The One You Feed - Ulrich Boser on How to Get Better at Learning

Episode Date: April 17, 2018

Please Support The Show with a DonationUlrich Boser is a best selling author and senior fellow with The Center for American Progress. He has been a contributing editor for US News and World Report and his work has appeared in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and Huntington Post. His latest book, Learn Better: Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business or School - or - How to Become an Expert in Just About Anything, will equip you with actual skills to get better at what some have called the ultimate survival tool: learning how to learn. This topic is relevant to literally everyone. To be alive is to learn and grow and change (whether we're aware of it at times or not!) so it's important to sharpen our skills in order to get better at getting better. What is discussed in this episode will confirm some of what you know about how people learn, challenge some beliefs you might have about this topic and teach you a few things in the process that will make you a better student of life. Bombas - enter offer code WOLF at checkout for 20% off your first purchase www.bombas.com/wolfIn This Interview, Ulrich Boser and I Discuss...The Wolf ParableHis book, Learn Better: Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business or School - or - How to Become an Expert in Just About AnythingLearning how to learnGetting better at getting betterThe ultimate survival toolBeing actively engaged in the learning processMaking meaning out of somethingThe hypercorrection effectGiving our brain time to make sense of the information, reflectionHow critical it is to understand relationships between thingsVarying the circumstances in which we learn/apply informationHow it's easier to remember something new if you can hang it on to something oldA systematic approach to learning somethingValue: valuing what you're learningTarget: learning small pieces of info at a timeDevelop: practice & get feedbackExtend: elaborating on something, looking at it from different anglesRelate: analogies are the essence of thought, relating something to other thingsRethink: take time to process informationMetacognition: thinking about thinkingWhat are you going to learn and how will you know that you know it?How intertwined emotion and cognition areDigestible parts: learn less at a timeAt 90 minutes of learning, adults are kind of doneActive learning strategiesHypotheticals: what would happen if...Why it's important to stay away from crammingPlease Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you believe something is true and then you're proven to be wrong, you're far more likely to retain that information. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, We'll be right back. that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really no really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The really no really podcast.

Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Ulrich Boeser, a best-selling author and senior fellow with the Center for American Progress. Before the Center, Ulrich was a contributing editor for the U.S. News and World Report. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. and the Washington Post. In February 2009, HarperCollins published his book, The Gardner Heist, which examines the 1990 theft of a dozen masterpieces from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. And his new book is Learn Better, Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business, and School, or How to Become an Expert in Just About Anything. or how to become an expert in just about anything.

Hi friends, there's a couple of other ways to feed your good wolf in addition to just listening to this show. One is that you can support us on Patreon and that will allow you to get additional bonus content as well as a mini episode from me each month. You can do that by going to oneyoufeed.net slash support. And the other thing that you can do is join our Facebook group where we have discussions about the episodes and other ways that people feed their good wolf and deal with challenges in life. And that is at oneyoufeed.net slash Facebook. And here's the interview with Ulrich Boser. Hi, Ulrich. Welcome to the show. Thanks

so much for having me. I'm happy to have you on. Your book is called Learn Better, Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business, and School, or How to Become an Expert in Just About Anything. And I love this book because, as you mentioned, and we'll get into it in a lot more detail, learning how to learn or knowing how to learn is such a critical aspect of life. And most of us don't get taught how to do it. So I'm excited to work through this with the listeners. But let's start like we always do with a parable. There's a grandfather who's talking to his grandson.

He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. It's a wonderful and powerful parable. When I was thinking about the parable and as it relates to learning, I actually had in my head a different parable or a different expression, and that is better off teaching someone how to fish rather than simply giving them a fish. And it relates in the sense that I feel like learning to learn how to get better at getting better is really, when it comes to this parable, really it's sort of like how do you feed yourself, right?

How do you feed what is good? How do you feed yourself? How do you feed what is good? How do you feed experience? How do you feed sort of wisdom and expertise? And the ways that sort of feeding yourself, at least when it comes to kind of knowledge and skill and dispositions and more effective ways. And that's really what I've really been long fascinated in. And how do we do that? How do we feed ourselves better?

Yeah, I love that teach a man to fish idea. It's so powerful. So let's talk about the learning process. So it's one of the most important predictors of learning is whether you actually know how to learn. You say that out of a bunch of different studies shows that learning methods dramatically shifted outcomes. And then the other thing, I love this phrase you say, learning to learn is what experts call the ultimate survival

tool, one of the most important talents of the modern age. So let's talk a little bit about the learning process. Is there a lot of different ways to learn? Talk to me a little bit about what you think is the best learning process and the importance of having a process. Sure. One thing to keep in mind is that there's just a lot of folk wisdom and conventional ideas around learning. And a lot of it is frankly wrong. So there's this idea that people have learning styles, right? That some people are auditory learners and some people are visual learners. There's really no evidence for that.

There's a lot of people who love to use highlighters. I often see people using them, whether it's at work or at school, and there's no research behind them either. What we do now have evidence for is certain approaches, certain processes in learning are far more effective than others, and it's really important that people figure out exactly what they want to learn, make sure that they're generating that learning. In other words, that they're really sort of mentally doing and reflecting on it. How can you think back on your learning? And when people really take this type of approach, they learn a lot more. And it sounds like a lot of what I got from the book is you want to be very actively engaged in

the learning process. And so, you know, highlighters are interesting because I think most of us think if we highlight something in a book, then we might remember it. The only way I've ever found that useful is when I want to go back later and find what it is I want to spend more time on, I'm able to do that, which is kind of how I arrive at questions for the show and all that is I'll read the book and I'll take a ton of highlights and then I'll go through those and go through another round of work with those till it's a smaller group and keep sort of iterating through it. But it's this active engagement more so than the passive taking in of information, even if you passively take it in multiple times. Yes. So the way that most people use highlighters is different the way that you described them.

And I really like the way that you are using them. And I haven't seen research on that specifically, but I would suspect that it's effective. I think the way most people use highlighters, right? They're just, they think if they highlight something like that material is going to transfer to their head. And it gets to this bigger idea that we really often think that our brains

are like computers, right? If there's information that comes at us, we're just going to know it, right? It's just sort of like data comes in and gets sort of stored somewhere in the back. But that's not really how the brain works. We need to make meaning out of something. And when we make more meaning out of it, we're far more effective. My favorite example of this is like visiting a researcher in Florida and he asked him this question, what is the capital of Australia?

Actually, let me ask the question of you, Eric. Capital of Australia, any guesses? I'm going to guess Melbourne, but that's probably not right. Yeah, so it's not right. You want to go for option number two? You have a second guess. I either guessed Melbourne or Sydney myself. Perth? You have a second guess? Perth. I ran through basically every city that I knew in Australia. I was like Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne. And then when he told me the answer, which is Canberra, I was like, no way.

Like, that's crazy. Like, I'd never heard of Canberra before. And researchers call this idea or describe this idea as a hypercorrection effect. If you believe something is true, or at least you think that you should know it, in my case, I really thought that I should know the capital of Australia rather than seem like some of that basic trivia that people should know. And then you're proven to be wrong, you're far more likely to retain that information in the future. I give this example because I think it helps us understand how the brain really isn't a

computer. In this hypercorrection effect example, one, making the error actually makes us learn more by guessing incorrectly. You said Melbourne, you're making an error and it's going to help you learn more. incorrectly, you know, you said Melbourne, you're making an error and it's going to help you learn more. And then that moment of kind of like shock and surprise, we were like, holy cow, it's, you know, I've never heard of that. It's really forcing you to kind of engage in some sense-making and kind of finding meaning. You're like, oh, why don't I know this? And I think helps us understand, you know, why when we're using highlighters, we're just sort of

passive, like, oh, yeah, not really thinking that much. That feeling that so often happens, right? But you've like read a whole page of text. And at the end, you're not really sure what you're learning as opposed to asking yourself questions, coming back to information, looking for connections, one more effective ways to retain knowledge. or more effective ways to retain knowledge. Yeah, you talk about that in the book in multiple different places, which is that idea of if you think about the information meaningfully and you ask yourselves questions about it or you think about it or you look at it from different angles is a lot better.

It makes me think of one of the early episodes we had, probably in the first 10 episodes, was a guy named Todd Henry. a lot better. And it makes me think of, you know, one of the early episodes we had, you know, probably in the first 10 episodes was a guy named Todd Henry. We had him on subsequently, but the thing he said that, you know, has stuck with me so much since that early episode, he said, if most of us were to change the way we consume information for every hour of information we consume, we spend an hour of information processing that, you know, which we, that we read, asking ourselves questions about it, thinking about how it applies to our lives, trying to apply to our life. He's, you know, our lives would change. And I think that is so very true because just consuming more and more information, which is what most of us do, doesn't necessarily make us any smarter or more knowledgeable would be a better way to say it.

I think that's a great way to look at it. If we want that information and want to use that information to solve problems at a later point, right? If we want that information, so we convert it into expertise, we need to give our brain that time to make sense of it. It's so easy for our brains to get overloaded, so we need information in smaller chunks. And we also just need time to have these types of reflections, these moments of understanding. One bit of research that I find that's really fascinating that I think puts Todd's point in a somewhat different light is someone did research a number of years ago looking at what sort of pause an instructor or speaker should have if they're really delivering important information. And they found in the study that the audience

learned more, right? They retained more if there were long pauses and pauses of three seconds. I'm not going to subject your listeners to three seconds because it's awkwardly long, right? It's like a moment, you know, if you guys edit this, if it was a three-second-long pause, you'd be like, that's got to go. Yeah, I was going to say,

Chris would trim that right out, and that's why none of us are learning anything. So good job, Chris. Thanks, Chris. We're grateful for it. But if you listen to like speakers and whatever your politics are, you know, Barack Obama, he speaks so slowly. And, you know, I think that's part of what makes him such a great speaker, right? These pauses are allowing the audience to really sort of engage, make sense of that material. audience to really sort of engage, make sense of that material. And I find that fascinating. It's a somewhat different spin on that same idea. But, you know, even in conversation, even when we're kind of teaching or learning or having a simple conversation like we're having, we need that moment to process. I was trying it for three seconds. You're right. That is a long time. I was trying to give you a three second pause before the next one came up, but you were probably just about to go. You still there?

It was on the tip of understanding relationships between things. You know, it goes on to say, identify cause and effect and to see analogies and similarities. But I love that idea of relationships. One of the ways, if I'm trying to learn something new, that I like to do it, is to try and consume a lot of information, but try and get it from three or four different people. So ask the same three, you know get it from three or four different people. So ask the same three, you know, or ask three or four people about the same thing. And there's something about the way each of them says it slightly differently that allows it after a few times of hearing it slightly differently, it clicks into focus in a way for me that it doesn't if I only hear it from one person. Yeah. I was so glad that you asked about relationships because when we

think about parables, right, that makes them so powerful is also relationships, right? It's, well, let me actually approach this from a slightly different angle and then come back from the parable if it's okay. And that's, you know, when we really want to learn something, we want to be able to learn that something in different situations. So if you learn 3 plus 5 equals 8, you can vary up the surface features of it. So you can change it into a word problem. You can see it numerically. You can use it in different situations.

Maybe one that's a little stressful, you're trying to figure, what you should leave on a tip on your first date. Now, when we vary those surface features, we know that deep features, really what it means to add three plus five in a richer way. And we do this kind of all the time, right? When we're skiing, if you want to get better at skiing, you know, you want to vary up where you can ski so you can figure out different situations. And what I find fascinating about this

is it's really about relationships. It's about analogies, taking one thing and figuring out the ways that things tie together. And it really changes the way that I think about learning, right? So I recently took a wine tasting class. I want to know a little bit more about wine. And, you know, ultimately what matters to me about wine isn't like, do I know where the most like Bordeaux is produced? What I want to know is like, what wine tastes good with certain foods? And so I took a wine pairing class and I feel like I learned so much more, right? I learned why the tannins in a red cut against the fattiness of cheese. I learned about why sweet wines go with spicy food. That type of learning is so much richer. And the idea of a parable is really the same thing, right? We can use that

same idea, like what is the one you feed in so many different situations? And it gives us a richer understanding of the underlying there-ness of feeding this. So it's a fascinating idea. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really? No, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition

signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And here's the rest of the interview with Ulrich Boser. The idea, and I think I won't get the words exactly right, that you use in the book is that the advantage of analogies or, you know, of looking at relationship is that it's easy to remember something new if you can hang it on something old that you already know. So you've already got this one memory or understanding or idea, and you're more likely to get the new one if you can kind of, you know, I like that analogy of just sort of hanging it on it as a way to remember the new things. That's exactly right. And when you hear

people talk about, oh, we now need an Uber for babysitting or an Uber for haircuts, you know, it only works if you know what Uber is, right? You know, and you're like, oh, okay, I know what Uber is. And so Uber for haircuts, like, how would that work? Or Uber for childcare, you know, how would that work? But you need to know that initial thing well, and then it allows you to use what you know to understand something new. One of the ways why these types of analogies can be so powerful. Yeah, and so in the book, you've got a systematic approach. And I thought it'd be useful just to kind of walk through the various steps in learning something.

I'll just read them real quick, and then maybe we can just take a spin through each of them briefly, and you can help us understand what each of these is. So the first one is value, then target, develop, extend, relate, and rethink. So let's start with value. What is the role of value in learning? It's very hard to learn

something if you don't know anything about it. So how can we find value in something and try and delve deep into what that means? But what's really important about motivation is it's a one-way street. So often we're like, oh, if the topic is interesting to me, other people are going to find it interesting. I don't know if you've ever had this experience, Eric, where someone is like, oh, we're going to talk about statistics. When I mention Justin Bieber or something, it might be of interest to other people. That's not really how it works. Motivation is a one-way street, and it goes from the person to the material. When we think about learning, just that idea is really important, right?

You want to find meaning, both in the motivational sense, but also in the understanding sense. So I have to value it in order to actually learn it. It's not going to do me any good if I don't. And so this idea of basically what's wrong with a lot of school, right, is that our children don't value what they're learning.

It makes it very difficult for them to pay attention or to learn if they don't see the value in it. That's exactly right. If you're not able to see the value in it, you're not going to want to learn about it. What the research says on finding value is that it is this one-way street. And one way we can do that is just to ask people, you know, sure, you're going to learn about statistics. You're probably not waking up in the middle of the night wondering about, you know, Stata or SPSS or, you know, P-squares, but just writing or taking a few moments to yourself being like, you know, why is this going to be valuable to me? How's this going to improve my career? How's it going to improve my family life? Makes people a lot more motivated to learn.

Yep. So the next stage is to target. What do you mean by that? What's important about target is two things. One, our brains get very easily overloaded. And at the beginning of the learning process, you want to learn in small chunks. So, you know, people often are like, oh, I just have to do hands-on learning. And the hands-on practice and getting your, you know, hands dirty, really important. But at the beginning of the learning process, you know, just take things in small bites because it's a much more effective way to learn. And like, think about something like riding a bicycle, you know, you wouldn't just sort of go out there and just jump on.

If you didn't know how to ride a bicycle, it's helpful to know what do the brakes do, how to balance. And so targeting, especially at the beginning of the learning process, just figuring out exactly what you want to learn and the best way to learn it becomes very, very important. So the next one is develop. becomes very, very important. So the next one is develop. Practice is so key when it comes to learning and there are better ways to practice. One, what is central to practice is getting feedback. And any way that you can get feedback is really crucial. So there are some basic ways you can ask, get feedback. Videotaping yourself is a great way if it's a performance of some sort. And then there are other ways to get feedback where you just make sure that whether it's your colleagues or your friends or your family,

that you create that norm that they should give you feedback and they need to give you critical feedback. So tremendously important. So this aspect of the learning process is really just sort of practicing, developing, and getting better at that type of practicing, at that type of developing. And then the next one is extend. This goes back to what we described a little bit earlier. You want to start using your knowledge in different areas and really start taking it out for a spin. And when we think about learning at this stage, creating arguments, building arguments is a wonderful way to create new knowledge to extend what you know and really sort of develop that expertise.

Another example of this is just elaborating on something. A great way to learn if you're learning about Russian history or biology or Microsoft Excel, just elaborating on it shows a lot of evidence in the research. Yeah, it makes me think of one of my favorite books of all time, Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And in the very beginning, he encourages, you know, very strongly, like, you know, turn around and start teaching this to somebody else, like immediately, because that that idea of being able to teach it to somebody else drives it home so strongly. And it makes us think about how to present the

information back in an understandable way yes when you think about elaborating right it's that idea and then plus when you teach it to someone else if you're doing it in person you have that experience of looking at a person's eye and realizing oh I didn't explain that so well right and so it can be more iterative and more social I find that there's a little bit of research that i find wonderful where just talking to yourself while solving problems is another way to to do this when you're elaborating you're also slowing down and there was a study this was a couple of years ago that found it's the same as having a 10 point increase

in your iq so talking to yourself while you're solving problems, again, the same type of thing of teaching someone else or elaborating this core idea is the same as, you know, having a very significant boost in your ground intelligence. Wow, that's interesting. We've got two more to go here. Relate is the next one. Yeah, we talked about this a little bit earlier, but analogies, as a number of researchers now believe, is the essence of thought. We're always thinking in categories,

and it's a powerful way to learn, to relate things to others. So a very simple example, you know, what does it mean exactly, the definition of a dog, right? And one way to learn is just to relate all sorts of different dogs to each other. You know, if you look at a schnauzer or a German shepherd or a mastiff, you're like, oh, you start relating them, figuring out what the category is and helps you learn a lot more about, say, dogness. But we can use this in so many different areas. You want to learn more about the oceans. It's not important to know sort of what's the average temperature of the ocean.

What's important to know is if the temperature of the ocean goes up, we can relate that to the fact that water expands. And this helps us understand why climate change can be so hazardous to islands. So when you're learning something, it's so important to relate it to others. We talked at the beginning of, you know, learning the capital of Australia. And as alone, it's like, huh, interesting fact. But, you know, why is it that many nations, the U.S. included, have these kind of obscure places as their capital? And we could, you know, go on a whole riff about that. It says a lot about the political process. It says a lot about kind of financial and political power and the nature of geography. And that actually helps us understand at a much richer level issues of politics and geography

and history, much more so than just having that isolated fact. So you're relating them to each other. Yep. And our final stage is rethink. So important when we're learning to take that time to process information. And there are a couple of reasons for it. One, we forget. We forget at a regular rate, and we're wildly overconfident about how much we remember. So just taking time to recall what you know about something, to revisit material. Forgetting in many ways is your friend. It allows you to relearn, to rethink, and we should do more to take advantage of that in all forms of learning. And also, ultimately, you learn to gain perspective, to develop richer insights.

And so taking that time for learning is so crucial. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Kranson is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all.

Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really.

Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Talk to me about metacognition. You brought up IQ a couple minutes ago, and there are studies that show that people who are good at this, metacognition, which you're going to walk us through here in a second, are able to learn better than people who even have, you know, way higher IQs. So what is metacognition and why is it so helpful in helping us to learn better? Metacognition is a fascinating thing. And researchers really talk about it as thinking about thinking, you know, what are you, What do you understand about what you understand? One issue of metacognition is that people are often wildly overconfident. So my favorite question on this, Eric, is do you know how a toilet works? This is a question for you. I read the book, so it's not a fair question, but I would say that no, not very well.

You don't. Well, you read the book, so it isn't a fair question, but if you ask the public at large, most people, and I often do this in talks, are like, sure, I know how a toilet works, but then you really start pushing them, like, why is it that if you put a little bit of water into a toilet bowl, it doesn't flush, But if you put a lot of water into it, suddenly it'll flush. Why does it have that weird little S-tube that's on the side? This is really an issue of metacognition. We spend a lot of time on toilets, and so we think we know how they work.

But really, when it comes to the engineering of them, we just simply don't know what we really know. We just simply don't know what we really know. And so metacognition really at this basic form is an argument that's at the heart of the book. It's at the heart of this learning process. What do you want to learn? How are you going to learn it? How will you know that you know it? And asking yourself questions at a very basic level when you're reading or watching a TED talk or listening to a podcast is like, do I really get this? Can I explain this to a friend? What kind of connect? And then reflecting of like, what can I do to learn this better is a really powerful tool for learners of

really any age. Another use of metacognition that you talk about in the book is that when people are upset or they are stressed they are unable to learn well and so another way to use metacognition is about being aware of what our emotional state is and working with our emotional state allows us to actually learn better this is something that's really fascinating to me and you a lot of people, including you guys, have talked about this. But let's sort of drill down this idea a little bit more. I think it's just so important. We so often think that cognition and emotions are two totally separate things, like our thoughts and our feelings are just totally independent. But really, they're intermixed, like how we feel and how we think, you know, they really kind of roll together. And we really underestimate that when it comes to learning. And there are really wonderful examples of this. You know, if you encourage people to think about their past, right, you know, tell them to start thinking about their childhood bedroom and their first grade teacher,

you know, they'll start to lean back. This has been shown in a number of studies and tell them about retirement, how they're going to move to the Bahamas. They start to lean forward. And it's a very clear, very concrete example of the ways that our thinking and our body work together. And you were asking about metacognition and feelings. What's important here is that we need to feel sort of calm. We need to feel ready to learn. We need to feel safe when we want to learn because our emotions and our thinking, our feelings and our learning, they're not two different things. They are often the same thing. And so having that feeling of safety makes us far more able to learn. Absolutely. So we're nearing the

end of time, but I want to hit a couple things that we have covered a little bit, but I want to call them out as sort of key points, and then you can bring up any key points you think we've missed. But one of the big ones over and over is digestible parts, right? Break it down into smaller parts, learn less at one time. You know, there's a study in there that shows after about 90 minutes, adults are kind of done. And so lots of this breaking it into small parts was one big one. Definitely. It's was one big one. Definitely. It's a really big one. You know, for a long time, we thought, you know, short-term memory could take, you know,

five to seven items. That's where our telephone numbers are, the length that they are. But increasingly, we realize that we can't even take that much into our brain at one time. And companies have realized this on their own, right? I mean, this is why like 9-1-1, 3-1-1, really important numbers are so short. So digestible parts, it's the way to go when it comes to learning. Yep. The next is active learning strategies versus being passive. Things like self-quizzing or self-explaining or describing it in your own words, but really going from just consuming

something and hoping you remember it. Even old flashcards make an appearance in this book, right? That they actually are useful because you're quizzing yourself and you're forcing yourself to recall versus just shoving things in. It's a great example. It's so important. It's a great example. It's so important. Tests have a terrible reputation. They deserve them in many ways. But like low stakes pop quizzes, kind of brain dumps really are very effective ways to learn. My favorite study when it comes to this is a researcher gave people some text. Some people read the text once and then took a test. Some people read the text twice, right? So they read it once and they reread it and took a test. The people who read the text once and then put it away and then just started writing everything that they knew about it, creating some connections and associations, learned 20 percentage points more. And they took the same amount of time, right? I mean, it doesn't take

longer to necessarily do that type of brain dump than it takes to, you know, reread the material. So just quizzing yourself in both ways of recalling facts is a great way to make sure those facts are in your head, but also just like, why did this happen? Engaging in recall, just summarizing material, great way to make learning a lot more active. Yeah, another technique you call out is called hypotheticals, which, you know, the examples you give in the book are, you know, ask what would happen if living things didn't evolve over time, or if you're studying Shakespeare, you know, consider what would have happened if the young lovers had not died in the play, you know, consider what would have happened if the young lovers had not died in the

play. You know, just pose hypotheticals about what you're learning. Yeah, encourages these types of why, these types of elaborations, these types of different angles of looking at something that create that richer sense of understanding. So any other sort of short hitters that you would add to that, that list of like, if you're going to learn three or four things in this, here's what I'd take away. Anything else that you'd add in there that I missed? So easily, we forget so much. We should incorporate that into our learning. What does that mean? Practically speaking, if you're going to, you know, take a Spanish class tonight, start early so that you have time to forget. Build in time in which you know that there's just going to be moments where you're not thinking about that material. Anything you can do essentially to stay away from cramming

is very, very effective. Excellent. Well, Ulrich, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show. And the book was really interesting to me. And I've always thought of myself as, you know, one of the things I'm good at is learning pretty well and reading the book. I was like, okay, well, I think, you know, I do do most of that stuff, which is probably why, but I definitely picked up a few tips that will be helpful to me moving forward. That's great. Really glad to hear that, in part because I've learned so much from the show, so thank you so much for having me on.

Yep, it's been a pleasure. Take care. Thanks again. Bye. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really

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