 We talk to our students a lot about this and certainly based on my own experiences I completely agree with John. Many of us spend the night before an exam just trying to cram weeks and weeks of material into our heads. The same goes with a big presentation that you have to give in front of people. What strikes me though is how we can get it so wrong. I mean we've had years and years of schooling. We've had lots of time to figure out exactly what the best strategies are to get information into our head. But we use these inefficient strategies. I mean how is it that we can get it so wrong? That's a really interesting problem, and it's one that people are actually working on. It's not done and dusted. John Dunlowski, who we talked to has done a fair bit of work. Bob Bjork, who we're going to hear from next, is also working in that field. And Nate Cornell, and they're trying to figure out exactly that. How do people get it so wrong? How is it that you can have a lifetime of experiences in learning? You've tried a lot of things that work and a lot of things that don't. Yet we continually make these sorts of mistakes like cramming. Cramming is not effective for actually having things stick in your memory. So why do we continue to use it? I think from reading their work, there are at least a couple of reasons. One reason is that it is effective in the short term, right? So if you have a big exam and you study as hard as you possibly can, it's probably enough to get you by. It's enough to get you over the line. You'll pass that exam and you'll see, you'll directly associate those efforts for studying the exam and that passing mark. Those two will go hand-in-hand and you'll see that connection. What you won't see is the lack of effect six months later. So if you're taking an advanced course in that topic that you've been cramming for in six months time, you're not going to see the fact that you don't know anything that you've studied for six months previously. So there's that lack of association, I think, is important. The second reason that people continually think that cramming is important, I think, is something called fluency. Now we touched on this with respect to the availability heuristic. So people mistake the size of a category with ease with which it goes down. And the same thing is kind of happening here. People are mistaking the fluency, the ease with which the information that they're studying is going down with learning. And they're not the same thing. So when you're cramming, you're massing all of this information together. You're repeating each of these things, then you reread it. All of this massed information feels like it's going down. It feels genuinely like you understand that material. And you're mistaking that ease of processing with learning. And it's exactly the same for rereading. So when you're studying for an exam or before a presentation, you read through the material you're supposed to remember. And then, oh, I've got to do something else. So I'll read through it again. And every time you read through it, it just feels better and better. It feels like you're learning. But obviously that's a mistake. It feels good and it seems to be one of those things, again, that our predictions about how things actually working are completely disjointed with reality. And that's exactly right. And I think that's what we're going to work on, particularly in this episode, is a little bit more myth-busting. Because this one is hard. This one isn't easy. Because what we think works for learning is almost, it's not even that there's no relationship between what we think and reality. But in fact, it's a negative relationship. What we think works is the exact opposite of what actually works. And so we talked to Bob Bjork about this. And he's been working in this field longer than anyone I know. And he had some pretty good advice about what works and what doesn't.