welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based

tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of
neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today we are
discussing how to study and learn that is what the scientific data say is the best
way to study in order to remember information and to be able to use that
information effectively in different areas of your life so for those of you that
are still in school this could be any stage of
school today's discussion will be very useful for you however even if you are not
formally enrolled in any kind of school at the moment today's discussion will also
be extremely effective for you to be able to study and learn better information
from say the internet or podcasts or any area of your life where you are seeking to
learn and use new knowledge now one of the most important things that you're going
to learn today is that learning that is the best learning practices are not
intuitive so
before we dive in keep in mind that whatever you believe about how best to learn
for you is probably Incorrect and I confess this was humbling for me as well when I
started to dive into this literature because as somebody who was a student for many
years and in some sense still considers himself a student of science and health
information because of this podcast and certainly somebody who still teaches
University courses both to medical students and graduate students and to
undergraduate students
at Stanford I thought I understood the whole teaching and learning process but I
too learned that it is anything but intuitive in fact most of what we believe about
the best ways to study are absolutely false fortunately today you will learn the
best ways to study turns out there's a rich literature on this dating back well
over a hundred years and the data are absolutely fascinating and Incredibly
actionable it's incredibly interesting how the fields of Education the fields of
psychology and the fields of Neuroscience have now come
together to define the optimal strategies to study and learn before we begin I'd
like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching research roles at
Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer
information about science and science related tools to the general public in
keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first
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Us by betterhelp betterhelp offers Professional Therapy with a licensed therapist
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huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by waking up waking up is a
meditation app that offers hundreds of
guided meditation programs mindfulness trainings yoga NRA sessions and more I
started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old and it made a profound
impact on my life and by now there are thousands of quality reviewed studies that
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up.com huberman where you can access a free 30-day trial again that's waking up.com
huberman to access a free 30-day trial okay let's talk about how best to study and
learn and of course people have different learning styles Some people prefer to
learn by reading some people prefer to study in a group Some people prefer to
highlight some people call themselves auditory Learners other people consider
themselves visual learners but guess what when one looks at the research on
preferred learning styles pretty much all of that melts
away it turns out that the best way to study and learn is defined not by the medium
in which that material arrives whether not it's auditory or visual or combined
whether or not you review slides or a textbook or you watch small videos it turns
out that the best way to study and learn is to access components of your memory
systems that offset forgetting this is a theme I'm going to return to over and over
again throughout today's episode rather than think about studying to learn and
retain information
I want you to think about studying to offset the natural process of forgetting that
everybody experiences when they are exposed to new material of any kind cognitive
or motor learning musical learning math Etc okay so keep this in mind throughout
today's episode the best way to learn is to think about offsetting the natural
forgetting of new information you're trying to inoculate against forgetting that is
the way to remember things that is the way to gain Mastery over them and I'm going
to teach
you how to best do that using the data gleaned from the peer- reviewed literature
now before I do that I want to talk about what learning is I promise to make this
fairly brief because I've covered learning and so-called neuro plasticity before on
this podcast for those of you that have heard those discussions this will serve as
a refresher for those of you that have not heard those discussions this will be
thorough enough for you to be able to digest all the rest of today's information
neuroplasticity is this
incredible feature of your nervous system which of course includes your brain and
your spinal cord which is the ability for your nervous system to change in response
to experience so any form of learning involves neuroplasticity neuroplasticity we
sometimes hear as neural plasticity two words or neuroplasticity those are the same
thing essentially the change that underlies neuroplasticity at the level of cells
which we call neurons or nerve cells generally involves three different mechanisms
one is the strengthening of
certain connections what we call synaptic connections synapses are the location
between neurons where they communicate with one another it's actually a gap between
the neurons it is technically called the synaptic left it's a gap and within that
Gap chemicals are passed across that Gap that allow one neuron to activate other
neurons or many neurons to activate many other neurons or to inhibit the activity
of other neurons okay so one form of neuroplasticity is the strengthening of
connections between neurons another form
of neuroplasticity is the weakening of connections between neurons and yet a third
form of plasticity which is often discussed in the media but is very rare actually
in the nervous system especially the adult nervous system of humans is neurogenesis
or the addition of new neurons let's just get this out of the way up front because
the addition of new neurons again grabs so much attention in media articles but
it's responsible for a near trivial amount of the sort of neuroplasticity that is
important for today's discussion or
frankly for most all discussions it is true you have a specialized set of neurons
in your olda factory bulb that are responsible for smell as well as a specialized
set of neurons in the so-called dentate gyrus of your hippocampus an area of the
brain that's important for memory in which new neurons appear to be added
throughout the lifespan but this is not the major mechanism by which learning and
memory occurs in humans rather the major mechanism by which learning and memory
occurs in humans is the strengthening of
existing connections and the weakening of existing connections or the formation of
new connections between already EX existing neurons not new neurons okay now the
removal or weakening of connections between neurons being an important component of
neuroplasticity is very important for sake of today's discussion I want to
emphasize that when we hear about weakening of connections we often think well that
means forgetting or that means the brain is getting less good however so much of
the neuroplasticity that underlies for
instance the acquisition of a new motor skill is actually the reflection of removal
of connections so we don't want to project any kind of value onto a discussion
about adding new connections removing new connections let's just leave it at this
level mechanistically when you hear about neuroplasticity just know that it could
be the consequence of strengthening of connections as well as weakening of
connections and that neither strengthening of Connections in the nervous system nor
weakening of connections can map directly to the
formation or remove removal of say memories or information just know that these are
the important mechanisms in fact if you look at a baby that is let's say I don't
know N9 months old their motor skills are not terrific typically compared to the
motor skills that that child will have when they are six or seven years old just
look at a kid trying to eat spaghetti or something of that sort or eat anything
when they're a small baby versus a toddler versus a young child versus an
adolescent or Te You know despite the um poor table
manners of some adolescence and teens and some adults for that matter they are
still exhibiting far more precise motor movements than they did as an infant of
course and believe it or not the Improvement in motor coordination that one
observes in humans and other species for that matter from birth until the
adolescence and teen years and adult years is largely the reflection of the removal
that's right the removal of neural connections as opposed to the form of neural
connections however the neural
connections that remain become much more robust they become much more reliable okay
so that's the mechanistic backdrop for everything that we're going to talk about
today which is how to study and learn and as I mentioned earlier in my introduction
most of learning and remembering new material is about offsetting the forgetting
process that naturally occurs any time we hear new information so in keeping with
what will ultimately reveal itself to be the dominant theme of today's discussion
right now and for reasons that will
become clear later I want you to take a brief quiz now the moment people hear quiz
or test typically it spikes their adrenaline they start feeling stressed but don't
worry you're going to keep your answers to yourself and you're doing this for a
very specific purpose here's my question this is a two question quiz how many
different ways mechanistically speaking does does neuroplasticity occur is it one
mechanism two mechanisms or three mechanisms or is it four or five okay can you
name in your head two
of the three major changes that the nervous system can undergo which are reflective
of neuroplasticity okay so the answer to question was is that there are three
different modes of neuroplasticity as you recall or as you may not have been able
to recall and by the way if you were not able to recall the three different modes
of neuroplasticity or mechanisms underlying neuroplasticity that is fine as you'll
soon realize recognizing the errors in your information retention is another
critical and very useful way to retain
more information even if you got the answer wrong or you didn't know in fact
especially if you got the answer wrong or you didn't know so the three ways are the
strengthening of neural connection second the weakening of neural connections and
third through neurogenesis the addition of new neurons why did I provide this quiz
why did I test you well as you'll soon learn if you look across the total body of
research on how best to study and learn it involves doing exactly what we just did
which is to periodically stop and
test yourself on the material that you learned testing is not just a way of
evaluating what knowledge you've Acquired and which knowledge you have not managed
to acquire it also turns out to be the best tool for offsetting forgetting of any
kind and I'll go into the data that supports that statement in a moment so yes
today we're going to get a little bit meta in the sense that we're going to be
learning about optimal studying strategies and applying those as we go through this
podcast and no there will not be a test at the end
although you're welcome to give yourself a test at the end I'm going to provide you
with an excellent zeroc cost very fast tool that you can use to evaluate your
knowledge and your ability to study and learn better as a consequence of having
listened to this podcast versus had you not listened to this podcast so if ever
there was an incentive to listen to the end there it is okay let's talk about some
of the other practical aspects of studying and learning I know a lot of you out
there who want to learn
and want to come up with the best studying strategies are trying to think about how
to structure your day or how much to study or when to study let's get the most
important things out of the way first neuroplasticity and learning that is convert
converting your studying efforts into retention of knowledge is a two-step process
you probably heard about active engagement that's just a fancy set of words for
focus for really attending to the information that you're trying to learn and it is
very important
anytime you're trying to learn new information so focus goes with alertness you
can't be focused if you're not alert this is prerequisite so you need to be alert
and you need to be focused in order to pay attention to the information that you're
trying to learn in fact it is the process of being focused and attending that cues
your nervous system that something is important that something's different about
whatever sensory experience you happen to be having when you're focused and
attending whether or not it's the information
you're hearing or that you're looking at or both that cue at the level of
neurochemicals in your brain and body signals to the neurons hey you're going to
have to change you're going to have to alter your connections either make them
stronger or weaker or a combination of those things in order to make sure that your
nervous system can retain and use the information at a future time so that's step
one and of course as a part of step one most people when they hear about optimal
studying strategies they
want to know you know what should they do what should they take in order to learn
better well here's what everyone should take in order to learn better which is a
great night's sleep the night before limiting your external stress although some
stresses good because it cues up your alertness it actually allows you to remember
certain things better we'll talk about this a little bit later no one can remove
all stress from their life but we know one thing for sure your ability to be alert
and focused is going to be greater if you
slept well the night before okay so sleep is without question the best neut Tropic
right the word neut Tropic means smart drug I don't really like that term because
learning involves all sorts of things it's not just about being smart it's about
being able to attend it's about sometimes being creative flexible with ideas and
information here's the point you're going to need to get your sleep right in order
to be able to study and learn at your absolute best and I've done many episodes of
The hman Lab
podcast about sleep we have a newsletter about sleep that details in a short PDF
format the various things you can do to get your sleep optimized so to speak you
can find all that hubman lab.com by putting sleep into the search function we don't
have time to discuss that material now but get your sleep right so that you can be
alert and focused when it comes time to learn now the process of being alert and
focused on particular material that you want to learn can be enhanced by just
having a silent script
within your head silent meaning you're not saying it out loud where when you sit
down to learn you're looking at a book or you're listening to a lecture perhaps a
podcast like this you're thinking okay I need to learn this I need to learn this
you can voluntarily ramp up your level of focus and alertness by telling yourself
that information is important don't be a passive participant in learning this is
the basis of active learning by expecting the information to be so interesting that
it pulls your
level of attention and focus out of you rather learn to engage your attention and
focus voluntarily volitionally okay when we hear about ADHD attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder we know that people with ADHD can attend very rapidly they
can really pay close attention for long periods of time if they like a given topic
or a given experience or activity they have serious challenges however engaging
their attention and alertness if they are not excited about an activity or
information and so it is the Hallmark of
all good Learners to be able to voluntarily force yourself to attend and to focus
and when I say force yourself that means a constant bringing back of your mind's
attention to whatever it is you're trying to learn it is meant to feel difficult I
say meant to feel difficult because that strain that you feel that encouraging or
in some cases forcing yourself to attend sometimes even putting on a hoodie and hat
you know literally putting blinders so that you can only attend to the material
right in front of you that straining
that you feel reflects in part the release of neuromodulators like epinephrine
adrenaline in the brain and body which serve to cue the neural circuits that they
need to change at a later time okay so the strength that you feel in trying to
learn the strain that you feel in forcing yourself to learn how to focus that is
good that's a c-tier nervous system that it's going to need to change that
neuroplasticity needs to take place think about it if you didn't feel that strain
and you were able to perform whatever it is that you
were doing or remember whatever information it is that you're being exposed to
seamlessly well then your nervous system wouldn't have to change because it already
has the capabilities within the neural circuits so that strain that you feel that
agitation is great that's a cue that you are learning or that you set the learning
process in motion now it's also the case that some people don't have great levels
of focus and attention and there are of course pharmacologic tools I would
encourage anyone that has clinically diagnosed
ADHD to talk to their doctor about whether or not they should use prescription meds
and or other methods great sleep is always going to be an important substrate for
attention and focus for anybody but especially for people with ADHD I highly
encourage anyone that's interested in enhancing their levels of focus and attention
to also consider the non-pharmacologic approaches so this is irrespective of
whether or not you need pharmacologic approaches yes being well hydrated yes the
appropriate amount of
caffeine for you that allows you to be alert but not you know shaking and agitated
can be very useful however the scientific data also support the fact that doing a
brief say five to 10 minute mindfulness meditation each day these are the data from
Wendy Suzuki's laboratory at New York University showing that people who do a 10-
minute meditation per day where they simply sit or lie down close their eyes focus
on their breathing their attention invariably drifts they bring their attention
back to their breathing people
who do that on a regular basis improve their level of focus they improve their
memory and recall ability and of course there are a bunch of other positive effects
of that simple zeroc cost tool of mindfulness meditation so if you're interested in
improving your levels of focus and attention for sake of learning I highly
encourage you to explore the Oho valuable tool of mindfulness meditation just five
or 10 minutes per day done on a regular basis you miss a day no big deal just get
right back to it the next
day does it matter if you do it morning afternoon or night no some people find that
doing it too late at night might disrupt their sleep but if you think about
meditation of the sort that I just described as a perceptual exercise maybe you
don't even call it meditation you're just teaching yourself to focus you could even
do it with Eyes Open by focusing on a visual Target allowing yourself to Blink
there are good data on this sort of approach as well and then just making sure that
your visual attention and cognitive
attention comes back to that visual Target over and over again it's a deliberate
process of bringing your attention back to a particular location that is very
valuable for improving your levels of focus in fact it is known to create
significant improvements in your ability to focus which is critical for your
ability to study and learn so I know that many people are interested in what to
take what to do at the level of kind of um esoteric practices or things to buy
there is stuff out there again I
mentioned hydration caffeine great sleep and so on but the simple practice of
mindfulness meditation or just what I describe as a focusing perceptual exercise of
bringing your attention back to the same location over and over again deliberately
will train you to train your nervous system to bring your attention back to
whatever it is you're trying to learn now I've done other podcasts about how to
focus about attention specifically and ADHD again you can find all of those at
hubman lab.com simply put ADHD or Focus or
tools for focus into the search function and it will take you to the exact
timestamps in those episodes that are relevant right now however I want to talk
about the second part of neuroplastic which is that the actual changes in the
nervous system the strengthening and weakening predominantly of connections between
neurons that underly learning do not occur during the focusing and learning or
rather the exposure to the material but instead during deep sleep and sleep-like
states and again I've done a lot of podcasts and talked a lot
about tools for getting better sleep but I just want to remind everybody that the
actual reordering of the connections the strengthening of connections between
neurons that underly learning the weakening of those connections occurs during
sleep in particular during rapid eye movement sleep which tends to predominate in
the latter half of the night so make sure that you're getting enough sleep for you
for some people it's 6 hours for some people it's eight hours and yes there is
something called
the first night effect the first night effect is the experimentally observed
phenomenon whereby information that you learn on a given day is mostly Consolidated
during the night's sleep that you have on that first night after the learning
occurs does this mean that if you get a poor night's sleep on the first night after
learning something that you are forever going to forget that information that it
cannot be Consolidated into your neural circuits no however it's very clear that
the first night after learning you want to
get the best sleep possible so if you're learning BS you're studying is going late
into the night and you're drinking a lot of caffeine be mindful that the sleep that
you get after drinking that caffeine late into the day the all nighters that you're
pulling those are not serving you're learning well so you need to structure your
life as a student of any kind so that you can get focus and attention to what it is
you want to learn and you can get sleep to the best of your ability and of course
people who
are raising young kids or who have stress in their lives for whatever reason
perhaps won't be able to optimize their sleep on that first night or even
subsequent nights but do your best to get your sleep right it's the single best
thing you can do for your mental health for your physical health and for Learning
and performance of any kind and it's really worth the effort Now with an
understanding of the mechanisms the focus and alertness and the Sleep phase of
neuroplasticity what are some other
things that you can do to enhance whatever studying and learning you've obtained I
already talked about a tool a behavioral tool for enhancing Focus what about a
behavioral tool for enhancing plasticity if your sleep is great or especially if
your sleep isn't great and there I highly recommend you explore non-sleep deep rest
or nsdr there's a script for this in the show note captions nsdr sometimes referred
to as Yoga Nidra although those things are similar but different is a 10 or 20
minute practice that you can do to
restore your mental and physical Vigor if you haven't slept enough so you could do
it first thing in the morning when you wake up if you feel you haven't slept enough
you can do it in the afternoon you can do it in the middle of the night if you're
not able to sleep and offset some of the Sleep loss that you otherwise would have
experienced nsdr is a very powerful tool in order to enhance neuroplasticity and
I'll talk more about this in a future episode there's a lot of exciting data coming
out about nsdr
and yoga Nitra but if you're sleeping well and even if you aren't I highly
encourage you to incorporate a 10 or 20 minute nsdr into your schedule someplace
again where you place it in your schedule isn't as important as the fact that you
do it in order to enhance neuroplasticity that is the reordering of connections
between neurons to serve the studying and learning that you're doing now let's talk
about how the best students structure their days turns out there are great studies
on this there's
a really nice paper in fact that surveyed close to 700 students these were medical
students approximately equal number of male and female students and analyze the
most useful learning habits that is the learning habits associated with the most
successful students now anytime you do a study like this where people take surveys
there's always the issue of causality in fact we can pretty much set aside any
possible causality for instance I'm about to tell you that the very best performing
students tend to study for about three
or four hours per day but you could easily say Well they're the best students
because they study three or four hours per day they don't study three or four hours
per day because they're the best students and you'd be exactly right okay we can
get into all sorts of discussions about correlation versus causation about reverse
causality and on and on however none of that is the point here the point here is to
establish what are the habits that the most successful students seem to incorporate
over and over again
regardless of what classes they're taking regardless of where they are in their Arc
of their learning trajectory and so what we know based on this study and I'll
provide a link to it in the show note captions is that there are at least 10 study
habits that the highly effective students use I'm going to focus on the top five or
six just for sake of time because it turns out that most of the effect it appears
of being a better student can be attributed to these top five or six habits first
of all they set aside time
to study they literally schedule time to study now this probably serves several
roles the first one is that they are able to clear out other distractions and in
fact that's the second thing that they do they are very effective or they make it a
point of putting their phone away and off of isolating themselves that's right
they're not studying with other people they study alone which is not to say that
people who study with others cannot be effective in their studying but the best
performing students seem to study alone they put
their phone away they tell their friends and families that they are not going to be
able to be reached during that time and yes they study for three or four hours per
day but they break that up into a couple of different sessions typically two or
three sessions so they're not doing a three or four hours studying about all in one
shot so they're managing their time they're eliminating distractions and they're
studying for a consistent amount of time at least 5 days per week okay presumably
they're taking some weekends
off although that wasn't made clear from this paper the other thing that they do
and this is very important is that they make an effort to then teach their peers to
teach other students in the class now some of you may be thinking and I'm thinking
back to college here mostly that if you spend all this time learning the
information and you are in a competitive scenario with the other students that
teaching them the information is kind of kind of a freebie for them and it's harder
for you meaning
you're putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage or you're giving them an
unfair Advantage for not having done the work now while this paper didn't do an
analysis of whether or not these students that served as the Learners from the
other students got an unfair Advantage it's very clear that students who make it a
point to learn material in isolation then bring that material to other students in
the same course and teach them perform exceedingly well in comparison to the other
students so don't be afraid to be a teacher of your
peers in order to test this is key to test and develop Mastery of the material now
in my laboratory for years we used to have a saying which I simply picked up from
the Laboratories I was trained in I didn't come up with a saying which was watch
one do one teach one and that was referring to doing surgeries or suturing or doing
an antibody reaction or a western blood or things that you do in Laboratories watch
one do one teach one watch one do one teach one of course should be reserved to
anything where no
one's going to be put in danger by the watch one do one teach one procedure right
some procedures especially in Laboratories can be dangerous given the materials you
use Etc and of course today we're talking about learning and studying generally so
provided it safe watch one do one teach one is an excellent means to learn that is
to study new material to develop proficiency and even Mastery and over time perhaps
even virtuosity we'll return to that later those distinctions so going back to this
idea that the best
students set aside time they designate time to study alone without distractions
that is sure to help them anchor their focus and attention they know that they're
going to need to use their focus and attention during that time and we know with
absolute certainty that focus and attention are a limited but renewable resource in
the human brain the longer you're awake the more is the buildup of a molecule
called adenosine in your brain and body it makes you sleep sley makes it harder to
focus when you sleep adenosine levels are pushed
down again you're able to focus again you feel more alert you can think of
adenosine as limiting your attentional budget which is not to say that some people
don't study best in the afternoon or in the evening or even late at night right I
recall times during University when I'd study between the hours of 10 p.m. and 2:
a.m. I don't do that any longer but scheduling time where you know you're going to
need to be focused and attending is perhaps one of the most important things toward
being able to
focus and attend to the material now if you're taking courses you probably are
going to be a slave to the timing of the courses you aren't going to be able to
tell the instructor okay listen I want you to do this course at you know 3 p.m.
because that's when you learn best or at 8: a.m. because that's when you happen to
be able to attend best however to the extent that you have any control over the
time in which you're going to study keeping that at a regular time or times perhaps
one block early in the day one
block later in the day perhaps two blocks early in the day and so on is going to be
beneficial it turns out that's also supported by the research literature that the
brain just like with its sleep wake cycles that entrain to a regular schedule that
is your brain and body get used to being active and inactive at particular times
based on your exposure to sunlight your exposure to activities your social rhythms
Etc if you regularly meaning for the course of about three days make it a point to
focus and study at particular times
again pulling your attention back it's not an automatic process but pulling your
attention back to a specific location perhaps on a page or that you're listening to
in a lecture your body and brain will start to entrain to that Rhythm such that you
will be able to focus and attend better simply by virtue of the regularity of the
timing of the exposure to the material okay so you probably need about two or three
days to break into a regular schedule of focusing and attending and studying at a
given time or times allow yourself that
transition period but then make it a point to schedule those times to study set
aside your phone tell people you're going offline turn off the Wi-Fi if you need to
or have to you may need it for your studying I don't know depends on what you're
studying but limit distractions at all costs and learn to just focus on the
material and this is a skill this is the most important thing to understand it's a
skill to be able to focus and study and it's a skill that you can learn very
quickly especially if
you schedule it for regular times and you give yourself two or three days in which
to adapt to those schedules and times and then try and stick to them as regularly
as possible perhaps even on the weekends if you're approaching you know the end of
the quarter or semester perhaps even on the weekend even if you're not in the
quarter or semester keeping those regular times will entrain your nervous system to
study and learn at its best at those particular times I'd like to take a quick
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special offer before I move into specific ways to study in order to maximally
offset forgetting notice I didn't say in order to learn but rather to maximally
offset forgetting AKA learning stably learning material there's one other point
that I wanted to pass along from this uh really nice study on the study habits of
highly effective medical students that I've
been referring to and that is when one examined or these people were asked about
their motivation for studying the best performing students had an interesting
answer they had a very long-term understanding of how or belief rather about how
their success in medical school would impact their family how it would impact their
life Arc how it would change them and they weren't particular about the ways in
which it would change them or their family in fact it was a rather broad abstract
aspirational way of thinking about their
study efforts so what I like so much about this paper is that you know in addition
to having a fairly large sample size close to 700 students that were evaluated and
yes it's purely uh you know self-report and this kind of thing nonetheless it
Bridges the two extremes of studying and learning you know it gets right down into
the nitty-gritty of how long they study when they study the things they do to limit
distraction that we just discussed but it also gets to their underlying
psychological motivations and the thing that they use
in order to pull them forward through their study efforts perhaps especially when
their desire is waning or their uh level of fatigue is increasing I don't know that
I'm speculating here but this is this aspirational component of going to medical
school which it turns out in the country in which the study was done um only very
very select few of the very best students are able to achieve that they have to
learn the in a different language altogether which is incredible I always Marvel at
that you
know I have friends that did their PHD thesis in Italy they're Italian by birth
they now happen to run a laboratory in Italy and they had to do their PHD training
and write papers and give their thesis dissertation and defense in English even
though English was their second language so talk about a challenge and um that's
just one example that I can think of there are many examples of that these students
students that I'm referring to in this study are not necessarily constantly
thinking about how their efforts will transform
themselves and their families but they certainly were able to report what it was
specifically that they are seeking what they're aspiring to besides just trying to
do as well as they can getting into and through medical school so the high level
aspirational stuff within you whatever that is for you it's going to be highly
individual is certainly important and it offers a bookend to the nuts and bolts
kind of stuff that you're going to do I would hope in order to best study and learn
the specific material so the
specific actions that you're going to take each day to learn specific bits of
information that will pull you toward those important aspirations and now again if
you love the material you're learning this aspirational component is probably not
as important right I can recall during University and graduate school and so on
thinking oh my goodness this is like the coolest thing I've ever heard probably say
that about a million different topics like oh my goodness circadian rhythms
seasonal rhythms
melatonin neural circuits dopamine I was just a wash with excitement about what I
was learning but of course sometimes I would take a course where the material was I
don't know if it was more challenging or not but I had a harder time getting
engaged by the material either by virtue of how it was being taught to me or the
material itself so the ability to attach to some aspirational goal to pull you
through can be very valuable you're not going to love every topic you have to learn
however I will say that at least
in my experience some of the courses that I look back on most fondly are the
courses that I struggled with the most and in fact that's the basis of the next and
easily one of the most important studying tools so a key theme in all of the
excellent literature that is the peer- reviewed research on how best to study is
that studying that feels challenging is the most effective I know nobody wants to
hear this everyone wants to hear about flow everybody wants to hear about
information just sinking into
their brain by osmosis I think it was a Garfield cartoon where he talked about
learning by osmosis there's this very cute real world video of a kid in a classroom
uh I believe uh it's in China where he's taking the book and he puts it on his head
maybe I can find this clip and he's just kind of like trying to wash it into his
brain it's super cute clip but guess what that doesn't work I mean it works to put
the book on your head it doesn't work to it's not going to get the information into
your
brain uh perhaps someday there will be ways to rapidly download information into
neural circuits right now we know we've known for hundreds of not thousands of
years that effort is the Cornerstone of learning so I know there probably some gron
about that I know some of you perhaps were hoping that today I was going to tell
you how to study so that studying wasn't painful I think I can accomplish that by
the end of today's episode but in order to do that let's take another quiz okay so
here's the quiz again you can answer
these questions in your head you don't have to tell anyone but you could write them
down or say them out loud if you want the first question is when during either your
states of alertness or sleep does the remodeling of neural connections occur I like
to think this is a pretty easy one okay the answer is during sleep the second
question is what is one behavioral tool that you can use to improve focus the
answer is simple mindfulness meditation which I'd prefer you think of Simply as a
perceptual exercise so again
just sit or lie down close your eyes focus on your breath when your attention
drifts bring your attention back to your breath and so on or if you prefer you can
do this Eyes Open by focusing on a visual Target either a foot or two feet or 3 ft
away whatever distance is comfortable for you allowing yourself to Blink as needed
but forcing yourself to focus on that visual Target for say 1 to 3 minutes maybe
even 3 to 5 minutes maybe even 10 minutes again please blink you don't want your
eyes to dry both
those tools will improve your ability to attend to focus to other material when the
time comes okay the circuits for focus and attention themselves are subject to
neuroplasticity and then the third question is can you name or List off in your
mind three tools that the most effective students have been shown to use I can
think of limiting distraction by virtue of putting away phones and telling others
you won't be in contact with them two and I'm getting these out of order I realize
is to isolate to study alone and
the third that I can recall is to teach others in the same course okay you can
probably think of a few others now why are we taking these silly little quizzes
Well turns out they're not so silly when one considers that hopefully you'll
remember the information from today so that you don't have to listen to it over and
over again but that if ever there was a strongly research supported tool in the
literature in the peer-reviewed literature about how students can learn information
better it's testing and I
know I know I know we think of tests as a way to evaluate our knowledge but it
turns out that testing is one of the best ways to build our knowledge to retain our
knowledge and again to offset forgetting now the study of testing as a learning
tool not just as a way to evaluate how much information we've learned goes back
over a hundred years there's a classic study that was done in 1917 where grade
school age children read biographies so they read biographies and then the kids
were divided into different groups one group
read and reread and reread those biographies over and over another group read the
biographies once and then were tested on those biographies but get this they tested
themselves on those biographies simply by having to think about the information
that they had read and trying to remember the information like what was the
biography who was the person who are they married to what did they do when did they
go to school what did they do in school what did they do in the world what role did
they play in
life so they essentially tested their own knowledge simply by going into their own
head and asking themselves what they could remember about those biographies now
keep in mind here that even though it's fairly apparent that reading a biography to
three four times might seem more passive than testing oneself on a biography that
they had read just once right you could imagine that thinking about the biography
involves more effort and indeed it does but keep in mind also that the kids in the
second
group were only exposed to the biography once and yet when you look at the percent
of accurate recall of information from those biographies the children that read the
biography once and then made a deliberate point to think about that biography in
their own mind to effectively test themselves on that material just within their
heads over and over but an equal number of times as the kids that read the
biographies directly on a page over and over vastly outperformed the kids that read
the biographies over and over put
differently reading and rereading material and re re rereading material is far less
effective than reading material and then thinking about that material testing
yourself on that material forcing yourself to bring that material to mind in your
own mind and this is not just for sake of remembering more volume of material but
also accuracy of recall of that material and that at least to me was pretty
surprising at first until one starts to explore subsequent studies of the role of
testing as a learning tool
and then you start to realize that testing yourself is Far and Away the best tool
for studying and learning not just for evaluating your knowledge but for actually
studying and incorporating that knowledge into your neural circuits okay so I
realize that anytime I or somebody else talks about a study that was done in 19 17
we think of people in these you know like wooden shoes and um in these School
houses that look so different and uh kids dress so different let's get a little
more modern here um
keep in mind however that the nervous system hasn't really changed much in tens of
thousands of years um nonetheless I think it's nice to think about a more recent
study of how best to study and this study which by the way we'll provide a link to
in the show note captions as well as a couple of reviews that include results from
similar studies again I'm pointing to a body of research not just one study here
looked at whether or not studying material four times so study study study study
was better in terms of locking
that information into people's minds allowing them to use that information flexibly
which is an element of creativity essentially giving the Mastery of the material
then a different Group which studied once studied the material twice studied the
material three times then was tested on the material or a third group that studied
material once then took one two yes three tests on the material now so what I just
described was three groups all of whom read a passage this was a passage about
animals about biology some other
topics too in different experiments again three groups one group studies four times
they study the material 1 2 3 four times then later they take a test the second
group studies one two three times takes a test on that material and then later
takes a test the third group studies the material once then takes three tests on
the material and then later takes a test so what's analyzed and compared between
these different groups is their performance on that final test okay what I put in
as the fifth bin there right because it was
think about it as ssss so study study study study and then later test or SSS T
study study study test and then later test or sttt study test test test and then
later test so what's compared and contrasted is performance on the test some period
of time later now some experiments made that final test of the material a couple
days later other experiments made it a couple weeks later other experiments made it
much later month or even a year later okay the point here is twofold first of all
based on everything I've told you
thus far you can probably guess who performed best on the test that occurred some
period of time later okay right the performance on that final test was essentially
proportional to the number ofest one had already taken on the material okay that
should be pretty much obvious given the way we've been going today in this
description of tests as a way to offset forgetting okay so the more tests that you
take as a way to expose you yourself to the material the better you're going to
perform on that material at some later
point now of course at some point you have to be exposed to the material for the
first time right that's why it's studying and learning but after one exposure to
new material taking more tests on that material even if you don't perform that well
on those tests as long as you're able to see the accurate answers to those tests
and compare your answers to those answers will lead to better performance on the
ultimate test and retention of that material at some later time put differently
it's not about how many times you study the
material or how many times you're exposed to the material it's about being exposed
to the material doing your best to focus and attend to that material and then self-
testing yourself on that material or as the case may be if an an instructor is the
one giving you the test but nonetheless taking tests on that material not just once
but ideally two or three times that's what really locks the material into your
neural circuits that's what's going to lead to the most pervasive change the most
durable change we should say in your
neural circuits that carry that material that hold that material in your mind what
we call Neural encoding okay so the the more times you test yourself or that you
are tested on material the better your retention of that material now some people
will immediately say well goodness what if I learned it and then I'm tested and I'm
somehow consolidating the wrong or inaccurate material but it doesn't appear to be
the case as long as you learn what the correct answers to the tests are even if
you're getting you
know 40 or 50% or less accurate on those tests that you take immediately after the
studying period that's still going to be a better strategy than rereading the
material which ought to be somewhat surprising it certainly was surprising to me
but you know what's even more surprising and a little scary and that we all should
know and I wish I had learned when I was like in the second grade is that if you
ask students how confident are you in the material that you just learned how well
do you think you would perform on a test
what you see consistently in these studies I'm chuckling because it's kind of
mindblowing is that the students who study the the material that is who were
exposed to the material four times think that they are going to perform best on the
ultimate exam however the students that study the material once and then are tested
three times on that material they think that ultimately they're going to perform
least well for instance they ask them their confidence how well do you think he
would perform on a test of this material in two weeks
or in a year or in six months or even tomorrow they report that is the students in
the study test test test group report much lower confidence in the material much
lower sense of Mastery of the material compared to the students that were exposed
to the material four times who are saying yeah I think I would do pretty well or
very well and guess what the exact opposite is true put differently when you're
exposed to material over and over and over again you think you've learned the
material in fact your confidence that you've learned
the material increases with each subsequent exposure to the material but actually
you haven't learned it at all compared to the people that are exposed to the
material and then take tests on the material often times straining to get the
answers right on those tests in fact sometimes getting those answers dead wrong and
then realizing they get those answers dead wrong or sometimes they just sense it
but guess what testing yourself once twice maybe three times prior to the ultimate
test of your knowledge of that material is Far and
Away the best way to lock that material into those neural circuits now I say I wish
I had learned this when I was a student because to some extent I used a self-
testing approach the one most Salan example of that is I took a course when I was
in college I still remember it was bioscience's 169 L neuroanatomy laboratory
taught by Ben ree he's still there I believe and he was known then and I'm sure
still now if he's still teaching as extremely challenging Professor extremely
challenging not as a
person not as personality but a ton of detail and rigor and high high high
expectation for this laboratory course in neuroanatomy which involved lectures it
involved a neuroanatomy textbook where you'd look at you know essentially panels of
different brain sections from different species different types of stains of
different brain tissue mind you this is an undergraduate course and then there was
a laboratory component hence the L in 169 L where you'd have to go from microscope
station to microscope
station identifying structures based simply on what you could see down the
microscope and therefore you had to know what the stain was you know what was
essentially visible to you on the slide because certain stains reveal certain
things like the what we call the cell body of neurons versus the um the sort of
wires what we call the axons between neurons etc etc I remember thinking this is a
really hard course it was a very difficult course and my mode of studying for the
course involved of course going
to class doing the dissection we dissected a sheep brain at that time um so we're
literally dissecting an actual brain we're doing microscope work we're learning
about it from the textbook and from lecture and there was a ton of new nomenclature
about rostral codal dorsal vent all the stuff of neuron anatomy and then at some
point I made the decision perhaps on the basis of sheer overwhelm to study for
neuron Anatomy by laying down on my bed in my studio apartment I lived alone and
closing my eyes and
flying through the nervous system from different entry points through the ear
review my coar anatomy through the eye review my retinal Anatomy through the dorsal
surface of the brain think about the susai and gyri and then the Corpus colossum
and then I got and and I can still see it in my mind's eye so my process of
studying for neuroanatomy yes involved exposure to the material but it involved
hours upon hours of thinking about the material within my own brain so it's a
little bit meta unto itself
there as a consequence I like to think in fact I believe um with some confidence
that I have uh very high Mastery of neuroanatomy in different species as well now
that's my particular area of expertise I don't think I'm any kind of savant with
respect to neuro Anatomy I just spent hours upon hours learning the material and
then reviewing the material within my mind so in other words testing myself here's
what I would do if I were moving down a trajectory of a of a neural tract for
instance between
say the the hippocampus and a neighboring structure and I didn't know what was next
I would then go look it up in the textbook and then I'd go back to this you know
mental exercise visualization type studying it really wasn't studying is the point
the point is that I was testing myself I was trying to find the points in which I
no longer had the knowledge to move further through in this case my mental image of
the brain but through the material and this is the key aspect of testing it's not
about just knowing how many things
you get right how many things you get wrong it's about recognizing exactly what you
know and don't know and an important component of testing is running up against
those things where you say h i can't remember I don't know what comes next or I'm
certain that that structure is the fimbria and then you go and you look and you go
it's not the fima but guess what I'll never forget for instance the location of the
habenula or what it looks like a structure which by the way since these names are
kind of uh esoteric at that
time we didn't know what it does it turns out it's involved in disappointment it's
key to the depression circuits or the circuits that underly depression in some
individuals it is um suppressed by viewing of morning sunlight we know that too and
by getting too much artificial light exposure in the middle of the night you
enhance activity of the habenula beautiful work not done by my laboratory but other
Laboratories demonstrates that so what I just did for you there was hopefully teach
you a little something
about neuron anatomy and depression but more importantly to just illustrate that
how you test yourself can be highly individual to the ways in which you learn best
now that contradicts what I said earlier which is that this notion that people have
different learning styles and you know some people are verbal Learners and some
people are auditory Learners and Etc doesn't really hold up so well anymore but
which by the way is not to say there isn't any research to support it it's just
that it's heavily contradicted by other
research that contradicts that idea but your approach your mode of best testing
yourself on material for sake of offsetting the forgetting process and for
identifying where you have gaps in your knowledge or where you thought you knew
something but you don't or you knew something but it's wrong that can be
accomplished through the approach that's best for you which in my case turned out
to be lying down and thinking about the material in my head head and still to this
day when I read a paper I try I
don't always do this but what I try to do is then take a walk in my yard or outside
and I try and think about the key components of that paper and think about some of
the graphs that are especially important which is what I'm going to do now I'd like
to take a brief break to thank one of our sponsors element element is an
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element.com huberman to claim a free sample pack okay so I like to think that we're
establishing that testing yourself or testing your students or being tested by your
teacher is the best way to offset forgetting let's look at the literature that
actually supports that statement directly because in the previous experiment I
described it was either study study study study or study study study test or study
test test test and then later everybody takes a test at the same time a variant on
that was done
where they had one group of students study material so this is new material and
when I say study I mean they were exposed to the material for the first time and I
realize this is a little bit of a problem because we're using the word study when
in fact I'm trying to make the point that testing yourself is studying okay so uh
forgive me but this is the way it's mapped out in these experiments in these papers
should you look them up in our show note captions one group is exposed to the
material what we're call studying and
then takes a test immediately after they are told what they got right what they got
wrong on that test and what the correct answers are and then sometime later after a
delay they take a test of the same material another group studies that is they're
exposed to the material then there's a delay okay that delay could be days it could
be weeks this experiment has been done every which way it seems by now then they're
tested and then there's another delay and then they take a test at the same time
that group
one did okay so again it's study test long delay test for group one or study delay
test delay test for group two remember the final test is taken at the same time by
everybody or group three study that is they're exposed to the material then a long
long long long long delay then a test and then the ultimate test okay the test that
everybody takes at the same time can you guess which group performed best and the
essence of this experiment if you're listening to this and it's not clear in your
mind is
you're either expose to the material and test it very soon after and then take a
test after a delay say a week or two weeks later or you're exposed the material
there's a delay of a few days then you take a test and then another few days and
then you take a test so it's more evenly spaced or if you were assigned to the
third group you'd study you're not going to see the material or be tested on it
until a day or two before the big test then you're tested on it you get your
answers back and then
you're tested on it again you could imagine that the last group might perform best
because they're reexposed to the material they're told what the correct answers are
so they know what they got wrong they know what they got right and then the next
day they're taking the test again I would have thought that group would perform
best but it turns out the opposite is true it's pretty wild the best performance
comes from being exposed to material what in this experiment they're called
studying okay so they read a passage or
they learn some math material or language material or music material or motor
learning then they take a test very soon after even same day or next day and then
there's a long delay and then they take the test that group performs best put
differently test yourself very soon if not the same day certainly the next day or
so very soon after being exposed to material for the first time as opposed to the
last group which performs worst they perform worse being exposed to material then
there's a long period of
time then you're tested on that material you are told what you got right what you
got wrong and then the next day you take a test again even with overlapping
questions to the test you took just the day before and that group performs worst
and the group that studied had a gap test that had a gap test they performed
somewhere in the middle what does this tell us what it tells us is so important
Visa neuroplasticity Vis of V best learning strategies this is something that
goodness I wish I had learned when
I was in graduate school when I was an undergraduate when I was in high school and
Elementary School goodness even when I was in kindergarten I wish IID learned this
test yourself on the material that you were just exposed to very soon after your
first exposure to it because that offsets the natural forgetting of new material
that the brain is exposed to this is absolutely the Hallmark of all the impressive
data about testing as a tool for learning testing oneself or your students or being
tested if you're the student by
your teacher as a tool not just for evaluating performance for knowing what you
know and don't know but for consolidating that information in your neural circuits
and when I say consolidating that information in your neural circuits I realize
it's a mouthful what we know is that this business of putting the testing soon
after exposure to new material is about offsetting the forgetting of that material
so you might say wait if that's true how come studying the material and then
waiting and then then taking two
tests right back to back where you're learning the material again during the test
that should be the best performing group ah well there seems to be something
fundamentally different about first exposure to material versus testing yourself on
that material and we don't know exactly what that is there's some interesting
neural Imaging data in humans that this has to do something with this notion of
familiarity with material this is very simple so this is easy to understand even
though it involves a little bit of memory
Neuroscience nomenclature familiarity with something recognizing it is not the same
thing as having agility with that thing of having Mastery of that thing is not the
same thing as having Mastery of the material of having committed it to memory okay
so when you read something over and over and over you see it over and over you hear
it over and over you think about it over and over of course you're reading it or
you're hearing about it and you think that you're learning the material that your
neural circuits are changing
but it's a pretty passive process or even if it's a difficult chapter to read or a
difficult passage of Music the difference is when you're tested on material
something happens in your performance of or recalling of if it's just you know
cognitive or you're writing it down or you're told to play the the music or do the
the motor movement something happens in the error the getting wrong of certain
things that cues your nervous system to lock in the information that you have right
and to remember what you have wrong so that you
then correct it which is Far and Away different than exposure and reexposure and
reexposure okay so it's a prerequisite to learning that you need to see the
material for the first time you can't just start testing yourself on material
you've never been exposed to I suppose you could but you're going to get it I would
imagine mostly wrong or all wrong but this business of using testing very soon
after first exposure to material as a tool to study in order to offset forgetting
is clearly tapping into this difference between
familiarity with something for which we know certain brain areas are activated
versus recollection being able to take that material and bring it to memory bring
it to your focused attention and use that material I realize this is a bit abstract
and some of this is still being parsed if you're interested in the Neuroscience of
familiarity with something versus your ability to actually recall something and
have Mastery of that material there's a really nice review that I provide a link to
in the show note
caption it's published in the journal hippocampus I always chuckle at the fact that
there's a journal that named after a brain structure after all as far as I know
there isn't a journal called retina or amydala um and I have a brief anecdote from
graduate school whereby I learned that there was this journal hippocampus and I was
at a graduate it was my first graduate student gathering in graduate school and the
guy who hosted it um turns out is AUM AR in the field of learning and memory and I
was
saying you know this is ridiculous like there's a journal called hippocampus here I
am first year graduate student he goes yeah there is and I said yeah that's so
silly like who are the who are the like who are the idiots that name a journal
after a brain structure turns out there's also a journal called cerebral cortex and
there's probably one about spinal cord so it turns out I I was the idiot saying
this and the guy I was talking to who of course was the host of the party said yeah
actually uh
that's my journal I founded the journal hippoc campus so you can look them up so at
this Point you're going to take a test and it's a super easy test okay I realize
we're a bit into the material and we're all probably fatiguing a little bit
marveling I hope at what an incredible tool testing and in particular self- testing
soon after being exposed to new material is and the question is this and by the way
this is an open-ended question you're not supposed to know the answer because I
haven't told you the answer yet but I
want you to think about this if one looks at the majority of data in this whole
field of testing as a studying tool how much improvement do you think you get from
testing yourself once on new material do you think it's a you know 10% Improvement
a 20% Improvement so here I'm just comparing to testing yourself once on material
that you were just exposed to For the First Time versus not testing yourself at all
okay how how much do you think you improve the answer is about 50% 5 zero and I can
say that on the basis of the fact
that in studies of musical learning of mathematical learning of language learning
of motor learning when subjects are exposed to new material and then tested at some
period of time later the percentage of information they get right or that they are
able to perform something correctly diminishes over time especially because they're
not doing any practice and no testing in the intervening time this was built into
these experiments and then you simply ask how much of the material was forgotten if
they just were exposed to
the material so in the case of say music learning this would be you know your
teacher sits down next to you and shows you the scales on the piano but then you're
not practicing them in between versus um or perhaps another example would be
somebody gives you a lecture about a particular phase in history and then you're
not being exposed to the material again and you're not self- testing versus if you
just take one test even a self-directed test of the material immediately after
irrespective of how well you perform you have the
amount of forgetting okay I want you to think about self testing in this way
because we're thinking about optimal studying strategies you have the amount of
forgetting that would normally occur this is oh so important in fact I don't even
know that most neuroscientists think about learning and neuroplasticity this way
most everybody including neuroscientists are taught we taught continue to be taught
that you're exposed to new material you focus okay then during sleep there's
remodeling of the connections all that's true but we
really need to think about how most information that comes into our nervous system
each day is forgotten most of it is completely discarded there are some rare
clinical deficits where people remember everything and I'll tell you these people
really struggle in life they do not do well in work in relationships they remember
every little detail of everything and it is incredibly disruptive to their quality
of life it's nothing you want you want to have a great memory for the right things
so when you self test material
you have the amount of forgetting that occurs compared to if you're just exposed to
the material I want you to keep that fact in mind because that fact is the one that
really hit me upside the head and made me realize goodness gracious how I wish that
I'd self- tested myself on material that I wanted to remember over time rather than
reading it over and over I had this elaborate process for studying that I used all
through college and graduate school and it worked pretty well for me where I'd read
and highlight then I'd
write out my notes then I would write little paragraphs about that stuff now some
of that probably mimicked self- testing indeed it had to have and then of course I
would take the quizzes and I would go to office hours you know once I got serious
about school I got really serious about school and of course I still forget things
I've made errors on this podcast before apart from going too fast or making a joke
that people didn't perceive as a joke a whole story there but in any case of course
I make errors
of course I've forgotten certain things and sometimes I misspeak I always strive to
get things accurately we correct things in the show note captions if they're called
out to us we're now using AI to review the podcast and adjust anywhere using
insertion so actually replacing those words if we need to and so on and so forth
but yes we all forget things we all make errors but if I had just known that
testing myself on material while walking out of class or soon after getting home or
later that evening or the next day would allow me
to perform so much better on an exam a midterm or a final exam and of course I
still would have studied because I was committed and you should still study as much
as you feel is necessary to get Mastery of the material for you however if I had
known that testing oneself or being tested soon after exposure to material would
have the amount of forgetting even out to a year later I definitely would have
saved myself a lot of time let's talk about some specifics of ways that you can
self test or if you're a teacher or if you
have good dialogue with your teacher and they are open-minded perhaps they are open
to hearing about what are the best forms of testing oneself as a tool for learning
the best tests are open-ended short answer very minimal prompt tests not unlike the
type that we've taken today during this podcast as compared to multiple choice
tests multiple choice questions allow for familiarity of names of facts you know
it's going to be a b c d and sometimes e is you know A and C and so on and so forth
and within each
of those a b CDE e answers and you're looking for the right answer you're looking
for the familiarity the recognition of something yes this not that okay that's the
best answer you Circle C okay this kind of thing as opposed to an open-ended
question where you have to write out your answer you have to recall the information
right it requires a much greater degree of Mastery of the information than does
familiarity or recognition of the material so the best tests as study tools are
going to be open-ended short
answer questions or even long answer questions now there's one exception to this
which are multiple choice tests that include tricks okay if you've ever taken the
GRE the graduate school entrance exam or the elsat or the MCAT there are some
questions in there that are very straightforward but in those standardized tests
they tend to include some quote unquote trick questions in which those questions
don't allow you to just recognize the correct answer and distinguish it from the
other incorrect
answers but rather they have answers in there that on first blush look like the
right answer and people have a tendency to Circle those and move on or to select
those and move on but if you think about the material a little more deeply turns
out those quote unquote obvious answers are actually the incorrect answers so there
are versions of multiple choice tests where it requires a greater degree of Mastery
of the material where simple familiarity won't serve you and you actually have to
be able to recall the
different components of information leading into that but those are a bit more rare
certainly in the context of other kinds of learning like musical learning although
I suppose for music theory that could be relevant but when I say Music Learning I'm
just kind of fating to the idea of the mechanics of musical learning but of course
there's music theory Etc so what I'm effectively saying is the ultimate exam the
final exam the midterm exam the exam that's administered to you rarely do you have
control over the format of that exam
sometimes it's mixed format but the different ways in which you self- test as a
form of studying are really key and ideally you would make these open-ended in
other words you would not simply rely on multiple choice you would rely on a form
of self- testing or that you give your students or that your teacher gives you that
requires you to think about the material with some degree of depth with some degree
of effort and of course you're going to get certain things wrong now I would hope
that if testing is
being used as a learning tool as opposed to just for evaluation but here we're
talking about using testing as a learning tool that it wouldn't impact at least not
at that moment your final performance in the course or whatever it is rather it is
testing for sake of learning learning now we know from the literature that students
don't like pop quizzes I gave you a few today and forgive me they don't like pop
quizzes and we know this in the form of the reduction in teaching evaluation scores
okay uh having received teaching
evaluation scores of different uh let's say values over the years and I always take
the feedback seriously one Salient comment that just leapt into my mind was the
fact that I end up mentioning my Bulldog Costello too often in class so here I'm
mentioning him again just to get back at that one student that said I mention too
much I'll mention him as much as I want the point here is that when students
evaluate their teachers they tend to punish their teachers for pop quizzes does
that mean pop quizzes aren't
effective no but you know what's more effective telling students at the outset of
class or telling yourself at the outset of any kind of learning Expedition because
this isn't just about the classroom that you're going to take a bunch of exams that
you're going to use testing or quizzes whatever you want to call them as a form of
teaching and learning and that you can expect five tests or five quizzes during the
course of being presented the material or that you are going to test yourself every
day
after the material now sometimes you have to go from one class to the next class
there isn't an opportunity to test yourself but guess what's not going to be
helpful walking out of class and getting immediately on to your phone we know that
that probably inhibits your ability to remember the material because it's going to
enhance forgetting because you do have this key opportunity right after being
exposed to new material to help offset the forgetting by testing yourself on that
material as soon as possible after being
exposed to it so again even though I did not attend school in an era where we had
smartphones and texting I recall walking out of class and just walking out of class
and going to my bicycle but of course there were people to talk to there were other
things to attend to if you're really serious about learning material take a few
seconds maybe even a few minutes after being exposed to that material and think
about that material test yourself on it and if you find that you don't know the
material you're
confused by it or overwhelmed by it great you just accomplished the first step in
queuing your nervous system to the fact that it needs to learn that material and
you've created an opportunity for enhanced neuroplasticity which is really what all
of the stuff about testing as a form of studying is about you're going to test
yourself so that you figure out what you don't know so that you then look up that
material test yourself on it again so that ultimately you forget very little of it
if any now
there are other components to learning and neuroplasticity that I've talked about
on previous podcast that are just too interesting not to mention but I'm just going
to mention them in brief things like Gap effects Gap effects are oh so cool and
they've been demonstrated for lots of different forms of learning Gap effects are
what I just did which is to take periodic pauses in the learning of material as
short as 5 to 10 seconds but even as long as 30 seconds during which guess what
your hippocampus the neurons
in your hippocampus repeat information that you've been exposed to for the first
time at a rate 20 to 30 times faster than typical just as it does during rapid ey
movement sleep so if you are a teacher and or if you are a learner periodically
throughout an episode a class or whatever of trying to learn new motor skills or
music skills or whatever kind of learning pause and let your hippocampus generate
more repetitions of that material than it would otherwise if you just tried to
Barrel through so I
realize as we've gone through today's discussion that words like test and quiz
evaluation offsetting forgetting all of that stuff can you know Spike people's
cortisol it can uh give us flashbacks to uncomfortable classroom experiences
related to being called on cold called uh for the answer um a vicious trick that
instructors play keep in mind that testing as a form of studying whether or not
self-directed or given to you by a teacher is not for sake of evaluation at the
level of okay you know you get an
exam at the end of a lecture and then you do your best to answer those questions
and then you turn it in and it impacts your grade no this is about being told or
revealing to yourself how much you know and don't know and then of course being
told the correct answers so that you can compare your answers to the correct
answers and doing this frequently and ideally very soon after being exposed to the
material that's one of the key things that I keep coming back to again and again
here um because it's something that frankly was
not done well I was in school um for whatever reason and I think that's largely
because when people hear the word testing they think of evaluation and if anything
at least in the United States over the last 30 years but in particular over the
last 15 years there's been this tendency to shift away from formal evaluation you
know I personally believe that one can learn in many different styles and many
different contexts I of course as a university Professor um believe that for
certain topics in particular science and
medicine and health but other topics as well of course that formal rigorous
coursework is by far the best way to learn information for me but that regardless
of whether or not you're learning just from YouTube or you're learning from
podcasts or you're learning from books you're learning from the school of life as
it were from experience that testing as a form of studying is absolutely key and
gosh there's such a beautiful body of research in fact I'll link to several studies
including a review entitled
testing enhances learning a review of the literature as well as a beautiful article
test enhanced learning uh which gets into this and there's a wonderful book about
this that I'll also provide a link to in the show note captions um all of course
authored by researchers who have worked squarely in this field and compare the data
on testing as a studying tool to other forms of studying and learning so it's a
really impressive literature that I do believe we all should have known about and
that's why
I'm passing it on to you now now before we wrap up I want to make sure that I
emphasize some of the other key components to studying and learning that have
nothing to do with testing as a studying tool and those are the role of emotion the
role of story and the role of what's called interleaving now in terms of emotion I
think we all inherently understand that more emotionally Laden experiences are
remembered more durably we tend not to forget them in fact this is the basis of
things like PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder it is the
reality that one trial learning that is exposure to something and never forgetting
it occurs very readily when the thing that we're exposed to is negative or has a
very heavy negative emotional Salient so it could be something we read or something
we see sometimes it's something that happens to us you know I I don't like the idea
of that but this is true your nervous system is wired such neuroplasticity is such
that stressful experiences because they deploy such massive amounts of adrenaline
epinephrine as well as other
neuromodulators allow very quickly for the milu the environment of the neural
circuits that led up to that experience to strengthen their connections with one
trial so-call one trial learning this is why sadly although at the same time from
an Adaptive perspective we say fortunately if you were to step outside today and
God forbid see somebody get hit by a car you would remember that chances are you
would remember that forever now that does not mean that the emotional components of
that memory are
necessarily going to stay within you there are tools for the treatment of PTSD such
as the different ones that come to mind are you know systematic exposure therapy
where you're reexposed to that idea or memory sometimes even circumstance with of
course the support of a trained professional typically a psychiatrist or
psychologist and the emotional load of that experience is gradually uncoupled from
your M Mor of the experience there's things like EMDR there are pharmacologic
approaches some of these
are combined with the sorts of things I've described I've done entire episodes
about stress and PTSD again you can find those at hubman lab.com by putting stress
PTSD into the search function however we know that it is the same neuromodulators
mainly epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed at massive amounts in those moments
where something very stressful happens that allows the neural circuits that led up
to the circumstance as well as the neural circuits that encode that visual scene
and scenes like it or sounds like it to
be locked in and linked to the stress response now what this is really all saying
is that negative stuff is remembered typically the first time and every time and
very durably over time as compared to positive experiences which as far as Peak
experiences go right birth of your first child a wedding a wonderful um
professional or person experience those two can be one trial learning and memory
but most things that we are exposed to are not at those extremes either negative or
positive however we know that any kind
of story any kind of emotional emphasis on material either in the delivery of that
material but certainly in the way that that material is perceived by you like
getting really excited about something you want to learn or thinking something's
really awful is likely to be more readily and stably committed to your memory and
that's because of these neuromodulators like epinephrine and norepinephrine but
other neuromodulators as well that wire those experiences into your neural circuits
again these
neuromodulators epinephrine norepinephrine we also hear about acetycholine dopamine
Etc they can operate at low levels and sort of background levels they can create
subtle fluctuations and mood focus and attention or they can create massive shifts
in mood focus and attention depending on their levels their time and much much more
Point here is that if you're a teacher Andor if you are a learner paying attention
to your internal State as you're trying to learn is very key we've all had that
teacher
that lecture that just kind of drones things out in monotone if you need to learn
the material coming out of a source like that person or otherwise you're going to
have to ramp up your level of internal attention consciously in order to bring
about some emotional salience some intensity to the way it's perceived and you can
do that just through your own thinking as opposed to the situation whether you have
a super Dynamic teacher who's telling you things with wide eyes and perhaps even
cracking
jokes by the way the teachers that crack jokes get lower teacher evaluations than
those that don't crack jokes or swear did you know that the teachers that crack
jokes and swear they're perceived as more likable but they get lower overall
evaluations typically they're seen as less professional and therefore less good
teachers by their students that's why I try not to make too many jokes or swear in
my lectures the point being that we all have those really wonderful Dynamic
teachers yes it's much easier to learn
and remember that material you still need to test yourself on it but it's much
easier to learn that material for the very reasons I say it before it's a lesser
example of more deployment of the neuromodulators in you the learner that is
exposed to that material okay so emotion matters so much so that in a beautiful
review about learning a memory from the Great James maau one of The Luminaries in
modern neuroscience and psychology of memory he talked about a medieval practice
this is pretty wild
whereby people and kids kids are people of course but adults and kids were taught
information and then thrown literally thrown into cold water why to deploy
adrenaline and consolidate memory of the material they were exposed to now I know
we've covered deliberate cold exposure on this podcast before no I'm not saying you
need to do a cold plunge after being exposed to new material but guess what they
were doing that many hundreds of years ago and it makes sense logically based on
all our understanding
of the neurobiology underlying things like PTSD underlying emotion Laden memory
formation and consolidation and our ability to remember things that were
emotionally Laden much better than things that were less emotionally Laden so if
you want to take a cold shower after learning some material or even better testing
yourself mentally on that material while in a cold shower or cold plunge you
certainly can just don't stay in there too long use best practices if you want to
know what those best practices are for deliberate cold
exposure you can check out our deliberate cold exposure newsletter at huberman
lab.com it's completely zero cost you don't even need to sign up you simply go to
newsletter in the menu tab and you can find that PDF and now because you are
becoming proficient in an understanding of neuroplasticity and learning and testing
and neuromodulators like epinephrine yes drinking caffeine will increase your
levels of EP nephrine not strikingly so but enough that it probably helps you learn
things a little
bit better should you drink the coffee after listen that's getting a little bit too
down in the details the most important components to learning are that you be alert
so that you can attend so you can pay attention to the material you're trying to
learn and then testing yourself later and of course the other component which is
getting sufficient amounts of great sleep each night and I highly recommend doing
nsdr I mentioned Gap effects before those are very very cool I just used another
one now and the
final tool for studying that I believe is not discuss enough and is a bit
counterintuitive so it's a fun one to just mention and that perhaps you can explore
in your own studying and learning Adventures is interleaving of information this
one's kind of wild actually turns out that if your instructor or you takes
information about something that they're trying to teach you or you're trying to
learn maybe it's piano know maybe it's Neuroscience maybe it's how to learn better
and every once in a while throws
in a little anecdote about something let's just say or mention something about the
Olympics or incorporate something that seems pseudo random because it's not
actually related to the material you're trying to learn turns out that that acts
not as a gap in the same sense that Gap effects which are times in which you do
nothing in order to get more repetitions of the material you just heard in your
hippocampus but rather those breaks of interleaving information not just getting a
steady barrage like drinking from a fire hose
of new information from start to finish turn out to enhance overall learning
ability probably we think at a mechanistic level because the neural circuits are
able to generate more repetition similar to Gap effects but actually in a very
interesting way also because by injecting other information that seems totally
unrelated random or pseudo random it allows the brain areas that are responsible
for encoding information to take whatever new information you're learning and to
incorporate it with existing knowledge
or even distantly related knowledge so does this mean that you should learn math
and history in the same lecture well I think that might be a bit overwhelming kind
of like drinking from Two Fire hoses here we're talking about interleaving
challenging information that's new to you with little anecdotes little bits of
information that perhaps are new to you but don't require a lot of challenge which
is of course why every once in a while I throw in a little anecdote about my
Bulldog or learning neuroanatomy or something of
that sort it's not just to provide a break it's to provide examples that are
related but not Central to the material that we've been talking about today which
is all about how to study and learn optimally okay so I realize that many of you
are not students any longer although some of you are but in many ways we are all
students we are all constantly being exposed to all sorts of information out in the
world and goodness knows um thank goodness we don't remember it all but there is of
course information that we would like to
remember that we would really like to consolidate in our memory and be able to have
some Mastery over earlier I said I would distinguish between unskilled skilled
Mastery and virtuosity and I'll do that now unskilled of course means that we have
limited understanding let alone um ability to use information skilled typically
means we know and can recognize and use information in basic ways or even Advanced
ways Mastery typically means that we have you know close to the full depth of
knowledge in
a given area and that we can use it pretty flexibly and virtuosity at least my
definition of virtuosity is where we actually have such Mastery of material that we
can use it in ways that we still don't even know how we can use meaning that we can
inject elements or we even invite elements of uncertainty and kind of spontaneity
into the use of that material here I'm thinking of great musicians I'm thinking of
great athletes where they know all the plays they know all the moves it's all
scripted into
their nervous system and they can deploy those at any time so they have real
Mastery but in order to display their incredible abilities their virtuosity they
actively invite in The X Factor the uncertainty such that sometimes they find
themselves playing their instrument or singing or performing athletically or
mathematically or what have you in way that even surprise them and that of course
is a lot to expect of ourselves I think most of us would be uh content to have
skill and Mastery of the things
that we care about and you know should we achieve virtuosity then wonderful but one
of the main points of today's discussion was to arm you with an understanding of
neuroplasticity in the context of studying and learning to really understand that
so much of learning stably and consolidating information over time is to offset the
forgetting process and that testing is not just a tool for evaluating our knowledge
but rather a tool for evaluating and reinforcing and building our knowledge put
differently
that testing is an excellent tool if not the best tool for studying and I think
that's an important reframe that others have brought about and that I really want
to highlight underline and bold face during today's discussion it's one that I
certainly wish I had applied more in my educational trajectory and it's one that I
plan to deploy further in my seeking out of new knowledge in terms of the podcast
and Neuroscience but in other areas of my life as well because from the existing
literature and
hopefully from the way it was presented to you today you probably realize that it
is near infinite if not infinite that we can apply testing as a tool for studying
self- testing testing of others using testing as a way to really probe what we know
and don't know and to really offset that forgetting process and in that sense it is
is really nicely aligned with what we know about neuroplasticity and it's also
something that we can use freely and that you can use covertly that you can apply
in your
own seeking out of knowledge and new skills of all kinds classroom or otherwise if
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have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols an
operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for
more than 5 years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience
and it covers protocols for everything from
sleep to exercise to Stress Control protocols related to focus and motivation and
of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are
included the book is now available by pre-sale at protocols book.com there you can
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email with anybody body thank you once again for
joining me for today's discussion all about how to study and learn and last but
certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]