This book started Chapter One with a fascinating question: why do people with brains split completely in half (surgery for severe epilepsy) still feel like one unified person? The answer: somewhere in the left hemisphere, there is a system in our brains that researcher Michael Gazzaniga calls the "left brain interpreter". The interpreter what what puts together the story of our lives. Oh, and 'story' is truly the right word; the interpreter will make up bullsh*t to explain what it does not know! Chapter One has some other interesting information about the brain. It's not directly about learning per se. But it's certainly interesting! Chapter Two was baffling to me at first: "The Power of Forgetting." Honestly, I couldn't put the anecdotes and information into something cohesive. I felt like something was missing or I was missing something, at any rate. At the end of the chapter, I asked myself this question: "Why is forgetting important to learning?" And I couldn't answer the question. I had no idea. I went back and skimmed over the chapter again. Nope, still couldn't answer that question in my own words. Huh. I shrugged and went on. But not before I stuck a sticky-note with a question mark on the last page of the chapter: a visual reminder of the question that bugged me. Chapter Three was also a bust! The science is all over the place and the conclusions feel like the author's personal preferences: if tying memories to environmental contexts is a crutch, you should vary your environment as you learn. A similar, better argument is made (varying or "interleaving" your practice), much more convincingly, later in Chapter Eight. Chapter Four's material about spaced repetition was review for me, but very interesting and worthwhile information if you've not yet read about the work of, say, Piotr Wozniak. The "Four Bahrick Study" was new to me and also very interesting. I believe in the power of this method because I've been using it for a couple months (paper flashcards). The general idea: the longer you can space out re-learning things, the better you'll remember them and the less time you'll waste reviewing things you already know. (Look up "spaced repetition" online.) Chapter Five is named "The Hidden Value of Ignorance" (sounds exciting and intriguingly counter-intuitive). I think it's a pretty poor title for some excellent advice, which is: quiz yourself often if you want to learn something. Don't keep reading and re-reading material, hoping it will sink in. We don't learn (or even memorize) by osmosis. If you put effort into recalling something even (or especially) if you fail to recall it, you'll remember that thing much better later. Much, much better, actually. And just as importantly, you won't be fooling yourself into thinking you've learned something you haven't (the "fluency illusion"). Another thing I liked about Chapter Five was towards the end when Carey applies "testing/quizzing" to the concept of "fake it 'til you make it." Basically, pretend you already understand the subject and then try to apply it; treat failures as opportunities to complete your understanding. Another way to look at it is the old adage that goes: you don't really understand a subject until you try to teach it to someone else.
Deep down, I already knew that. Writing these book reviews, for example, is very helpful for me because it forces me to put my half-formed ideas and understandings about a book into my own words. I'm trying to communicate my thoughts to other people. I may not succeed, but the effort alone increases my understanding (and often forces me to re-read a paragraph or two!) It's very valuable.
The final thing I got out of Chapter Five, strangely, was that I think I finally understood the point Carey was trying to make back in Chapter Two about forgetting! So, if you forget something, you'll remember it better next time, right? Well, I guess testing yourself and failing is another way to find that you've forgot something and thereby actually strengthen your understanding. It's all part of the same "making connections stronger" action in the brain.
Why is forgetting important to learning? Answer: if we forget a little, we make a stronger connection. Trying and failing makes a better connection.
But, really, does this chapter demonstrate any "value of ignorance"? I'm not seeing it. I'd say that's an odd way to put it at best.
Chapter Six was frustrating for me. It's about the idea that you need to distract yourself from a problem in order to let your subconscious work on the problem - often resulting in far better and more creative solutions than brute force mental effort. I actually believe very strongly in this concept; I have experienced it first hand more times than I can count. So what's my problem with this chapter?
Well, it's the emphasis on the "not thinking about the problem" part. Reading the chapter casually, you might get the impression that your average person is, if anything, not distracted enough! That we should go check our inboxes or juggle a ball every five minutes and the world's mysteries will unfold before our very eyes!
Nonsense. You first have to think about the problem to exhaustion. Put in the work. Try it from every angle. Draw diagrams. Lose yourself completely in the attempt. It might take hours. It might take days. It might take months. You have to get to the point where you start to have dreams about the problem.
Ah! Now distract yourself. Take a shower. Do some gardening. Play some Minecraft. Your brain is still working on the problem, but now it's applying the subconscious to the problem, making weird connections and being all creative and sh*t.
I'll admit, Carey does mention this mental effort part in the chapter. He does. But it's downplayed so much that distractions end up overhyped like this one weird trick that Nobel Prize winners don't want you to know about.
Chapter Seven is yet another take on distractions! On the surface it's about that nagging feeling we have when we can't complete something. We remember the project we weren't quite able to finish the other day. It stays in our memory.
At first, this chapter annoyed the hell out of me because...my life right now is a series of distractions. I'm a software developer who works at home...with two young children. I can tell you right now: distractions are not the key to solving hard problems, okay? Hard work and concentration are the key to solving hard problems.
You can live an entire life of distraction, learning and accomplishing nothing.
Anyway, the idea that your average person "would sure benefit from some distractions right about now" needs to be taken in context (or with a big old grain of salt). Unless you're a cloistered monk, live alone, work in a private office, study in a library, or spend a lot of quality time out in nature, you're probably already up to your damned eyeballs in distractions. You could probably do with a lot less of them. You probably laughed darkly, maybe even a little frighteningly, when you read a chapter about the benefits of distractions. You probably turned to the back flap of the book to see who this Benedict Carey guy is who has no beneficial distractions in his life, the poor guy, so he needs to go get himself some distractions because he's just got too much damned peace and solitude and concentration in his life, the poor bastard!
Actually, what's funny is that I really liked how Chapter Seven ended! There was some really solid advice about tackling large projects: don't try to "incubate" ideas for a project as a whole; get started right away ("break the skin," to paraphrase) and go until you get stuck. Then incubate the solution to that problem. Then get to the next problem. To borrow the quote from poet A.E. Housman:
When I got home I wrote [a line or two of verse or a whole stanza] down, leaving gaps, and hoping that further inspiration might be forthcoming another day.
Chapter Eight. Honestly, I have no complaints about Chapter Eight. It makes a solid case for "interleaving" your studies as opposed to mindless repetitive drilling of super-specific skills. The science started with physical activities (sports), but eventually came to find that purely mental learning (say, math) is also most effective if you shuffle the learning up, revisiting topics and doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
My own flashcards work this way: I have a single deck with everything I want to remember. I have computer science in there, math, some philosophy, the difference between i.e. and e.g., "who" vs "whom", you name it. I shuffle the cards so I have no idea what topic is coming up next. Reviewing the cards on a spaced repetition schedule brings back old subjects that I'm just starting to forget. According to science, I'm making strong connections. If I keep this up, I'll know these things for life.
Chapter Nine was also solid and I'm eager to try out its method: perceptual learning. Here's the idea: make yourself a little computer game; display an image; press a button to identify what you're seeing; display a different image; press a button; repeat. Do it repeatedly and fast. What you're doing is teaching the image-processing and subconscious parts of your brain to identify the patterns in the images. Our brains are really, really good at this.
What kinds of things can you learn with this method? Well, the book uses these examples: airplane instrument panels, styles of paintings, and species of birds, medical skin conditions. It has to be visual.
I wonder, though, if you can learn things that aren't generally considered to be "visual" problems, like programming idioms, certain elements of mathematics (the book confirms this one), obscure or difficult English grammar, and anything else that can be very quickly seen and identified? I bet it would work. My evidence is the fact that we didn't learn all of the words of our native languages by looking them up in the dictionary. No, we learned them through context, whether spoken or written. I'm still learning how to pronounce many words which I learned in books but rarely (if ever) hear in conversation. I've never looked these words up, but I've seen them enough times to have an accurate understanding of their meaning. Seeing 50 examples of right and wrong uses of "who" vs "whom" and repeating the test until you get it 100% correct ought to very quickly embed the correct usage in your mind even if you can't explain the "rule". Anyway, just a thought. I'd love to try it out.
I loved the fact that Carey had his daughter make a PLM (perceptual learning module) for him so he could learn to identify the artistic movement (Impressionism, Romanticism, Expressionism, etc.) of a painting by sight. It worked amazingly well. It makes sense that it would work. And yet, it's not the sort of thing I would have ever considered building for myself.
Chapter Ten was okay. It's about the role of sleep in learning. Having just finished a whole book on this subject (Why We Sleep by sleep scientist Matthew Walker - who is quoted in this chapter), Carey's summary was a little underwhelming and possibly slightly wrong or out of date.
I took quite a few notes while I was reading this book (I use sticky-notes as my marginalia - they act like little bookmarks for quickly finding a subject, I find notes distracting upon re-reading a book, they allow me to revise my notes easily as I refine my understanding, and at any rate, this was a public library book, so I couldn't write in it even if I wanted to). I got a lot out of it!
So why am I giving it just three stars? That doesn't seem fair!
Well, a non-fiction book can have tons of great information and still fall short of being great book. A fiction book can also have great characters and ideas and still fail as a story.
I think my criticisms are most easily addressed by looking at some of the chapter titles:
* 2. The Power of Forgetting
* 3. Breaking Good Habits
* 5. The Hidden Value of Ignorance
* 6. The Upside of Distraction
* 7. Quitting Before You're Ahead
* 8. Being Mixed Up
* 9. Learning Without Thinking
These are clearly written to titillate. They sound counter-intuitive and exciting and - best of all - they sound like shortcuts to hard work! But by shooting for excitement and aiming to please, the titles end up being somewhat inaccurate or possibly misleading ("The Hidden Value of Ignorance" comes to mind). Worse, in trying to make the text match the chapter title, the conclusions get all muddled. "The Upside of Distraction" underplayed the real instigator of powerful problem solving: the preceding deep concentration. The mixed message in "Breaking Good Habits" was befuddling at best!
If this were the only book on this subject, I would highly recommend reading it (carefully). But I'm part way into "Make it Stick" published the same year (2014) and I'm impressed with it. I certainly won't go as far as to say it's better without finishing it, but it's looking good.
