Transcriber: Marco Fleichacher Reviewer: Juliana Tomas
About a year ago, while a few of my friends and I were studying for
a test, we were all extremely nervous about.
One of my friends said the common phrase uttered by most confused students.
“I don’t know how to learn this.”
Now, at the time, the rest of us thought that he was making a comment
on his immediate “inability” to grasp the concept.
And we had a good laugh about it at the time.
But, later in the day, I got to thinking.
We’ve all had that feeling before.
Like, we just couldn’t understand something that others
around us understood with relative ease.
What gives?
Do we just have our off days, or is it something deeper?
It often feels like the only reason for school,
is to recite memorize information for the next test,
only to get us into more difficult classes,
meaning that we have to memorize even more complex concepts,
such as the many different formulas of math
or the multitude of important dates in history.
Information can often mushed together,
and it can become very difficult to recall.
Historically, school has always rewarded this ability of students to recall
and recite such information more colloquialy, referred to as random facts.
And a student’s capacity for this ability is called their crystallized intelligence,
a term coined by Richard Cattell back in 1963,
with this theory on general intelligences.
Students who perform best in the classroom
in metrics such as GPA and standardized test scores,
are usually the students with a larger than average crystallized intelligence.
Cattell also introduced another type of intelligence,
with his theory on general intelligence, called fluid intelligence.
Our fluid intelligence is essentially our problem solving ability.
However, this is less rewarded in the classroom,
a trend dating all the way back to the Industrial Revolution and
the creation of the public school system,
where students were turned into the perfect factory workers
being able to follow orders and memorize algorithms.
However, this is the part of the brain that we want and should be able to grow.
Our problem solving ability has allowed us to make essential leaps in technology
and society, and this undervaluation of fluid intelligence in
the classroom creates a problem within our society,
where students with a larger,
crystallized intelligence are often more confident going into the workforce,
than students who graduate with a larger fluid intelligence,
who are more insecure about their abilities.
However could, and probably would, do a better job than the former.
A little known physicist, by the name of Albert Einstein,
you may have heard of him,
said or echoed the same sentiment,
saying that true education is not the learning of facts,
but the training of the mind to think.
And credit where credit is due educators around the world today,
are beginning to nurture this fluid inteligence in students from a young age.
I mean, students, you must have been asked at some point to make connections
between the material reading in class and your previous experiences,
or other material you’ve read.
While analyzing the antiquity,
a tragic Greek play based in the ancient myth of Oedipus Rex.
My literature teacher took the analysis far deeper than I expected,
making connections from the comparisons between the lives of Oedipus
and Tantalus in Greek mythology,
to the parallels of their daughters lives, because of their infamy.
These discussions based on the connections we make,
are the most vital and truly understanding new concepts,
anchoring down these new ideas to facts that we already know
and experiences that you will experience.
Learning is the act of bridging the connection between the facts we know,
and the memories that we make.
And knowing how to learn, how to make those connections, has allowed us humans
to discover the trivial knowledge we learn from a young age today.
Biologically speaking, when you learn,
you literally make physical connections between the neurons in your brain,
a process known as neuroplasticity.
One common definition of neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to form
and reorganize synaptic connections,
usually in response to learning or experience.
However, neurology is still an emerging science,
so there’s two readily accepted and discussed forms of neuroplasticity,
structural neuroplasticity and functional neuroplasticity.
Structure neuroplasticity is commonly acknowledged to be
the encompassing idea of neuroplasticity,
essentially, the physical connection
or the creation of those physical connections between our neurons.
Functional neuroplasticity builds upon that definition, being our brains ability
to change the functional properties of our neurons,
essentially correcting
mistakes and our previous knowledge on anything.
When a toddler learns to walk, they often try to emulate their parents.
But when they fall and they get back up, they eventually learn not to fall
for those same mistakes, pun intended
And these learning techniques can be used to learn virtually anything.
Take, for instance, learning the theory of general intelligences. Fluid sorry
Crystals tend to usually be very hard, very solid,
not really able to fit most of the containers that they're put in.
The same way, the hard facts only solve problems completely that are geared
towards those solutions.
Fluids, on the other hand,
fill the container therein regardless of the shape of that container.
The same way our problem solved ability allows us to solve virtually
any kind of problem.
See? Learning is not that bad.
You just learn 40 years worth of neurology in the past 5 minutes.
And, with all the information in the world at our fingertips,
there’s no reason for us to stuff our head with all this information
to regurgitate it for the next assessment.
Being able to connect a few key details, allows us to reconstruct
the whole course during the exam.
So, to the friend who probably isn’t listening to this right now,
and is currently stressing over the next test, I say that's how you learn anything.
Thank you.
(Audience applause)