The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn by Sanjay Sarma, Luke Yoquinto

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn by Sanjay Sarma, Luke Yoquinto A groundbreaking look at the science of learning: how it works both in the mind and in the classroom, which teaching techniques are most effective, and how schools should (and absolutely should not) use instructional technology. This is an essential resource for teachers, anyone interested in cutting-edge research into learning, and parents considering the educational alternatives available to their children. As the head of Open Learning at MIT, renowned professor Sanjay Sarma has a daunting job description: to fling open the doors of the MIT experience for the benefit of the wider world. But if you're going to undertake such an ambitious project, you first have to ask: How do we learn? What are the most effective ways of educating? And how can the science of learning transform education to unlock our potential, as individuals and across society? Grasp takes readers across multiple frontiers, from fundamental neuroscience to cognitive psychology and beyond, as it explores the future of learning. Some of its findings: • For educators teaching remotely, online instructional tools have been proven to be a powerful ally when used appropriately—and a dangerous impediment when misapplied. • By structuring its curriculum to better incorporate cutting-edge learning strategies, one law school in Florida has rocketed to the top of its state in bar exam passage rates. • Scientists are studying the role of forgetting, exposing it not as a simple failure of memory but a critical weapon in our learning arsenal. • New developments in neuroimaging are helping us understand how reading works in the brain. It's become possible to identify children who might benefit from specialized dyslexia interventions—before they learn to read. Along the way, Sarma debunks long-held fallacies (such as the noxious idea of "learning styles"), while equipping readers with a set of practical tools for absorbing and retaining information across a lifetime. He presents a vision for learning that's more inclusive and democratic—revealing a world bursting with powerful learners, just waiting for the chance they deserve. Drawing from the author's experience as an educator and the work of researchers and educational innovators at MIT and beyond, Grasp offers scientific and practical insight, promising not just to inform and entertain readers but to open their minds.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in be sure to watch the video version of this you can go to youtube.com for

chris floss hit that bell notification button it'll give you pleasure it will make you feel like you've accomplished something in life if you hit the bell notification button you get those notifications and make it feel like you're part of a family that you're loved and of course if you're a listener and support of the show you are loved virtual hug out to everyone anyway uh refer the show to your friends neighbors relatives go to the cvpn.com or christmas podcast network.com you can subscribe to all nine podcasts there's nine of them because we got nothing better to do it's covid quarantine land what do we what do you expect me to do with my time so anyway guys uh check that out uh today we have uh brilliant authors we always have brilliant

authors it's kind of weird they just keep appearing on the show and they're the most smartest people in the room especially in my room because we all know you know i'm one of the dumbest idiots around but that's why i interview brilliant people uh the book authors we have on are the authors of the great new book, you can pick this up, Grasp, The Science Transforming How We Learn. My two great authors that are here today that co-authored the book are Sanjay Sarma and Luke Yoquinto, and these two are brilliant. Sanjay is the professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. You may have heard of this brilliant university.

He's also the vice president for open learning. He co-founded the Auto ID Center at MIT and developed many of the key technologies behind the EPC suite of RFID standards now used worldwide. Together with that, Luke is a science writer and research associate at the MIT Age Lab. I'm clearly like, I just have two brilliant MIT scholars here, and here I am. I never even went to college, so I'm not sure what's going on. Welcome to the show, guys. How's it going, eh? It's going well. How are you? Good, good, good, good. It's wonderful to have you on the show. And you too, Sanjay. Thanks, Chris. Lovely to see you.

There you go. So you guys wrote this book. Give us your plugs where people can find you guys on the interwebs, dot coms. You may want to have people look at and where they can order this brilliant book. Probably the best place is Amazon, right, Luke? Yeah, well, buy it from your local bookstore but failing that you can get it wherever books are books are sold and for the folks on the video here's what it looks like in the americas we have a different cover in the in uh europe and asia but

uh yeah look for look for grasp the science transforming how we learn there you go so what motivated you guys to want to write this book? Well, maybe I'll take a stab at it. You know, if you look at how we teach today and how we learn, the systems were set up hundreds of years ago, decades ago. But we're learning a lot about the science of learning. Imagine in medicine, if you didn't know genetics and biochemistry, and imagine that COVID had hit now, you know, our vaccine development,

et cetera, would be very different. In learning, we now understand how memories are formed, the importance of forgetting in learning, whether you should practice, you know, like practice everything within a day or spread it out. And all these learnings are sort of one side, but then the other thing that's happening is the growth of online education, which I lead up at MIT. And, of course, right now during COVID, we have, you know,

during the spring we had 1.6 billion students separated from learning worldwide, many of them using online education, but not all of them doing it right. So what Luke and I do is look at the history and the science of learning, but then also look at the implications for online education, how to do it right, how to do it wrong. And we talk about what MIT is doing on the topic. There you go. And, yeah, I would just add, you know, the tradition of applying the best that we know of from cognitive science and psychology to learning is a very long one.

In fact, that is what happened in kind of 1910 and 1920 when a lot of the systems and traditions and institutions that we're familiar with as education, as we know it, were kind of put in place. And what's happened since then is that a lot of that stuff has been frozen while the science has advanced. So kind of a big mission of this book is to say, hey, let's find a way to catch up.

There's this gap that's formed. We need to close it. So to give a overview from the sky down of the book, kind of a general overview, and we'll get into the weeds of it, what would you say the book is largely, the topics are about that you guys discuss in the chapters, et cetera, et cetera. There are several arcs here, and it's also how Luke and I worked together was to sort of describe these arcs. One is, to be frank, my personal arc, you know, growing up in India, going to college, and then sort of how I began to appreciate the power of good learning and good teaching versus the lack thereof sometimes. I went to a good school in India, but nonetheless, I had some things that I would have done differently if I were a professor. The second arc is the arc of two giants in this field, Pondyke and Dewey.

And maybe, Luke, you can talk to that. And then there's a cognitive science arc, which is how we've understood how, you know, it's neuroscience. You know, I'm starting with someone called Ramoni Kahal, who basically drew the first neuron all the way to how the brain works. And then there's another thing we talk about, which is we sort of trace the evolution of a course, a famous course at MIT where students make robots that compete with each other.

So it's these four arcs intertwined to create what we hope and we think is a pretty engaging story. Luke? Yeah, it's basically it. Believe it or not, these things braid together, I think, pretty well. And I promise you, listeners, this is actually kind of a fun read. There you go. Learning is so important in today's world. My mom was a teacher. My sister was a teacher. You know, they dealt with a lot of different things, a lot of different challenges here in the States where, you know, for 20 years, my mom would complain to me about how, you know,

they were constantly cutting back the budgets. I had a lot of discussions with her over the years. We talked about how Americans teach and how, I believe, Europe and British teach, where early on they kind of try and figure out where you should go as a trade or learning sort of the way you learn kinetic ways that you learn or auditory or stuff like that. What are some of the things that you guys uh saw in the book that uh you guys speak to and in in addressing learning and making it better or improving it well i mean maybe i'll give it the high level a high level view which is you know human beings um we are the most evolved, obviously, of animals.

And we have evolved to be learning animals. We've evolved to be teaching animals. Human children are helpless until their late teens, and in some cases to their 30s and 40s, may I say. I'm just kidding. I was going to say, Sanjay, have you seen Americans lately? Are you sure that we're the most? And every parent is a teacher.

That's almost an evolutionary prerogative, right? And that's what makes us so adaptable. You can live in the desert. You can live in the Arctic and so on. And so it turns out that if you understand how the brain wants to learn, it actually reflects a lot of that. I mean, you know when your kid's listening to you and you know when your kid rolls her eyes and, you know,

and stops paying attention. You know to back off. You know when they're half an hour later or a day later when they're in the car and they seem attentive, you sort of are curious, you sort of jump into the topic again, right? So the results, I mean, what we write about is very specific, but at a high level, it's, I think, quite human actually, right? I mean, Luke, why don't you talk a little bit about this spacing

and retrieval and things like that? Right, and to what Sandra was saying and to what Chris was saying, you know, teachers, in our view view are the heroes of this, of this story. And in fact, they have known for a long time, a lot of, a lot of this stuff that we, that we pick apart at a mechanistic level. So for, for instance, you know, just about every teacher I've ever run into has told me, you need to space out your studies. You need to not cram for an exam, but you need to space it out over the course of a couple of days. And what they mean is like, even if you take the same number of hours studying for a test and space it, so you're not just, you're not just spacing, studying over the course of several days and studying more. If you study the same amount, but over several days, you will, you will do better in the long run.

Now we can talk about whether you actually do better on exam day, and spoiler alert, you might not, and that's a problem with how school is structured. But in the long run, you will remember more. And so one of the kind of mind-blowing things about this effect, so first of all, it's been really well described going back to 1885. This is like one of the best, most robust findings in all of psychology. But it's not limited to psychology. It is found in ethology, which is the study of animal learning. And so, Chris, would you be surprised when I tell you that great apes, for instance, benefit from the spacing effect, too, when they're trained on some kind of an exercise, right? Yeah, even like my huskies, you can't really train them for more than like 10 minutes at a time

or something they say because they just, you know, I don't actually know why. So you probably don't. Yeah, sure. So that comes down to their kind of attention span right but also yeah you need a little time for these things to consolidate but so great apes sure that's not surprising rats okay they're they're mammals like us they have brains like us right fruit flies benefit from the spacing effect sea slugs there is a there's a species of roundworm. So we have 86 billion neurons, right, in our heads. This species of roundworm, C. elegans, has 302 neurons. And yet even this worm, when it's trained

to avoid like a noxious stimulus, benefits from spacing in terms of the training schedule. So when we're talking about the spacing effect that teachers tell us about over and over again, it appears to be, there's a very good chance it's fundamental to memory itself. Like when you have an animal with neurons numbering in the hundreds, this is something to do with how information is stored in neurons or actually in between neurons. Cause we, as we found out, and as we explore in the book, it's really likely stored at the synapse, which is the junction between neurons. And basically what happens is the synapse, which is the junction between neurons. And basically what happens is the synapses become stronger and weaker, and that pattern of strengthening and weakening is essentially how a memory is stored.

And it turns out that a spaced schedule of training causes that memory to last longer, and it causes that strengthening pattern at the synapse to last longer and so that's just an example of this thing that that kind of penetrates through educational psychology to psychology through brain science all the way down to the cell level and molecular level of neuroscience it's a deep deep deep effect and it's the more we learn about stuff like this, it's kind of wild that school is almost set up to defy that effect. Right? That was going to be my next question, yeah. Yeah. Our curriculums, I mean, you guys talk about curriculums in the book and different ways to appropriately set them up and the science of it.

But our curriculums in most of, like, say, I will just be subjective to American schools. Are American schools, you know, are they making it better or making it worse? Well, first of all, by the way, as someone who grew up in a different country, I'm not one of those who think the American system is that bad. I'll come back to it, okay? Controversial as my defense might seem. But having said that, Luke just described the spacing effect, which is you want to learn slowly. By the way, if you want to put on weight, you want to eat for a long time, you can just go through a hot dog eating contest. You don't put on weight. You know what happens the next day. Cramming is like the same thing. You cram and you don't actually remember

it. So you want to space it out and the brain sort of absorbs it. Now there's another effect, and I'm going to come to curriculum, which is something called interleaving, which is, let's say you're learning to calculate something, you know, like calculate the surface area of a cone and a sphere, right? You actually want to do cone, sphere, cone, sphere, cone, sphere, not cone, cone, cone, sphere, sphere, sphere. Why? Because the brain likes the contrast. And it likes the uploading of the, you know, the computer program to do cone and then flush it and then upload the sphere and then flush it. It's the uploading way the learning occurs. This even turns out to be true, for example, if you're learning to toss a beanbag or something.

It turns out to be true in sports as well. So if the contest is going to be, I don't know, 10 yards or whatever as an appropriate number, you want to practice at 9 yards and 11 yards and interleave. It's called interleaving. You'll be better at 10 yards then because your body is learning. It's very interesting. Now, but if you look at our curriculum, it's all about not spacing. And it's all about putting

things in blocks. See, cone, cone, cone. There's a chapter on cones. There's a chapter on spheres, right? So our curriculum and just the way our exams are organized and the way we test and the way we declare that the student's done, actually, to a large extent, this is not just in the United States. Actually, in fact, even more in other countries. In my view, it promotes cramming, and it promotes sort of eating, hot dog eating, right? It doesn't promote long-term learning. In fact, you're better off cramming if you want to do better at the test.

But if you want to learn for life, we would do things very differently. And just my little defense of the American education system, there are some good things about it. One of them is, you know, it's a lot more creativity, right? Students are given more opportunities to projects. Now, someone who grew up in a different country, and I'm seeing, I saw my daughter grow up here. I show you some of the things she got here. I wish other students in other countries had. So there you go. I would just say like those projects Sanjay is talking about. Part of the problem with cramming is that you, when you study something for a semester or a year, say you study trigonometry for your sophomore year of high school, right? And then you, never pick it up again, that's the problem. You cramp your final exam at the end of the quarter and the end of the year, and you never do it again. That's when you've, you know, you spend

a year learning trigonometry and your society has invested a lot of investment in making sure you learn that stuff. And then you forget it. That's kind of not good right if you have a project maybe across curricula where like next year you're designing something and you have to refer back to your trigonometry that can that can uh kind of line up the spacing effect for you so it's like when you have these interdisciplinary things and one thing leads into the next uh in terms in terms of curricula in terms of the content of curricula, then you can de facto create this basing effect. So we've got this number of neurons that everybody has in their brain. Do people learn differently?

Like some of those discussions we've had where some people learn differently than others or maybe some people take more time to soak up something even though they're using the interleaving sort of effect yeah so that's fascinating you know the um they're clearly people are different but one of the things we talk about in the book is false starts in neuroscience in other words neuroscience when the first time, not neuroscience, you know, psychology initially, right? So there's this battle between these two giants, Thorndike and Dewey. And what Thorndike does is Thorndike takes a sort of a, he thinks he understands psychology and sort of reduces it to these principles, which turn out to be not frankly very, it's, you know, it's at

that time it was a cutting edge. This is the 1910s and 20s. The 1910s, right? And what he does is he comes up with an approach to teaching where the teaching sort of treats human beings as if you're training a dog, basically, right? Here's a treat. Right, here's a treat. Exactly, exactly.

It's called behaviorism, right? Dead to behaviorism. But that was an understanding of psychology that fell short of the incredible emergent properties of the brain. It really sort of really underestimated how magnificent the brain is and how complex, right? Then there was another false start in the 60s and 70s

and 80s where, you know, we tried to apply sort of a slightly advanced, but still not there understanding of neuroscience. And it led to some fads and some things about learning styles. It turns out not to be true. It's not true that some people are visual learners. I mean, it's certainly not a replicable thing. But having said that, clearly, we all do learn differently.

For example, our preparation is different. I might pick up a math topic more quickly than someone who has an art background. And our education system is unforgiving to these differences. It's like a freight train. If you fall off, you fall off. The thing's going to go, and then you're going to spend all your time catching up. And then they sort of fall off. So I just wanted to clarify that we are now and we too could fall prey to that we too could be um declaring victory and making you know drawing conclusions that may lead to other misguided attempts but i think what luke and i explain is you know the picture is now complete um we've you know once between twice shy as i say or twice

between three times shy so now we can take a much more thoughtful approach where we try and leverage some of these learnings because we've seen them across these lessons because I've seen them across entire species. Right. Can you just flesh that out a little bit? Because I mean, I feel like I feel a little delicate saying it, but, are also vulnerable, right? Right. You're right. Yeah, I would say, so Chris, there's this kind of philosophy of science split. And it's like a schism that goes back through American history as we know it. And basically, on one side, you have this ethos where you say, we can reduce learning down to its constituent parts. And we can figure out the nuts and bolts. And from there, we can create a model of how learning works optimally.

And that's kind of the E.L. Thorndike point of view. And when Sanjay says it's based on teaching a dog, like, Thorndike literally developed his theory of learning, which was really, really influential, based on his experiments with cats and dogs escaping boxes that he created himself. And he studied them himself in this attic in this building at Columbia University. And the other side of the schism is John Dewey. So Thorndike thought that the human mind was too big to study on, to experiment upon. He wanted to break it apart. Dewey said that the human mind is too small to study on he to experiment upon he wanted to break it apart thorne or dewey said that the human mind is too small to experiment experiment upon there are bigger systems involved

there the social relationships between students and their teachers there are the um the larger things in society and there are um you can't divide up the curriculum either you have to have these um these interdisciplinary projects that are that you have students acting as bankers and bakers, and they're learning fractions based on baking bread, and they're learning geography based on the history involved, and so forth. So you have this very, on Thorndike's side, a very reductionist view of science and of teaching, and on Dewey's side, a very holistic view of science and teaching. And the question, you know, for time immemorial is, when is the reductionist approach correct?

And we've seen now quite a few false starts where they say, you know, we've got to figure it out. We can now create the optimal way to learn in classrooms. And, you know, over and over again, we see people, you know, 20 years later go, oh, wow, they screwed up. And so one of the things that we turn to is the finding from the holistic side, from the Dewey side. And we say, hang on. All right, let's take, let's, you know, neuroscience has advanced a lot.

We know a lot now. But let's check our work against what know, neuroscience has advanced a lot. We know a lot now, but let's, let's check our work against what the holistic people are telling us. And so like what we really look for are these areas of overlap between the two where we say like, oh, uh, you know, yes, we do believe learning proceeds in this way, but here's the larger picture. Let's, and let's not lose sight of the larger picture. You know, it's, know, it's really interesting what you guys have gotten into because you guys are kind of, you're really getting into the neuroscience of education.

And does more neuroscience need to be applied to our current education boards and our education curriculum where we really get into what you guys are talking about, the science of how learning works and restructuring these curriculums to make them better, give them better absorption levels, if you will? Well, I would say maybe. I suspect you expect me to give you a resounding yes, but let me bore you with one little sort of intellectual structure. You know, if you look at a computer, right, you have the computer does stuff you want, you know, go to Facebook, whatever, you know, do Zoom calls, right?

Run spreadsheets. Then one level lower, you have the operating system, you know, there's a new Mac OS that's going to come out soon, Big Sur. Then one level below, you know, you can go all the way down to electrons moving in circuits, right? So really that's the brain is no different. You have literally, you know, these things called action potentials that cascade on neurons and, you know, the chemistry and the biology and the, you know, the proteins all the way

up to, wow, you know, Chris is a really great guy. And he's got a great sense of humor. And he has a podcast, which he made up, which he came to do a podcast because of these circumstances, right? So there's a whole stack. We haven't connected all the way up and down the stack yet, all right? Neuroscience, the spacing effect that Luke described, we have. We sort of understand now why it happens at the synapse level,

why it happens in different species, and why it applies to us. Other things we have not. But we have things that are sort of midway in that stack. That's cognitive science, psychology, things that are highly replicable. And we sort of have a sense of why they may apply, what the neuronal mechanisms are, but we're not quite there yet. So here's the summary. I think there are plenty of cognitive science things we know, right? Which if I mentioned

to you three of them, right? I suspect just as a fellow human being, you know, you will agree that we should be applying right now. Here's one, right? 10 minutes. If you learn for 10 minutes, at some point, your brain's going to go into mode called mind wandering where it wants to connect the dots. What do we do? We shake a finger at the student and go, you're not paying attention, but actually that's what the brain wants to do. Spacing effect is one.

Here's a whole other one, curiosity. You make a student curious, they're much more likely to learn. Curiosity is like hunger, and dopamine, which is the neurotransmitter in the brain, is like saliva. So you focus on curiosity. So every parent sort of knows this, right? Are we doing enough of this? And then finally, what's the role of online?

Not Zoom lectures, not sticking 48 faces in a rectangular pattern on Zoom. Video lectures that you watch on Khan Academy, where if you don't understand something, you can sort of tailor it to your speed or you can listen to 2X. Or you can go back and watch it again because you didn't understand something, but you didn't realize it until later. Right. That sort of adaptability. These are clearly good things. Right. And finally, which student would rather not learn Spanish online and write a skit in the classroom and play and have fun, right? Then listen while the teacher goes through, you know, the grammar and, you know, makes you sort of repeat it, right? That's good too, but that shouldn't be the whole thing. So these are all things we shouldn't be doing more of, you know, that's the question, right?

Interesting. How do you guys feel about online learning? I know I've seen you guys talk about that, talk about it in the book and some of your interviews. Where we're going with online learning, maybe what the future is going to be. I don't know if we can get the genie back in the box of getting everybody back to working in offices and going to college full time. I don't know. Maybe we will years from now. Who knows?

Well, there's online learning and there's distance learning. All right. And I, you know, maybe we will years from now. Who knows? Well, there's online learning and there's distance learning. All right. And I, you know, a little play on words. What we're doing right now is distance learning. Okay. And my sort of gallows humor on this is that we were doing distance learning in the classroom to begin with. Right.

Because the teacher was, you know, often, I mean, my mother was a teacher too, by the way. So it's not the teacher's problem, but just the way was often, I mean, my mother was a teacher too, by the way, so it's not the teacher's problem, but just the way the setup, the way the things are set up. In a higher ed, you have a class of 100 people, right? And the student's sitting way far in the back

and the teacher's trying to reach him. That's distance learning to me. Zoom actually is just that, except we're doing it on Zoom, right? Real online learning is like Khan Academy. It's like what we do at MIT, open courseware. It's what we do with MITx and edX, where you shoot videos that are shot in 10 minutes, and you really sort of craft it to catch the attention. At the end of it, you have a Q&A where the student's actually answering questions and probing their short-term memory, promoting long-term memory, where there's a spacing effect. You get reminded of something

you learned two weeks ago just because we want to make sure that we're spacing it out. By the way, Duolingo does this. Babbel does this. Are we doing it in education? We're not. My point is, what you're seeing with Zoom right now is just a sad recognition that

we were doing distance education to begin with. Wow. New online education is very different, right? Luke, what would you sort of say? Yeah, I would just add to that, you know, I guess in education circles, I don't know if you're familiar with this phrase, but the flipped classroom is kind of, has been a hip phrase since well before COVID.

And the idea there is you watch a video lecture at home, and then you come in to class, and that's where you really let that knowledge marinate and ping pong around the classroom, and you ask your teacher questions. And it gets back to this idea that there's kind of two phases in education. One is the delivery of new information that has to happen somehow, right? And the other part is kind of the marination of that information. You learn how to apply it

within your head and in the world, and you really have to do both. And, you know, traditionally, the delivery of information has been in the classroom in the form of a lecture, and maybe in a textbook too. And it's going to be kind of a redundant double delivery. And then you go home and you kind of try to apply it in your homework. And so the flipped approach is you say, you know what, we'll do the delivery at home over video. And this goes back to like the freight train argument. But, you know, in a classroom lecture full of students,

that's a freight train moving at a certain speed. And if you fall off, the train continues on without you. If you're watching a video lecture, you set the speed. You speed it up if it's boring. You go get a snack if you're hungry. You know, you go to the bathroom if it's, you know, is it an emergency? You know, and in the classroom, that's when you really get time as a teacher to ask questions, to do stuff that can really only be done in person. So, like, is it when we talk, I think part of what we think about now, when we think about going back to the classroom next year, hopefully, is really doubling down on that classroom time and saying, you know, we would now recognize the value of this time.

Let us really make the most of it. You know, you guys talk about a really interesting way to approach this. For me, I had a lot of challenges with school. Part of what it was is I grew up in California, and we were really advanced. I think fourth grade we were filming stop-motion pictures and stuff, doing calligraphy. And then my parents moved us to Utah, which was about two or three years behind their, the curriculum. And so I was

like sitting there in classes going, I already learned all this crap. Like what the hell, this is boring and stuff. So I tuned out. And then, um, in high school, I figured out the, the, the forced curriculum nature of, of schooling in my high school. And I figure out that they want us to get 52 credits when I only needed 26 to graduate. My parents were poor. I wasn't going to MIT or any other place. And I knew I was a dumb kid. Somehow I was smart enough to know I was a dumb kid. I'm still a dumb kid, I guess. But I basically sat down and I flunked, literally flunked all half of my classes through high school to just get the 26 credits to pass. Because my brain, I've got one of those brains that goes, you know, if you look at baseball, I just sit there and watch baseball. And why the fuck did they run around three things?

I just run the second base of back and forth and run a straight line. So that's kind of how my brain works. What's interesting to me is I still absorbed a ton of stuff in high school. When I got out of high school, I could read, write far better than most of the people I went to school with. Most of them couldn't spell or do anything. I flunked math. I was horrible at algebra, you know, anything above grade level math, I was screwed at.

But at 18, I started my own companies. I did all the accounting for all my companies i do math and and and can do math in my head and and uh averages like most people are like what are averages and i'm sure you guys laugh at that because you guys know what averages are but i you know so it was weird to me that i flunked all these classes i had a hard time in in classes you know, with the forced curriculum, like what you guys are talking about, that whole here. And you're just like, what does this apply to me?

Why do I care? But what's interesting is my brain still absorbs so much of that. And I went back to it and utilize it so many different ways across my life. There's still stuff that I pick up. My number one, I think my most valuable from monetary aspect of my class was my typewriting class, learning to type, because then I could type business stuff and business invoices and shit like that. So it's interesting how the brain works, but our curriculums kind of go against that, and they kind of punish you, because I was really beaten up for my self-esteem, because I was like, you're a flunking kid, but somehow I achieved something. I don't know.

I built multi-million dollar companies going on all these years. So I don't know what that story has to do with anything really. Oh, it does actually, Chris. Let me different Chris Walsh to Chris Walsh. May I? That's about learning, I guess. Yeah. So let me just say that there's something called the Dunning-Kruger effect.

You should check it out. Yes, I'm fully aware of that. You something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. You should check it out. Yes, I'm fully aware of that. You're fully aware of that, right? Yeah. So you say, you know, the people I see who are talented often are the first to recognize their own, you know, have a sort of a clear-eyed view of themselves, right? And so there are two issues there. One is context. When you learn, if you're given context, curiosity, context, things like that,

it really makes one much more likely to understand and to sense-make what they're learning, right? That's sort of one aspect of it. The second, that's why learning on a job is so powerful. That's why apprenticeship is so powerful. I mean, remember, 304 years ago, most people learned the trade with their parents, right? So that's why learning on a job is so powerful. That's why apprenticeship is so powerful. I mean, remember, for 304 years ago, most people learned the trade with, you know, their parents, right? So that's one thing. The second thing, and there's a whole, there's people who talk about something called situated cognition. You know, if you explain math to a kid in abstract form, they might not get it.

But if that kid is a fruit seller and you put the same thing in fruit terms, they totally get it. In fact, a lot of these kids who, you know, in India when I was growing up, you know, the little kids who sell you stuff on the street. I mean, my God, they spoke multiple languages for the tourists and they could do math in their head much faster than I could, right? That's one. The second thing, just to put in precise terms what you just shared, is the authenticity of the test. So what happens is we test people. We say, hey, can you do this? But how authentic is it to the context or to real life? Right?

And I struggled a little bit in college when I could not get myself to really motivate myself, really, if there was not authenticity to real life. So I think there's all sorts of stuff like that, but I suspect your story is not unique by any means. And I think it applies to what I think what I was trying to do is apply to what you mentioned by distance learning. Because, you know, one of the things my mom would talk about was they were constantly, you know, doubling the size of her school class. And she was complaining, like you said, about the kids in the back of the room who weren't getting

enough attention and everything else. I was definitely one of those kids where distance learning was a part of it too. I had a really high brain function going on. I would tap on my desk and drive my teachers crazy or I'd shake my foot. And so a lot of times there was something going on with my brain where my brain was consuming. And then, like you say, the Dunning-Kruger effect, which I reference a lot in, uh, in our current politics lands, let's put it that way. Um, I knew that I was needed to learn stuff. And so when I did graduate from, um, high school and I started my first business at 18, I started reading books. And actually one of the things I started consuming, I knew I wasn't going to have a college education. Um, one of the things I started consuming, I knew I wasn't going to have a college education. One of the things I started consuming was Harvard Business Review. So I

started studying the science and systematic nature of business and being a CEO and started preparing myself to run companies. So that was my college. And I sat down and I read a lot of books and studied and I knew I was dumb. I mean, I knew the Dunning-Kruger. I'm like, this kid is an idiot. He's got to learn something somewhere. But it was interesting to me how, how, how, when I, like when I was in school, if I didn't feel something was applicable to my life, like, how does this make a difference to me? Like an algebra thing? Like, I don't know, this is going to get me laid. I don't know. I didn't, you know, you just looked at it from those different angles. And I think if someone was sat down with me and said, someday you might run a company, Chris, and this math is going to be really important and make you a lot of money. But it was never sold that way to me in the curriculums of school. And that's one of the functions that I see that are a failure in school is they don't sell the people on why this is really important. They just go, you have to take math, you have to pass.

And then you've got a gun to your head for the test. And I was never a good tester either, as you can probably guess. So this actually, this is like straight out of that kind of philosophical divide I was talking about. Because when you're studying for a test, right, who's the beneficiary of that? It's not you right now. It's future you 20 years in the future. And, you know, maybe not everyone is just super motivated by future them. Right. So that's, that's one of the,

one of the big splits between Dewey and Thorndike is Dewey was like, okay, in this scenario, you are a baker. You got to make some good bread. You're going to need to know your fractions to do that. This has to be relevant to you in the here and now, whereas in the other, in the reductionist view is like, you know, we're going to divide this up and here's the fraction part where you study fractions and this is going to be relevant to you someday, maybe, you know? And so this is,

this is one of the things where we try to take a step back and say like, hang on, this is something that got missed. We need to bring that back. One thing you guys, go ahead. I'm sorry. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry, Chris. What I'm saying, that's a reductive thing, right? Imagine if your Snickers bar were, you is, peanuts and proteins and sugar served up separately as opposed to a Snickers bar, right? There's a great quote from Saint-Exupery. He was the author of a book called Little Prince. And I won't get it right, but basically what it says is if you're trying to get people to build a ship, don't get them to go collect wood and, you know, cut it up

and da da da, teach them to love the sea, right? And that we lose, you know, because in this reductive approach, it's all about, you know, slicing it up and saying, get this, get the protein, get the sugar, get the, you know, come on, give them the big picture for God's sake, right? Yeah. One other thing I'd say is that, we talk about this stack from neuroscience up to psychology and educational psychology and so forth, at each one of those levels is a potential to lose a student. So if you're having trouble remembering stuff from last semester and applying it, maybe you kind of got a little lost because you weren't getting delivered the spacing effect you're having trouble reading that's in the next level up in kind of

brain science from fundamental neuroscience you know maybe maybe you have dyslexia or maybe you were taught the wrong way to read and we can talk at great length about reading frankly um but also at that level is curiosity right there's this. And like, it really is a problem when students are not made curious about the stuff that's in front of them, or if they're curious about something else, and therefore they're bored in class. And, you know, the level above that, you say like, well, what is the student's motivation? You know, are they actually motivated to learn this? Are they motivated by having a good GPA? Like in your case? No. And you know, like you downplayed a lot,

but you're clearly a very capable person. So like that was actually like a stumbling block in your trajectory, in your own cognitive science stack. And you know, you got, they kind of threw, there was a wrench thrown in the works for you. And luckily you've surmounted it. But part of what we're doing here is we're saying, we're going to stop throwing wrenches in the works, if at all possible. You guys talk about cognitive psychology in your book and beyond.

And how this all ties into the neuroscience and everything. And do we need to, like, I've seen, I think it's in Finland. They have some different curriculums that they use where they use a lot of, I think video learning, but they, they use these, I forget what they're called. They're kind of like open Silicon Valley schools and, and the students learn off of laptops and they gather together and they,

and they kind of review and go over their curriculum, and I think they interact with a teacher somewhere around there. Do you guys think that that sort of learning is better, like you're saying? Because people can learn at the different speeds. I think that was one. I think it was like a 60-minutes thing I saw or something like that, and people can learn at different speeds. Like, you know, you might consume a video and like, you know, okay, I got it,

where I might be like, okay, I need 10 minutes and then let's get back to this. Sometimes I read Audible books that way. Let's talk about that and how that applies or if you think that's a function that works. No, without a doubt, it works. The, you know, I was going to use an analogy. Maybe I'll use it, but let me just explain. So, you know, the assembly line was born in America with Ford and so on. And, you know, and we think of America rightly as a very creative country.

But actually what happened with the Toyota production system was the Japanese discovered that the assembly line dehumanized the worker a little bit. And they introduced something called the Toyota production system, where they introduced something that looks like a craft shop, where every worker had a little cell, it's called cellular manufacturing, where they ran their own little crafting. And then they could be innovative. And when the line was not fast, they could improve things.

They could invent things and share with others. And that's the lean production, lean manufacturing. That's the thing that revolutionized Japanese car making. And that's what revolutionized quality. In the 70s and 80s, we noticed that these Japanese cars were a little bit cheaper and better quality. And then, you know, there was a way, there was a book about this called The Machine That Changed the World, right? The American approach, actually, there was a guy called Taylor who really instrumented the heck out of every little job you did. And if you've seen the Charlie Chaplin movie, Modern Times, right? Charlie Chaplin becomes an automaton.

So they were trying to turn human beings into automatons. And the Japanese made them into human beings. So to some extent, in my view, anything that humanizes a student, gives them agency, gives them some freedom, gives them some flexibility, gives them some adaptability where, you know, maybe they're confused about something. Or maybe they were distracted. That's okay, right? Embrace it rather than penalize it. Spacing effect. What spacing effect tells you is forgetting is a key stepping stone to learning.

That's basically what the spacing effect is, right? I mean, if you want, I can give you the summary of that, if you want me to, as why forgetting is important. But the point is, and it all comes to the flip classroom that Luke mentioned, which is you do stuff, but you make people curious, then let them learn on their own, then let them discuss, apply, work, and heal their misunderstandings. So any system that does that is going to be better but different

and harder to manage and harder to establish metrics around and harder to measure except in an overall outcome in the long term. And so we are hewed towards highly measurable and reductive approaches. Do you want to expand on that idea of forgetting? I'm curious about that. Let me ask you this, Chris. You woke up this morning, you made a coffee, you had breakfast. Do you remember the temperature of the handle of your car when you opened it?

No. No? Okay. What was the temperature of the steering wheel when you first touched it? It was cold, but I don't know the exact temperature, of course. My point is that we're incented to forget things. If you remembered everything, we would go nuts, right? So let's say that you couldn't open the car because it was frozen

or something, and then the next day it happened again, but you used a trick and you figured out how to open it, and then you'll forget the trick, but then it happened again, and then the same, you recall the trick. Now the brain has incentive to say, you know, this is a useful trick. I need to remember this. So the brain is actually incentive to forget. And when you're about to forget something, if I remind you, the brain's like the short-term memory I created by using a neurotransmitter won't work. I need to create a new synaptic junction and create a long-term memory.

So it turns out that when you're just about to get rusty in something, you're actually poised, if you're reminded, to learn it in a way that's much more permanent and durable. So spacing actually, that's what spacing really does. It identifies the things you're about to forget. And by reminding you, it gives the brain an incentive to say, I need to learn this for the long term. This sounds like something I experienced with my wife

and her anniversary and her birthday. No, I'm just kidding. I'm not married. But no. Did you want to get into any of that, Luke? Yeah, no. I would say it comes down to the fundamental metaphors that we use around what is a memory, right? People think a memory is like a computer file that we tuck away somewhere but you know actually some of the some

of the cognitive science um and in fact i just i just discussed this with robert bjork who's kind of the major domo of this because sanjay and i have a piece coming out about this a memory is more like a house deep in the woods that has a path going to it okay and the way you forget is not you it's not that the house disappears it's that other paths form and they lead in confusing directions and some go to the house from somewhere else and maybe there's like decoy paths that go to it like one of those pitfall traps that you fall in with the spikes you know what i mean and i think yeah that's the words that quicksand and so what happens with forgetting is that your path all those paths become overgrown in the woods and then once it's just when the that memory is still accessible you can still find your way to the house but it's difficult that's a great

chance to kind of clear cut the original path. And so you lose all those competing associations. So like if you meet some guy at a, at a party, remember when we had parties and he tells you his name is Jim or was it James or was it John? And it's like, Oh no, I've got these like competing ideas for what his name might possibly be plus you might not care also you might not care that might be it too but later but then you realize like oh no this guy's gonna is instrumental in me getting a job tomorrow like I gotta know

this guy's name it's gonna be horrible if I forget it and someone mentions it to you oh you know like that's Jim that memory is gonna be much stronger as a result. And so I was talking to Robert Bjork. Another good example is forgetting is helpful because if you meet some guy on a plane flight, remember when we had plane flights? You meet some guy on a plane flight and he's sitting next to you and he's really boring. You want to maybe remember his name in the short term because you don't want to be rude, but you really don't care to remember that for any amount of time after that. But if you meet a person on the flight, they recommend a book to you, they say it's really

good, sounds interesting. Meet a person on your next flight, they recommend that same book to you, what is going on? That's interesting. That's a book whose title you're going to remember, because you've encountered that in a repetitive fashion. And you've evolved to remember information that comes up like that in a pattern like that. And to some extent, forget the information that does it, right? Because it's useless. Right, right. So is there a usefulness application that we applied information? I mean, that's half the reason I brought up the story of my sort of experience with education was the usefulness nature of it. Yeah, I mean, there's a variety. We haven't figured it all out, but there's a variety of things

that flag your memories, right? One is usefulness, but it might show up in repetition. Context is one. And sort of extreme version of it is the flashbulb effect, right? So imagine as you walk home today, I hope it doesn't happen to you,

but let's say you see a bear, right? And you try and scare the bear away by doing various things sing a song you know whistle etc it doesn't work when you raise your arms it runs away right you're gonna remember that because it's a vivid memory that's why emotions flag your memories right right so um these are all sort of so we're trying to figure out what how context of curiosity how a particular sort of vivid situation heightened the memory. Right, Luke? Yeah, I would add that, you know, Chris,

when you think back to your time in school and you, it might not come to mind like right in this moment, but as memories from school come back to you, discrete memories, they're going to be probably moments of either emotion emotion where something that you found emotional happened to you. Maybe it was an inspiring moment in a lecture or something. There are probably also moments that really clicked something into place for you or modified your original model of the world in a way that you found notable. And so thinking through that. Also, location And so that's what, and so.

Also location does that by the way. Yeah. All right. So the other day I was trying to remember something and I couldn't, and I, you know, I live in Lexington, Massachusetts and I had to go to the CVS and I drove by the Starbucks and I met the guy there, right? Boom. His name came back and the conversation.

So the association of that and stuff. I think that's very true, Bob. No, I'm just kidding. I had to do the joke earlier from Luke. The, you know, if with online learning is so huge right now, are we doing it right? Through you guys' study of neuroscience and psychology and stuff, how could it be done better?

Well, let me just say a few words about that. But first of all, I think people are being heroic, right? I mean, the last thing I want to do is say anyone is doing anything wrong just because, my God, we're surviving in very tough times. And the survival of our species, if I have any doubts about it, right? I still have doubts, but how we've reacted as humanity has been reassuring in most respects, not all, but in most respects. Okay.

Having said that, I don't think that in this jury-rigged online world, we're doing things necessarily right. We're doing things because we're forced to. The right way to do online, in my view, if you want to play offense, is record videos, right? Give students really, really exciting projects, which entice them to watch the video, right?

And then flip the classroom, except use Zoom, because that's all we have. We have discussions and debates and have students do projects at home and show them on Zoom, whatever, right? That takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of effort. And people are working from home and you have your cat and your toddler to deal with and the spouse, right? And it's noisy. So it's hard to critique anyone right now.

I mean, they're surviving. But if I had to do it differently, that's how I would do it. But that's a luxury. So let's say, let's play devil's advocate. I mean, a lot of my friends right now, they have kids, they're doing the Zoom thing. Do you think that delivery is appropriate or should there be a follow-up to, you know, I don't know how they're doing testing with the zoom stuff but that was one of the problems i had with

learning stuff because it just it was so forced and like we've talked about in the discussion you know everything was boom boom boom okay today we're learning about washington and i'm like uh i didn't get finished really learning about washington can we go over some of these topics again no fuck you boom boom boom oh here's a test and you're going to fail it because you wanted to absorb that just a little too much and maybe there's some maybe there's something in me that when i learn about stuff i i like the application i like the i like the soaking in it if you will like i read books that way i like to soak in them and sometimes i go back and i i to think, okay, what is the context of this having the world? Kind of like what we're doing right now with video learning.

Well, you know, exams are very interesting. In fact, Luke and I were exchanging emails earlier this morning about it. And maybe Luke can talk about it a little bit. But I do think that our exams tend to have – by the way, I'm not one of those who says get rid of SATs, get rid of exams. I think exams are important. That's not the point. But I think we rely on them a lot. And in places where we should be relying on projects, we still do exams because it's so easy, right?

And so I think maybe this might force us to rethink our exams and grades. Grading is we've got to figure out what the exact purpose is. And there is a purpose, right? But it's become just a reflex. I would love to see us at MIT, for example, we're going to do a lot more projects and take home exams and papers and things that are more reflective and thoughtful and show marination in the topic, that's the word, to use the soaking concept you described,

and really spend some time on assessing learning, but also on ensuring learning rather than simply have an exam with a, you know, pass, no, with a, with a grade, right? Yeah. You know, I would say, Chris, you know, exam is a powerful teaching tool. It tells you, it tells you what you've mixed, what you've missed. Right. And there's also this retrieval effect that you get when you, when you dredge up a memory for the exam and apply it. That's a powerful learning moment.

And that act strips away a lot of these competing associations and things. So it can be really helpful. But, you know, we do have these high-stakes exams, and then we never return to a subject. And, you know, we also kind of cast judgment on students, you know, especially at a time like this when things are really hard, man. And, you know, at the very least, I kind of hope that any admissions department anywhere will kind of look on this year and go like, you know, we don't know what's going on in this student's life this year let's you know every it seems like things this year should be taken with a grain of salt how comes this year yeah i think we really need to think

about authenticity you know really about what does it really mean i'll give you a little tidbit from my personal sort of history watching a quiz show actually it was in my college, and it was about, you know, states of India and their favorite dessert, right? And it's one thing to say the favorite dessert in this state is this, and the favorite dessert in that state is this, right? There's another thing. What this guy did, the quiz master, was he gave the people the dessert and said, eat it and tell me which state it's from.

Right? That's authentic. You know know that shows like a deep learning i'm of course how do you do that how do you get that right and i think maybe it'll force us to think about it during covet and and what you guys have talked about in your book and adjusting curriculum and talking about all these different things this is a perfect time to maybe once we return to a normalization to you know rethink these concepts and maybe maybe there's an incorporation of video learning or or or everything else the Khan Academy stuff is brilliant like you say where you can go you can you can pause it you can stop it you know I do the same thing with audiobooks there's sometimes where I'll get to a point in audiobook where either I can tell that brain is wandering, as you mentioned, or there's a concept that I want to marinate in. And I kind of feel like my brain will wander a little bit because my brain will start thinking, how does this apply to X, Y, Z?

And what's the bigger picture here? Because that's where my brain likes to go. And so I'll have to shut off the tape and kind of, like I say, marinate and explain it. What's interesting to me, even though I flunked most of my high school by choice, the people who had the most effect on me and the people I learned from most in those classes were the classes I flunked from and the teachers who motivated me the best with the quality of their learning. Now, imagine people have different ways or different personalities they aspire to that maybe influence them. There may have been people that didn't.

But once I took that gun to the head equation out, I learned so much better. And probably, I guess my point is more so than some people in my classes. But everyone's different, of course. I'm not the monolith. It's interesting that when you decided that grades are not a motivator for you and you took that away and you allowed yourself to just kind of just tangle with the information on an information basis and not on a what this says about me basis,

that it suddenly became a lot more interesting to you. So that's like a really interesting point. My mom had – one of the challenges my mom had with being an educator was during the Bush years when they forced the no child left behind. And it kind of really put a lot of teachers to my understanding in this sort of gun against your head. You know, you will learn these stupid kids. And there were certain like goals they had to perform to. Do you think that was a good thing to do? I think Luke, you know,

I would say, you know, we don't get much into like specific policies in the book, but you know, that's a great example of a, of an approach where you say like, we think we have it figured out. Therefore we're going to put this policy in place.

And like, lo and behold, you know, I, I'm know, I won't weigh in too much on it, but I will say that some people had problems with it. Some people had success with it. The world was a more complicated place than that model suggested. And that's a little bit of what we like really try to keep in mind when we talk about this stuff is we say, you know what? Like this, we have a model. We think,

we think it's really valuable. Let's be humble. The brain is complicated thing. People are complicated and there's a lot of them. What are some other aspects of the book that we haven't touched on that we should enlighten people? Well, the, we, we, we didn't talk about a course that started at MIT called 2007. And the joke behind it is licensed to design. It was created by, get it?

It was created by an incredible colleague of mine who passed away, who was a mentor to me while we were writing the book. And we recognize his extraordinary contributions in the book. It's in memoriam to him, Woody Flowers. And this course at MIT is rather famous. You may not know the course itself, but a lot of the contests where you see robots competing with each other, they come from that course. And what happens in this course is students are given a box of basically like metal and

some wheels and a few motors. And then they're given a contest, which is, you know, like, you know, some sort of table where they have to compete. You know, they catch balls and, you know, push each other out of the way and put the balls in a basket. And there's usually two or three things and there's five different or ten different strategies for doing it. And then they compete and it's one of those highly sort of project oriented things but very guided a very guided there's a lot of coaching from faculty and I used to be I used to teach that course I was a professor as well and we followed the arc of that book and I've taught that course and Luke in this case followed a few students.

And we weave it into the story, right? Because it's more outside in, you know, you're sort of trying to figure out the problem, you don't really think of the cognitive science. But if you do the, if you, if you learn the concepts well, and you apply them, like your startups at 18, Chris, you connect those two extremes. So that's the other thing we do in the book. That's the other arc. That's right. So one of the great kind of debates in between this sort of reductionist Thorndike and holistic Dewey approaches is like, can learning to learn be taught? Can we learn to problem solve?

Is problem solving innate your problem solving ability or can you improve it over time? And so, you know, design thinking is like the ultimate in problem-solving. You're given just a blank slate and a kit of materials, and you have to create this robot. And so I really wanted to – so I embedded it in this course with these young MIT students. And, like, side note, I would not have gotten into MIT, you know,

when I was applying to college. And so going into this course to, to sit in on this course, I had the worst back to college dreams where you, where you're about to fail your, your final exam of my life. It was, it was like, it was intimidating to, to, to be with these students in this class. And they actually kind of welcomed me and were really warm, but it was kind of stressful.

And just watching these students design these robots over time, it gave us a really good window into this open question of, can we learn to problem solve? And almost kind of what we discovered is, let that be an open question of can we learn to problem solve? And almost kind of what we discovered is let that be an open question. What you can learn is comfort in the face of an uncertainty and that, that open drawing board and that pile of kits in front of you, or, you know, an open wide world, then you need to create a business, right? Like once you've created your first business,

I bet it was easier to create your second business. That's the blank slate effect. What do you do when you see a blank slate, right? And you got to figure it all out, right? And that is, we've got to do more of that. Definitely, definitely. Well, we could talk about this for hours, and I certainly appreciate you guys being here.

I know we've run a little long, but this is the reason why people should buy the book. We've given them a nice teaser and some nice tastes and they can dip into the book and check it out. Give us your plugs real quick guys as we go out. Yeah, sure. Sanjay is thankfully not on

for his sanity, not on Twitter, but I'm on Twitter. So I'm at Luke Yoquinto, just my name with an at in front of it. And you can find me on there. Yeah, and I'm on Twitter. So I'm at Luke Yoquinto, just my name with an at in front of it. And you can find me on there. Yeah, and I'm not on any social media, unfortunately, Chris, but it's a pleasure to meet you and really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you.

It's been a pleasure as well. And you're probably a much saner and smarter person for it, let me tell you that. So as a person who is on social media luke will probably second that uh so anyway guys uh i certainly appreciate you guys being on check out the book it's grasp the science transforming how we learn and i think this would be great especially for people who are educators people who are doing these curriculums or anybody who just wants to get the basics of cognitive learning and psychology. I find it fun nowadays because I love it's the adventure of it, learning new stuff.

That's really cool. Check it out, guys. Thanks so much for tuning in. Be sure you see us on youtube.com for just Chris Voss at that bell notification button. And we'll see you guys next time.