How We Learn Quotes

“Once a goal becomes activated, it trumps all others and begins to drive our perceptions, our thoughts, our attitudes,” as John Bargh, a psychologist at Yale University, told me.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“In plain English: 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. In even plainer English, the pretest drove home the information in a way that studying-as-usual did not.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“Answering does not only measure what you remember, it increases overall retention.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“It’s not an adventure until something goes wrong.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“The “losers” in memory competitions, this research suggests, stumble not because they remember too little. They have studied tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of words, and often they are familiar with the word they ultimately misspell. In many cases, they stumble because they remember too much. If recollecting is just that—a re-collection of perceptions, facts, and ideas scattered in intertwining neural networks in the dark storm of the brain—then forgetting acts to block the background noise, the static, so that the right signals stand out. The sharpness of the one depends on the strength of the other.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“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.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“Zeigarnik’s studies on interruption revealed a couple of the mind’s intrinsic biases, or built-in instincts, when it comes to goals. 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.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“Napping is sleep, too. In a series of experiments over the past decade, Sara Mednick of the University of California, San Diego, has found that 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.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“Every exam, every tournament, every match, every recital—there’s always some wrinkle, some misplaced calculator or sudden headache, a glaring sun or an unexpected essay question. At bottom, interleaving is a way of building into our daily practice not only a dose of review but also an element of surprise. “The brain is exquisitely tuned to pick up incongruities, all of our work tells us that,” said Michael Inzlicht, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto. “Seeing something that’s out of order or out of place wakes the brain up, in effect, and prompts the subconscious to process the information more deeply: ‘Why is this here?’ ” Mixed-up practice doesn’t just build overall dexterity and prompt active discrimination. It helps prepare us for life’s curveballs, literal and figurative.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“the science suggests that interleaving is, essentially, about preparing the brain for the unexpected.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“Self-examination can be done at home. When working on guitar, I learn a few bars of a piece, slowly, painstakingly—then try to play it from memory several times in a row. When reading through a difficult scientific paper, I put it down after a couple times through and try to explain to someone what it says. If there’s no one there to listen (or pretend to listen), I say it out loud to myself, trying as hard as I can to quote from the paper its main points. Many teachers have said that you don’t really know a topic until you have to teach it, until you have to make it clear to someone else.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“Using memory changes memory—and for the better. Forgetting enables and deepens learning, by filtering out distracting information and by allowing some breakdown that, after reuse, drives retrieval and storage strength higher than they were originally.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“Yet we work more effectively, scientists have found, when we continually alter our study routines and abandon any “dedicated space” in favor of varied locations. Sticking to one learning ritual, in other words, slows us down.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“And we will show that some of what we’ve been taught to think of as our worst enemies—laziness, ignorance, distraction—can also work in our favor.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“The philosopher John Locke once described the case of a man who had learned to dance by practicing according to a strict ritual, always in the same room, which contained an old trunk. Unfortunately, wrote Locke, “the idea of this remarkable piece of household stuff had so mixed itself with the turns and steps of all his dances, that though in that chamber he could dance excellently well, yet it was only when that trunk was there; he could not perform well in any other place unless that or some other trunk had its due position in the room.” This research says, take the trunk out of the room. Since we cannot predict the context in which we’ll have to perform, we’re better off varying the circumstances in which we prepare. We need to handle life’s pop quizzes, its spontaneous pickup games and jam sessions, and the traditional advice to establish a strict practice routine is no way to do so. On the contrary: 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.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“a short study break—five, ten, twenty minutes to check in on Facebook, respond to a few emails, check sports scores—is the most effective technique learning scientists know of to help you solve a problem when you’re stuck.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“To build and retain foreign vocabulary, scientific definitions, or other factual information, it’s best to review the material one or two days after initial study; then a week later; then about a month later.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“As the nineteenth-century American psychologist William James observed, “If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“studies show that “deep sleep,” which is concentrated in the first half of the night, is most valuable for retaining hard facts—names, dates, formulas, concepts. If you’re preparing for a test that’s heavy on retention (foreign vocabulary, names and dates, chemical structures), it’s better to hit the sack at your usual time, get that full dose of deep sleep, and roll out of bed early for a quick review.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“Let go of what you feel you should be doing, all that repetitive, overscheduled, driven, focused ritual. Let go, and watch how the presumed enemies of learning—ignorance, distraction, interruption, restlessness, even quitting—can work in your favor.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“We’re still in foraging mode to a larger extent than we know. 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.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“The modern institution of education, which grew out of those vestigial ways of learning, has produced generations of people with dazzling skills, skills that would look nothing less than magical to our foraging ancestors. 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.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“Studies in animals have found direct 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 of the day—and integrating the new material with the old.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“The definition of a mathematician is a person who carries around the concept in their head for long enough that, one day, they sit down and realize that it’s familiar.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“Zeigarnik’s studies on interruption revealed a couple of the mind’s intrinsic biases, or built-in instincts, when it comes to goals. 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 people in her studies were doing things like sculpting a dog from a lump of clay, for heaven’s sake; they got nothing out of it but the satisfaction of finishing.) 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.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“people don’t benefit from an incubation break unless they have reached an impasse.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“Gestalt psychologists theorized that the brain does similar things with certain types of puzzles. That is, it sees them as a whole—it constructs an “internal representation”—based on built-in assumptions.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“Since we cannot predict the context in which we’ll have to perform, we’re better off varying the circumstances in which we prepare. We need to handle life’s pop quizzes, its spontaneous pickup games and jam sessions, and the traditional advice to establish a strict practice routine is no way to do so. On the contrary: 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.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“In its nomadic hominid youth, the brain was continually refreshing its mental map to adapt to changing weather, terrain, and predators. Retrieval strength evolved to update information quickly, keeping the most relevant details handy. It lives for the day. Storage strength, on the other hand, evolved so that old tricks could be relearned, and fast, if needed. Seasons pass, but they repeat; so do weather and terrain. Storage strength plans for the future.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

“reminiscence is strong for imagery, for photographs, drawings, paintings—and poetry, with its word-pictures.”
― Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens