 In the last episode we talked about learning how to learn and so we provided people with a few tools that they could use to try to learn information and remember that information for a longer period of time. Things like retrieval practice, interleaving, desirable difficulties more generally. And hopefully people will be able to use those skills to be able to help them improve their learning across the board when it comes to learning a new language, a new skill like the guitar or a sport, or even formal training like calculus or computer programming or everyday thinking. And we're going to continue on that theme today in providing people with skills that they can use in their everyday lives. We're going to be borrowing something from science, specifically some of the tools that scientists use in the lab that we can use everyday. Yeah, I agree. And in fact, I don't think there's anything particularly special about what scientists do in the lab. Yes, they're performing experiments, they're doing data analysis, they're using statistics. But these are just formal ways of finding things out, of detecting strangeness, of picking up whether something fishy is going on. Now, what we do in our everyday lives, we may not realise it, but we're actually using some of the tools of science as well. But we use these informally, we use these intuitively. And this idea came up in my conversation actually with Tom Gillovich. Can you tell me about the intuitive scientist? Sure, that's a metaphor that people have used to draw a parallel between what scientists do, which is try to understand the world and there's some formal tools for doing that. And what scientists try to do professionally, of course, we all try to do in our everyday lives to figure out the world around us. And there are a lot of similarities between what we do as people in our everyday lives and what scientists do. In fact, science developed out of the kinds of mental habits that we had. We, over time, recognised what the problems are and what are the things that allow the most powerful conclusion. So it would be odd if regular thinking was just radically different than scientific thinking. It's different, but there are some parallels between it. We're trying, just like the scientist does, to identify what are the phenomena out there? Okay, they're the phenomena. Why are they that way? We ask why all the time. There used to be this beer commercial in the United States of why ask why. And it's a brilliant little tagline because by raising it, it's illustrating it. We just do that all the time. Something happens and we want to know why. That's what scientists do and that's what we do in our daily lives. This idea of applying the formal tools of science to our everyday lives came up in my conversation with Michael Brenner and Pia Sorensen, who were teaching another edX course called Science and Cooking. Here's what they had to say.