Here is the full transcript of 

Barbara Oakley’s talk

on  Learning How to Learn @ Talks at Google 
conference.
Introducing speaker: We have a very, very special guest
with us today. I remember reading Charlie Munger saying
that he didn’t know a smart man who didn’t read all the
time. And he has categorized Warren Buffett as a learning
machine.
The inspiration from there is how does one become a very
effective learner? What is the science of learning? And
reading Barb’s book, that is exactly what the book seems
to be teaching us. And I have loved reading her book. Not
only loved reading her book, I could identify that the
voice in that book is the voice of a teacher, and that
resonated a lot with me personally. So I’m very glad Barb
is here with us today.
So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, please join
me in welcoming Barb Oakley.
How To Make Delicious Molten Chocolate Cake

Barbara Oakley: It’s such a pleasure to be here. And I’d

like to begin by telling you a little story– another one.
And this story is about– well, I think all of us love to
watch other people, right? To some greater or lesser
extent. And I love people watching.
And so I have to tell you about this one guy who was one
of the most interesting people. I’ve ever watched. And
this was when I was working down in Antarctica at
McMurdo Station, and this guy’s name was Neil. And Neil
was this thin, wispy little guy with kind of a high-pitched
voice. And he had a big head, so he looked like this sort
of upside-down exclamation point. And what Neil used to
like to do is he liked to pick up the phone and answer it
with a perfect imitation of the 6’8″ gorilla of a station
manager, Art Brown.
So one day, phone rings. Neil picks it up, as usual…”Hello.
This is Art Brown speaking.” And it was Art Brown on the
other end of the line.
So Art says, who the heck is this? Or more unprintable
words to that effect. happened to me early on I fell off
the math bandwagon. Just said, I can’t do this. I hate it. I
really want nothing to do with it at all. Science is the
same way. And so I basically flunked my way through
elementary, middle, and high school math and science.
And it’s really funny, thinking back on it now, because I’m
a professor of engineering.
And I publish well in some of the top journals, so I do
very well as an engineer. But one day, one of my
students found out about my sordid past as a math
flunky, and he asked me, he said, how’d you do it? How’d
you change your brain? And I thought, you know, how did
I do it? I mean, looking back on it, I was just this little
kid, and I loved animals, and I liked fluffy, furry things,
and I liked to knit, and I loved language and studying
language.
And at that time, there weren’t college loans that were
relatively straightforward to get. And so I really wanted to
learn a language. And I couldn’t afford to go to school,
and so how could I study language in that kind of
situation? And there was one way I could do it.
I could actually go and learn a language and get paid for
it while I was doing it. And that was to join the Army. And
so that’s what I did. I joined the Army. And there you see
me, looking incredibly nervous, about to throw a hand
grenade.
And I did learn a language. I learned Russian. And I
ended up working out on Russian trawlers, Soviet
trawlers, up in the Bering Sea. And that’s me standing on
a bunch of fish there. I can still swear quite well in
Russian, although the rest of the Russian’s a little rusty.
But I loved having adventures and gaining new
perspectives. And so I also ended up at the South Pole
station in Antarctica. And that’s where I met my husband.
So I always say, I had to go to the end of the Earth to
meet that man, and I did. So the thing is, though, what
was going on was I began to realize that you know, I was
always interested in these new perspectives, but they
always sort of perspectives that I was kind of comfortable
with somehow.
You know, and having adventures, that’s sort of a
comfortable thing. But I wasn’t actually kind of stretching
myself to really have a totally new perspective, I thought
back on the engineers that I’d worked with, West Point
engineers, who were in the military. And I realized that
their problem-solving skills were, in many ways,
exceptional. They could think in a way that I couldn’t
think. And I thought, you know, what if I could read these
kinds of equations like they could read equations? What if
I could, in some sense, learn the language that they were
able to speak.
Could I actually change my brain to learn in that way? To
learn what these people knew? And so as I began to try
to answer that student’s question, how did you change
your brain? I started working on a book to kind of
describe what some of these key ideas were. And while I
was working on this book, I did things like I went to
ratemyprofessorscom. Probably a few of you who’ve been
in schools realize that that’s a pretty good website. And I
looked to see who were the top professors worldwide,
teaching subjects like engineering, math, chemistry,
physics, economics, a lot of really difficult subjects.
And a lot of very relevant subjects, as well, like
psychology, even English. How did they teach so people
could learn, and how did they learn themselves? And I
also reached out to top cognitive psychologists and
neuroscientists. And my background also informed this.
I’ve taught for several decades as an engineering
professor, done active research in active learning. And so
all of these things kind of combined together.
And what I found that I thought was very interesting was
when I reached out to all these professors, a lot of the
ones in the STEM disciplines in particular– Science,
Technology, Engineering, and Math– used these
approaches that might involve things like metaphor or
analogy. But they were very embarrassed to say that,
because other professors would kind of be like, oh, you’re
dumbing things down. But it was actually something that
all of these top professors used to more easily
communicate the ideas. It was like this shared
handshake. They all knew how to do it, but they didn’t
realize these other top professors were using the same
approaches.
So what I’m going to tell you now is I’m going to give you
some insight. This, these, are the key ideas related to
learning that all of these people have discovered. So first
off, we know that the brain is really complicated. So what
we’re going to do is simplify it. And you can simplify the
brain’s operation into two fundamentally different modes.
First one is what I’ll call focused mode, and the second is
what I’ll call the diffused mode. And this is actually– it
relates to the default mode network and other related–
there’s some 24 or 25 so far– neural resting states that
have been detected. And so all of these states altogether,
I’ll just call the diffused mode. And what can happen– I
mean, our best way to really understand these two
different modes is to use a metaphor. And the metaphor
we’re going to use is that of a pinball machine.
And a pinball machine, you all know how it works. You
just take the pinball and you pull back on the plunger,
and a ball was boinking around on the rubber bumpers,
and that’s how you get points. And what we’re going to
do is we’re going to take that pinball machine, and we’re
going to superimpose it on the brain. And you see the
brain right here. Here’s the little ears, and there’s the
nose right there.
And what we’re going to do, we’re going to take that
pinball machine and we’re going to put it right on the
brain. And there you go. There’s the pinball machine on
the brain. And you can see how you can pull back on the
plunger there, and you’ve got all these little pinballs in
there, or the rubber bumpers, and they’re all very close
together. So what happens is in focused mode-type
thinking, like what I’m showing right here, you’ve got
these close together bumpers, and you often have
patterns that are already here.
For example, if you’ve already learned how to multiply,
and you’re trying to do a multiplication problem, you
would sit in focused mode, and you’ve got these patterns
that are already there. And you think a thought, and it
takes off, and it moves roughly around the rubber
bumpers along the pathways it’s already been in before,
that you’ve developed as a consequence of previous
learning.
But what if the pattern you’re trying to think is something
new? What if you already know about multiplication, but
you’ve never encountered division before? So you’re
trying to understand this idea. Or the concept of limits in
calculus. How do you go at a completely new idea that
you’ve never encountered before? Well, that’s where this
other way the brain works, in diffused mode thinking, can
actually be a benefit.
Now, take a look. Here’s the representative of the
diffused mode. And it’s just an analogy, but it’s a very
good one that helps us understand. Look at how far apart
those rubber bumpers are. When you think a thought in
diffused mode, the thoughts can range much more
widely.
Now you can’t think in a tight-grain fashion to actually
solve the particulars of a problem, but you can at least
get to a new sort of way of thinking about things that you
couldn’t have gotten if you were just in the focused
mode. In fact, sometimes, when you’re trying to solve a
really difficult problem, the worst thing you could do is
just keep sitting there and focusing and focusing on it.
Because you can be up on that part of the brain, so to
speak, and yet you need to be in a completely different
place.
So the best thing to do when you’re really stuck and
frustrated on a problem is not to keep focusing on it. You
actually need to get in a very different mode of
thinking. And that’s what’s represented here. And so what
this means practically for you is you’re sitting there,
you’re working– hey, get out. Go for a run. Go down and
have a– go take a shower if you need to. Or do something
that really gets your mind totally off it.
Because when you’re in this mode, as long as your
attention is focused on that problem, you’re still in this
mode, and you can’t get to this way of solving things. So
how can this play out for people? If you look at this guy
right here– he was Salvador Dali, one of the most brilliant
of the Surrealist painters of the 20th century. He’s shown
here with his pet ocelot, Babou. And what Dali used to do
is this. He’d sit in a chair when he had kind of an
intractable problem with his paintings to solve.
He’d sit, and he’d relax, and he’d relax away. And just as
he’d relaxed so much, you know, kind of letting his mind
run free, he’d have a key in his hand. And just as he’d
relax so much that he’d fall asleep, the key would fall
from his hand, the clatter would wake him up, and off
he’d go with this new idea from the diffused mode, taking
it back to the focused mode, where he could refine and
really use them. So you might think, well, you know,
that’s just great for artists.
But what if you’re an engineer? If you look at this guy
right here, this was Thomas Edison. And what Edison
used to do, at least according to legend, was he’d sit in a
chair with ball bearings in his hand. And he’d relax and
relax, and then finally when he’d fall asleep, the ball
bearings would fall from his hand. And whatever he’d, in
his very relaxed way, been thinking about, he’d be able to
take some of those ideas from that mode and bring them
back with him to the focused mode, where he could refine
it, analyze, and come up with some of those brilliant
inventions. So the lesson for us, out of all of this, is this
I’m giving some exemplary innovators in various fields.
But whenever you’re solving a problem, even if it’s a
problem that thousands or even millions of other people
have solved before, for you, it’s the very first time that
you’ve solved that problem. And you need to use some of
these same creative approaches that these other brilliant
thinkers have used. And what you want to do, be aware
of, is that you can be in focused mode or you can be in
diffused mode, but you can’t really– as far as we know,
unless you’re an exceptionally well-trained monk– be in
both modes at the same time. So focused or diffused. And
you want to develop both modes.
Diffused thinking is often not conscious, but it is also
learning. And so that’s why that relaxation process can
also be very important. Now I just wanted to give you a
quick image here. This shows some of the brilliant
connectivity of the default mode network. See all these
connections here between various aspects of the brain?
This is a web for one mode of working, but focused mode
has a very different web.
So if you’re only focusing, you’re not making access or
getting access to a lot of the different connections that
are available for you. That’s why going back and forth
between modes can be so very important. Now, it takes
time to do this. That’s why you can’t sit down and just
solve a difficult problem immediately. You often have to
go back and forth between the modes.
And in some sense, you can almost think of it like this is a
weight-lifter. And a weight-lifter, he doesn’t cram the
night before a big meet and build muscles like that. It
takes time to develop those muscles. In the same way, it
takes time to develop the neural scaffold that is involved
in learning and in new thinking processes. But I know
what you’re really thinking.
You may be thinking, I’m a procrastinator I wait.
Sometimes I don’t, like, have time to do stuff, right? And
so let’s talk a little bit about procrastination. And
sometimes you can be a really effective human being but
still procrastinate about some things. And so in that
sense, there are things to learn to help improve your
productivity and your effectiveness in what you do.
So procrastination arises in a very interesting way.
Studies have shown that if you look at something you
don’t like, the pain centers of your brain actually activate.
So if you look at a book for a subject you don’t like, you
can actually feel a twinge, and we can see it in the brain,
if you’re being imaged. So what do you do when you feel
pain? I mean, it’s the same pain as when you hammer
your thumb with a hammer. Well, you have two different
ways of handling it.

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The first way is you can work through it, like 20 minutes
or so, and the pain will gradually disappear. But if you’re
like most people, what you’ll do is you’ll just kind of turn
your attention away to something more pleasant, and
guess what? You’ll feel better immediately, right? And so
in some sense, procrastination can actually be a little bit
like an addiction. You do it once, you do it twice– it’s not
that big a deal. You do it a lot of times, though, and it
actually can be very, very detrimental for your life. So I’m
an engineer.
I believe in totally practical, useful things. So what I’m
going to do is cut right to the chase and say here’s the
most effective way to help you deal with procrastination.
And it is simply to use the Pomodoro Technique. And
this is a technique that was developed by Francesco Cirillo
in the 1980s. And it involved– he called it the Pomodoro
Technique because he had a tomato-shaped timer, and
pomodoro is Italian for tomato.
And what he would do is he would– he recommends you
set a timer for 25 minutes. Actually, you can have
different times. Different time lengths are useful for
different people. But you set it, in general, for 25
minutes, and then you turn off everything else. So no
alarms, no instant messages– anything that can disturb
your concentration, you turn that off.
And then you work with as careful a focused attention as
you can for those 25 minutes. Now sometimes, I’ll be
working away, and I’ll think, am I really focusing as hard
as I can? And then I think, well, obviously not, because I
just got distracted, and I’m wondering whether I’m
focusing instead of actually working. But I let that
thought just drift by, and then I get back to my work,
right? And that’s what you’re doing in this technique. You
want to just keep your mind on your work. And what
happens is because you’re only focusing on the task and
the time, and not the pain of “I must complete this task,”
it somehow makes it so much easier to do.
I mean, anybody, virtually anybody, can sit for 25
minutes and work. And then when you’re done, you
reward yourself. And that reward is actually very
important. Because what you’re doing is you’re focusing
during the focused mode, but then you want to train
yourself to relax, and enjoy, and do something different.
Just surf the web, go out for a– whatever floats your
boat, you go off and do that.
And this, actually, is important. Because we know that
some aspects of learning take place during this relaxed
process. So your tendency is to think, I’m not working
when I’m not focusing. But you actually are. So it kind of
gives you a little bit of a feeling of relief and
accomplishment that is OK to relax.
So a couple of little pointers. First, don’t sit down and do
a Pomodoro and say, you know, I’m going to finish off my
work. Don’t focus on the task. Only focus on the time.
And that’s the trick to this technique.
Because it gets you past that pain in the brain and allows
you to just relax comfortably and get into the flow of the
task. The other thing is don’t say, OK, I’m going to do 20
Pomodoros today, and think that you’re going to beat
yourself into more productivity that way. You want to just
gradually start getting used to this technique, and you’ll
see that it works very, very well.
Now another aspect that’s really important, related to
learning, is we’ve also been told, hey, sleep’s really
important before a big test or something like that.
Actually, sleep is important in a lot of different ways. And
I’m going to talk to you, just mention a little bit of one of
the primary important reasons that sleep’s important for
learning. We’ve found that if you look at the cells– these
little circles here represent cells, neurons, in the brain.
And what happens when you go to sleep is this. Well,
when you’re awake– first, when you’re awake, these
metabolites will come out, and they’ll go in between the
junctions. And they kind of sit out there, and they’re
essentially toxins in your brain.
So when you’re awake, these toxins are gradually
accumulating in your brain. And they affect your
judgment. That’s why, when you stay awake a longer and
longer time, it’s more and more difficult to think clearly.
So when you go to sleep, though, here’s what happens.
Now watch very carefully to what happens to those cells.
You go to sleep, they shrink. I’ll do that again, because I
just have so much fun doing this. See? They shrink when
you go to sleep. And because they shrink, what that does
is that allows fluids to wash by the cells and wash these
metabolites out. So a very important part of sleep is just
the housekeeping, the cleaning that takes place, that
allows your brain to function so much more effectively.
Now, another very important aspect of sleep relates to
neural synaptic growth. In this wonderful paper by Guang
Yang — she’s out of Langone– is if you look at the top
picture, you can see here what’s going on. This is the
same neuron at the top and the bottom. The top neuron
is before learning and before sleep. The bottom neuron is
after learning and after sleep.
All of these little triangles or new synaptic connections.
And so when you learn something and you go to sleep,
that’s when the new synaptic connections are forming.
And this is what’s going on when you’re learning. So
that’s why it’s very important, when you’re learning
something new– again, you don’t want to cram at the last
minute. You want to have many short learning periods,
sleep, learning, sleep, and that’s helping you build that
neural scaffold that helps you learn so much better.
So there’s another aspect of learning, and people often
think this is so completely disconnected from real learning
that they even are taking away recess from kids. Because
they’re like, oh, that doesn’t help them learn. Only when
they’re sitting in front of us, learning from us, that’s when
they really learn. But that’s not true at all. We’re now
finding how incredibly important exercise is to the
learning process.
Now if you look here, this study was is of a mouse, and
they were training this mouse to differentiate between
two different symbols. And if you look in the background,
what’s happening is all of these blue blobs are old
neurons. Now we used to think you are born with all the
neurons that you have, and that’s what you got for the
rest of your life. Well, of course, now we know that’s not
true. But it was wisdom, received wisdom, for many
decades.
And so what they found was– see these red lines here?
Those are actually the new neurons that are being born
every day in all of us, as well as in this mouse, in the
hippocampus. And that is how– those are absolutely
essential to our ability to learn and remember new
information. There’s two ways to allow these new neurons
to grow and survive. One is you get exposed to new
environments. That’s why travel can be so good. That’s
where your learning can be effective. And these kinds of
things can help those new neurons survive.
But the other way of helping these neurons survive that’s
just as powerful as learning is simply to exercise. So
exercise is profoundly important. And I’m not talking,
hey, I’ve got to be an Olympic weight-lifter, or be a
marathon runner. Even simple walking can be very, very
effective. And I’m sure you’ve all had the experience.
You’re all muzzy-brained, and then you go out for a walk,
and it clears up your way of thinking. But even a few days
of an exercise program is doing much more than that. It’s
actually enhancing the ability of your neurons to grow and
survive.
Now, if you look, there’s a name right here, Terrence
Sejnowski. He was on one of the original papers doing
this original research. He’s the Francis Crick Professor at
the Salk Institute, and she’s also my colleague in doing
the Massive Open Online Course that’s based on the
book. And Terry is– he’s a remarkable guy. And it was
really a lot of fun making the Massive Open Online Course
with him.
And so we went and we did some filming together. And so
then I asked him, I said, well, Terry, you know, you’re
talking all this stuff about the importance of exercise. Do
you exercise? What do you do? And he’s like, do I
exercise? And what he does is he goes and every day, or
every few days, he goes down– he’s like a mountain goat.
The guy’s 65, and he climbs down. You know, I’m
scrambling after him.
And he goes running on the beach, just like you see here.
And this is how he gets his exercise. I love how he
finishes here. Watch this…Look at that.
So he is a legend in neuroscience. And I’m convinced that
part of it is because he uses some of these ideas that he’s
found in his research to help him really keep his edge
intellectually. Now, so let’s just talk a little bit about
something called working memory. Working memory is
how you keep a brief thought in mind. It used to be
thought that you had seven slots in working memory, and
that’s why you could hold a phone number of seven
numbers.
But now we’re kind of realizing it’s more like maybe
there’s four slots in working memory. So maybe for me,
it’s like two slots in working memory. But anyway, so you
have four slots, and it’s in your prefrontal– you can kind
of think of it as your working memory, you’re holding
things in your prefrontal cortex. So I’ve got it kind of
symbolized right there as your four slots of working
memory. So when you are remembering something, are
thinking about something with working memory, you can
think of it symbolically, at least, as something like an
octopus, the Octopus of Attention, that reaches through
those slots of working memory and makes connections
between different ideas.
And that’s why you can’t hold too many ideas at once in
your brain before you get all confused. But what happens
if you’re multitasking? What happens if you’ve kind of got
a little bit of an eye out here on some, you know– am I
getting an instant message? In some sense, that’s like
taking one of those tentacles away of your working
memory. And you don’t have a lot of tentacles. So it
really is kind of actually making whatever intellectual heft
you have, you’re kind of losing some of it. You’re getting
a little stupider when you’re multitasking.
So that’s why careful focused attention is so incredibly
important, especially when you’re working on something
that’s rather difficult.
Now, I just like to contrast this with the diffused mode.
The diffused mode, it’s a lot of connections, but they’re
much more random in how they take place. So how do
you take something from working memory into long-term
memory, which is more distributed around in your brain?
Well, the best way is through practice. Practice makes, in
some sense, permanent.
The more you practice, the broader that little neural
pathway becomes, and the more deeply embedded it
becomes. So if you’re learning something and you
practice, those patterns get deeper and deeper. And
that’s how you can learn something and draw it from
long-term memory into working memory. If you don’t
practice, what’s going to happen is you’ve got those
neurons, and it’s almost like you’ve got these little
metabolic vampires that just come and they suck those
patterns away before they can get deepened. And so
that’s why sometimes you can learn something from a
professor– you even understand it.
You’ve had that great stroke of insight. You walk away.
You don’t look at it for a few days, and those little
metabolic vampires just suck that pattern away. And you
can’t really remember or understand what you had
learned previously. So the best way to get patterns well-
embedded in your long-term memory is to practice
through spaced repetition.
So you might practice Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
maybe again on Friday. And by spacing things out, you
realize, now, that you’re getting those new synaptic
connections growing every time you learn a little and then
you sleep on it. What you don’t want to do is this kind of
thing, where you’re just kind of cramming like crazy. And
then look, that metabolic vampire just kind of sucks at all
away, and you’re left with very little. It’s hard to
remember what you were learning.
A good way to think about this is just the analogy of a
wall. If you’re building a brick wall and you give yourself
time between layers of mortar, it can set, and you can
build a solid, sturdy wall. But if you don’t, it’s all kind of a
jumble. And it doesn’t turn into a really good structure
that you can actually us.e So let’s go back again, and
we’re going to talk a little bit more, quickly, about
attention, and the relationship with working memory.
Now, if you look here, you can see you’ve got one slot in
your working memory that’s filled. When you have one
slot filled, you could put other things in your working
memory. But here’s the trick. How do you get things into
just one slot? It turns out that if you create a chunk, one
chunk, of the material, it’s easy to pull into working
memory. So here’s what I mean by that.
If you look here, here’s a raw pattern of information,
right? It’s a puzzle. It’s hard to figure out. It looks like a
mad scramble. And look what’s going on in your working
memory. It’s kind of going a little crazy, trying to figure
things out.
In fact, recent research at Stanford has shown children
who are trying to learn math facts, their little prefrontal
cortexes are going crazy as they try to assimilate and
master the material. But once they’ve got those math
facts down, this relaxes. What’s actually happening is
this. They’ve got the essential idea, and what that
essential idea is like is one smooth, single ribbon they can
easily pull into working memory when they need to, in
order to understand and make connections with other
problems that they’re trying to solve. Now, if you just
memorize and you’re not understanding what you’re
memorizing, that’s like creating that little circle there.

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And you can see it. You’ve got it. It really is a chunk. But
you can’t fit it very well with other chunks. So there’s
another important idea about chunking, and that’s this.
Once you’ve compressed an idea– one of the most
brilliant mathematicians was mentioning one of the great
aspects of math is simply that idea that you can compress
it. You grapple, grapple, grapple, and all of a sudden, it
clicks, and you’ve got it compressed. Once you’ve got it
compressed in a chunk, there’s actually– you can make
that chunk bigger, right? Just like learning a little piece of
song? You can actually learn another piece and join them
together, and you’ve got a bigger chunk. Or you can also
learn similar chunks of other disciplines, and it’s very,
very helpful That’s an idea of transfer.
But what you’re really doing when you’re learning and
mastering a topic is you are, in some sense, creating a
library of chunks. And you can draw on that library and
make connections between things. And that’s how great
creativity arises, is making connections with those
chunks. So true experts often have enormous libraries of
chunks that they’ve developed.
Now, when you’re learning, there’s sort of a– you can
think of it as there’s a top-down approach.  So if you’re
learning a new topic, you can almost think of it like
there’s a chunk there, that’s that tire, and here’s a chunk,
that’s the man’s face, and another tire. So you’re learning
all these chunks, and when you get them all kind of
learned, it forms the big picture of the material. Even if
you’re missing a few pieces here and there, you’ve still
got that big picture. But if you don’t practice and repeat
and really master your chunks, it’s like this. It’s like
you’re trying to put together the big picture with chunks
that are faint.
And it’s much harder to put together the big picture with
that in mind. So again, as I was saying, you’ve got one
ribbon of thought. That’s a chunk. Here is another chunk
in another field, but it’s of a similar shape. And that’s the
idea of transfer.
So if you’re a physicist, you may be able to learn
economics more easily, because some of the chunks are
really similar in their shape. If you are a language learner
and you’re learning math and science, there are meta-
chunks available. For example, that idea of practice and
repetition for language also applies in learning math and
science. So let’s go to some other aspect that I think
relates to learning. Some of you may say– so of you may
have wonderful memories here.
But some of you may wish you had better memories.
Well, let me kind of give you a little awareness. What you
think may be a negative attribute actually can be a very,
very positive attribute. It turns out that when you have a
poor working memory, what that really means is you
can’t hold things in mind very well, right? So you’re
looking at your colleague who can remember all this
different stuff. They can hold it in their working memory,
turn somersaults with it, and come up with new ideas
really quickly.
And you’re lucky to remember what they were even
talking about. But here’s the thing. Research has shown
that if you have a poor working memory, and your four
slots are pretty weak, other stuff is always slipping in.
That’s why you can’t hold ideas very well in your mind.
But because the other stuff is slipping in, you’re actually
more creative.
And research has shown that if you have Attention Deficit
Disorder, or your attention wanders– oh, shiny! Then
what that means is you have much more potential for
being creative. Do you have to work harder than some
other people in order to make up for that? Yeah, you do.
But that comes with the trade-off that you are highly
creative. So you can be very, very valuable in your job,
even though you may have to work harder sometimes to
have that achievement. Now, you may say, well, that’s all
well and good, but I’m actually a slow thinker.
I see these other people, and they’ve got like a super
race car brain. They can pick up these ideas so fast, and I
kind of move along more slowly. Well, one of my heroes
in the history of science is the Nobel Prize winner
Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who’s known as the father of
modern neuroscience. Ramon y Cajal was not a genius,
and he said so himself. Part of what he did was he worked
hard and was persistent.
But he said, these with race car brains– which he was
not– often race along and they jump to conclusions that
he didn’t miss. He would see them, and he was more
flexible in his thinking. When he’d see a mistake, he
would go, wait a minute. Whereas the race car driver is
so used to being right and being fast that they’re much
less able to be persistent and to flexibly change in the
light of contradictory data. So if you have a slow brain,
think of it like this.
There’s the person with the race car brain. Great. But
you’re the hiker, and your experience is completely
different. You walk along. You can see the little rabbit
trails that they’ve missed.
You can reach out and touch the pine needles. You can
smell the pine forest. All of this is missed by the race car
driver. So your way of thinking can be exceptionally
valuable, as well. In fact, Maryam Mirzakhani, she won
the Fields Medal, which is the top award in mathematics,
the equivalent for mathematics of the Nobel Prize.
And she was told as a young person, you think too slowly
to be a mathematician. Well, guess what? She’s one of
the most creative mathematicians alive. So if you think
slowly, more power to you. You’re doing good. Now, I
also want to bring up another aspect, and that is the
aspect of the impostor syndrome.
This is so important and so common. And what it is, it’s a
feeling like you’re the fake in the room, right? I’m
working here? Maybe I’m working at Google and I’m
really not as good as they say that I am, and I’m kind of
an impostor here. And people feel this all over the world,
no matter what they’re doing. You’re a professor? Oh,
wait a minute. You know, they’re going to find out what
the real truth is.
I took a test, and I did well. But next time, I’m gonna fail
it, because I know they’ll find out what the real truth is.
Really, really common feeling. And the best way to
address the impostor syndrome is to just be aware how
common it is. So next time you have a thought like, I’m
really not as good as they say I am, remember, that’s the
impostor syndrome talking.
And probably one of the most important things that I
could bring up– and so that’s why I’m doing it towards
the end here– is this idea of illusions of competence in
learning. Now, let’s say that suddenly, for some reason, a
bear came hurtling out of this screen and rampaging
through the room. Would you feel a surge of adrenaline
and nervous energy? I mean, suddenly your body would
react physiologically to this feeling of intense fear as you
realized the bear was actually in front of you. But the
thing is, when you think about learning situations– we
often say, students will come up and say, you know, I
have test anxiety. That’s why I didn’t do well on this test.
But for a lot of students, sadly, sitting down and looking
at a test is like there’s a bear there. They just realized, at
that moment, that they really didn’t know the material,
even though they thought they did. So students, and
people, can fool themselves that they’re learning
something when they’re actually not learning something.
So I’ll give you some of the best ways for truly learning
something. First off, tests are the best.
Test yourself on everything, all the time. The same hour
spent testing as opposed to that hour spent studying, you
will learn far more by taking a test. And use flashcards.
Flashcards are not just for language learners. Why let
them have all the fun? Flashcards are for ordinary– for
learning in math and science, for example.
If you talk to great poets, what great ports will tell you is
memorize the poem, because you’ll feel the passion and
the power of the poem much more deeply, Why should
mathematicians not be able to share in this fun? How
about engineers? When we have equations, if you
memorize the equation, and really look at what does it
mean while you’re doing that, it actually can bring out the
richness of what you’re learning, And the thing is when
you’re having homework, Homework– a lot of times,
people make the mistake of thinking, hey, you know, I
did my homework problem. And it’s like saying, I’m
learning the piano and I played this piano piece one time,
and so I’ve got it.
Well, nobody does that when they’re learning a musical
instrument. And in the same way, when you’re studying,
you don’t want to just do a homework problem once. You
don’t have time to do all of them and kind of repeat
them, but pick some of the key ones and see if you can
do it again. Like practice it, and maybe do it in your mind.
Can you step through all the steps? If you can play it
almost like a song in your mind, you’ve really got it.
You’ve got it down as a chunk, and that can help build
your knowledge of the material. Now, probably the most
valuable technique when you’re trying to really
understand something difficult is simple recall. When
you’re reading material on a page, you read away, and
your tendency is to– well, I’m going to underline it, right?
Because when you’re hand is moving on the page, you
think it’s moving it into your brain somehow. But it
actually is not. So resist the urge.
You can do a little bit of underlining. But it’s better to
write it, because you’re helping to neurally encode these
ideas. And then when you read the page, simply look
away and see what you can recall. That, as it turns out, is
very powerful in building your understanding of the
material in a way that other techniques, including mind
mapping and re-reading– they’re not nearly as good as
recall. So another very important aspect is simply to
study judiciously with other people, or talk about what
you’re trying to understand with other people.
Now, this has to be done judiciously. Obviously, all
learning does not take place in a cooperative fashion.
Sometimes you have to go off. But when you’re learning
something sort of in focused mode, there’s a part-and-
parcel of that focused mode, and that is a feeling that
what you’ve just learned is correct, right? This sort of
rightness feeling. And the only way you can really
disabuse yourself, sometimes, is to go off and bounce
your ideas off of other people.
And they can almost serve like a greater kind of diffused
mode, to help disabuse you when you do make mistakes.
So judicious studying with friends and conversation with
colleagues can be incredibly helpful. Also, explain in a
way that a 10-year-old can understand. So frequently we
explain electricity, the flow of electricity, as water, the
flow of water. It’s an analogy.
It breaks down. All analogies break down. But Richard
Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, used to go
around and challenge top mathematicians in the world to
explain in a simple way, like in a way that their
grandmothers could understand, what they were doing.
And you know what? They could. So this means that no
matter how difficult that problem is that you’re working
on, if you find a way to explain it simply, you’ll be able to
understand it much more deeply.
One thing to do is insert yourself into whatever the
problem is. Like, here I am in a copper matrix, right?
Barbara McClintock, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist,
used to kind of imagine herself down at a genetic level, so
she could understand and see how the genes might
actually be operating. So that’s a trick that’s often used
by some of the greatest thinkers. Try to find a way to get
yourself into almost like a play, whatever you’re trying to
understand. If you want some more information about
what I’ve talked about here, there’s much more in the
book, “A Mind For Numbers”. And there’s a lot more– and
it’s all free– in the Massive Open Online Course for
Coursera, through UC San Diego, Learning How to Learn.
And that is the key, except for one thing I’d like to leave
you with this last thought.
We’re often told, follow your passion. That is the key to
everything. Just follow your passion, and your life will
really be a better place for it. We’re told that. But some
things– your passion develops about what you really good
at. And some things take much longer to get good at. So
don’t just follow your passions.
Broaden your passions. And your lives will be greatly
enriched. Thank you very much.
Question-and-answer session
MALE SPEAKER: Thanks, Barb, for the fantastic talk. Now
we’ll open it up for a few questions for Barb. Please raise
your hand if you have a question, and I’ll bring the mic
over to you.
AUDIENCE: So one of the questions I had was that, you
know, whenever learning things and tackling tough
problems, people always say, well, break it down into
smaller parts that you know how to do. And so I
wondered how that fits into the focused and diffused
mode. Because that seems kind of like breaking a
diffused problem into a bunch of focused problems.
BARBARA OAKLEY: Actually, what that really relates to is
that idea of chunks. So remember that you’ve got four
slots in working memory. The more you can understand
one simple part of it and make it into a chunk, and then
another little aspect of it, and make that into a chunk,
and then another one, so you’re focusing to do that. And
then in diffused mode, you reaching up above and making
the connection randomly, when you’re sleeping, out for a
walk, taking a shower, all these kinds of things. So they
all are related, but actually, that’s great advice. If you try
to learn it all at once, it’s so overwhelming, it’s like your
little prefrontal cortex is scrambling madly, but it’s
overwhelmed.

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So you want to just get a piece of it, so you can draw that
up as a ribbon. Very good question.
AUDIENCE: A chunk requires understanding. So when
there is a chunk, that means that there was an
experience of understanding that led to that?
BARBARA OAKLEY: Not necessarily. You can learn a word
in a language, and you can not know what that word
means. And you can learn a lot of words in a language,
but not know what that means. But if you do know what
they mean, it actually can make it easier to remember
that word, and easier to chunk that word. And easier to
use those chunks, to put together sentences. So for the
most part, we always want chunking to involve
understanding, as well. But technically, no.
You don’t have to have understanding. It’s just that
understanding helps to kind of knit things together so
that you can remember them more easily. For example, if
I’m trying to learn the word duck as “pato” in Spanish, if
I’m just going “pato,” I’m trying to remember that word, I
don’t have any understanding of what it means, it’s kind
of harder to remember. But if I know that “pato” means
duck, I can say, what if I’m trying to remember it by
having a little “pot-o” that my duck is floating in, and that
can help, that understanding, help serve as a bridge to
get it into my mind. So that’s a really good question,
because people often think, oh, you build a chunk, it’s
automatic that you understand it. Not necessarily. But it’s
a very good thing to have, for the most part.
AUDIENCE: I wanted to ask– we’ve mentioned that
people who’ve mastered one area can find it easier to
learn another area, because they’re related chunks.
BARBARA OAKLEY: Depending on how close the area is. If
you learn Icelandic, you’re probably going to be able to
learn German more easily. But it may help a little bit with
some of the metacognitive skills, as far as when you’re
learning Chinese, but they’re so very different that it’s
only those metacognitive sort of things that might help
with learning. And there’s still a little bit of an aspect of
fundamental “how do you structure a language” that I
think is common to all languages. So it depends on how
close things are. But what I think is fascinating is that you
never know. That’s why it’s so important to have people
coming from one field to a very different field, right?
You’re a deep sea diver, and you go into nursing.
And you actually can bring some really good ideas. And
the best ideas are often developed by two different types
of people. One is someone who’s very young, so they
haven’t been sort of indoctrinated into “this is how you
think”. But the other is outsiders, people who are trained
in a different discipline, who come and take an initial look
and have fresh eyes at what they’re seeing. So, good
questions.
AUDIENCE: Maybe a more practical thing. I’m curious
about your opinion, if you’re familiar with the Everyday
Math curriculum which a lot of schools are teaching now,
which, for example, my kids take. And for example, when
they teach math, they emphasize getting sort of almost
like a number theory feel. Like they learn, like, four
different ways to multiply instead of one, you know, the
way we learned.
And so for example, my kids, they’re incredibly confused
by this. I’m just wondering if you’re familiar with it. If you
have– how does it fit into this, and if you think that’s–
have opinions.
BARBARA OAKLEY: It’s different in different parts of the
country. And so I’m out of Michigan. We have different
techniques. It depends I think it depends on the kids. For
some kids, it’s great to learn all these different
techniques. For other kids, you know, just get one
method down really well, and then you can climb up from
there.
My own personal opinion is one of the best math
supplement programs is simply Kumon Mathematics. And
I’m not a paid spokesperson for Kumon Mathematics. But
what they do is they have simple methods of practice and
repetition to help build mastery in your learning of
mathematics. And they don’t give you a bunch of different
methods. They just make sure you know how to
multiply. You know how to divide. And you really know
how to do these things. So I guess my gut sense, and I
haven’t really encountered that question before, is I think
I’d prefer to see someone really learn it well using one
technique. When you’re older, you can see other ways.
But if you’ve got that one way really good, you got it, and
you can move up.
But if you’re learning too many, it can be quite confusing.
I suppose it would be the equivalent of you’re growing up
learning eight languages at once. You know, some kids
can handle it. But for a lot of kids, it might be a little bit
confusing to have too much going on at one time,
especially about one thing.
AUDIENCE: I have a question around reading, and not
like math or something, but if I’m reading, say, a
philosophy book by Nietzsche or Heidegger, for example,
which is 400 pages long. And I’m a slow reader. And I’m
assuming I’m a very focused reader, because I do grasp
and retain what I have read pretty well. But I’m incredibly
slow. So do have any methods to figure out how to be a
fast reader, but at the same time, be able to retain and
deeply grasp what I’m reading?
BARBARA OAKLEY: The short answer is no. Research has
lately shown that techniques for speed reading are
actually– they’re a little bit, it seems, somewhat
spurious. To read anything difficult more deeply simply
takes time. I always think, in the back of my mind, STEM
disciplines– Science, Technology, Engineering, Math– is
really difficult for a lot of people. But then there’s
philosophy. That’s, I think, one of the hardest things in
general for people to really grasp. It’s incredibly
important, but it’s difficult.
And I think just having a little understanding and
compassion for yourself, that you’re actually tackling
among humankind’s most difficult topics. And if it’s slow,
well, you’re doing fantastic. Because I would be the same
way. And I think a lot of people are really the same way.
There’s some probably super-fast. Maserati brain thinkers
who could buzz right through that stuff. But they would
miss things that you would see.
AUDIENCE: I’ve been wondering how your techniques
apply more generally to kids. And you briefly touched,
actually, on a previous question, practice and repetition,
practice and repetition. But more concretely, how do you
get, actually, kids interested in mathematics, so that they
keep on practicing?
BARBARA OAKLEY: The way that we’ve been teaching
kids is, it’s like, let’s give them introduced to the fun
stuff. We’re going have them hands on, and we’re going
to have them dropping eggs, and doing all this exciting
stuff. And then they get to college, and they hit calculus,
and it’s like the death march, right? They start dropping
like flies. Because they’re not used to that. Everything’s
always been fun, right? So we don’t do that when we’re
teaching things like music. We don’t do that when we’re
teaching foreign languages. But students fall in love with
those subjects because they can gain the expertise– in
part through some drudging through practice and
repetition.
So I think part of the reason that we have so many kids
in this country fall off the bandwagon is we try to make
everything really exciting and really fun. And we forget
the lessons that language learners and musicians, and
sports, people in sports, dance instructors– they all know
that practice and repetition is part of gaining expertise.
And when we get that incorporated back into the
curriculum– it’s there, but it’s not nearly as sound as it is
in many other countries. Which is why I think we see so
many people coming to this country with a love and a
mastery of learning in science and in mathematics that is
not growing organically, because we’re not introducing
kids in the United States to some of these ideas of also,
the supplemental importance of practice and repetition.
So those are my thoughts.
We do do a little bit of it, but really not enough. Because
for a long time, sadly, there’s been this feeling that too
much practice and repetition in mathematics will kill your
creativity. Instead of the reality, which is every great
expert has to have practice and repetition with what
they’re learning. So those are my thoughts on that.
AUDIENCE: Hi. So understanding is important, and
context is important. And speaking of that, so there could
be like top-down approach and bottom-up approach. So
what do you think is better? Is it better to understand the
big picture and then try to study subject? Or it’s better to
study the small chunks and build this understanding
from– or maybe we have to mix it?
BARBARA OAKLEY: You’ve got it exactly right. You don’t
want to be just doing small things all the time. And you
don’t want to be perched overhead all the time. You want
to be– it’s hard to get what is the big picture when
you’re– you learn one little chunk and you learn another
little chunk. But you want to start piecing that into the big
picture as much as you can. And so you want to be kind
of going back and forth. One of the techniques that I
didn’t talk about, that’s very important, is that of
interleaving.
And a lot of times, when you’re learning, for example,
some new technique in calculus, you’ll do 10 problems
pretty much the same, in learning that technique in
calculus. But you don’t want to do that. You want to do
one or two problems using that technique. Flip to another
section of the book. Do that problem.
Kind of compare– wait a minute, why am I using this
technique here and that technique here? Why are those
different? Flip back. Do another one of the first technique.
Then flip to a different– we’re not training people– we
don’t even have our books set up to interleave. And we
need to start doing that, because that’s what actually– it’s
practice of repetition, but mixed with interleaving, that
builds flexibility. So those are my thoughts on that.
AUDIENCE: Like when I was in high school and college
and taking math, I was perfectly fine. Like I did well, and
did well on the tests. But my problem was always trying
to apply it outside that environment, like trying to use it
practically or in everyday life, or whatever it was that I
needed certain math skills I just could never do it.
And I was wondering if you had any sort of technique or
strategy or ideas about how there’s a way to take math
from the school and sort of be able to apply it in regular
life, or just outside of school.
BARBARA OAKLEY: That’s a very good question. One of
the things that people do, they look at math and they
say, how am I ever going to use this? In fact, I remember
when I was called into the principal’s office in eighth
grade, because I wasn’t doing my math. I was actually
reading a book And so I remonstrated with the principal,
saying that there was no real use for it.
I would never use it. And they gave up on me, at that
point. But it’s kind of like this. When you’re at the gym
and you’re lifting a specific type of weight, are you ever
going to go into the outside world and lift that kind of
weight? Of course not. But you’re actually using muscles
that you might use related muscles when you’re lifting up
your luggage to get in and put it in the airline
compartment.
So what you’re doing when you’re learning something in
math and science is you’re developing sort of neural
pathways. You may not use exactly that one, but in
surprising ways, they can shape how you’re thinking
about things. So an example is this. They did a study,
and they found, you know, there’s some kids who go all
the way through college. And you can kind of take
courses that have almost no math, really, involved.
You know, math for poets, or these kinds of courses. And
you go all the way through. But people who have this
kind of background, where they’ve had very little
exposure, when you control for all aspects of what’s going
on that you can reasonably control for, the ones who
have no real background in math are far more likely to
default on their home mortgages. So you know, think
about that. But it’s actually, you’re able to think more
intelligently.
Now, what about– you’re really concerned about the
environment. So someone comes up and says, well,
we’ve got to have electric cars. Sounds really good, right?
But if you’re trained, you’ve got some kind of
background, you could go, yeah, but wait a minute. What
about the effect of batteries on the environment, right?
Do they actually make more pollution? In fact, does that
transfer of energy create more harm for the environment
than a regular gasoline engine? If you’re taught to think a
little bit more rationally and carefully about things, you
can actually– you’re using those intellectual muscles in
ways that you haven’t really– you don’t really realize how
important that actually is. So one way, though, just
reflecting, just a little bit of a different way, because your
question’s very deep.
When you’re learning a language, one of the things you
do is you’re learning, you’re practicing. And it can be
really tough to actually go and meet somebody and talk
with them, who speaks that language. But that real life
experience is what brings the language alive, and what
nourishes the desire to learn it. So I think finding ways–
when you’re walking around and you’re thinking about
something you just learned mathematically, look around
and try and bring it into the environment you’re in. And
try to think about it in those ways.
That’s such a great question. Because it helps us be
aware of the richness of life around us. And so I think
trying to bring some of these ideas you’re learning into
the life around us is a brilliant thing to do, and a great
attitude to have. So I thank you so very much for having
me here.