Category: Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America by Ron Powers. Both of Powers’ sons were afflicted with schizophrenia, which fueled his desire to begin sorting out and writing about why there is such chaos in the US regarding treatment for those who clearly cannot care for themselves.  The essence of the problem lies with lies anosognosia, which, as Powers writes, is “the false conviction within a person that nothing is wrong with his mind. It stems from a physiological by-product of psychosis, and accompanies about 50 percent of schizophrenia occurrences and 40 percent of bipolar cases. Anosognosia disrupts the parietal lobe’s capacity to interpret sensory information from around the body.” No One Cares details how virtually every ideology—left, right, and libertarian—has contributed to the disastrous set of policies for mental health that have increasingly unleashed heartbreak and chaos both for US families caring for the mentally ill, and US society as a whole.  (It’s interesting to watch, however, as Powers attributes simple lack of knowledge as causing the mistakes of his favored political party, but outright malevolence as causing the mistakes of the political party he dislikes. A more dispassionate observer might draw different conclusions.) A worthwhile book on a vitally important, but all-too-neglected problem. Also good for audio listening.

How to Finish an Online Course

Here’s a fine article by Pat Bowden of Online Learning Success not only on how to choose a MOOC, but on how to be successful at finishing it.  Enjoy!

A First Rate Overview of the World of MOOCs

Don’t miss this review of MOOC stats and trends from Class Central. The numbers involved are quite boggling!

Future of Learning 2020 Conference, Bangalore, India 

‘Learning to Learn, Unlearn and Relearn: Flourishing in the Age of Disruptions and Innovation’ will be held on January 3-4 at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. Barb will be speaking via web, and there will be goodly time for your questions. So don’t miss it if you’ve the chance to attend!

Study Finds Athletes Have Healthier Brains Than Others

Here is an article relating yet more evidence that exercise is beneficial for cognition. The main ideas are that “…athletes were found to have much more pronounced responses to sound than non-athletes and lower levels of background ‘static.’  Similarly, both musicians and people capable of speaking more than one language have also been found to process incoming sound signals more efficiently. But…these groups of people appear to achieve this by turning up the sound in their brains, whereas athletes appear to be turning down or quieting the background noise in their minds.”

The Dark Side of Neuroplasticity

Is learning and changing the brain always good?  Is it possible to take drugs that will help reopen the rapid-learning mechanisms we used as children to, for example, learn to speak a new language quickly and without an accent? The deeper you go into this episode of the podcast Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the more interesting it gets.  

Smaller Class Size Doesn’t Always Benefit Students

This article describes the counterintuitive findings that reducing class size may not be so important: “…class size effects are more likely to be detected in countries with limited school resources where teacher quality is lower on average.” In other words, quality teaching may be the real key for helping students–there may be better outcomes for students through improving the pool of teachers than through mandated class-size limits. 

Ever Wondered Whether to Dabble in Simple Video Creation as Backup Materials for Your Class?

Here’s one of the nicest introductions to screencasting for absolute novices that we’ve seen.

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. Great ideas for parents, too!
• Follow LHTL on Facebook | Join the private LHTL Hall of Fame group | Follow LHTL on Twitter

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

The Gift Inside the Box, by Adam Grant and Allison Sweet Grant, illustrated by Diana Schoenbrun.

Adam Grant wrote one of our very favorite books, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (which also discusses Barb’s work on Pathological Altruism.) Adam and his wife Allison have been looking for ways to help teach kids about the joy of giving. The result? The sweet-natured children’s book The Gift Inside the Box. If you’re looking for something to read together with your little one to help inspire an attitude of giving, this simple little book is a great gift. 

Artificial Intelligence—the Killer App Is Education

The New York Times has an outstanding article on artificial intelligence in education. It quotes Terry and features our very own Learning How to Learn. Key ideas:

“For years, people have tried to re-engineer learning with artificial intelligence, but it was not until the machine-learning revolution of the past seven years that real progress has been made. Slowly, algorithms are making their way into classrooms, taking over repetitive tasks like grading, optimizing coursework to fit individual student needs and revolutionizing the preparation for College Board exams like the SAT. A plethora of online courses and tutorials also have freed teachers from lecturing and allowed them to spend class time working on problem-solving with students instead….

“‘Education, I think, is going to be the killer app for deep learning,’ said Terrence Sejnowski, who runs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., and also is the president of the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, which each year puts on the largest machine-learning conference in the world….

“There are gatekeepers at every step,” said Dr. Sejnowski, who together with Barbara Oakley, a computer-science engineer at Michigan’s Oakland University, created a massive open online course, or MOOC, called “Learning How to Learn….”

“[Sejnowski] said that by using machine-learning systems and the internet, new education technology would bypass the gatekeepers and go directly to students in their homes. ‘Parents are figuring out that they can get much better educational lessons for their kids through the internet than they’re getting at school.’”

Computational Neuroscience—a Talk by Terry Sejnowski

And speaking of Terry, here is a brief video of Terry describing extraordinary advances in computational neuroscience for CARTA – Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny.

Visual Snow Syndrome

It can be very possible to turn a seeming challenge into a beautiful positive. Just such is the case with Barb’s daughter Rachel Oakley, an artist who has turned her visual snow syndrome into fascinating art.

Tell Us About Your Experiences in Our Learning How to Learn Course

Barb’s friend, Dr. Eulho Jung from Boise State University, wants to investigate your experiences on Learning How to Learn, MOOC online course. You are invited to participate in the study—click here to enter the survey. 

Tips on Language Learning by Chris Lonsdale

Chris’s TED talk on language learning has been viewed nearly twenty million times.  After watching it, you’ll see why—it’s got many great insights. [Hat tip Harry Taylor] 

The Disarray of Studies in Nutrition

There’s evidence that good nutrition, along with exercise, provides excellent support for learning. But what is good nutrition? This interesting article from the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal provides a general overview of the disarray of nutritional studies. Key graf: “In recent years, psychology has dealt with a legitimacy crisis. Many influential psychological studies could not be reproduced by other psychologists, discrediting some key insights and weakening academic faith in the entire field.  Nutrition science has a similar problem. The loudest critics argue that the methodologies relied on by researchers give bad data that are meaningless at best. Others worry that funding gives undue influence to the federal government, big business, or influential nonprofit associations. And some critics think nutrition science focuses on the wrong questions entirely about nutrition.”

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. Great ideas for parents, too!
• Follow LHTL on Facebook | Join the private LHTL Hall of Fame group | Follow LHTL on Twitter

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Hit Lit! Top Books of 2019 for Learning How to Learners!

Here are the books and tools that LHTLers have found to be most useful this year (not counting our own Learning How to Learn, A Mind for Numbers, and Mindshift, which of course ranked at the top!)

• Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career
• How to Become a Straight-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less
• Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning
• The Brave Learner: Finding Everyday Magic in Homeschool, Learning, and Life
• Remember It!: The Names of People You Meet, All of Your Passwords, Where You Left Your Keys, and Everything Else You Tend to Forget
• Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life
• The Bottleneck Rules: How to Get More Done (When Working Harder isn’t Working)
• The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in “Healthy” Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain (please note that this book is NOT against vegetarianism—you can be a vegetarian and still follow some of the plans in this book)
• The Graduate Student as Writer: Encouragement for the Budding Scholar
• Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

Learning Tools

LHTLers also find the following learning tools to be perennially useful: 

• 3M Peltor Optime 105 Over the Head Earmuff, Ear Protectors, Hearing Protection, NRR 30 dB
• Palomino Blackwing Pencils (Barb’s favorites)

A video on Memes and an App to Help with Patients with Dementia

4-time US memory champion Nelson Dellis is back with a video about the origin of memes and our memories, with a little discussion of an Alzheimer’s app he is working on. (See Nelson’s great book Remember It! in our list above.)

The Overhyped College Dropout ‘Scandal’

It’s easy to read a “sky is falling!” type article about problems in academia and get sucked into the hype before your critical thinking skills kick in. This thoughtful article, “The Overhyped College Dropout ‘Scandal,’” by George Leef of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, will help you to take a step back and analyze whether or not high college dropout rates are really such a bad thing.

New Exercises for Parents and Teachers in the Learning How to Learn for Youth MOOC

Due to the popularity of the exercises for parents and teachers to help kids learn how to learn better— and the kindness of Professor Kenzen Chen of National Chiao Tung University—we’ve added some great new material to the Learning How to Learn for Youth MOOC teachers’ notes.  To access these exercises, go to any video in the MOOC, click on “Download” right beneath the video, and then download the file called “Teachers notes” (available as either pdf or Word documents).  

If you want to help your youngster(s) study more effectively and efficiently, try sitting and watching these LHTL for Youth videos together, one or two each day, during the holiday break. You’ll discover a shared vocabulary for learning that will help you to become a better coach! 

Constant Wonder podcast

Here’s Barb on the podcast Constant Wonder, talking with host Marcus Smith. Check out the other discussions on the podcast related to Napoleon’s exile on Elba and Lawrence of Arabia.  This is wide-ranging podcasting at its best.

An interactive chart that lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers

Type in any word or two word phrase you want into this online tool to get a sense of how often that word is used in reviews from RateMyProfessor.com, broken out by discipline and gender. This tool lets you see which disciplines are, for example, funniest.  (Sadly, Barb’s beloved engineering comes in dead last…. but education isn’t much better.) Read this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education to get a bigger sense of the tool and its implications.

Starting Is the Hardest Part—a Reflection on Procrastination

Here’s an interesting blog post from Dan Calamai that reminds of how procrastination can start—and how we can nip it in the bud.

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. Great ideas for parents, too!
• Follow LHTL on Facebook | Join the private LHTL Hall of Fame group | Follow LHTL on Twitter

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Barb’s just back from several days working with Novartis in Basel, Switzerland.  This post, by Chara Balasubramaniam, Head of Global Development University at Novartis, hints at the visionary work Novartis is doing related to learning at a corporate level.

Tell Us About Your Experiences in Our Learning How to Learn Course

Barb’s friend, Dr. Eulho Jung from Boise State University, wants to investigate your experiences on Learning How to Learn, MOOC online course. You are invited to participate in the study—click here to enter the survey. 

Book of the Month

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, by Ronan Farrow.  We’ve long been interested in the “successfully sinister” among us. These individuals can become so powerful that they can get away with virtually anything—that’s how they can destroy so many lives. Ronan Farrow is to be commended for pursuing the story of Harvey Weinstein and others of his ilk, despite the threats and imminent personal danger that put off so many for so long. Catch and Kill might as well be a thriller—we’ve become huge fans of Ronan and his fearless ability to uncover behavior of those who can feign doing good while doing so much harm.

The successfully sinister are the subject of Barb’s book Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend. For six years, while overtly working towards tenure as an assistant professor of engineering, she covertly delved into an analysis of the holes and flaws of the field of psychology. She remembers thinking “Why am I even doing this? Nobody’s going to read a book that’s focused on psychology, but written by an engineer.” Ultimately, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker called Evil Genes “A fascinating scientific and personal exploration of the roots of evil, filled with human insight and telling detail.” 

As one correspondent recently wrote Barb, “Reading your outstanding book [Evil Genes] today…. I work with organizational behavior, reading a lot recently about narcissism. Everything I just learned is in your book. From my work with others and most recent personal experience of aggression directed at me and accepted by a Board, I asked myself the questions that you did years ago to write your book. Seems like the Me Too movement exposes this everyday behavior…”

Yes, the Me Too movement does expose this type of behavior, which, sadly, is equal opportunity and can be found in women as well as men.  The hypocrisy of news organizations like NBC reporting on sexual abuse in organizations such as the church, while killing stories that might incidentally be related to their own sordid abuses, or the horrific behavior of their favored people or politicians, is a perfect example of Conquest’s third law of politics: “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” Sadly, we feel Conquest’s insight is relevant to the field of education.

Looking for an Extra Credit Assignment? How about Learning How to Learn?

Math professor Jeffery Parent notes: “I just finished grading a bunch of extra credit assignments from my students this semester.  The assignment was to watch Barb’s Google Talk and find at least 10 things in it that students thought that they could use to benefit their own studying. I have seldom had such a successful extra credit assignment as this one. It was gratifying to see all the nice things my students had to say about the talk. I am sure that it will help them moving forward in their studies.”

Direct Instruction Is Still Necessary in a Problem Based Learning Classroom

This thoughtful article by Professor John Spencer, a “former middle school teacher and current college professor on a quest to transform schools into bastions of creativity and wonder.”  Spencer notes: “Early on in my project-based learning journey, I made a vow to go 100% project-based. My students would learn everything through exploration and discovery. I would remain the guide on the side observing the process and helping out only when necessary. After leading students through a highly-structured documentary project, I decided to pull back entirely. This would be more student-centered and authentic.

“Then it tanked.

“Not a week later or a month later. Two days into the project, I realized my mistake…”

It’s worth pointing once more to cognitive developmental and evolutionary psychologist David Geary, who has concluded, “It is unlikely that teacher-directed, peer-assisted, or self- discovery alone will be the most effective way to learn secondary academic material” (p. 224), and that “only empirical studies will allow us to determine the best mix of methods for different academic domains and for different children”(p. 224). [“Secondary academic material” means material that humans have not done for evolutionarily lengthy periods of time.] 

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. Great ideas for parents, too!
• Follow LHTL on Facebook | Join the private LHTL Hall of Fame group | Follow LHTL on Twitter

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss, by Jason Fung. We’ve met several friends lately who have shifted to eating only one meal a day—whatever they want during that meal—and have successfully lost, and kept off, dozens of pounds. One friend finally clued us into The Obesity Code, which has helped them a great deal to provide a good background and framework for this type of semi-fasting lifestyle.  We have to say, after a month’s tryout, we’re finding this lifestyle has done a lot for helping keep us alert, even while we still enjoy our meals and knock off a few pounds.  The Obesity Code is a wonderfully thoughtful book—if you are having trouble with losing pounds that creep back, even while you’re trying to keep your cognition in tip-top shape, give this approach a try.  (It works great except on days where Barb’s giving major presentations and can’t eat until late!)f you’re in a hurry, just read the final chapters on how to set up this lifestyle.

Pointing Out the Elephant in the Room in Teaching Math to Children

Dan Willingham has written a controversial article in the Los Angeles Times: “Math scares your child’s elementary school teacher — and that should frighten you.”  Predictably, elementary school teachers have recoiled against Willingham’s suggested breaches to their kingdom. Barry Garelick writes an interesting reaction from more traditional perspectives.

Why We Love Closed Captioning

We’ve found ourselves relying more and more often on closed captioning to help us stay focused on videos we’re listening to.  We also enjoy the chance to quickly read through podcast scripts to grab the key ideas—these captions are a benefit that the Deaf Community has offered to the hearing community when it comes to focused learning. It seems we’re not alone in our admiration for closed captioning, as explained in this fine article by Lance Ulanoff in Medium. In it, adolescent psychiatrist Andrew Kent notes: “I believe auditory processing is more easily impacted upon by distractions, and that they need to read [captions] to stay focused.” [Hat tip: Katie Murch]

Questions that Students Commonly Ask about Learning

Barb’s friend Jocelyn Roberts, the Principal at Holland Park State High School, Brisbane, Australia, has set up a wonderful website where students can ask Barb questions about their challenges in learning.  Here are some typical questions (the answers are posted on the website):

• I try to study by reading my notes or the textbook a few times but I find I don’t remember it very well. Can you help?
• I like it when the teacher gives us a weekly homework sheet. That way, I can do it all in one session on the weekend and have the week free to do other things. Is this a good way to tackle homework practice? I am passing my subjects but I do forget how to do stuff by the end of the week.
• I really need to listen to music through my earphones when I study—I can work for longer that way. Is this a good study technique?

You may wish to make posters with some of these questions and answers for your school—many of these are very common student questions around the world! 

Hundreds of Millions of Dollars Down the Drain in Misguided Efforts to Improve Literacy

In yet another sad story of how simply throwing money at education isn’t necessarily the answer, this article notes, “Colorado has spent hundreds of millions to help kids read. Now, it will spend up to $5.2 million to find out why it’s not working.”

What happens in our brain when we are learning?

Watch Barb’s interview with ESIC’s La HoraTech to hear her thoughts.

Socrates and Retrieval Practice

Learning How to Learner Drew Stegmaier observes “Socrates’s famous method of teaching by asking questions has become well known and timeless as a teaching modality.  I suspect it’s because it utilizes recall (which we know is a fantastic way to learn) and engages students by forcing them to problem solve a concept before being fully introduced to it, allowing the question to marinate in the background over the course of a lecture or discussion.”

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. Great ideas for parents, too!
• Follow LHTL on Facebook | Join the private LHTL Hall of Fame group | Follow LHTL on Twitter

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Today, Barb’s giving the opening keynote for the Harvard-MIT-Dana Alliance Science of Learning Conference at 1:15 PM – 2:15 PM at The Westin Copley Place, Boston, MA; with an advanced workshop that builds on these ideas at 3:45 PM – 5:15 PM.  If you’re near Boston, don’t miss it!

Book of the Week

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Sebag Montefiore. This extraordinarily well-researched volume reveals what can happen when a vicious, brutal, but charming-whenever-necessary killer climbs to power in a system that has nothing by way of checks and balances.  Even Churchill—no fool when it came to Hitler’s intentions, was wowed by Stalin—a man who enjoyed the mental as well as physical torture of all who opposed him. Montefiore describes the strange family and public life of a man who led one of history’s greatest democides. It’s hard to convey just how difficult life was for anyone who thought independently, or even anyone who made a simple joke, in Stalin’s time—Montefiore does an outstanding job at this virtually indescribable task. An extraordinary book. 

Tell Us about Your Experiences in Our Learning How to Learn Course

Barb’s friend, Dr. Eulho Jung from Boise State University, wants to investigate your experiences on Learning How to Learn, MOOC online course. You are invited to participate in the study—click here to enter the survey.

How the amount and spacing of retrieval practice affect the retention of mathematics knowledge

This fascinating recent paper by Lyle et al in Educational Psychology Review tackles the specifics of how often and how much retrieval practice is most helpful in math (a pre-calculus) class, as assessed in part by subsequent performance in the following calculus course. “We assessed retention of precalculus knowledge at two educationally relevant time points: the end of the precalculus course (within-semester) and the beginning of a calculus course 4 weeks later (across-semester). Within-semester retention benefited significantly from practicing more and from spacing out practice, although some evidence suggested that the effect of amount of practice was less robust than the effect of spacing. Across-semester retention benefited exclusively from increasing spacing. Given that retaining precalculus knowledge across semesters is crucial for success in higher-level mathematics, these findings support increasing spacing in real-world mathematics education.”

And Speaking of Retrieving—Here’s a Fine Article on Optimal Processes for Creating Flashcards

One of our favorite writers on learning, David Handel, MD, has written “How to Create and Practice Flashcards Like a Boss.” Even if you think you are an expert at flashcard use, you will learn new and useful ideas from this brilliant article. And be sure to check out IDoRecall, which we’ve begun using and like very much.

Study Shows the Brains of Girls and Boys are Similar, Producing Equal Math Ability

This paper, “Gender Similarities in the Brain during Mathematics Development,” in the journal npj Science of Learning, led by Jessica Cantlon at Carnegie Mellon University, is aptly summarized here: “Cantlon and her team conducted the first neuroimaging study to evaluate biological gender differences in math aptitude of young children.

“Her team used functional MRI to measure the brain activity in 104 young children (3- to 10-years-old; 55 girls) while watching an educational video covering early math topics, like counting and addition. The researchers compared scans from the boys and girls to evaluate brain similarity. In addition, the team examined brain maturity by comparing the children’s scans to those taken from a group of adults (63 adults; 25 women) who watched the same math videos.

“After numerous statistical comparisons, Cantlon and her team found no difference in the brain development of girls and boys. In addition, the researchers found no difference in how boys and girls processed math skills and were equally engaged while watching the educational videos. Finally, boys’ and girls’ brain maturity were statistically equivalent when compared to either men or women in the adult group.” [Hat tip: Rick]

On Second Thought, Maybe Male and Female Brains Really Aren’t So Similar…

Interestingly, the above study sticks assiduously to mathematics and makes no note of differences in girls’ and boys’ average verbal abilities—which can have a significant impact on a child’s ultimate interests and career preferences. This is a perfect example of the streetlight effect, the observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look. The above study also ignores salient work such as this fine paper, “Sex differences in academic achievement are not related to political, economic, or social equality,” by Stoet and Geary, which observes “… when it comes to choices made by individual students, mean sex differences in mathematics or reading may not be as important as whether they are, as individuals, better at mathematics than verbal competencies, including reading, or vice versa.” (Girls, it appears, often have an early verbal advantage over boys.)  

And this recent study, “Sex differences in brain correlates of STEM anxiety,” finds neural differences in male and female reactions to studying STEM.  “We found sex differences in STEM-related and clinical anxiety, with longitudinal increases in science anxiety observed for both female and male students. Sex-specific relationships between STEM anxiety and brain connectivity emerged, with male students exhibiting distinct inter-network connectivity for STEM and clinical anxiety and female students demonstrating no significant within-sex correlations. Anxiety was negatively correlated with academic performance in sex-specific ways at both pre- and post-instruction. Moreover, math anxiety in male students mediated the relation between default mode-salience connectivity and course grade. Together, these results reveal complex sex differences in the neural mechanisms driving how anxiety is related to STEM learning.”

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. Great ideas for parents, too!
• Follow LHTL on Facebook | Join the private LHTL Hall of Fame group | Follow LHTL on Twitter

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners, by Michael Erard.  For years, Barb has thought she would like to write a book about language superlearners. Babel No More is what she had in mind. This fascinating book begins with the story of legendary linguist Giuseppe Mezzofanti, the Italian cardinal who was said to speak 72 languages. It goes on to share dozens of interesting language learning tidbits. Although in 2012 (when this book was published), neuroimaging techniques weren’t as advanced as they are today, Erard does a fine job of exploring how the brain of language superlearners might be different from those of more ordinary learners.  Interestingly, “..individuals living in multilingual communities seem to settle on an optimal cognitive load. The hyperpolyglot possesses a similar patchwork of linguistic proficiencies. Yet he or she exceeds this optimum with a conspicuous consumption of brainpower.” 

We particularly liked learning how the common mentality that you only speak a language if you are a native or near-native speaker is actually not a reasonable measure. “[People think] that when you really know a language, you think in it. In fact, the brain doesn’t think in any language. What people refer to as ‘thinking in a language’ comes from being able to speak more immediately in a language without rehearsing it or translating it from a language one might know better; the spoken thought feels as if it’s closer to its source in the brain.”

If you’re interested in language-learning, and want some inspiration, you’ll find it here in this book.

How Schools of Education Became a Bastion of Bad Ideas

This important, hard-hitting article by Erik Gilbert in The Chronicle of Higher Education (behind paywall), describes the inertial, anti-scientific ways of typical schools of education.  The beginning of the article gives hints of what’s to come (it’s worth subscribing to The Chronicle to read the whole thing): 

“A few years ago, when I was on my university’s Graduate Council, a new course proposal came to us from our College of Education. The proposal referred to the different learning styles of students, something that struck me as odd — I remembered having heard years before that the learning-styles theory had been discredited. Trusting my colleagues’ expertise, I kept my mouth shut and, assuming that learning styles must have been rehabilitated by new research, voted to pass the proposal.

“I later polled the education majors in one of my history classes: Not only did they know about learning styles, they all knew the acronym ‘VARK,’ which stands for visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinesthetic — the four alleged learning styles. The theory, it seemed, was alive and well.

Then I sought out the supporting research. Instead, I quickly came across a New York Times article on the curious persistence of learning styles — curious because of widespread evidence debunking the theory (The Atlantic has since published a similar piece). Despite all this, learning styles still apparently pervade colleges of education. A 2014 article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience on the topic of “neuromyths” found that over 90 percent of teachers it surveyed believed in learning styles.

“Another disturbing example of ed-school thinking involves the way reading is taught. According to a 2018 report by American Public Media:

“The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read. Many educators don’t know the science, and in some cases actively resist it. The resistance is the result of beliefs about reading that have been deeply held in the educational establishment for decades, even though those beliefs have been proven wrong by scientists over and over again….”

Busuu Language Learning App

Although we’re fans of Duolingo (300+ million users), we’ve recently learned of another popular language learning app, Busuu (90+ million users). If you’d like to compare the two, comment on the discussion forum here.

The Myth and Magic of Generating New Ideas

Here’s a wonderful explanation by mathematician Dan Rockmore in the New Yorker on how to generate new ideas.  The secret? Hard focused work combined with diffuse mode breaks.  We may have already known that, but we didn’t know how to write it as beautifully as Dan Rockmore. (On a side note, though, the exercise probably matters more than he thinks…) [Hat tip: Steven Cooke, Lead Mentor LHTL.) 

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. Great ideas for parents, too!
• Follow LHTL on Facebook | Join the private LHTL Hall of Fame group | Follow LHTL on Twitter

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Mайстер-клас від Барбари Оуклі

Barb’s just wrapping up her work for IE University in Madrid, Spain this week and, after a weekend visiting historic and beautiful Toledo, is off to Kyiv, Ukraine to work with and speak for  Оsvitoria! 

Book of the Week

Patient H.M. A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets, by Luke Dittrich.  H.M., that is, Henry Molaison, rivals only Phineas Gage as one of the world’s most famous brain patients.  As it turns out, Dittrich’s grandfather, neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville, performed the notorious surgery that removed Molaison’s hippocampuses and helped spur extraordinary bodies of research on memory. Dittrich’s family history means he has an unparalleled perspective to share on what actually happened to Molaison and what type of man Scoville actually was (hint—there are many dark secrets). This can sometimes be a bit graphic about what can happen during brain surgery, as well as what happens when people undertake to do experiments on people, but its final revelations are astonishing.

Learning About Focused and Diffuse Modes

Barb’s good friend Professor Kenzen Chen of National Chiao-Tung University hosted a fascinating meetup. One of Kenzen’s new TAs, Jenny Wu, made two crafted pinball machines, one representing the diffuse mode, and another representing the focused mode. She wrapped aluminum foil on the board, connected screws to the anode and the foil to the cathode. When the pinball kicks the screw, an electric circuit is formed and the light bulb blinks. Participants were excited and the handmade machine prompted them to compare and think about how the two modes are different! These two images convey something of the excitement!

How Deep Sleep May Help The Brain Clear Alzheimer’s Toxins

This article by Jon Hamilton, in NPR’s health news section, discusses the role of deep sleep in clearing toxins (which may affect Alzheimer’s). It also includes a marvelous animation so you can more clearly see the phenomenon taking place. [Hat tip: Carolyn Patterson]

First Common Core High School Grads Worst-Prepared For College In 15 Years

This article, by Joy Pullmann in The Federalist, observes “For the third time in a row since Common Core was fully phased in nationwide, U.S. student test scores on the nation’s broadest and most respected test have dropped, a reversal of an upward trend between 1990 and 2015. Further, the class of 2019, the first to experience all four high school years under Common Core, is the worst-prepared for college in 15 years, according to a new report…. This is the opposite of what we were told would happen with trillions of taxpayer dollars and an entire generation of children who deserve not to have been guinea pigs in a failed national experiment.” This article in U.S. News & World Report echoes the findings.

Learning is optimized when we fail 15% of the time

As this Neuroscience News article describes: “Learning is optimized in computer models when there is an error rate of 15%. Researchers say the 85% accuracy rule may also apply to humans for optimal perceptual learning.” [Hat tip: brandonrox10.]

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. Great ideas for parents, too!
• Follow LHTL on Facebook | Join the private LHTL Hall of Fame group | Follow LHTL on Twitter

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come, by Robert Preston. We’ve been fans of Robert Preston ever since his gripping New York Times best-seller The Hot Zone first came out. Crisis in the Red Zone focuses on Ebola—Preston traces its origin back to a little boy playing in the forest, probably touching a bat. Ebola got its initial foothold in humanity largely because of lack of education—most people simply couldn’t believe that the love and care that is at the heart of our humanity is what allows the contagion to take place. The bravery of the nurses and doctors on the front lines of this epidemic, and the potential danger to humanity of these types of diseases, is something everyone should know more about.  Don’t miss this edge-of-your-seat thriller.

Living With—and Learning From—ADHD

In this thought-provoking article by Sarah Stein Lubrano, a DPhil student at the University of Oxford, she describes how she learned to make distraction work for her.

Key graf: “I work in instructional design, which is the practice of developing engaging and effective educational products and experiences to help others learn. In creating interactive classes and workshops, my aim is to cultivate the learners’ attention and focus, but one of the first things I learned was that this is incredibly difficult, for everyone – neurotypical or otherwise. In fact, there are common rules of thumb that reflect how universally short attention spans really are: one is that even 10 minutes of lecturing is too long for some people to follow (think of the number of times that you’ve caught yourself, or someone near you, wilting during a long meeting, presentation or conference paper). The trick is to intersperse lectures with exercises and discussions. Moreover, research increasingly suggests that people are more likely to take in new ideas and information when it relates to something they already care about. All of this is magnified for people diagnosed with ADHD, who lack focus, unless there’s a strong and clear connection to their immediate concerns, but who can nonetheless focus profoundly when this element of deep interest is present.” [Hat tip: Tom Busk]

Busting the attention span myth

Here’s an article on attention by Simon Maybin in BBC News that’s also worth your attention. Key grafs: “In the always-connected world of social media, smartphones and hyperlinks in the middle of everything you read, it can feel that much harder to stay focused. And there are statistics too. They say that the average attention span is down from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to eight seconds now…. But the sources are infuriatingly vague… And when I contact the listed sources – the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine, and the Associated Press – neither can find any record of research that backs up the stats. My attempts to contact Statistic Brain came to nothing too. I have spoken to various people who dedicate their working lives to studying human attention and they have no idea where the numbers come from either. 

“In fact, they think the idea that attention spans are getting shorter is plain wrong.” [Hat tip Enrique Planells]

How to Really Listen

This video, featuring deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, explores how we can inadvertently become limited in the possibilities of sound—and of life.  [Hat tip: Kurt Meyer.]

Newly Discovered Brain Cells Help Us Recall Where We Last Saw Objects

This fascinating article by Jason Arunn Murugesu in the New Scientist (well worth subscribing to), describes how newly discovered “vector trace cells” in the brain depend more on the objects in the environment rather than the environment itself.

Key graf: “The vector trace cells become active when we see an object. They help us judge how far that object is from us and also its relative distance to other objects we can see.

“But vector trace cells are active even when the object they have been tracking is no longer visible or has been removed by someone else, and they can remain in this active state for hours. In other words, these cells – assuming they are present in the human brain – may help us remember where we last saw an object.”

So, now you can blame your vector trace cells when you can’t find your keys…

Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s Tips on How to Write a Great Science Paper

Here’s an article in Nature describing literary genius Cormac McCarthy’s approach to editing scientific articles. Barb can vouch for the fact that Cormac McCarthy is not only tremendously altruistic, but a tremendous editor—he edited her books Evil Genes and Cold-Blooded Kindness, and the books were much the better for it.

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. Great ideas for parents, too!
• Follow LHTL on Facebook | Join the private LHTL Hall of Fame group | Follow LHTL on Twitter