How We Learn

Professor Monisha Pasupathi, Ph.D.

University of Utah

Learning is a lifelong adventure. It starts in your mother's womb, accelerates to high speed in
infancy and childhood, and continues through every age, whether you're actively engaged in
mastering a new skill, intuitively discovering an unfamiliar place, or just sleeping, which is
fundamental to helping you consolidate and hold on to what you've learned. You are truly born to
learn around the clock.
But few of us know how we learn, which is the key to learning and studying more effectively. For
example, you may be surprised by the following:
• People tend to misjudge what they have learned well, what they don't yet know, and what
they do and do not need to practice.
• Moments of confusion, frustration, uncertainty, and lack of confidence are part of the
process of acquiring new skills and new knowledge.
• Humans and animals explore their worlds for the sake of learning, regardless of rewards
and punishment connected with success.
• You can teach an old dog new tricks. In fact, older learners have the benefit of prior
knowledge and critical skills—two advantages in learning.
Shedding light on what's going on when we learn and dispelling common myths about the
subject, How We Learn introduces you to this practical and accessible science in 24 half-hour
lectures presented by Professor Monisha Pasupathi of the University of Utah, an award-winning
psychology teacher and expert on how people of all ages learn.
A Course about You
Customers of The Great Courses are already devoted to lifelong learning and may be surprised at
how complicated the process of learning is. We have a single word for it—learn—but it occurs in
a fascinating variety of ways, which Professor Pasupathi recounts in detail. She describes a wide
range of experiments that may strike a familiar chord as you recognize something about yourself
or others:
• Scripts: We have trouble recalling specific events until we have first learned scripts for
those events. Young children are prodigious learners of scripts, but so are first-time
parents, college freshmen, foreign travelers, and new employees.
 • Variable ratio reinforcement: Children whining for candy are usually refused, but the
few occasions when parents give in encourage maximal display of the behavior. The same
principle is behind the success of slot machines and other unpredictable rewards.
• Storytelling: Telling stories is fundamentally an act of learning about ourselves. The way
we recount experiences, usually shortly after the event, has lasting effects on the way we
remember those experiences and what we learn from them.
• Sleeper effect: Have you ever heard something from an unreliable source and later found
yourself believing it? Over time, we tend to remember information but forget the source.
Paradoxically, this effect is stronger when the source is less credible.
Dr. Pasupathi's many examples cover the modern history of research on learning—from
behaviorist theory in the early 20th century to the most recent debates about whether IQ can be
separated from achievement, or whether a spectrum of different learning styles and multiple
intelligences really exist.
What You Will Learn
You start by examining 10 myths about learning. These can get in the way of making the fullest
use of the extraordinary capacity for learning and include widespread beliefs, such as that
college-educated people already know how to maximize learning or that a person must be
interested in a subject in order to learn it.
Professor Pasupathi then covers mistaken theories of learning, such as that lab animals and
humans learn in the same way or that the brain is a tabula rasa, a blank slate that can absorb
information without preparation. Babies might seem to be a counterexample, showing that you
can learn from scratch. However, you examine what newborns must know at birth in order for
them to learn so much, so quickly.
Next you explore in depth how humans master different tasks, from learning a native language or
a second language, to becoming adept at a sport or a musical instrument, to learning a new city
or a problem-solving strategy, to grasping the distinctive style of thinking required in
mathematics and science. Then you look inside the learning process itself, where many factors
come into play, including what is being learned and the context, along with the emotions,
motivations, and goals of the learner. You close by considering individual differences. Some
people seem to learn without effort. How do they do it?
Tips on Learning
Along the way, Professor Pasupathi offers frequent advice on how to excel in many different
learning situations:
• Mastering material: Testing yourself is a very effective strategy for mastering difficult
material. Try taking a blank sheet of paper and writing down everything you can recall
about the subject. Then go back and review the material. Next, try another blank sheet of
paper.
• Second-language learning: Becoming fluent in a second language in adulthood is
difficult because your brain is tuned to your native language and misses important clues in
the new language. To overcome this obstacle, immerse yourself among native speakers of
the new language.
• Motivating a child: When trying to motivate a schoolchild to learn, avoid controlling
language, create opportunities to give the child a sense of choice, and be careful about
excessive praise and other forms of rewards, which can actually undermine learning.
• Maintaining a learning edge: Middle-aged and older adults can preserve their learning
aptitude by exercising to maintain cardiovascular health, staying mentally active, and
periodically trying a new challenge, such as learning to draw or studying new dance steps.
Adventures in Learning
Winner of prestigious teaching awards from her university's chapter of Psi Chi, the National
Honor Society in Psychology, Dr. Pasupathi brings today's exciting field of learning research alive.
Her descriptions of ongoing work in her field, in which she is a prominent participant, are vivid
and insightful, allowing you to put yourself into a given experiment and ask, "How would I react
under these circumstances? What does this tell me about my own approach to learning?"
By the time How We Learn ends, you will appreciate the incredible breadth of what we learn in
our lifetimes, understand the commonality and diversity of human learning experiences, and
come away with strategies for enhancing your own adventures in learning.
"Learning is a human birthright," says Professor Pasupathi. "Everything about us is built for
lifelong learning—from our unusually long childhood and our large prefrontal cortex to our
interest in novelty and challenge." And she finds reason for optimism about the future of
humanity due to our almost miraculous capacity to learn.
24 lectures | Average 29 minutes each
Z

1. Myths about Learning

Explore what it means to learn, and consider 10 myths about learning—for example, that
learning must be purposeful or that emotions get in the way of learning. None of these or
eight other widely held views is accurate, as you discover in depth in this course.
2. Why No Single Learning Theory Works
Take a historical tour of early work on learning, which was deeply influenced by classical
conditioning, made famous by Ivan Pavlov. Learn that in the effort to avoid anything that
wasn't directly observable, researchers left out key unobservable factors, such as the
attitudes of the subjects.
3. Learning as Information Processing
Investigate the information processing approach to learning, which holds that learning
occurs as people encounter information, connect it to what they already know, and as a
result, see changes in their knowledge or ability to do specific tasks.
4. Creating Representations
How do you create representations of categories and events in your mind? Explore two
aspects of this process. First, you seldom, if ever, learn passively; instead, learning occurs
in the context of purposeful action. Second, what you already know changes your
experiences in learning.
5. Categories, Rules, and Scripts
Whether you realize it, you acquire new knowledge by organizing experiences into
categories, searching for rules within those categories, and establishing scripts—or
patterns—that serve as guides for predicting what happens next in an unfamiliar activity or
interaction. Find out how in this lecture.
6. What Babies Know
Newborns are not a blank slate on which parents can dictate whatever they want their
children to know. Instead, babies come prepackaged to develop in certain ways.
Investigate how babies manage an overwhelming amount of learning and what this tells us
about how grownups learn.
7. Learning Your Native Tongue
Developing humans progress from no words to about 60,000 words by adulthood, while
also mastering complex syntax and grammar. Probe the mechanisms that permit babies to
absorb the language they hear around them and make it their native tongue.
8. Learning a Second Language
If learning a native language occurs almost without effort, why is it so hard to learn a
second language, particularly after childhood? Examine this question in light of
experiments to teach human language to other species, which provide intriguing clues for
the difficulties adult language learners face.
9. Learning How to Move
Focus on four questions central to learning a new motor skill: What should you pay
attention to while learning the skill? Can verbalizing the skill help with mastering it? What
 about learning by watching versus learning by doing? Does imagining the movement
provide any benefits?
10.Learning Our Way Around
Investigate how you learn to navigate through the world, a skill we share with all other
mobile creatures. Find that while spatial learning has a conscious component, we often
don't know that we have a cognitive map of a particular place until we have to use it.
11.Learning to Tell Stories
Storytelling is a crucial way that you connect with other people and also learn about
yourself. Discover how you learn to narrate your experiences in a way that is ordered in
time, communicates the essential details of what happened, and makes clear to the
audience why they should listen.
12.Learning Approaches in Math and Science
Math and science require learning both facts about the world and a special process—the
"how" used to identify and solve new problems. Survey different approaches to teaching
math and science. Some work for building a knowledge of facts, others for instilling an
understanding of process.
13.Learning as Theory Testing
Scientists engage in theory testing to evaluate their own work and that of their colleagues.
But is it realistic to expect nonscientists to develop similar habits of mind? Examine the
problems people have in overcoming natural biases that inhibit scientifically rigorous
thinking and learning.
14.Integrating Different Domains of Learning
Survey some common factors that apply to many learning situations, focusing on both
intuitive and conscious processes. Tips for learning include spacing your rehearsals,
varying the context, drawing on connections to things you know, learning the same way
you'll use your learning, and sleeping on it!
15.Cognitive Constraints on Learning
Delve into three constraints on learning: attention, working memory, and executive
function. Consider the evidence for the importance of these capacities in supporting or
limiting learning. Close by investigating how they can be improved to enhance learning
abilities over your lifespan.
16.Choosing Learning Strategies
Monitoring progress in learning can help develop a more effective learning strategy.
Examine research showing how easy it is to misjudge success or lack of success at learning
a skill or subject. Then look at approaches that let you increase retrieval and retention of
learning.
17.Source Knowledge and Learning
Often it's important to know not only a piece of information but also its source, especially
in today's information-rich culture with many different sources to be weighed for accuracy.
Learn how to combat the common tendency to forget the source before anything else.
18.The Role of Emotion in Learning
How does it affect learning when you feel happy or sad? Examine the role of emotions in
learning, discovering that some moods are better for some tasks. For example, mild
anxiety in studying for a test might actually enhance performance by focusing attention.
19.Cultivating a Desire to Learn
Consider how to foster the kinds of motivation that will help support learning rather than
undermine it. Rewards such as good grades can backfire by reducing a student's desire to
learn about a topic and willingness to persist on that topic. But what is a more effective
motivation?
20.Intelligence and Learning
Do IQ scores predict the ability to learn? Or are they simply a measure of what has
previously been learned, giving a person a leg up on subsequent learning? Use the
statistical concept of correlation to shed light on the long-running debate over the nature
of intelligence and its role in learning.
 21.Are Learning Styles Real?
An influential contemporary view holds that we're all good at some things but not others,
and that we may each differ in the way we like to learn. Probe the arguments for and
against these ideas of multiple intelligences and differing learning styles.
22.Different People, Different Interests
Trace the origins and growth of the different interests that people naturally have. Interest
stimulates the development of initially higher knowledge, which then facilitates further
learning and further interest. Then consider an interest-related personality trait that is
likely to be shared by the audience for this course.
23.Learning across the Lifespan
Focus on the role of age in learning by reviewing four principles presented earlier in the
course and exploring how they relate to different age groups. Close by examining a variety
of strategies for preserving information-processing abilities into late life.
24.Making the Most of How We Learn
Conclude your exploration of how we learn with a look at today's frontiers of learning
research. Then revisit the myths of learning from Lecture 1, review optimal approaches to
learning, and consider what educators can do to make best use of our new understanding
of this vital process.

Professor Monisha Pasupathi, Ph.D.

• University of Utah
• Stanford University
I became a professor in the first place so that I could spend my life learning; the opportunity to
both learn and tell others about the process of learning was irresistible.
Dr. Monisha Pasupathi is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Utah. She holds a
Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University. She joined the faculty at Utah in 1999 after
completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in
Germany. Professor Pasupathi has been honored multiple times for her teaching. She was named
Best Psychology Professor by her university's chapter of Psi Chi, the National Honor Society in
Psychology. Psi Chi also awarded her the Outstanding Educator Award and Favorite Professor
Award. Professor Pasupathi's research focuses on how people of all ages learn from their
experiences, particularly through storytelling. She is coeditor of Narrative Development in
Adolescence: Creating the Storied Self, and her work has been published widely in scholarly
journals.