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Transcriber: Tijana Mihajlović
Reviewer: Mile Živković
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I grew up moving all over the place.
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By the time I'd hit 10th grade,
I'd lived in 10 different places.
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Math is extraordinarily sequential.
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By the time I'd hit 3rd grade,
I'd fallen off the math bandwagon.
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Basically, I flunked my way
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through elementary, middle,
and high school math and science.
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So it's a little strange looking back now
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because today
I am a professor of engineering
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and I'm passionate about my job.
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One day, one of my students
found out about my past,
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and he asked me, "How did you do it?
How did you change your brain?"
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And I thought, you know,
"How did I do it?"
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I mean, here I was, this little kid,
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and I just loved language and culture,
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and that's all I wanted
to learn when I grew up,
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but I didn't have the money
to go to college,
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so I enlisted in the army
right out of high school
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to learn a language.
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You can see me there,
looking very nervous,
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about to throw a grenade.
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(Laughter)
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And I did learn a language.
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I'd learned Russian,
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and I ended up working out
on Soviet trawlers, up on the Bering Sea,
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as a Russian translator.
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So, I just love adventure
and getting new perspectives.
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So I also ended up in Antarctica,
at the South Pole Station.
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That's where I ended up
meeting my husband.
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So I always say -
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(Laughter)
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I had to go to the end of the Earth
to meet that man.
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(Laughter)
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But I begin to realize something, though.
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I was doing all these adventures
and seeing these new perspectives,
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but somehow they were always external.
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They weren't internal;
I wasn't changing inside.
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When I'd worked in the military,
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I worked with all these
West Point engineers,
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and they had these powerful techniques
for problem solving.
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I thought, you know -
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I'd look sometimes
at what they were doing,
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and they had these calculus
and physics books,
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and it looked like hieroglyphics to me.
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But I thought, "What if I
could get those ideas?"
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What if I could learn that language?"
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I mean, the world's evolving.
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Language and culture are important,
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but math, and science, and technology
are important, too.
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What if I could learn these new ideas
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and add them to the ideas
I already knew and loved?
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So, when I got out
of the military, at age 26,
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I decided to try and change my brain.
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It wasn't easy.
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But if I knew then what I know now
about how to learn,
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I could have learned much more easily
and much more effectively.
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So, several years ago,
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as I begin trying to answer
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that student's question,
"How did I change my brain?",
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I begin reaching out to top professors
from around the world,
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people who not only had knowledge
of their difficult areas of expertise,
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but also who could teach effectively.
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And I asked them.
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I said, "How did you learn?
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And how do you teach,
so others could learn?"
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What I found was the way they learned,
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and the way they taught was often similar
to the way I learned and I taught.
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It was almost like this kind
of shared fraternal handshake.
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But we often didn't know
why we did what we did.
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So I begin researching neuroscience
and cognitive psychology,
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and reaching out to talk
to top experts of those fields.
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Here is what I found,
the keys to learning effectively.
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As we know, the brain
is enormously complex.
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But we can simplify its operation
into two fundamentally different modes.
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The first is just what I'll call
the focus mode.
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The focus mode
is just like it sounds like:
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you turn your attention to something
and boom! It's on.
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But the second mode is a little different.
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It's a relaxed set of neural states
that I'll call the diffuse mode.
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It's a number of resting states.
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So it seems that, when you're learning,
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you're going back and forth
between these two different modes.
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How can we better understand these modes?
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Through analogy.
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What we're going to use
is a pinball machine analogy.
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You all know how pinballs work.
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You just pull back on a plunger,
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and the ball goes boinking out
and bounces around on the rubber bumpers,
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and that's how you get points.
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What we're going to do is
we're going to take this pinball
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and we're going to put it
right on your brain.
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So, there it is.
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There's the pinball machine on your brain.
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If you look, this is the analogy
for the focus mode.
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When you're learning,
you're often thinking tightly,
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as you're focusing on something.
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It involves thoughts
you're somewhat familiar with,
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perhaps historical patterns,
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or you're familiar
with the multiplication table.
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So you think a thought, and it takes off,
and moves along smoothly,
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pretty much along the pathways
that you've already laid.
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But what if the thought you're thinking
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is actually a new thought,
a new concept, a new technique
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that you've never thought of before?
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Well, that's symbolized
by this new pattern
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towards the bottom
of the pinball machine metaphor.
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To get to this new place, I mean,
at least sort of metaphorically speaking,
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look at all the rubber bumpers
that are in the way.
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How can you even get there?
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You need a different way of thinking,
a new perspective in a sense,
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and that's provided here
by the diffuse mode.
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Look at how far apart
those rubber bumpers are
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from one another.
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When you think a thought, it takes off,
and it can range very widely,
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as you're attempting
to come up with some new ideas.
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So, you can't do that careful,
focused thinking
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that you can in the focus mode,
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but you can, at least,
get to the place you need to be in
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to grapple with these new ideas.
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The bottom line for all of us
out of this is this:
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when you're learning,
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you want to go back and forth
between these modes,
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and if you find yourself,
as you're focusing in on something,
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trying to learn a new concept
or solve a problem,
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and you get stuck,
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you want to turn your attention
away from that problem
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and allow the diffuse modes,
those resting states,
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to do their work in the background.
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How can we actually use
these ideas in real life?
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If you look at this guy right here,
he was Salvador Dali,
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one of the most brilliant
surrealist painters of the 20th century.
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Dali was the very definition
of a wild and crazy guy.
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You can see him there.
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He's got his pet, Ocelot Babu.
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What Dali used to do
when he was kind of stuck
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as he was solving some problem
related to his painting
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was he'd sit down
and he'd relax in a chair,
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and he'd have keys in his hands.
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He'd hold those keys, and he'd relax,
kind of letting his brain noodling away.
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Just as he'd relax so much
that he'd fall asleep,
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the keys would fall from his hands,
the clatter would wake him up,
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and off you go: he'd take those ideas
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from the diffuse mode
over to the focus mode,
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where he could work with them,
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refine them, and use them
for his painting.
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You might think, "That's great!
It's good for an artist.
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But I'm an engineer.
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So how can I use these ideas?"
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If you see this guy right here,
he was Thomas Edison,
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one of the most brilliant
inventors in history.
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What Edison used to like to do,
at least according to legend,
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he'd sit in a chair
with ball bearings in his hand.
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He'd relax away, kind of thinking
about the problem, loosely,
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that he was trying to solve
related to his inventions, relaxing.
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Just as he'd fall asleep,
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the ball bearings
would fall from his hands,
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and off you go: he'd be woken up,
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and he'd take those ideas
from the diffuse mode
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back into the focus mode.
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He'd use them to refine
and finish his inventions.
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The bottom line for all of us
out of this is this:
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whenever you're sitting down
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to solve a new problem
or analyze a new idea,
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even if millions of other people
have thought the same thoughts,
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or solved the same problems,
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for you, it's just as creative
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as it was for famous people
like Dali and Edison,
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and you want to use
some of these creative approaches.
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But you might say to me,
"Yeah, but I've got a problem, though.
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You know, I just love to procrastinate.
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This back and forth stuff is great,
but I don't have time.
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I cram at the last minute.
That's just me."
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So, let's talk just a little bit
about procrastination.
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What seems to happen
when you procrastinate is this:
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you look at something
you'd really rather not do,
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and you actually feel a physical pain
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in the part of your brain
that analyzes pain.
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So, there are two ways
that you can handle this.
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The first way is you can just
kind of keep working a way through it.
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And research has shown
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that within a few minutes
it actually will disappear.
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But the second way is you just turn
your attention away, and guess what?
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You feel better, right, right away.
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(Laughter)
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So, you do this once, you do this twice;
it's just not that big a deal.
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But you do this very often,
and it's actually like an addiction.
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It can really cause problems
in how you lead your life.
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So, how can you handle it?
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A very simple way:
using the Pomodoro Technique.
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The Pomodoro technique, as it turns out,
all you need to do is you get a timer.
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Any timer will do.
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Then you just take it
and set it for 25 minutes,
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and make sure
everything else is turned off
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- so, no instant messengers,
nothing like that -
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and you work with focused
attention for 25 minutes.
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Anybody can do 25 minutes,
virtually anyone.
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When you're done, you do something fun;
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just a little bit,
a few minutes of relaxed fun.
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What this seems to do is this:
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you are enhancing,
you're practicing in some sense
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your ability to have focused attention,
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and you're also practicing
your ability to relax a little bit.
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Now you understand that relaxation
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is also an important part
of the learning process;
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there are things going on
in the background.
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The only thing is this:
when you do the Pomodoro,
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you want to make sure
that you don't sit there
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and say, "I'm going to do
my entire homework set
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in these 25 minutes." No.
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You just sit and say, "I'm going to work
with focused attention for 25 minutes",
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and that's the key.
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Students sometimes make the mistake
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of thinking that some
of their absolute best traits
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are their worst traits.
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What do I mean by this?
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Let's take the idea of memory.
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Let's say that you have
a poor working memory.
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You can't seem to hold things
in mind very well.
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You watch these other students
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and they're able to grasp all these ideas
and kind of manipulate them,
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but you can't.
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Well, what this means is:
surprisingly, you are more creative.
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Because you can't hold
these ideas in mind so tightly,
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other ideas are often creeping in.
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If you have problems with the tension,
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you're always kind of diverting off
into some other idea, it's similar:
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you are often more creative,
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because these new ideas
are slipping in instead.
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There's another thing,
and that's slow thinking.
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Some students compare
themselves to other students
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and say, "You know,
I'm really slow by comparison.
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These other students,
they are like race car drivers;
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they go past me so fast."
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But, think of yourself as a hiker.
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Yes, a race car driver gets there
much faster than you ever can,
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but a hiker has a completely
different experience.
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A hiker can smell the pine air,
they can reach out, touch the leaves,
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they see the rabbit trails.
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In many ways, your experiences
are deeper and more profound,
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and you don't jump to conclusions.
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So if you are a slower thinker,
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yes, you may have to work harder
in order to grasp the materials,
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but the trade-offs in many cases
are well worth it;
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you gain solid mastery
of what you're studying.
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So, there is something called
"illusions of competence in learning".
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What this means
is you can study all day long
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and you can be spinning your wheels
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because you're not using
effective study techniques.
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There is such a thing as test anxiety,
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but in many cases, surprisingly many,
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it arises because you've just come
face to face with the scary bear,
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(Laughter)
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and that is that you have just learned
that you are not a master of the material.
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Researchers, with both
critters and people,
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are finding powerful insights
into how we can learn most effectively.
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One of those ways
is simply through exercise.
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Exercise within a matter of a few days
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can increase our ability
to both learn and to remember,
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and researchers
are beginning to understand
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the neurophysiological pathways
that allow this to occur.
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Tests. Tests are the best.
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Test yourself all the time.
Give yourself little mini tests.
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Make flash cards,
even in math and science,
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mix them up, study them
in different places,
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and this brings me to homework.
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When you do a homework problem,
never just work at once and put it away.
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Would you ever sing a song once
and think you knew that song? No.
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Test yourself, work that homework problem
several times over several days
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until the solution flows
like a song from your mind.
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Recall.
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When you're looking at a page
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as you're trying to learn
something in a book,
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people's tendency is to highlight, right?
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There's something about the motion
of the pen on a page
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that makes you think
that it's actually going into your brain,
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but it often isn't.
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Often times, people will just reread,
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but that too is simply
spinning your wheels.
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The most effective technique
is simply to look at a page,
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look away, and see what you can recall.
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Doing this, as it seems,
helps build profound neural hooks
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that help enhance your
understanding of the material.
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And finally, don't be fooled
by the erroneous idea
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that understanding alone is enough
to build the mastery of the material.
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Understanding is truly important,
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but only when combined
with practice and repetition
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in a variety of circumstances
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can you truly gain mastery
over what you're learning.
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So, in closing, I would like to say
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that learning how to learn
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is the most powerful tool
you can ever grasp.
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Don't just follow your passions;
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broaden your passions, and your life
will be enriched beyond measure.
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(Applause)
