Hello everyone and welcome back to Seeker+!
I’m your host, Julian Huguet, and we’re here to talk about learning and what science
has to say about optimizing the ways that we can cram information into our brains.
Because until the day that we can plug in a harddrive and download new languages and
kung fu straight into our gray matter, I guess we’ll have to learn the old-fashioned way.
In the first episode in this series, we talked about what learning is, how we encode information
and broke up some myths around different learning styles.
If you missed it, definitely go back and check it out.
So, as we talked about, learning happens in three steps.
We have encoding - the taking in of information and understanding it.
We have storage which is where the information is retained.
And then we have retrieval or the accessing of that stored information.
And this is all obviously happening in the brain.
What’s cool is that neuroscience has taught us so much about how learning occurs within
the brain which is leading to new approaches in how we can be better learners.
Learning happens because of neuroplasticity in the brain.
Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain cells to adapt and change.
To be specific, it’s the organizing of the connections between the neurons.
Neuroscientists used to think that the brain stopped developing before adulthood and that
any later brain trauma was permanent.
But now we’re finding that, thanks to neuroplasticity, that just isn’t true.
A way to think about the learning process is that the brain can change in three ways;
chemical change, structural change, and functional change.
When you first start learning something new, there are tiny electrochemical pulses that
fire from one neuron to another across a gap called a synapse.
It’s a little chemical change as a result of what you’re interacting with.
This forms a learning pathway.
At this stage, the information is in the brain as a short-term memory.
And as you are thinking about it and comparing it to your existing mental map of knowledge,
it is in what scientists call the working memory.
Working memory lasts for about 15 to 30 seconds and can store about four items of information
at a given time.
But the more that these same neurons fire together, the stronger the connections between
cells get.
So if you practice a task over and over, the connections grow so that a stimulation in
one part of the brain is more likely to trigger the next one to go off.
Or as neuroscientists liked to say in the 90s “cells that fire together, wire together.”
This causes the second type of brain change; structural change.
As connections are formed over time, the actual structure of the brain starts to change.
And it means that the information is stored now in long-term memory.
So that’s the first big tip on learning.
Repetition and practice.
Yeah, no cheat sheet there.
Sorry.
Ultimately, enough chemical and structural change and then you get functional change
which occurs when entire brain networks change.
These networks become more efficient all across the board.
This is also known as a reorganization of the brain.
I should note that this isn’t just a concept about learning.
It’s something happening in your physical brain.
These connections are across the brain’s gray and white matter or the neural tissue
in regions of the brain.
Gray matter regions are for muscle control, sensory perception, emotions, speech and decision-making.
White matter connects these regions together.
And I came across some cool examples of how learning in particular areas changes the physical
gray matter in the brain by looking at fMRI scans.
FMRIs or functional MRIs can detect brain activity based on blood flow, glucose and
oxygen.
Some older piano players can prepare for concerts by visualizing what they are going to play
and the same motor maps light up in their brain as when they physically practice.
People who practiced regular mindfulness were found to have increased the amount of gray
matter in parts of the brain responsible for attention, memory, and emotional regulation.
Learning a second language gave people more density in their gray matter and strengthened
their white matter.
Of course, the opposite is true too.
When people stop practicing what they’ve learned, the brain will trim or get rid of
the connections that formed pathways.
Or if you only practice something once, it never gets moved into long-term memory or
forms a lasting connection.
So that’s how the whole process works.
And with that in mind, there are things you can do to make sure that you are forming strong
connections as you learn.
There’s repetition and practice, as we touched on.
Recall is another big one.
If you can put your vocabulary list away and then try to rewrite it out on a piece of paper
or describe a concept outloud to someone, you’re forcing your brain to make connections
that last.
This is the “testing effect” and it works best when done with short but frequent intervals.
Another way to use your brain’s functions to your advantage is to put information into
context as you learn it.
If you can take new material and relate it to knowledge that you already have, you will
achieve more successful memory storage and retrieval.
This is also why tricks like mnemonic devices work.
I know for as long as I live I’ll never forget righty loosey lefty tighty.
And while we’re at it let’s just go ahead and take this neuroscience-brain-learning
palooza to the extreme.
When I was researching, I found this incredible new study about learning and the brain that
I need to share with you.
It’s about how comprehension changes in the brain when it comes to really abstract
topics.
This study out of Carnegie Mellon University looked at how theoretical physicists are able
to think about topics that are hard to apply to anything concrete.
Earlier we talked about how connecting new knowledge with something you already understand
helps you create a mental model of the new information.
But when it comes to subjects like quantum particles, dark matter, or the multiverse,
the brain doesn’t have a conceivable scale to link to.
This is part of why these topics are so confusing to step into and understand.
The researchers took fMRI scans of the physicist’s brains and watched them think about measurable
physics topics like acceleration, wavelength, and frequency and then scans when they thought
about immeasurable topics like dark matter, duality, and cosmology.
What they found is that the physicists' brains actually separated the two into different
processes in the brain.
There’s a part of the average person’s brain that lights up when we try to apply
scale or understand the extent of things.
I.E. how big is this rock, how tall is that building.
When someone like me thinks about the expansion of the universe, this part of my brain fires
off trying to figure out that concept against the scale of things I know, and that’s going
to be difficult.
This study found that for physicists and especially older, very experienced physicists, that “scale
or extent” part of the brain doesn’t light up much at all.
So the brain is more efficient at skipping the comparison and getting into the real thinking.
As one of the researchers put it “There's a sense that as physicists grow older, the
concepts kind of crystallize in the mind, and you end up using them in a more efficient
way."
If we’re talking about deep, deep learning.
That’s the good stuff.
And it might just be why older physicists can make incredible breakthroughs later in
their careers.
Well, that does it for how we can optimize our brains to the best that they can be.
But you can’t really apply this information about learning without also considering focus,
attention span, state of mind, and productivity as a whole.
So in the next episode of Seeker+, we’re going to get into all that and how you can
apply what you’ve learned here to your learning out there in your real life for real things.
And why you also need things like sleep, nutrition, exercise and even a little bit of stress to
help you learn and be productive.
Nice.
I’ll catch up with you there.
Thank you so much for watching this episode of Seeker+.
I’d love to hear what other topics you want me to cover - I’m open to any ideas you
may have.
Whisper them to me.
Shout them from the rooftops.
Or leave a comment.
That works too.
Thanks for tuning in.
See you next time!