 A lot of people who are coming into the course tend to think that the mind or the human brain is like a video camera. So you can rewind and replay faithfully the information that you've accumulated or the information is somehow limited. So people can only store a certain amount of information before they lose it to something else. Is that how the mind works or what's a better conception of the way that memory works? No, that's a very good question. I once taught a course with the structure was, you know, in all the critical ways that we differ from anything like a tape recorder. And it really is just a whole array of things. But people's general notion that they work something like a tape recorder or any kind of recorder leads them to do very non-adaptive things. They take notes like a court stenographer in a course trying to remember something. And a court stenographer can get every word down all day long and not be able to tell you what the whole trial was about. And then also some notion that when I retrieve information, I leave it the way it was before, you know, which should be true of a compact disc or something. But whereas in the case of human memory, retrieval is a very dynamic process. It alters the state of the system. It makes what you retrieve more retrieval in the future. Things in competition with it less recallable. And so both on that kind of what memory researchers call the encoding side and on the retrieval side, we differ in just absolutely critical ways. And one of the mysteries, one of the continuing interests in just how people learn and how they should learn is why wouldn't we, across our schooling years and stuff just from the trials and errors of everyday living and learning, why wouldn't we learn how the thing works? And that really is a mystery. But one component of that, I think, is we may not understand the engineering details of like the computer in a memory in a computer or the how a disk of some kind works. But we sort of understand the logic of it. And I think when we think, well, we probably work something like that. And we don't work like that at all. It's a very different kind of architecture. So given what we do know about now, and we've had a long career of studying how people remember and retrieve information, what's the best way to try to maximize that? How do you, so again, some of the people who are watching this course want to know how to study better, how to retain information better. And it probably isn't very intuitive given what I know about your work. So what they think they know about memory and how to remember information probably isn't accurate. What is? Yeah, so it makes a lot of difference what activities you engage in trying to learn. And there are a couple of key things to remember that then lead to important just things to have in your repertoire when you're trying to learn. One is we've already sort of mentioned that we don't work like a tape recorder. A key feature of storage in our memories is that that's a process of linking up any new information with what we already know. And in fact, rather than thinking of your memory as some sort of box or tape that the more you have in it or on it, the less room you have. Actually memory storage creates capacity for additional storage. The more knowledge you have in some domain, the more ways there are to link things up and hook things up. It's almost like a scaffolding structure that the more it's built up, the more places there are to put things. And so it's always you want to make an effort to link this to your everyday experience, to what you already know, think of an example, try to extend it. All of those things really help at the stage of trying to encode the information. Almost any way you can be active really helps and a very broad principle is to test yourself. Practice trying to generate the information. Do you know it, get together with a friend, ask each other questions. When you just look at information in a text or on a screen, your judgment of whether you understand it, know it, could answer questions about it is very flawed. Whereas if you test yourself with a friend or by yourself, you get good information about whether you know it or not. Another benefit of course I mentioned earlier is the very fact of retrieving it will make it more recallable in the future. And then there's a third important thing. It potentiates the effectiveness of your subsequent study. If you've tested yourself, and I don't mean testing in such a formal way, you can just stop and think could you summarize this. You're together with a friend, try to come up with a question instructor might ask. Those things will then help you study better. They'll potentiate the effectiveness of study. The next time you study. So that's absolutely important key is to test yourself. I sometimes tell undergraduate students that just an overall principle is that they should input less and output more. Spend less time highlighting copy and rereading. Spending more time trying to come up with another example, trying to answer a possible question. Trying to reproduce the outline of this chapter. All these things try to sort of generate this material. Rather than trying to have it write itself on you. The whole effort to just copy it down with whole notion that it will sort of write itself on you if you're diligent enough is just so wrong and so wasteful to spend that much time. Often students have come and are disappointed in their exam. I ask them to bring their textbook, their notes, tell me how they're trying to study. And there's evidence of a massive effort, huge amount of time spent on this. Sometimes things are highlighted to the point, the only thing that stands out is what's not highlighted. But that activity is not a productive activity. So you really have to learn. And then there's other principles like the very well known spacing effect. If you're going to study something twice, don't just read this chapter again right away to try to see what you missed. Go on to other material, other courses, and then come back to it. That's called the spacing effect. And the spacing your study opportunities can lead sometimes to a doubling of your later recall. So how you manage yourself really matters. And there's a whole series of things to learn about just managing your own study activities. And in some sense of how easily it is to get misled, some of the poorest things that you can do from a learning standpoint create an illusion that you're learning rapidly. Massing study sessions or practice makes people improve rapidly and then forget very rapidly. And so it's becoming sophisticated as a learner as a lot of components. You have to monitor the state you're learning well. You have to control it. A whole series of knowledge about sort of activities, use technologies well rather than poorly. So it matters. So I think in the early 90s, you coined the term desirable difficulties. Now these are obviously not the sort of things that would occur to students who would immediately think of them when studying for an exam or something. Could you just explain desirable difficulties? Well, the notion of desirable difficulties is that refers to a set of manipulations that all have the property that they create challenges, a sense of difficulty during the acquisition process. That's the sense in which there are difficulties. Their desirableness sense then they enhance long-term retention and transfer. So varying the conditions of learning or practice examples rather than keeping them constant and predictable, reducing, using tests rather than presentations is learning. Interleaving the separate things to be learned rather than blocking practice on each thing at a time. There's a whole set of these that create this misimpression. Actually, I've just given you the desirable difficulties. They create the sense of difficulty but then are associated with better long-term attention. And really, another way to put all this is a very old distinction going back to the 1930s between performance and learning. So performance would be like how accurate you are, how rapidly you can do something during the acquisition process. Learning is those changes in relatively permanent changes that will support your being able to recall, use this information later. That's what we would like to optimize. But what happens is we can confuse performance during the process as evidence of learning. And many things that make performance go up very rapidly. Mass practice, continuous feedback, keeping conditions constant and predictable, make performance go up really rapidly and then are associated with very poor long-term learning. And other thing that's made these results so important is various things where you ask people, what helped you learn better, this condition or that condition? Or predict how well you do on the test that comes in a week. It shows that people are really fooled by their current performance. It's not only unreliable indicator of whether learnings happen. It's sometimes exactly the opposite. So we're really at risk of misinterpreting whether we've acquired the skills and knowledge that we are intending to acquire. So on the one hand, it's never been more important to know how to learn because more learnings happen outside of formal supervision. We're on our own. We're at a computer. We're doing this. We want to learn some new tech for job purposes or whatever across the whole lifetime. So we need to know how to learn. But it's not easy. Our intuitions mislead us. A lot of the standard practices that we've been exposed to in schooling are not optimal. We would just natural for us to think, well, if our teachers did that, that's the way we should do it. And that's often wrong. So it's a critical kind of juncture of can people learn how to manage or be effective stewards of their own learning? And that's an ultimate sort of survival skill. My name is Bob. I think about learning.