Attention Required

Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley!

Attention Required: What a Memory Champion’s Brain Reveals About Learning

Nelson Dellis—the six-time US Memory Champion whose new book Everyday Genius I recommended a few weeks ago—has just had his brain studied in unprecedented detail by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis. Nelson had an ordinary memory until his mid-twenties, when his grandmother’s decline from Alzheimer’s inspired him to start training for hours every day. What the researchers found, after more than 13 hours of brain scanning, is remarkable.

Nelson did not supercharge his normal memory circuits. What he did was stranger and more interesting. Years of daily practice built entirely new functional modules in his brain—modules that simply do not exist in typical brains. And we know this because of a shift in how brain science itself is done. Imaging studies in the past generally worked by averaging scans across large numbers of people, which blurs exactly the individual differences that we might be trying to focus on. The team working with Nelson used precision functional mapping—dense, repeated scanning of a single brain—to see what was really going on inside his head.

What they found is that Nelson rerouted normally-difficult-to-remember information into the brain’s very large and naturally accessible systems for navigation and storytelling—systems that evolved because finding your way home and remembering the stories that held your group together were essential to survival. Nelson’s retrosplenial cortex, which most of us use for spatial navigation, developed unusually strong connections to visual and memory networks. His caudate nucleus—deep in the brain, involved in skill learning—forged connections to memory networks that were simply absent in the nearly 900 control participants. The researchers speculated that the caudate’s involvement makes memory a “consolidated skill”—something that has shifted from effortful to automatic through sheer practice.

But here is the thing. None of it works without attention. As Nelson Dellis observes, “The ability to control your attention on demand is a genius superpower.” Nelson’s entire memory system—visualization, storage, review—depends on a step so fundamental that it is easy to overlook: you have to notice the information in the first place. No amount of technique can encode what the mind never took in. Attention is the gate through which all learning must pass.

And that gate of attention is exactly what Tom Bennett—a former London nightclub manager turned teacher, turned the UK government’s national behavior advisor—is fighting to keep open.

Running the Room: The Book Every Teacher Deserves on Day One

Before Tom Bennett became a teacher, he ran nightclubs in central London—managing drunks, bouncers, bartenders, and what he calls “every shadowy citizen of Soho.” He could read a crowd well enough to know when horseplay was about to turn into a brawl, could snap his fingers and have 300 people removed, and had years of practice doing what he calls “dissolving ardour, anger or anguish in the fraught centrifuge of a nightclub.” None of it helped. When he walked into a classroom, the confidence melted, the certainty evaporated, and the children’s indifference was crushing. His crowd control, it turned out, was not some magic quality he carried with him—it worked in the clubs because the clubs gave him authority—a room full of teenagers simply didn’t care. The story of how Tom wove his way through the school of hard knocks to be able to run a classroom is what makes Running the Room: The Teacher’s Guide to Behaviour the best book on classroom behavior management I have ever read.

Bennett’s core argument is simple and important: students need to be taught how to behave, deliberately and carefully, the same way you would teach any academic subject. That idea still runs against the dominant belief that children will behave beautifully if you just make lessons engaging enough and get out of their way. But good behavior is not natural. It is built, piece by piece, day after day, by someone willing to do the work. And when it isn’t built—when even a handful of students are allowed to misbehave unchecked—the damage radiates outward. Every child in that room who came ready to learn is paying the price for an adult’s failure to act. 

The science of Nelson’s brain and the practical wisdom of Bennett’s classroom are making the same argument from differing perspectives. Every student whose learning is disrupted by unchecked misbehavior is a student whose attention has been hijacked—not by choice, but by an adult’s failure to run the room. If students cannot focus, they cannot encode. If they cannot encode, they cannot build the neural connections that transform effort into skill. Practice reshapes the brain in extraordinary ways, but only if someone first creates the conditions that let a learner pay attention.

Tom will be keynoting at researchED Tokyo on April 18—if you’re in Japan, you do NOT want to miss it! (And I’ll be speaking there, too!) https://researched.org.uk/event/researched-tokyo/

Looking Ahead to 2027

With 2026 largely spoken for, I’m now fielding inquiries for 2027. If your organization or institution is interested in a keynote or workshop on learning science, neuroscience, or AI and education, I’d love to hear from you. Just visit barbaraoakley.com to get in touch!

That’s all for now. Happy learning!

Barb Oakley

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!