How We Learn - Benedict Carey

“From an early age, it is drilled into us: learning is all about self-discipline. We must confine ourselves to quiet study areas, turn off the music, and maintain a strict ritual if we want to ace that test, memorize that presentation or nail that piano recital. What if almost everything we were told about learning is wrong? And what if there was a way to achieve more with less effort?”

I came across Benedict Carey’s book, How We Learn, and am fascinated by his research. An American journalist and reporter on medical and science topics, Carey’s book introduces information that changes everything we thought we knew about the brain; including his honesty, experiences and strong narratives together with scientific research, wisdom and practical tips. He tells us to take a break and stop cramming information and beating our brain up. We need to study smarter, not harder.  In the introduction, Carey begins telling the reader about himself as a student, starting off with four simple words; I was a grind. ‘Like so many others, I grew up believing that learning was all self-discipline: a hard, lonely climb up the sheer rock face of knowledge to where the smart people lived. I was driven more by a fear of failing than by anything like curiosity or wonder’. He tells us how the only strategy he knew for deepening learning was to ‘drive yourself like a sled dog’. Carey’s real conversion experience occurred when he began applying for colleges, sending out application after application and failing to receive anything back but one spot on a waiting list, a college he dropped out of after attending for a year.

Reading sections of this book, I was reminded that there are so any ways in which people learn. Whether this be linguistic, kinaesthetic or mathematical learning. “Another common assumption is that the best way to master a particular skill is by devoting a block of time to repetitively practising just that. Wrong again. Studies find that the brain picks up patters more efficiently when presented with a mixed bag of related tasks than when it is force-fed just one, no matter the age of the student or the subject area”. Personally for me I find repetitive practise to be incredibly helpful, whereas others may not.

Learning does not need to be an isolated chore, but more a part of living. Each person has their own way of learning, there is never a ‘wrong’ way of learning as long as it works for the individual. Here are a few excerpts from How We Learn that I thought were interesting.

· The brain is not like a muscle, at least not in any straightforward sense. It is something else altogether, sensitive to mood, to timing, to circadian rhythms, as well as to location, environment. It registers far more than we’re conscious of and often adds previously unnoticed details when revisiting a memory or learned fact. “Moods colour everything we do, and when they’re extreme they can determine what we remember”.

· “If the brain is a learning machine, then it is an eccentric one. And it performs best when its quirks are exploited”.

· “In short, it is not that there is a right way and wrong way to learn. It’s that there are different strategies, each uniquely suited to capturing a particular type of information. A good hunter tailors the trap to the prey”. 

How We Learn; The Surprising Truth about When, Where and Why it Happens. Benedict Carey (Officially Published September 2014).