 Now, despite the decades of research into this stuff, most high school and university classes are done in a kind of traditional format. They call it the sage on stage where a professor stands in front of a room and their job is to profess, to fill these empty vessels, these students with knowledge. But what's actually happening in a lot of these classrooms is students spend their time taking notes and they're feverishly trying to record what the professor is saying, kind of like a court stenographer, right? And so that doesn't give much of an opportunity for students to really engage with the material, to process it deeply. Instead, they're just note-takers. That's their main role, I think, as students. And I have a lot of experience with my students in each of my classes that I teach and I talk to them, each of them about how they record their lectures, how they take notes, how they study for these sorts of things. And the vast majority of people, when they sit in a class or they sit in any university lecture, as you said, they just write down absolutely everything that you say. And that's their method of studying. And it's very common. In fact, I suspect that a lot of the students in this course are probably writing down every word that we're saying right now. And that's not the most effective way of learning. We know this. But it's extremely common. So is highlighting the information when they're reading a textbook. And obviously, the title of the segment is Learn by Doing. And what we're really trying to emphasize here is the importance of active learning. That sounds trite. The active component, the struggle that people have with generating the content. And that is extremely important. It's not enough to just sit back and let the information kind of wash over you. It's a matter of actually producing the content. So that struggle, I think, really solidifies it in memory, really cements it. So you'll remember it far longer than you will if you actually just reread the information. Yeah. I think anything, what we mean by that active learning is anything you can do to engage with the content more deeply. So this can be anything from quizzing yourself, using flashcards, getting your friends to quiz you, just chatting about the content with your friends and family over dinner, trying to relate the concepts that you're learning now to other concepts that you know really well. Just relating the material to your everyday experience will really help with encoding that information. And this is something that both John and Bob said, that memory in our learning kind of works like a scaffolding. The more that you know, the more you're capable of knowing, right? And as we've heard, memory does not work like a video camera with some kind of limited capacity. It's kind of better than that. You can build on this material if you work on it actively. So that'll help with encoding, and it'll help with retrieving those memories when you need it in the immediate future or months down the track. That's exactly right. But I think what we need to do is make that idea of retrieval a little bit more concrete. So what does that actually look like when people are retrieving the information? And I think the best way is something that most people are already familiar with, and that is flashcards. So, obviously, something as simple as learning another language. So if you see the word, say, bonsoir in French, if you actually have to generate the English equivalent of that word from memory, that struggle, that, oh, bonsoir, what is that? That process right there that you're actually engaging in to generate good evening in English. That's that process that we're after. But if you just see the words, bonsoir equals good evening in a guidebook or in your textbook, you can read that a dozen times, and it's not going to get you any closer to remembering that information nearly as much as actually generating that. And so having flashcards, writing on one side of the card, bonsoir, having generating the English equivalent, writing it out, and then looking on the other side whether you were correct or incorrect. Going with another French phrase and so on. Having English on one side and French on the other and going back and forth. But it's not just simple association learning like that. It can also be very complex, and so we can have a word like, or a concept like the availability heuristic. So on one side of the card you have what is the availability heuristic, and you generate the response. So students in this class might actually try it. So you have on one side availability heuristic go, right? What is it? Generate the description of the availability heuristic. And then once they've tried and they see where they're not quite clear as to exactly what their understanding of that is, then they can flip it over and then they can see exactly what that definition is. And you can do that for the confirmation bias. You can do it for representativeness heuristic. For each of the topics and the content in this course, put it into a flashcard. Use retrieval learning and see whether you can actually explain it or not. Whether you can actually talk to your mother or your sister or something and explain that concept to them. And it's only when you see, only when you struggle with that material in producing it that that real learning happens. And that is going to cement it in memory and you're going to remember it for much, much longer. I think now it's really important to realize that this process, this struggle of retrieving something from memory and making mistakes is by far the best way to learn. I mean a good heuristic or rule of thumb that you can use is that if it feels easy, you're probably doing it wrong. I think that's right. And another really good example of this is when you're preparing a talk or presentation of some sort. Now the first sort of knee-jerk response when you're preparing a talk is to memorize it. To write out the entire thing and read it and then reread it in preparing for this big event. That's what most people do. How else am I going to get through it? That's right. But in fact, that's probably the worst thing that you can do. The best advice that I can give when preparing to give these sorts of things is to give it. Just present it. Present it to your dog or your cat or your friend or your mother or something. Anyone who's willing to listen, just have a go. Don't worry about getting the lines right or getting... It's going to be bad. The first one, two, three times that you do is going to be horrible. You forget what it was that you were talking about. It's going to be terrible. But that's the process. If you're actually trying to generate the thing, if you're trying to struggle to remember the themes of your presentation, what it is that you're going to be talking about, that process, that struggle is going to cement it in memory, but it's going to make it a lot more flexible. When you're actually giving the talk, you won't be stuck to your lines. If you lose your place, you won't be out on a limb. You're going to be completely able to adapt and go on to something else, and it's going to seem a lot more natural, a lot more pleasing to the audience to watch that sort of presentation than one where people just memorize the entire thing. I think you're right. This idea of struggling is something that's not comfortable. It's probably the worst thing that we can possibly imagine. Bob York calls this desirable difficulties, and this is just one example. This is the difficult part, that struggle, that feeling of uncomfortableness that comes with trying to generate, trying to retrieve that information. The desirable part is all of the benefits that that kind of provides. Six months down the road, or when you're giving your presentation, these desirable part is really the reason that we're doing this entire episode is for people to reap the benefits of that. Here's what Bob York had to say when I asked him about desirable difficulties.