Everyday Genius

Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley!

Happy Friday! If you’re looking for a book recommendation, here’s one I genuinely mean: Nelson Dellis’s new Everyday Genius (Abrams Press)—and yes, I wrote the foreword, so you know I’m not just being polite.

Nelson is a six-time USA Memory Champion, which sounds impressive until you realize he started with the same average brain the rest of us have. What changed wasn’t his innate ability—it was the techniques he learned and practiced, under pressure, in real competition. That’s what makes this book different from the usual “unlock your potential” fare: these methods are battle-tested, not dreamed up in a lab.

The memory chapters alone are worth it. But he also covers mental math, card counting, speed reading, problem-solving, and—I’ll admit this surprised me—remote viewing and lucid dreaming. Whether you use all of it or just the parts that fit your life, you’ll come away thinking differently about what your brain can actually do.

Grab it this weekend. You won’t regret it.

When a Learning Scientist and a Memory Champion Walk Into the Same Podcast

Jeff Young’s “Learning Curve” podcast recently put together an unusual combination: me and Nelson Dellis, six-time USA Memory Champion, interviewed separately and then woven into the same episode. We didn’t plan our answers together, but we kept landing in the same place—which is either reassuring or alarming, depending on how you feel about what AI is quietly doing to human cognition.

Nelson’s side of the conversation is worth the listen on its own. He demonstrates how he encodes D-Day into a mental image involving Steve Jobs on a Normandy landing craft doing something I won’t spoil here. It is both ridiculous and impossible to forget, which is exactly the point.

Five Minds, One Mission: A Roundtable on Math Instruction

Something a little different this week—instead of a one-on-one conversation, I joined a lively roundtable on Kennet Fröjd’s podcast with four other people who have spent their careers trying to fix math education: Amanda VanDerHeyden (behavioral psychologist and founder of Spring Math), John Mighton (founder of Jump Math), Anna Stokke (mathematician and host of Chalk and Talk), and Craig Barton (author of How I Wish I’d Taught Maths: Reflections on research, conversations with experts, and 12 years of mistakes). What struck me about this conversation is that we all arrived at essentially the same conclusions from very different directions—behavioral psychology, cognitive science, classroom practice, curriculum design, and neuroscience—which I think is actually the most compelling argument that we’re onto something real. We dig into why multiple-strategy instruction backfires, what fluency actually means and why it matters, and why the biggest barrier to better math education isn’t teachers—it’s the layer of management above them. Worth a listen if you’ve ever wondered why so many kids leave school convinced they “just aren’t math people.”

Around the World and Back Again: Where You’ll Find Me in 2026!

One of my favorite things about this work is that it takes me everywhere—from Guatemala to Hong Kong, Tokyo to Göteborg, and a whole lot of places in between. If you’re in any of these cities and want to connect, or if your organization might be interested in a talk while I’m already in the region, just visit barbaraoakley.com to get in touch!

Here’s where I’ll be keynoting (mostly in person, but occasionally via web)

• March 9–13 — Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala City, Guatemala
• March 21 — IBM Tech2026, San Diego, CA (On “grokking” and “distilling” and your brain)
• March 31 — Healthcare Leadership Academy (webinar, UK)
• April 10–14 — The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Distinguished Speaker Series, Hong Kong
• April 16 — Coach A, Japan
• April 17 — Tohoku University, Japan
• April 18 — researchEd Tokyo, Japan
• April 25 — researchEd Colombia, Bogotá (webinar)
• Late April — Korea (dates TBD)
• May 5 — University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, TN
• May 11 — OMSCS Conference (Online Master of Science in Computer Science), Atlanta, GA
• May 21 — Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ
• June 5 — University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia (webinar)
• July 15–16 — Opening keynote and workshop, Biannual Cambridge Schools Conference, Cambridge, UK
• August 30–September 4 — co-chairing the 2026 Ernst Strüngmann Forum: “Memory, Learning, and Neural Adaptation in the Age of Cognitive Offloading,” Frankfurt, Germany
• September 17 — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL, Gies College of Business
• October 6–9 — AHISA Leading Learning Caring Conference, Perth, Australia (webinar)
• November 20 — The Human Rise: Learning in a New Era, Göteborg, Sweden

It’s going to be quite a year! If you’d like to explore having me speak at your organization or institution—especially if you’re in one of these areas around the time I’ll be there—just visit barbaraoakley.com to get in touch.

That’s all for now. Have a happy New Year in 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!