Outsmart Your Brain Quotes

“Outsmarting your brain means doing the mental exercise that feels harder but is going to bring the most benefit in the long run.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy

“wanting to learn has no direct impact on learning. You often remember things you didn’t try to learn.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy

“In summary, your brain evolved to understand typical speech. In a normal conversation you don’t plan fifty minutes of remarks in advance; you say things as they occur to you, and because you’re planning only a sentence or two at a time, you’re unlikely to say something that can be understood only if your listener connects what you’re saying now to what you said twenty minutes ago. But lectures are planned and organized hierarchically. Therefore, it’s not just possible that an idea connects to something mentioned twenty minutes ago, it’s likely, and if a student misses that connection, she will miss a layer of meaning.”
― Daniel T. Willingham, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy