 Over the last few episodes we saw that our intuitions about how we perceive and remember the world are often mistaken and in fact we have no real privileged access into the basis of our decisions, how it is that we do what we do. In the last episode we introduced a more realistic account of how the mind works. We spoke about system one and system two and chatted to Danny Kahneman about some of the heuristics and biases that we rely on, that we have to rely on in order to deal with the complexity and ambiguity of the world. One of the things I think is important that people take away from the last episode is that it's not really a matter of just slowing down. That's not really a solution and as Danny Kahneman said during our interview when we asked him how to improve everyday thinking he suggested that we pick only a couple of areas and try to improve those or recruit the help of a friend, someone who's looking at the circumstance from the outside. And the reason he made this suggestion I think is that he's been doing this a long time, 50 years I think he's been in this area and he's won a Nobel Prize. If anyone is going to improve their everyday thinking by generally improving their problem solving skills it's going to be Danny Kahneman and he mentioned that his everyday thinking hasn't improved over the last 50 years or so. And so where does that leave us? Well, just being more careful or being more deliberate really isn't going to help necessarily. So that's only half the story. Of course learning the names of these heuristics and biases are important so people can recognize them when they're actually happening. But that's only half the story. The other half of the story is what we're going to talk about today which is learning to learn. We talked to Jeff Norman who essentially teaches this stuff to doctors about this very topic and here's what he had to say. So how do they improve? As an expert you mentioned that going slow doesn't necessarily help, being deliberative and there's this compounded issue of self-assessment that we often don't know how good we're actually doing in any given case. What does that mean for improving practice? How do we get better? The goal of this course that we're taking is called the science of everyday thinking. So given your experience in the field of expertise and in medicine, how do we improve everyday thinking? You improve by knowing more. So just the accumulation of experiences. Yeah, it seems so tantalizing. It would be really nice if I could be very prescriptive and say well if you do this, that and the other thing then you'll be much better. At some level I guess there's got to be a bit of a germ of truth in that. This course wouldn't exist if we didn't think that there are some that being explicit about everyday thinking and the traps in everyday thinking wouldn't help people think better. And at some level that's true but that's generally locking into what's been called general problem-solving strategies which are not very powerful. Sure that's going to help a bit. I suppose reflection is going to help a little bit. But it seems that all of these strategies to sort of generalize horrendously are good for about a 10% improvement. It's not zero but it's not night and day or black and white either. And very clearly the single best predictor of how good you are is how much you know about the domain. Not what problem-solving skills you bring to bear on it. We began there, that was wrong. Reaction is are there strategies we can do to optimize the acquisition of knowledge? And again we're talking about two kinds of knowledge, formal knowledge and experiential knowledge. And we're now beginning to discover and I can't take any personal credit for this one. This isn't my domain. But people like Mayor Bjork Rotiger have been working hard on taking models of the nature of the mind, short term working memory, long term memory associative. And turning that into very prescriptive and powerful strategies to enhance the efficiency of learning. Things like an obvious thing like mixing up the examples from across multiple chapters so that you have to try and figure out which is which. It turns out to be an extremely powerful strategy for learning. The idea of transfer which is being able to take knowledge that you've learned in one context and apply it to another. One it doesn't happen at all as easily as we think it does. There are two psychologists with device strategies to make that happen better. So I think this is moving much more into the instructional educational psychology into things. There are things we can do to very much enhance the efficiency with which you acquire the knowledge you need to get the job done as a diagnostician or as a human. My name is Jeff. I think about reasoning. I think it's really clear now that just telling people to slow down to be more careful is not going to help people improve their everyday thinking. Yeah it's really important that we have the vocabulary for this stuff. You need to be able to know what the heuristics and biases are and point to them and see where they're operating. But as Jeff said the key to improving thinking, to thinking better is to know more. So if you want to be a better singer you have to spend time singing. If you want to become a better cricket player you have to practice. That's part of the story I think but the other half is, as Jeff said, yes practice is important. You need to spend the time and the effort actually doing the thing that it is that you want to improve on. But the other is actually taking the advice or learning from experts. So reading, right? You need to spend time looking at the things that experts say are important within that field in order to improve a lot more. So when it comes to sport, knowing where to put your fingers or your feet is critical, right? In academics, learning from experts or academics to tell you what area or what things to read within that area. So you're not going down blind alleys all the time. They can tell you exactly what you need to, where you need to focus your attention. And that's really important, that's what reading does. But this idea of general knowledge or general problem solving, as Jeff Norman called it, is a little bit tricky, isn't it? I mean he said that, yes, that's not going to help. Having this sort of generic problem solving capability hasn't done very well in the past. And Danny Kahneman mentioned that in his interview as well. So just having this sort of blunt force thing that you can apply to each of these different areas isn't going to be terribly successful. And the reason it's not is that it's so far removed, right? So you have this sort of general purpose tool that you're applying to all of these different very specific things. And by that very nature, it's going to be unsuccessful because it's so far removed from each of these different areas. But what is going to be successful is exactly as you mentioned. It's in order to improve everyday thinking, you need to know more. You need to expand your experiences with that particular domain. And so that's what we're going to talk about today specifically, learning how to learn. If your goal is to try to improve, is to try to know as much as you can about a particular domain, we can help, we know a lot. We can help you get there more efficiently. So we can help with learning the information faster and hanging on to it for a longer period of time. And so we talked to John Dunlowski, who's done an enormous amount of work in this area. He's done a massive analysis of all of the techniques that seem to be effective and those that don't. And here's what he had to say.