it plateaued. A comparison group, who studied sixty words presented on slides, improved from 27 to 30 in the first ten hours—and no more.

The brain holds on to only what’s relevant, useful, or interesting—or may be so in the future. It does mean that everything we have deliberately committed to memory—

Retrieval strength, on the other hand, is a measure of how easily a nugget of information comes to mind.

Having something going on in the study environment, like music, is better than nothing (so much for sanctity of the quiet study room).

We can easily multiply the number of perceptions connected to a given memory—most simply, by varying where we study.

four. A simple change in venue improved retrieval strength (memory) by 40 percent.

Try another room altogether. Another time of day. Take the guitar outside, into the park, into the woods. Change cafés. Switch practice courts. Put on blues instead of classical. Each alteration of the routine further enriches the skills being rehearsed, making them sharper and more accessible for a longer period of time. This kind of experimenting itself reinforces learning, and makes what you know increasingly independent of your surroundings.

The technique is called distributed learning or, more commonly, the spacing effect. People learn at least as much, and retain it much longer, when they distribute—or “space”—their study time than when they concentrate it.

it’s best to review the material one or two days after initial study; then a week later; then about a month later. After that, the intervals are longer.

The fluency illusion is so strong that, once we feel we’ve nailed some topic or assignment, we assume that further study won’t help. We forget that we forget. Any number of study “aids” can create fluency illusions, including (yes) highlighting, making a study guide, and even chapter outlines provided by a teacher or a textbook. Fluency misperceptions are automatic. They form subconsciously and make us poor judges of what we need to restudy, or practice again.

Repeating facts right after you’ve studied them gives you nothing, no added memory benefit.

The quickest way to download that St. Crispin’s Day speech, in other words, is to spend the first third of your time memorizing it, and the remaining two thirds reciting from memory.

Testing is studying, of a different and powerful kind.

Spitzer showed not only that testing is a powerful study technique, he showed it’s one that should be deployed sooner rather than later.

each test was an additional study session.

testing > studying, and by a country mile,

“When teachers hear the word ‘testing,’ because of all the negative connotations, all this baggage, they say, ‘We don’t need more tests, we need less,’ ” Robert Bjork, the UCLA psychologist, told me.

Checking for understanding

“retrieval practice.”

On some kinds of tests, particularly multiple-choice, we learn from answering incorrectly—especially when given the correct answer soon afterward.

The act of guessing engaged your mind in a different and more demanding way than straight memorization did, deepening the imprint of the correct answers.

You work a little harder by guessing

wrong guesses eliminate the fluency illusion,

If you’re studying just the correct answer, you don’t appreciate all the other possible answers that could come to mind or appear on the test.”

it primes students to notice important concepts later on.

“Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”

That is the soul of self-examination: pretending you’re an expert, just to see what you’ve got.

“Okay, I’ve studied this stuff; now it’s time to tell my brother, or spouse, or teenage daughter what it all means.”

They’ll expose what you don’t know, where you’re confused, what you’ve forgotten—and fast.

In Duncker’s terminology, when the boxes were full, they were “functionally fixed.” It was as if people didn’t see them at all.

Romantic entanglements are another classic example: We become infatuated, we think we’re in love, but time loosens the grip of the fixation. We come to see exasperating flaws. Maybe she’s not the one, after all. What was I thinking?

We already take breaks from problem solving anyway, most of us, flopping down in front of the TV for a while or jumping on Facebook or calling a friend—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.

On average, participants remembered 90 percent more of the interrupted and unfinished assignments than the ones they’d completed.

being interrupted at the “worst” time seemed to extend memory the longest. “As everyone knows,” Zeigarnik wrote, “it is far more disturbing to be interrupted just before finishing a letter than when one has only begun.”

Zeigarnik effect,

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. When we’re in the middle of that paper, for example, we’re far more attuned to race references all around us.

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 biggest improvement, she wrote, was that they took on “an expert persona, an authoritative presence capable of contributing to the scholarly exchange.”

Another said, “I had a more complete understanding of the material I was dealing with because I was able to ask more questions of myself” in the journal.

Remember, Dively had the students make regular entries on what they thought about the sources they used, the journal articles and interviews. Their thinking evolved, entry by entry, as they accumulated more knowledge.

writers talk about it endlessly and because, in a critical sense, writing about something is discovering what you think about

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.

“The general goal of practice is to transfer to a game,” the pair concluded. “A game situation varies from event to event, making random testing the best condition to appraise the effectiveness of practice.”

In the long term, repeated practice on one skill slows us down.

the spacing effect.

context change.

simply alternating targets.