[MUSIC PLAYING]
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 he-- 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-foot-8 gorilla of a station
manager, Art Brown.
So one day, phone rings.
Neil picks it up as usual. (LOWER VOICE)
Hello, this is Art Brown speaking.
(NORMAL VOICE) 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.
And Neil says, why, Art, is this you?
[GASP] I'm so glad you've finally
gotten in touch with yourself.
And so that's actually what we're going to do here today,
is to help you to get more in touch with yourself
and what you're doing when you're
doing one of the most important things
you can do as a human being, and that is to learn new things.
Now, to start, I have to tell you
a little bit about my background and growing up.
I grew up moving all over the place.
By the time I'd hit 10th grade, I'd
lived in 10 different places.
Now, moving around a lot like this has some benefits
but it also has some drawbacks or potential drawbacks.
And one of the things for me was math
is a very sequential topic.
And if you miss it anywhere along the line, right--
somebody is a little bit further ahead,
and you're from a school where it was a little behind--
all of a sudden, you can actually
fall off the bandwagon.
And then you've fallen off.
It's hard to get back on.
And that's what 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.
I liked to knit.
And I loved language and studying language.
And at that time, it wasn't--
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
if-- you know, 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 I was always
interested in these new perspectives,
but they're always sort of perspectives
that I was kind of comfortable with somehow.
You know, when 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?
AUDIENCE: 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 focus and diffuse
mode, because that seems kind of like breaking a diffuse problem
into a bunch of focus problems.
BARBARA OAKLEY: It 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, make that into a chunk,
and then another one.
And then, so you're focusing to do that.
And then in diffuse mode, you're reaching up above
and making a connection randomly when
you're sleeping, out for a walk, taking a shower, all
these kinds of things.
So they are all 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.
So you want to just get a piece of it
so you can draw that up as a ribbon.
AUDIENCE: A chunk requires understanding.
So when there is a chunk or there is
a-- 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"--
it's [SPANISH] in Spanish--
OK?
If I'm just going [SPANISH],, 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 [SPANISH] means duck, I can say,
what if I'm trying to remember it by having a little "pot-oh"
that my duck is floating in, and that can help serve as-- that
understanding helps 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.
So I thank you so very much for having me here.
SPEAKER: Fantastic talk, great answers.
Thank you so much, Barb.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]