Limitless Mind: Learn, Lead, and Live Without Barriers

by Jo Boaler

What is important is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other.

Medical doctor Norman Doidge says that when people learn something quickly, they are probably strengthening existing neural connections. These he describes as “easy come, easy go” neural connections, which can be rapidly reversed.9 This is what is happening when we study for a test, and we go over something we have already learned.

We cram information in and reproduce it in a day or so, but it does not last and is quickly forgotten. More permanent brain changes come from the formation of new structures in the brain—the sprouting of neural connections and synapses. This is always a slow process.

Mathematics is amazingly compressible: you may struggle a long time, step by step, to work through the same process or idea from several approaches. But once you really understand it and have the mental perspective to see it as a whole, there is often a tremendous mental compression. You can file it away, recall it quickly and completely when you need it, and use it as just one step in some other mental process. The insight that goes with this compression is one of the real joys of mathematics.13

The group was amazed, so much so that some of the team immediately went out onto the streets and started interviewing passersby, asking people to solve 18 × 5. They then made a mini online 18 × 5 course and made 18 × 5 T-shirts that they started wearing around Udacity.

One day Nina noticed that Jodi was walking around with her pockets stuffed full of small pieces of paper. Over a few weeks, Nina saw the pockets growing bigger and bigger till the pieces of paper began spilling out. Eventually Nina asked her what they were. Jodi reached into a pocket and handed Nina her scribblings of different patterns she had been trying. Nina had been working diligently for weeks on the Collatz conjecture, trying pattern after pattern.

LEARNING KEY #6 Connecting with people and ideas enhances neural pathways and learning.

Being willing to feel uncomfortable with not knowing something and still know that I don’t have to give up on something just because I don’t understand it right away. And I have other resources that I can utilize to increase my learning as an educator, as a person. So for me, it’s just . . . I always felt like I was an island and I had to show up knowing. . . . I think for me, it’s changed the way I navigate life in terms of I listen better, I think. I feel like I grow and learn by collaborating, so I think I’ve opened up a different way of connecting to my community of colleagues so that I can learn better, and sharing is really learning. That whole idea of letting go of judgment and knowing your worth changed me as a person.

I don’t respond to change with as much tension as I used to. So I’m more open to recognizing I’m experiencing something that might be uncomfortable for the moment, but that I can learn how to navigate. The more I relax with it, the more I can navigate it.

The Swiss scholar Etienne Wenger created an important framework to help people think about learning differently. He states that when we learn something, it is more than just acquiring knowledge or accumulating facts and information, because learning changes us as people.

When we learn new ideas, we see the world differently—we have a different way of thinking and a different way of interpreting every event in our lives. As Wenger says, learning is a process of identity formation. Psychologists used to see identity as a static concept, maintaining that we all have “an” identity that we develop as children and keep throughout our lives. But more recent work has given identity a more fluid meaning, suggesting that we can all have different identities in different parts of our lives.

Henry Fraser. I first read his book, The Little Big Things,

Psychologist Robert Emmons specializes in gratitude and has found that it is critical to people’s well-being.

Because they believe they can do less, they actually do less, which results in the cognitive decline they fear. Instead of retiring to a life of minimal activity, research tells us that we would be helped by filling our retirement years with new challenges and learning opportunities.

Research has shown that elderly people who pursue more leisure activities have a 38 percent lower risk of developing dementia.11

Beth recalled that she was at the point of going on disability pay and giving up work altogether when she remembered how students were transformed when people in their lives who knew about brain change worked with them. She realized that her situation was the same, and she needed to believe in change for her body and her medical situation, just as she believed in change for her students.

But knowledge can sometimes be inhibiting; it can stifle creative thinking15 and lead people to use methods from a domain that they should look outside of. The two computer scientists who made the breakthrough believed that their success came from the fact that they had less knowledge than others, and this had allowed them to think differently.

We start to see our minds as fluid instead of fixed and start to see infinite life possibilities.

Many people believe that they will become happier if they work harder, get a better job, find a perfect partner, lose ten pounds, and so on (substitute any goal of your own). But a range of research studies have shown that this is backward thinking and that when people become positive, they become more motivated, engaged, creative, and productive in all sorts of ways.

“Happiness fuels success, not the other way around.”