'How We Learn' offers new look at how our brains work
In high school, Benedict Carey admits, "I was a grind," the kid who worked long hours over flash cards to master course material. He envied kids who possessed "a cool head, an ability to do their best without that hunted-animal look." Rejected by a dozen colleges, Carey began to reconsider what it took to succeed in school. He talked his way into the University of Colorado and eventually became a science writer, first at the Los Angeles Times and then at The New York Times, where he has closely followed new developments in the science of learning. He shares the latest findings in his new book How We Learn (Random House, $27.00). Carey recently spoke to USA TODAY education reporter Greg Toppo. This is an edited version of their conversation:
Q: You write that research "defies almost everything we've been told about how best to learn." What have we gotten wrong and how should we think about learning differently?
A: The main thing we've gotten wrong is that we all think of learning in terms of education, in terms of classroom and practice, and those things are all recent constructs. Those are good ways to learn, but there are a whole lot of other ones. All the advice we get comes straight out of the education world: You need to learn in blocks of time with isolated concentration in a quiet place, in a ritual where you block out all distractions and isolate the work from the rest of your life. That is what we have always been told. That's what we assume is true because it seems self-evident.
The science says something completely different. It says the brain is not by nature a school learner. It's a scavenging learner, a foraging learner. That's the way it has essentially evolved to learn, by pieces, on the move, picking up information as it goes along. The implications of that are huge for studying or for learning of any kind. It means that when we feel restless during practice it's not because we're not good learners, it's because that's the way the brain works. Science says that's the nature of the learning brain: It's a restless, scattered learning instrument. Of course you need to do some concentrated study, but you in fact do better when you begin to incorporate a whole bunch of other learning strategies that make learning more efficient.
Q: When we think about learning, we naturally consider remembering as good and forgetting as bad. Is that wrong?
A: We think of forgetting as this kind of thief, stalking us and waiting to rob us of our knowledge and our skills. But the truth is almost the opposite. Forgetting is the best friend of learning, in fact, for a couple of reasons. One is that a little bit of forgetting allows subsequent study or practice to double the strength of memory. In that way, forgetting is like a muscle. You go to the gym and you take a day off, then you return and you do the same exercise and you get more muscle. A little bit of forgetting allows you to build subsequent strength. Forgetting helps in another way — acting as a filter. It's what allows you to isolate and pick out facts you're looking for. If you need to find the name of an actress or the name of your second-grade teacher, the way you select those names is in part by suppressing other material that's similar. Otherwise, for example, the name "Cate Blanchett" blocks you from finding the name "Kate Winslet."
Q: What is the function of sleep in all of this?
A: A lot of us grow up thinking that falling asleep and naps can be a waste of time, a sign of weakness — here, too, the opposite is true. Sleep is learning. Sleep is downtime, but it's also a special kind of learning: learning consolidation. At some point when you become tired, your brain is telling you it's had enough study and practice, and now it's time for the sleeping brain to finish the job, to consolidate what has been learned and also to sort things by importance. Sleep does that. The second cool part of this is that different stages are specialized to handle different kinds of information. The first half of the night is retention territory. That's when the brain consolidates facts, figures, faces, foreign words, just straight memory. So you want to keep that sleep if you're preparing for, let's say, a foreign language test. If you are going to cut into sleep, take it out of the morning side, the second half.
Q: So if the first half of the night is for retention and consolidation, what does the second half do?
A: The second half contains a large dose of REM sleep, which is better for comprehension. If it's a math test, then you want to get your comprehension side of sleep. If you want to cut into sleep, cut into the first half, not the second. The second half also includes a large dose of Stage 2 sleep, which helps in motor learning. The point is, you can be tactical about how you manage your sleep depending on what you're preparing for. You do one thing if it's a French exam and you something else if it's a calculus exam or a recital.
Q: So if I'm preparing for a test on French verbs?
A: If you want to study a little extra, get up a little earlier and do it then. If you normally get up at 7 a.m., get up at 5:30 a.m. You'll get the full dose of the first half, the retention side.
Q: How could schools best use the new research on how the brain works?
A: Schools could teach this research directly. They should teach the science of learning. It's the most valuable information a kid could get and they should start teaching it in middle school, when kids really become students. Teaching the science of learning opens up all of the possibilities for how to use study time, so kids don't feel crazy or slow just because they can't learn in this sort of boilerplate way, with quiet study time and so on. That kind of work is stressful — you feel like you can't live up to the ideal. It's too hard. What's not appreciated is that there are a lot of better ways to use time. Teaching learning skills is also a great way to talk about brain science. You have, I think, a really rich course and one that kids can use. They can use this information and come up with strategies of their own. We're used to studying on hope and prayer. We do what we're told, hope we're doing it right and hope we're doing enough of it. At least with the science you can develop a plan. You can have strategies for how you study particular information. It's fun to actually use them. You're not just sort of locked in your basement with books. You're able to do a whole bunch of things to make it more interesting by studying in different ways.