28: Learning How to Learn

that is a professor of engineering at Oakland University. She's involved with multiple areas of research, ranging from stam education, to engineering education, to learning practices. Most recently, Professor Oakley has created and taught learning how to Learn Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects. It's the third Biggest mook, which is online and nonline on learning course

available on Coursera. And you also wrote the book A Mind for Numbers, How to excel at math and Science even if you funked algebra, Barb, Professor Oakley, whatever I should call you? How are you doing today? Oh? Please call me, Barb. I'm doing just great. Actually, I've been looking forward to our podcast all day. It's so fun. Just you know, it brings back to mind, your wonderful book, Ungifted, and it's yeah, and so I just love thinking about how people think and why they do what they do.

And that's that's a big part of I think, your own writing and your own approach to life. And so anyway, I guess for me, I share a lot of background or some background, I think with you. I know you had your own learning difficulties early on, and I did too. I basically flunked my way through elementary, middle and high school math and science. I know that, Yeah, I did. And it's really kind of funny because I'm a professor

of engineering now. So I think that people all too often sort of peck themselves and think that they have a certain type of intelligence and that means that's the only thing they can do and that's the only, you know, kind of world that they can have, And that's actually not true at all. There's much wider horizons for most

people than they ever really imagine. Yeah, and particularly in math, right, because that seems to be a kind of topic that people just sell large swaths of societies assume that they don't have the math gene or they aren't talented in math before, they can't do it. But you really opened up my eyes a lot to that when I was reading your books. It's funny, people. Part of the problem is just the last few years, there's been whole new horizons of fantastic findings in how we learn effectively, and

a lot of these findings haven't really percolated down into classrooms. So, for example, many people don't know the following idea. It looks like we have two fundamentally different modes of thinking. Your brain operates in two radically different ways. One of those ways is when you're sitting there and you're focusing on something like, let's say you're trying to figure out the tip right for a waiter or waitress, or you're trying to follow something that's going on in history and

you're analyzing the historical trends and so forth. And when you're thinking in this way, with a careful, concentrated focus fashion, that is a completely different way of thinking than when you're sitting in a bus looking out the window absolutely not thinking about anything in particular, or you get in the shower and you're just taking a shower or something like that. And I call those two different modes focus mode and diffuse mode. And diffuse mode is actually a

shorthand term for the many neural resting states. And as it turns out, when you're learning something new, you often have to alternate between these two different modes before you can actually figure out something, if it's something difficult. So are they pretty much they map on to Conomon's system one system too? Or is it a little bit different?

I think? I asked Daniel Konneman once whether his System one and System two might be related to Simon Baron Cohen's system systematizing and empathizing sort of thinking, and he was, so, I mean, what a wonderful thing here. This brilliant man is a Nobel Prize winner. He doesn't need to respond to anybody. He wrote that very nice email and just said, well, you know, I hadn't really thought of that. I don't

really know. And I think there may be a fundamentally a fundamental relationship between this kind of focused and diffuse thinking. It between that and fast and slow thinking. I do. I mean, it does seem like slow thinking is really focused thinking, but fast thinking, I think can be a variety of differences. And that's Keith Stanech's model of Type

one processes versus Type two processes. Type one processes are a wide range of things, from you know, automatic learned associations, to emotional intuition, gut feelings, to evolutionary evolved instincts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, so do you think the learning of you know, to learn something at a really deep, meaningful level requires a Schmorgas board of processes? Yes, back

and forth between them. It does seem. For example, when I was talking to Bob Builder at UCLA, I asked him, can you can you do focus mode thinking and diffuse mode thinking at the same time? And Bob was like, maybe, if you're an advanced meditation mounk, you might be able to do what There's some intimations that that might be possible. So what I'm really getting at is when you say a Shmortas board, yes, it does. It involves both modes of thinking, but not necessarily at the same time. You

want to go back and forth alternating. So when you get really stuck on a problem, it's essential that you back away because that opens your mind to these other much broader neural networks that are apparent in the neural resting states. I love that There's an article which I'll be happy to link to in the show notes by Jack and colleagues called fmriah reveals reciprocal inhibition between social

and physical cognitive domains. I don't know if you're familiar with that paper, but it supports exactly what you're talking about. They did find that there was opposing reactions between the default mode, or what I like to call imagination brain network, which is very much tied to social cognition and social reasoning, and the brain regions associated with UH, spatial visualization and mechanical and mathematical reasoning. Wow. That sounds like a fascinating paper.

I can hardly read it way too. Yeah, I bet I bet the listeners of this podcast can't wait to read it as well. Oh, they're like, oh my god, fm IRA fields reciprocal in ambition between the default I bet they're very excited about this right now. Yeah, there's like I knew it. I just they're like, I suspected that for years, but no one will listen to me. No one would believe me. Yeah, no, so this is

actually exactly exactly. So it's a really I really like in your in your book, how you talk about the importance of both modes of thinking, for for math and science, which is not typically a set of fields where you would immediately think your stuff. Oh, intuition is important. But but some of the greatest mathematicians Einstein, you know, it wasn't one actual Actually Einstein wasn't one of the greatest mathematicians. But yeah, it's funny cause I said some of the

great mathematicians, even Einstein. I didn't mean include him as a class of one of the grast mathematicians, but including the class of some of the greatest scientific thinkers and mathematicians have talked about the importance of intuition right well, and in that regard it sort of tangential. Related to that is the idea that analogy and metaphor are super

super important in mathematical and science. It's like literature claims first rights to anything to do with metaphor and analogy, and that that's really a literary sort of thing, right, it's actually so deep a part of math and science. And what I found I play this one trick. I went to rate my professors dot com, which is a very popular website if you're outside college. That what you do is you go to this website and you can go and see what people say about their professors and

they rate them. And what I did was I looked up the top three hundred or so professors in it throughout the world in physics, math, engineering, chemistry, all the you know, and even psychology and really interesting and worthwhile disciplines, and I wrote to them and said, hey, would you be willing to look at the manuscript for this book that I'm writing about I learning math and science. And

a shocking number of them said yes, I would. And then when I started hearing back from these people, one thing that just shocked me was how many of them, these top professors in difficult disciplines like engineering and physics, chemistry, used metaphor and analogy to help them communicate really effective ideas.

And what was strange was they were embarrassed to reveal it to me, because hey, that's not heavy duty mathematical, you know, and sort of scientific approach, right, if we're using a football as an analogy for some sort of conveying energy or or anything like this, these kinds of fun imagery, it seems to make things less serious, and so people, really great teachers often use these techniques, but they don't really want to tell other people because they

might be seen as kind of, oh, they're lightweight or whatever. And I have to say it was kind of funny when I first did the mooke learning how to Learn, I knew that metaphor and analogy and fun imagery is really important for learning and learning well. And sure enough, when the mook was first starting, there's not like a whole bunch of people out there saying, Hey, this mook is incredible, right, like actually is going on now, which

still just boggles me. But there were people out there saymen, So some of the first people who watched the move were like, wow, this is just so condescending. She has these kind of little, cutesy, little zombie images and it's not a serious class. And of course, now with what nearly half a million people and the really a solid reservoir of great science behind this that's recognized by the people who are in it, and it still makes me laugh. Those first few people who were kind of like, oh, no,

this can't be serious. And I think that's why professors who do use these great techniques like metaphor and analogy and fun imagery are really shy about saying it to other people because they do get oh, how you must be a lightweight, you know, and then that that's actually not true. Oh, I mean again, I keep going. I can't stop thinking about Einstein because he is he. I mean,

he said imagination is more important than knowledge. And you know, some of these cogniprocities you're talking about right now relate to imagination. But you also talk in your book about the importance of creativity, you know, even going beyond you know, just mental imagery, importance of uh, you know, synthesizing things and and going beyond what currently exists, thinking about in the future. How important do you think do you think some of the do you think the most creative mathematicians

have a great imagination. I think they have a fabulous imagination. What's interesting about scientific and mathematical imagination is versus literary imagination. The difference with literary each form has different types of constraints, and depending on what's going on, the more constraints you have,

the more challenging creativity becomes. And so I think with math and science you have a lot of constraints, and so it becomes more challenging to be creative, and so people who are creative in math and science are enormously crazy. That's such a good point. Yeah, that's such a good point. I mean, some researchers have argued some creativity researchers like Stokes have argued that the creativity is more likely the more constraints you actually put on. I like that because

and it does. In fact, I was just speaking with I was interviewing for the mook and in fact, I've got to get you on to get hopefully you will come on. That's right. We discussed that, didn't we discuss that a while ago? Yes, I think that would just

be fantastic. And I was just interviewing a I was out in Washington, d C. And Bill Rice is the director of Education for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he was mentioning that many people in the humanities sort of think that the humanities has got a lock on creativity, like they're the creative ones and the other ones are sort of like and I'm I'm he didn't use these words or anything, but I've heard these kinds of thoughts from people in the humanities and out here

in the sciences or engineering. So you're just kind of a drone, You're just you just got to plug the numbers into some pre done equation. And it always makes me laugh when I hear that kind of thing, because it's that's the equivalent of someone saying, you know, learning language and learning a new language like French or Spanish, that's all you're doing is memorizing and plugging in uh words. Right, It's just so easy. It's just all you do is

plug it. And of course that's completely untrue. If you study languages, you know how much, how how flexible, how creative, how intimately you have to understand differences in how people perceive reality in order to learn a new language. And it's the same way, the same thing if you're learning something like math or science. There's differences in how you perceive reality, and it's so exciting and so filled with the potential for creativity. Yeah, I could definitely see that.

I think people, you know, people don't understand I think what real like not real, but what professional mathematicians, what their life is like. I mean a lot of us think math that we think of like the what we do think of the algebra one or the pre algebra class where we were taught to plug and chug. Although maybe a good free algebra class goes beyond that. But I think a lot of people, unfortunately their experiences in middle school and high school math really is primarily formulas.

But I think that something that's very useful that you're doing is is making people aware of so many different aspects of the stuff that's much more exciting than what you remember in middle school and high school. Part of what I think is fascinating about math and science, but really about any kind of learning, is we're often told, hey, you know, follow your passions. That's where it's all at. You find out what you're good at, and then just

get better at it. And that's such a I mean, to my mind, that's such a mistake and approach, because what happens is people people have things are good at, but some things take much longer to get good at. And so if you just write off immediately, hey, you know, I'm only good at these things, and you don't take the time to get good at other things. And let's

take women for example. Well, women, we know that developmentally, yes, women and men have the same potential underlying potential for for knowing math and science and language and all sorts of things, right, But what is that does that include spatial three D mental rotation? What's that? Does that include three D mental rotation? Well, I'm not looking at the

specific studies. I'm speaking very very generally. Yeah, in terms of like actual achievement and right, but there are studies that show that women verbally have a little bit of an advantage early on. Right, they develop a little bit faster verbally. It doesn't mean they're slowed mathmatically, it just means they're advanced verbally. So what does this mean when they get a little older. Well, they've always been a

little bit better verbally. Right, So, even though they're just as good as guys mathematically, when they're told, hey, follow your passion, what are they gonna do. Hey, I'm a little bit better verbally? That must be my passion. Yeah, it's such a good point, And so they end up, even though they have the capability, they think they should follow their passion off into Sometimes disciplines are that maybe temporarily fast satisfying, but long term they don't lead to

as good a job prospects. So I always say, don't just follow your passions. Broaden your passions, and your life is so enriched if you do that. I think that's an excellent point. I don't know if you're familiar with Calen Newport's book So Good, they can't ignore you. I love cal Newports What skills trump passionate in the question for a work you have? It seems to be in

line with a lot of what you're saying. Let me let me like unpack some of this, because I am I think a lot of I think it's you're making some excellent, excellent points and how can we how can we combine optimism with realism? So not everyone is going to be suited to be a professional mathematician proper you know that that does take it, you know, to really like to be have a get a PhD in mathematics. I think we can honestly say not all minds are

gonna find that enjoyable, you know. So, I, on the one hand, I completely agree that we should we shouldn't prematurely judge potential. I mean, that's the whole point in my book of Gifted, right, is that we really stop judg prejudging, and if someone does have the passion and interest for something, we should have more of a go go go attitude. You know. Then Oh, let's see what your iq is and stuff like that. With that said, not everyone should be encouraged to go to math, right, Oh,

I think you're you're making a good point. But I think it's important to differentiate between high level being a mathematician, yes, an ordinary number sense absolutely, and most jobs, like let's say engineering. And I'm not suggesting that everybody should become an engineer, or that everybody should be a chemist or

that ever. But what I am suggesting, however, is that the world of twenty twenty almost fifteen now is quite different than the world one hundred years ago, and there is a far greater demand for technological know how and skills. And so it is great to have a passion for learning languages and for culture and for all sorts of humanities and social science sorts of things. But because the world is what it is, it's also important to add to that, to broaden with some kind of number sense,

some kind of a technical ability. If you're a well educated individual, it's just going to be really helpful for you to be broader than the typically sort of unilateral, monodisciplinary person of even twenty five years ago. Absolutely, absolutely, And the development of skills, as you note, is not all grounded any talents. You talk a lot about active learning, active work, and you know something very interesting or active learning strategies and how important they are for problem solving

and learning. I mean, how can we instill the benefits and enjoyment of active learning and students in the United States in such a standardized, testing based environment. Well, that's a great question. I mean, if you if you really put just started denovo, you would. I think the most important thing that it could possibly be in any student's life is to have great teachers. And any system that doesn't promote really great teachers and doesn't enhance having great

teachers is a system that's hamstringing people. So I think one of the best things we could do is really look carefully within and say, are we supporting systems that are supporting the best teachers? And so that's another thing that I think is important is we often think that, especially to get somebody in math and science, hey, you know, let's get them out there and get the excitement of it, get their hands on it, let's have fun, let's drop eggs off buildings, let's do all this kind of stuff.

And then these kids who have grown up through this hit college, hit calc One hit some of the harder, tougher and they it's like what one university professor called the mass science death March. You know, they hit it and it's like, wait a minute, this isn't fun. You know, everything we've been led to believe until this point is it's really fun. And then we get here and it's this part isn't. And I think part of what we

should also be doing, particularly in the younger grades. And I'm not saying let's just force wrote learning down kids' throats, but what I am saying is that having a saw understanding of fundamental facts I mean fundamental facts and how to swiftly draw them to mind and solve problems with him is really important. And we don't really give students a lot of practice. We give them lots of fun stuff, we give them all sorts of exciting, but we don't just have them sit there and do short amounts of

solid practice. A great methodology that does do this is the math study program known as Kuman Mathematics. And in that program, and I put my own daughters in that, I was like, you know, I get one after school activity that's mine. You know, as a mom, I get to force down their throat. I don't want to be a tiger mom and have them doing all sorts of things.

Maybe it would be better. Now my daughters are like, you know, I wish you had made us take music, you know, take a play, And I'm like, you know, I was trying hard not to be a typer mom. But one thing I did do was given math. And they had about twenty to thirty minutes of practice a day. And now one is just wrapping up med school and the other one is an artist, but she took calculus

for fun and aced it, you know. And so I think one thing that we don't do enough of is a little bit a practice each day with math, just as they would practice a musical instrument or a sport or something like that. I agree, But how can we motivate that practice. You talk a lot about the procrastination in your book. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the common problem. So many people procrastinate and then they say, see I don't have that, I didn't have the talent

for it. Now, oh, yes, how can we You know, I agree with a lot of what you're saying, And how can we enlighten people to know that it's not because it's because they're lazy. It's not because you're stupid, right, a lot of it, at least some people are. I'm joking, Well, I don't know about the fourteenth time I get asked you what's for dinner? I'm like, okay, that's one of those stupid questions. But the thing is with why why do students I don't know, let's see, let's see, can

you can you rephrase that? Just a lits midget. I'm just wondering how we can motivate students to want to practice math. How can we have them see the joy and love in this stuff. That's going to be tough to do if you don't have a good teacher. And so part of part of the whole what's going on now is we have a really, really imperfect system, and how can we change it to improve it? Sometimes there's

just no way to do that. What you can do is seize the day individually with the few people who sort of kind of, for whatever reason, happen to look sideways and notice that, wait a minute, there is something I can do here. And I think that's what the mook was really about. One thing that I did was I volunteered in a local inter urban school district for five years to help bring them a math program. And what I found was the kids were incredible. I mean,

they were just really wonderful kids. And the teacher is on the other hand, sometimes they would use the twenty minutes they had only twenty minutes to have their kids study math, they would use that entire twenty minutes to hand out the materials so that by the time they were all done, they didn't have anything to fiddle with, right because the students didn't have time to do anything. So it was really a demotivator for me in that I looked at what was going on, and I didn't

see the problems at the student level. I saw that at that teacher level, particularly in schools for disadvantaged individuals, And that's part of why I wanted to work on the mook, was to try to reach to teachers themselves and also to directly to students to try to show them that there are much easier ways to approach their learning. When I was see what happened was I had trained myself as a linguist, and I loved language, I loved culture,

I loved all those kinds of things. And then when I was twenty six or well, I got a of the I graduated from high school, and there was only one way at that time that I could study language and actually get paid for it, and that was due join the army. So I joined the army, and I learned a language. I learned Russian, and I ended up working as a Russian translator on Soviet trollers up in

the Bering Sea and all sorts of fun things. So that's what I was saying, I said, Selesio is not but that's it's things to tell me all the time, which is you know too much, it's time to kill you.

But for the record, you said that in the free interview, so the listeners wouldn't have heard that the first time, were right, right, But at any rate, So when I got out in the military, though, I saw that really there there's just it's kind of funny, but there just doesn't seem to be a big call for people who know Slavic languages and literature. And so I thought, you know, I'm just I love travel, I love adventure. I mean, I ended up working at the South Pole station as

a radio operator. That's where I met my husband. So I always say in the earth, to meet that man. And I mean, I just loved having seeing new perspectives and looking at things in new ways. And then I thought, huh, you know, why can't I do that with me? I mean, if I really want a new perspective, why don't I try on for size whether I can actually learn math and science? Because there could have been nothing more alien

to me than learning something like that. And when I first started trying to do it, I made every mistake in the book. I would sit there and I would beat my head against them, literally against the wall. I just sit there and I get so upset. And there if you look at my old books, there's like little holes where I'd take my fork and stab the book. I get so frustrated. And I didn't know things like, hey,

you got to back away when you get stuck. You're thinking yourself into a corner and you're using a tiny little set of neural networks, and you got to back away, go into resting mode, you know, diffuse states and look at things from a new perspective, and that will allow you to solve the problems. I didn't know that. And there's lots of other tricks for example, you brought up procrastination. I mean, it's so easy to put things off. I

didn't know that there was a simple trick. Just set a timer for twenty five minutes and then practice focusing just for that twenty five minutes, and then when it's done, relax, because it's important to relax and use those neural resting states learnings continuing. You're not conscious of it, but it's going on in the back. I didn't know these kinds of things, and so I wanted to with the mook communicate some of these very very simple ideas about learning.

And I was so lucky of my My co instructor in the mook is doctor Terrence Sinowski. He's the Francis Crook Professor of the Salt Institute, and he's a fallible progressive. He's like he's so he's such a wonderful human being. He's actually a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Institutes of Medicine. That's one of only ten living human beings who's like that.

And if you met him, you probably think he was pretty smart, because but he's one of those people that what I love about his intelligence is you probably know this too. There's a lot of super smart people out there. I mean, they're not super smart like Harry, but they're they're pretty smart, but they're not flexible in their thinking, Like they'll jump to conclusions and then if you try to like say, hey, you know there's this like obvious fact that you're missing or something like that, they do

not want to hear it. So I define intelligence. In my dissertation my PhD, I present a dual process theory of intelligence that argues that intelligence. You're going to love this. My dope theory is that intelligence is neither controlled nor diffuse or autonomous thought spontaneous thought. It is that flexibility to go between the different modes of thought depending on

the test constraints. So in my view, you know that it has no meaning to say they're super smart people that aren't flexible because for me, that flexibility is intelligence. So you're not smart if you don't have it. So there's no such thing as a super smart person who's not flexible. I think it does depend because I think that,

for example, you can have a programmer. Uh and and I'm I'm aware I'm stereotyping here, but a programmer who's really really gifted and really good at what they do, and yet if you ask them about to think about something that's related to Hey, you know you just said something really rude to your wife. Yes, it like doesn't click, you know. There, So there are there's flexibility and intelligence, and I do think that there can be types of intelligence inflexible. It's just that I don't like to hang

out with those kinds of people as much. Well, do you know Danielle Bassett. She is She won the MacArthur Award for her career work in sort of quantifying mathematically people's ability to learn. And she's at the I think she's at the University of Pennsylvania, and she is like the coolest. Her work just seems really cool. It's quantifying in a hard science way the kinds of things that

we're talking about. And she talks about intelligence as the ability to maximum to for when they're imaging the brain, how it can when you're learning something new, the brain reconfigures itself, yes, and that people who are better learners or faster learners reconfigure themselves more swiftly. Fascinating. Yeah, she is in the engineering school at penn just look that up. Wow, that's just her work is amazing. Yeah. Yeah, you know you have a background, you got you did your doctoral

training and systems engineering. How is systems engineering? What is systems engineering? And how to like influence you in terms of how you see sort of the big picture in your own work today. Oh, what a great question. I've never been asked that question before, and I think I've been waiting for it all my life. First off, what is systems engineering? It it Let's say that you are a mechanical engineer and you learn a certain set of mathematics related to how do how does the spring and

the dash pod in your car? How does it bounce back around between the mass of your car and the inertia of it and the sort of the these kinds of inertial factors, and how do you quantify all of

that kind of thing. So, so then you have electrical engineers, and electrical engineers deal with things like inductance and capacitance and resistance, and what people don't realize is there's actually a very deep relationship mathematically between capacitance and elastance, probably boring people to tears, I'm sorry, between resistance and like a dash pod in mechanical engineering. So anyway, what it all comes down to is, hey, guess what. There's these

very different disciplines. One's dealing with little circuits and others dealing with your car and things like that, but mathematically there's this deep essential similarity between them. Well, systems engineering gets at that mathematics and kind of says, oh, hey, guess what. There's lots of underlying relationships between seemingly different disciplines. And so what systems engineering does is try to kind of tie systems together, often mathematically, to better understand what

the deep essential commonalities are. So I think that that perspective has flavored all of my work, and for me, I almost have to laugh because one thing I've noticed, like, I did an interview with this wonderful guy. His name is Benny Lewis, and he goes by the nome diplume of Benny the Irish polyglot, and he just speaks a lot of different languages, a good jazz musician. Oh yes, well he's like us, he started. Well, yeah, but I wouldn't quite put it that way, at least not when

I was speaking with him. Oh that's a positive thing in my book. Oh, well, he is definitely a very interesting person. Interesting, let's go with interesting, Let's go with interesting. But what he he was an engineer and he complete wash out with language, just was always flunking it and couldn't pass it, couldn't learn it. Moved to Spain, took six months of Spanish lessons, was the loser in the class.

He was flunking it completely. And then he sort of realized that, hey, you know, how I'm learning language is really bad. It doesn't work for me to learn it in the conventional way, and so he reconfigured his approach to learning. And now he speaks I don't know, something like eight ten, twelve languages, a lot of different languages, and he travels the world learning languages and having fun doing that. And so Benny is is a perfect example of like, when I'm looking at Mook's, I'm like, why

isn't there a mook on general language learning? And I mean not that I know, maybe there is, but I mean if you go to a you know, you'll see classes for linguistics, but language for like, how do you swiftly pick up a block? What are the common kind of meta learning techniques for learning language? Yeah, and that's the kind of thing that Benny teaches. I will burn, I will tout his book here, which is fluent in three months. And but that's what Benny does. And I

started to notice this. It's like academics get so set in their discippointments. For example, a French teacher speach teaches French, and you go up through the the whole academic discipline and you becoming get your doctorate in French or something like that, or engineering, you get your doctorate. It's always towards a pinnacle. But there most of the time people who are more broad ranging, like Benny, who knit together

different things. They're not an academia yea. And yet academia needs these kinds of approaches absolutely absolutely, There needs to be more more creativity in academia across the board. Well we kind of, yeah, we kind of make sure that that doesn't happen. We went so focused on their own little question there is. There's not a lot of systems thinking going on in academia. But how did you slip through because I never got an academic job. You are so smart? No I should say that, but yes, I've

been on the outskirts of my jobs. Have been like you know, in the periphery of you know, like tenure track, but not actual tenure track. And you know, staying away from that I think has increased my creativity. I think it really can. Because also another thing that happens is getting grants is it's becoming such a huge financial game.

And if you are in any of the disciplines that has the potential for bringing in money, the new intellectual resources are often really tied up is writing grants, writing grants, writing grants, and you're not that doesn't give you. It's like, have you ever read about the old system in England of how they used to teach mathematics at the highest levels.

It was the if I remember correctly, it was called the Wrangler system, and what they used to do they had a big test and then your score on that test sort of determined how sort of the rest of your life. Right, if you were the first Wrangler, you're going to get your pick of the prestigious positions in mathematics professorships in England. Second Wrangler is download. You know,

it goes down. But there was a lot of complaint after a while that people that young at that time, it was young men were devoting some of the most creative years of their life up to like age twenty two or something like that. So it was like the years when Einstein was dreaming about writing a photon were the time when these people are just sitting there preparing for this test. And so it actually just locked their minds and didn't allow them to have the time for

the creativity. And sometimes I wonder that it is kind of like that in math and science in academia. Now, such a good point. I think it is like that. I think it's a shame. I would like for the remaining time we have here in our podcast, can we can we get a little bit of practical advice for people on how to learn you. In your book, you list four components of building mental habits. Would you mind

talking about what those four are? Well, first, let's go back to what happens when you see something that you do not want to do? Yes, Like, let's say that you look and you see you see your math textbook. What happens when you get your math textbook or see that math textbook, As it turns out, you actually experience pain. Like the part of your brain that experiences pain, the same part that like you hit your thumb with a hammer. Yes, no,

now my question, I'm I'm good at neuroscience jeopardy. Yes, yes, you've got those facts down right. And so what happens is you there's two ways you can handle that. You can work through it or and after about twenty minutes that pain will go away. So if you work through your math after about twenty minutes, you'll start to maybe start getting into the flow of it and it doesn't seem so bad. But there's another way that you can handle that much more quickly, and that is you simply

turn your attention away from the math book. Right. If you switch your focus of attention, the pain instantly disappears. So that's great, But that's also kind of like an addiction. And because because you do it once, you do it twice. Right, it's like the short term, hey I feel better, Hey, I feel better. It's no big deal if you do it a couple of times, but if you keep doing it, it ends up having a terrible long term effect your life on your life, just like any addiction. Right, So

what can you do to handle this? The first thing is when you get that little cue that's painful, that is a that's a queue. And so what you want to do is for me, I'm imperfect. We're all imperfect, but I kind of say, there we go. But I enjoy the perfect people that I do need. I'm perfectly imperfect. I like that. Well, what happens is you you want to kind of start keeping an eye on when you're starting to avoid things and sort of this metacognition of oh, hey,

guess what, that's my procrastination cue. And when that happens. The best thing to do when you finally become aware of it, and you also are aware this could create a problem for me long term if I let it keep going. What you want to do is try to stop yourself as soon as you reasonably can and get a timer. And you can get any timer you want, like a physical timer, or you can have a timer loaded on your computer or whatever. And you want to

take this timer. You want to turn everything else off, so nothing on your cell phone, you know, you turn that so there's no sounds, no beeps on your computer, close your email programs, everything gets shut off, so no disturbances, and you set your timer for twenty five minutes, and all you have to do is work as efficiently and diligently as you can focusing for twenty five minutes. Now, sometimes I'll catch myself be like, wait a minute, am

I really focusing here? I can't be doing my focus on my work because I'm focusing on my thinking, so I and then I gently just push that thought away and I just keep trying. And the whole idea is just to work as efficiently as you can for that twenty five minutes. When that twenty five minutes is done, then what you want to do is you just want to relax for just a little bit, and learning is also taking place or cogitating. Mental thinking about what you're

working on is also taking place. You're not consciously aware of it, but it's also taking place during this sort of relax process, whether you want to go and just kind of surf the web a little bit or whatever. So when you get the queue and you're aware of it, you're aware of it, it's creating a problem. Then set your palm. This is the Palmodoro technique, and it was invented by a Italian name is Francesco Sidilo in the

nineteen eighties and it's really effective. And that's that's about the best way you can practically approach and then you know and then sort of. Don't think you're going to rewire your entire life. Just start building in a few of these little palmondoros and it makes an incredible difference in your productivity. The only other thing is try to do try to eat your frogs first. So like one thing in the morning, do one thing you've really been kind of putting off, and only do it for twenty

five minutes. Frogs are quite tasty. Well they tell me they taste like chicken. But everything always tastes like chicken so much, but frogs are delicious. I'm choking. So what is red? What is renaissance of learning? Renaissance learning is is like to I want to be a good renaissance owner. It just sounds sexy. It does. And what I really meant by that I took as my riff point Santiago Ramonicohol, who is just one of the most incredible characters in the history of science. And he was he was just

this loser. I always loved loser dropout types who were really in trouble and couldn't learn anything, and he was the perfect example of that. He ended up in jail when he was eleven years old, and it was in Spain, in like the eighteen sixties, so it was really a rotten jail full of fleas and straw and all sorts

of terrible things. And his father was at his wits end because here his father worked really hard to try and drag him up, himself up out of complete poverty, and his son is going directly back there and was hard headed just he couldn't handle his studies at all, flugged out of got thrown out of all these schools. And then he turns out around his late teens early twenties, Hey, I'm going to rewire my brain. And he did, and he became known as the father of modern neuroscience, and

he won the Nobel Prize for his discoveries in neurophysiology. Yeah, and so said, he exemplifies a renaissance learner to me, someone who really just sort of came out of nowhere. And what he said was, and I think it's true. He said I wasn't a genius. He says, I've worked with geniuses. He wrote this wonderful autobiography. But he said that that a lot of times. The problem with geniuses, in fact is that they jump to conclusions and they're

really inflexible in their thinking, just like you had said. Yeah, but he and he said, if there's anything that's good about me, it's a I'm persistent and be inflexible. Somebody shows me that I'm doing something wrong, hey I'll adjust. And a lot of intelligence. That's intelligence there. But a lot of the people who worked with couldn't do that. So I guess all of that kind of thing is that renaissance learning? Is that renaissance? What I think is

you're already there. Well, I don't know about that. I'm halfway there because I am. I'm open to it. Uh, you know, let's leave here today. Can you give any practical strategies to increase your memory? Or warning or warning anything you want to say to our listeners who are like their head is about to explode after all this discussion of math, and they're like, how what can I do practically to increase my memory? Take take to t and call me in the morning. Yeah, just take a

tiny little thing. That's what you want to Don't think about everything you want to learn or need to learn. You just take a tiny little thing and just work on that. And another thing is just the importance of visual visual aspects of memory and what this is is it or funny things? It helped the visual centers through your brains. A brain is enormous, right, These are really large areas of your brain. So if you can get something in there visually, you've got sort of in some

sense more neural hooks to hang your memories on. And so so try to make an image or try to try to just come up with some kind of a funny thing, like if you're trying to remember a that duck is pto in Spanish, well, poto, How am I going to remember that? It doesn't even sound like duck. But the duck sits in a plato of water and it paddles around, So then you can kind of think duck, What is a duck? Oh? Yeah, yeah, it's in a pato. That's it. And at first when you do this, you

make these funny little analogies to help you remember. It's really time consuming and slow, but the more you practice,

the faster you get at it. But you'll find that once you make of something vivid like this, it actually sticks really well in your memory and you can use it not just for language learning, but if you're trying to learn pharmaceutical names as a physician, you can use it for all sorts of different things, but always try to and the stupider and actually the more risk gay whatever you come up with, the easier it is for you to remember. So that's one quick flick trick to

help your memory. Thank you so much, Professor Barb Oakleigh for being on my podcast today and in part of your knowledge for all of us, it's a pleasure. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast with Doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as informative and thought provoking as I did. If you don't like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can go to the Psychology Podcast dot com.