 Now we have time for questions, we have our mic guy just grabbing the mic there and you know by now taking your that's nice with some background music yeah we can learn how to do more things at once we'll have unicycles in the back if you want to practice thank you so wave your hand and your name we have a volunteer over there yeah hi I'm Johan Lang I have a question for Sarah you said something that stupid guys do better with feedback could there be a system problem that I keep them back in the feeling of being stupid by giving feedback instead of for instance coaching well the idea is that you continuously update your anticipations and when you have enough evidence when you find you have enough evidence you will update your anticipation and in this case it would actually be the opposite that you start doing much better when you get feedback and you realize that I'm not doing that badly so it could be I would guess that the effect would be that you actually become more confident um one of the things I did um in writing the book guitar zero was I went to classes for different people learning guitar I mean I went some for myself but I also went for young children including kids who were taking Suzuki lessons for a guitar who were like three or four years old and one of the teachers there was really great and what she said to the parents was never ever correct your child unless they've made the same mistake at least three times and part of why she was saying that is there's feedback about what you're doing whether it's right or wrong but there's also feedback in order to encourage someone to motivate them and some of the work that Sarah was talking about about flow states for example the video games are designed to give you a certain amount of negative feedback but more positive feedback than negative feedback to keep you going so I think there's an element of feedback that's about motivation there's an element that's about information and you want to balance those exactly thank you and do we have uh any more questions we have one there and then we have yeah I have a question for Sarah how much uh of the priming is linked to belief if you I mean if the subject is primed as being stupid and the subject doesn't believe it or or vice versa yes so um we always ask the participants after the experiment to fill in a questionnaire so first of all when I I hope this answers your question when I instruct the participants I say that you will first do a language task and then a working memory task I never tell them that they are going to be primed afterwards I asked them did you they fill in a questionnaire answering the question do you think there was any link between the two tasks you did do you think one of the tasks influenced the other and the interesting thing is that in 95 percent of the cases people don't understand that there is a link and that's why it's I mean these are really automatic implicit processes um the second thing with my studies is that the same participants are primed both with being clever and stupid and the fact that I see the strongest effect only when they make errors and not so much when they make correct responses also implies that they are not really aware but it's rather like an automatic quite dynamic process there are studies suggesting that would they be aware they could actually counteract and not get so influenced by it but of obviously in order to be able to be primed stupid you have to have representation of stupid so you have to have a feeling of how it is to be stupid you have to have that schema so to speak do you want to add to that thank you and we had a question yes I have a question here my name is Tina Marie Whitman and I have a question also for Sarah but for for both of you really have you found that there are differences between image or language based sources for priming for example if you would see a picture of a of a crying face versus the word cry do you do find that there are different results or what what are the differences I haven't studied that but I'm sure you know much better the difference between language and I mean there's it's not quite my area of expertise but there are certainly studies that have looked at for example bilinguals and can you be primed from either language there's there's evidence that you can be primed from your secondary language that you can be primed from visual materials there's certainly many different ways in which one can be primed and then there's arguments about how strongly effects are how fragile their effects are when you get them when you don't but certainly almost anything you can think of there's at least some evidence that some priming some of that time thank you and we have another question here hello my name is Aista and this question for Gary but really both um I know there there are windows especially for language and if you miss that window like the feral child Jeanie she never really learned language after that the way we she spoke but the way we of regular speakers she didn't has there been any studies or anything else like language that um we cannot learn as well there's a couple things I would say there the first is that in Jeanie's case she was locked in a closet till she was about 11 I think and so there were profound social effects as well as linguistic effects so um from a scientific perspective she's not a very clean case you don't really know whether the problems she had were because she didn't want to interact with other people or because she had problems say with the language acquisition device like Tromsky might talk about um and that's generally a problem with all of the feral children the best studies maybe are ones of kids that are taught in oral schools deaf children that are taught spoken languages um Alyssa Newport has has done some of that work and I think that the evidence shows that there's some effect but it's not nearly as strong as people think so I wouldn't want to say adults can't learn new languages I would say that on average they don't do it as well people have done much larger scale studies and what you see is a kind of gradual fall-off so the the way it's written up in the literature is sort of you reach puberty and you're done you can't learn anymore I always imagine it as you start thinking about sex and you can't learn another language but the empirical data are some people past that point and as adults learn second languages natively not most people most people can't but some people can um and the decline is pretty gradual if you actually look at the graphs carefully in this classic work by Alyssa Newport the difference in percent correct is like between 100 percent and 80 percent correct or something like that or 75 percent correct um and on some things on word order the the non-native adult learning speakers do pretty well there there are subtle things that have to do with accent basically those are the hardest ones um one other thing that it's really pretty hard for adults to learn about is perfect pitch so it seems like if you're gonna learn perfect pitch you have to do that early in life but almost anything else that I can think of offhand that isn't like directly perceptual I would not write the adults off I would say that you know until we do careful data and there are lots of things where if you actually do a carefully controlled experiment in fact most things the adults will learn something faster than the youngest children if you look in any article that you pick at random from a developmental psychology journal that looks at kids of different ages up to adult controls the adults will learn whatever is going on faster than the within the say the 10 year olds and 10 year olds will learn it faster than the five year olds and the five year olds will learn it faster than the two year olds and so it's hard to find laboratory evidence one possibility is kids just don't quit they get into something and they keep going at it the way I think about it is imagine your young child watching the same DVD over and over and over again there's a kind of patience that young kids have maybe that's part of what's going on it's not that they're faster at learning things but they stick to it longer that could be explaining a lot of the obvious fact that people who learn languages younger in life learn them better but if you try to kind of narrow this down in the lab it's hard to find things that little kids are actually better at than adults thank you and have you seen have you tried with different ages in your lab no that's a very good point I have not so adults in the lab my participants are between 18 and 35 years old there are some studies in the last few years showing that priming is something that kids are subject to there's some argument that they're more weekly subject to it so you can think like the classic prime is I say the word doctor and you start to hear the word nurse well if you're four years old you don't have a strong association in your head between doctor and nurse but you still might get some small priming there and then as you get older and the concepts become more associated you get a stronger prime thank you and we have a next question here hi and thank you for interesting speech I'm Camilla and I'm interesting in cultural and organizational development and I wonder how can we create culture in organizations and in schools to support more learning good question the first thing I think it was the Claude Steele stuff do you want to talk about that but yeah I could actually I'm quite fascinated by carol dweck's studies that I have read there are studies suggesting that instead of giving feedback to children that oh you are clever you you should feedback what they do you did a clever thing so you should focus on what they do so this notion what I spoke about of task focus rather than me focus so that's one thing and I would also promote even though I haven't scientific evidence that's I mean what what my studies clearly shows is that one day you can feel clever but the next day the same person can feel stupid and as I said it seems as if when you feel stupid you are more uncertain and you benefit more from feedback so if you learn to know yourself and are allowed to put yourself in different environments in school so maybe today I need feedback next day I need peace and quiet I don't know the empirical literature for this well but I would say that kids are born really interested in learning it's a natural part of their culture if they don't learn enough things per moment then they start to fuss and so you bring them into school at least in my country and there's kind of a culture not of learning so much as a culture of obedience of following the rules maybe learning particular tests and I think that that diminishes what's an intrinsic culture or at least an intrinsic drive towards learning that relates to some of the stuff that you started with so I think that we are naturally as a species really really curious and then it's not that we need to instill this we need to figure out how to make it stop going away and I'm gonna see if there is do we have more question here because a follow-up question before when you think about you have a question is you talked well you talked about how if we know how to learn then we can learn and on to both of you but to be able to learn we also need some times to unlearn and so how do we unlearn I mean unlearning is a really hard thing so unlearning is about breaking habits and the default for the brain is the more often you do something the more the brain makes that automatic and does it more quickly so one of the reasons you need for example a teacher when you're playing guitar is if you teach yourself how to play guitar you get in bad habits about posture and then as you do the same thing over and over again as long as you're making reasonably good music but maybe not great music your brain says hey I'm doing great here and then it just gets better and better at doing that thing even if it's not quite the wrong thing so and the best thing to do with habits is to not develop them in the first place is to have teachers that monitor you and say no this is not a good idea once you start on a habit like smoking it's pretty hard for for the human brain to get over it we may start to develop better chemical interventions and so forth but our natural tendency is to do whatever we do just do it faster and faster and and and more efficiently part of the reason I think the brain does it is takes less attention so if you do the same thing over and over then it takes less attention that leaves more room for you to do other things so you start driving first it's really hard to figure out how to take a turn and put on the turn signal it becomes automatic then you have more room for conversation and unfortunately you have room for your cell phone so the brain doesn't always put this extra space to good use but the natural thing is to make things automatic to take less attention and that's that's where habits come from I mean I could add that if you think about power of stocks that I spoke about that is pretty much the idea behind cognitive therapy so if you have if you have made an association one point in your life that you're afraid of elevates lifts you got stuck in a lift in cognitive behavioral therapy what you do is to be exposed to lifts in a pleasant state and in a pleasant environment to change this to unlearn the phobia and to to make positive associations between lift and the second item there's some treatments of sort of along those lines there's some experimental treatments of PTSD they're not a post-traumatic stress disorder I don't think that they're clinically ready yet but they will try to activate a memory that's bad in a way that memory is is a habit it's a kind of habit and then deliver a chemical at just the right moment that's involved in the brain's process of reconsolidating something so ordinarily I guess another reason that a habit continues is you do it and the brain tries to make that even more firm so if there's some way of interrupting the process of consolidation then we might be able to pharmaceutically break habits in that way is there do we have we have one question here okay thank you both guys for excellent speeches I have one question I think it's for both of you mid but perhaps you could start Gary it's about how those of us who work with teaching how can we what is the key in order to kind of lower to lower the barrier entry barrier for learning something new so I'm thinking you had an example with the 3000 hours versus 23 000 hours of learning chess so what are the key elements in order to learn something faster to to come in in the state of flow as you also described sorry there are probably many but I would start with motivation and teaching so one of the things that you want to do is to make your practice regimes effective by making them not be too tedious such that you're not really fully engaged we talked about float earlier you want to be kind of in a flow state when you're practicing you want to enjoy yourself if you find that something's tedious for example you might want to change your practice regime so for example if you're always working with a metronome and that gets boring to use the music example again maybe work with a drum machine sometimes so that you're varying the practice you're keeping yourself in a flow state the other thing I would emphasize as a teacher you don't typically know the outcome that you're trying to achieve you don't really know what it's like to be skilled at something and so you're kind of figuring it out for yourself maybe you're watching some youtube videos but a teacher is going to be able to monitor what you do and recognize a good teacher is going to be able to recognize that hey this step you're doing is ultimately going to lead to something wrong so to continue the guitar example if you start playing guitar and you don't use your pinky you'll get a long way your your little finger you get a long way but then you'll reach an end point where you really can't have have long enough reaches for things and so forth a good teacher will not just pay attention hey he's playing the notes in the right order but watch you closely and say hey he's not using his little finger that's going to lead to problems down the road you're not going to know that for yourself and this is why teachers are valuable is that they if if they're sensitive if they're like a good car mechanic who's looking at hey what's going wrong here and they can be gentle and deliver the feedback in the right way then they can alert you to problems that you don't even realize are problems so those are two things that I would emphasize most although I think there are a lot but would be having the right kind of teacher who really studies the art of learning this particular skill and making sure that you keep yourself engaged that practice doesn't feel like labor but it's somehow fun do you want to add Sarah just very a very small thing so the brain is very clever the brain will compute how much effort do I have to put in and what do I get back right so it's important to understand the reward to understand and more likely to want to reward you know the student needs to want what it gets otherwise it's too effortful for the brain so the some kind of understanding of the goal or you mentioned your teacher yes or you imply your teacher another thing that comes to mind is that students learn the best if they realize that they actually don't understand something so a good good trick is to find like if you're teaching them fractions find some fraction problem that they don't understand and then walk them through it so that they do understand it people especially young children overestimate how much they do know but even undergraduates college students underestimate how much they do know and it's very easy for someone to slide through a lecture not thinking about what they don't know and not realizing that there's something there to learn so if you can gently point out a fallacy in people's thinking such that they're aware that there is something to learn that increases their motivation in itself that's another thing to think about thank you and it was and we had a question in the back here as well but you can take the mic because we're streaming as well so then we catch it for the benefit of the people on the internet yes i wonder learning a skill where you know the answer is something we know of from school but many of us try to actually get teams into taking risks to be innovative and creative so can you learn to take more risks and be creative without knowing that you get the reward is that a two tricky question do you know where i'm heading i can try um try emphasis on the word try i think that to some extent risk taking is genetic thing so some people are genetically inclined to take more risks than others and you can see this very very early in life um but i think you can also if you're teaching a class of soccer kids or football i guess you guys call it football um i think that you can try to calibrate the rewards to whether the kids take risks and they will they will pick up on that so um if you say you know great shot even if the child missed the goal um but you still reward the behavior that um that they were intending i think that you know that's going to lead in one direction as opposed to if you only reward them when they get a goal and you see that's great they got the goal and so i think that the young children are very sensitive and adults are very sensitive to what the rewards are and if you think carefully about whether you're rewarding people for success as opposed to sort of doing the right kinds of behaviors that's one way to to mediate the risk taking ability encourage people to take the risks and with with the link to what you said that with the risk if you consider yourself smart you're more inclined to not take risk is there a link to it um i didn't mention anything about that but what signifies a negative self-image is not having thoughts that oh i'm stupid i'm stupid it's actually consistently a consistent finding is that you just display uncertain behavior so it's uncertain it's a lot of variance in the data and so on and of course um and i showed you also that you activate areas in the brain related to pain and aversion and loss and so on so of course if you have a positive self image you're probably more likely to explore and be brave because you feel calmer and less stressed so thank you and we have room for one more question take a risk somebody yes we learned about risk so we're but but i asked so what's the what's the biggest because we're talking about power and lies and disruption so what's the biggest lie about learning that we need to know or what you talk about and what's what should we do with the power of learning i mean i think the biggest lie is that i think the biggest lie is that you can't do it if you're an adult and i think the biggest disruption is if there's something that you want to learn that you think i'm too old to do this go ahead and do it so there are these studies on eudaimonia which is um goes back to aerosol though there's two kinds of pleasure in life there's the immediate gratification of food and sex and so forth immediate pleasure but there's the long-term pleasure of fulfilling your potential so disrupt that feeling that says i can't do this pick something that you love that you think you're never going to be great at but it would be fun just to do it that's what happened with guitar i'm not jimmy hendrix but i love just to be able to play find your guitar go out there and learn it thank you and sarah no no i don't have any i mean it's really gary's talk topic um i'm just fascinated by all the years i've been doing my research i put people in the mr scanner which is very noisy quite boring actually and i have these awfully boring tasks because we need to sample a lot of data points and i'm so fascinated by how intrinsically motivated people are they want to do well even though it's very boring and also we have done studies where we manipulate feedback in different ways and the different aspects and factorial designs and it turns out that most people perform best if they don't get any feedback because they are competent the brain is competent to understand ups i did an error i will try to to correct it so it's not really secret or or something that someone would pose i guess but that's my most obvious impression over the years so the reminder that we have the power and the capacity to yes learn thank you very much for your talk