5 Things You Didn't Know About How Your Brain Learns New Information

No, you don’t have a learning style. And you’d learn more by quizzing yourself than re-reading that book. Here are 5 things you should know.

I’ve been working in Learning & Development (L&D) for eight years. Essentially, my job is to find ways to get information into people’s brains.

When I first started in L&D, I discovered that people have a lot of opinions about how they learn best, but very few of those opinions are grounded in reality.

“A great deal of what we think we know about how to learn is taken on faith and based on intuition but does not hold up under empirical research.” -Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel

It turns out that there is a lot of research about what works and what doesn’t, but the answers are buried in research papers and obscure books.

The best myth-busting book I’ve found is called Make It Stick by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger III, and Mark McDaniel. The book summarizes years of data behind how people learn, including the five takeaways below:

1. You don’t have a “learning style.”

“The popular notion that you learn better when you receive instruction in a form consistent with your preferred learning style, for example as an auditory or visual learner, is not supported by the empirical research.” -Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel

This is the most common learning myth. Since the time you were a child, you’ve probably been told that everyone learns in a different way, and people learn better when the mode of teaching matches their preferred style.

But that theory has not been validated by research.

Cognitive psychologists Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Bob Bjork conducted a study in 2008 to determine whether there’s sufficient evidence for the learning styles theory.

Their research uncovered several studies that outrightly contradicted the theory and virtually no studies that supported it.

They found that people learn best when the style of instruction matches the subject being taught. Geometry should be taught visually, poetry should be taught verbally, and so on.

Functionally, everyone learns the same way. The best teachers recognize how to teach their topics and use whatever teaching mechanisms best support the subject at hand.

People indeed have preferences for how to learn, but those preferences don’t line up with how people actually learn.

This means that if you’ve always considered yourself to “not be a reader” and think you don’t learn that way, you’re probably wrong. If you think that you learn best kinesthetically (e.g. doing something physically with your body), that’s probably because everyone learns that way for the subject you’re trying to learn. It’s impossible to learn archery by sitting in a classroom. You can’t learn to dance by reading a book. Ensure that the teaching mechanism lines up with the material that you are trying to learn.

The learning styles myth is predicated on the idea that people learn best by doing something they enjoy — something that comes easy.

In fact, the opposite is often true, which brings us to our second takeaway about how we learn…

2. Experiencing difficulty can help you learn better.

“[S]ome difficulties that require more effort and slow down apparent gains…will feel less productive at the time but will more than compensate for that by making the learning stronger, precise, and enduring…our judgments of what learning strategies work best for us are often mistaken, colored by illusions of mastery.”
-Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel

Did you know that when written text is slightly out of focus, readers remember more of the material? The brain is forced to perform more work, so the information sticks better.

Similarly, if a professor’s lecture strays from the order of material presented in the textbook, students have higher recall of the information. The students are forced to discern the key insights and connect those to what they remember from the textbook.

We assume that what comes easily will stick in our brains more readily than things that come difficult, but the opposite is often true.

This is another reason why the learning styles theory is so inaccurate. If you have a preferred way to learn, it’s probably best to do the exact opposite! Experiencing difficulty while learning helps our brains approach the material from a different perspective. The authors of Make It Stick call this “desirable difficulty.”

Desirable difficulty is one of the reasons cited for why many dyslexics have gone on to build incredible businesses. Richard Branson (entrepreneur and philanthropist), Barbara Corcoran (real estate mogul), and Charles Schwab (investor and financial executive) have all credited dyslexia for playing a role in their success. The additional effort they had to expend to learn made their knowledge more robust.

“There are still many dyslexics out there, especially young people, who feel held back by their condition. I used my dyslexia to my advantage and learned to delegate those tasks I wasn’t so good it. This freed me up to look at the bigger picture, and is one of the main reasons I have been able to expand the Virgin brand into so many different areas.” -Richard Branson

When you’re learning something new, be patient. Expect difficulty. Difficulty is a sign that your brain is wrestling with something foreign, exploring how it fits into your existing assumptions and mental models.

3. Self-quizzing is better than re-reading.

“One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know.” -Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel

I can remember situations back in college when I re-read a portion of a textbook several times until I was very familiar with the text. I got to the point where my eyes would scan the beginning of a paragraph, and I’d think to myself, “Oh yeah, I remember that. I’m gonna nail this test.” Then I’d skip that paragraph and go on to the next.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realize a few things about how our brains learn:

Awareness ≠ Understanding
Familiarity ≠ Fluency
Recognition ≠ Knowledge

My familiarity with the text did little to help me recall that information later. When it came time for the test on that material, I was often surprised that I couldn’t remember information that “I knew so well.”

What I should have done was quiz myself more frequently on the material. Self-quizzing identifies places of hidden ignorance. It also helps our brains get better at retrieving the information we have stored:

“[R]ecalling what you have learned causes your brain to reconsolidate the memory, which strengthens its connections to what you already know and makes it easier for you to recall in the future. In effect, retrieval — testing — interrupts forgetting.” -Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel

The next time you’re trying to learn something new, look for an opportunity to test yourself on what you’ve learned. Rather than reading and re-reading the material to develop familiarity, look for a way to gauge your places of hidden ignorance.

4. “Massed practice” is ineffective.

“Massed practice gives us the warm sensation of mastery because we’re looping information through short-term memory without having to reconstruct the learning from long-term memory. But just as with rereading as a study strategy, the fluency gained through massed practice is transitory, and our sense of mastery is illusory.” -Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel

Years ago, I advised my company’s client services team to batch similar work for new hires so they could learn how to solve one type of problem before moving on to the next type of problem. I was inclined to educate new hires through massed practice — repetition of a single task until that task is mastered.

Then I read Make It Stick and realized I had given crappy advice. Massed practice is not how people learn best.

To explain why massed practice doesn’t work, let’s look at an example from the world of baseball…

Let’s say you are a hitting coach who wants to improve your team’s batting average. You’re not sure how best to do this, so you divide your batters into two groups to run an experiment. As part of the experiment, every hitter will get 45 practice pitches.

The batters in the first group will get 15 fastballs in a row, then 15 curveballs in a row, then 15 changeups in a row.

The batters in the second group will get 45 random pitches. They don’t know what’s coming.

Which group do you think will become better hitters?

Before answering that question, I’ll tell you who will enjoy batting practice more: the first group! They know what is coming. They will crush pitches during batting practice because they know what to expect. But that doesn’t make them perform any better during a game because real life doesn’t work like that.

The second group (the one that received 45 random pitches) will become better hitters. Their practice mimicked what they’ll face in a real game-time situation.

The Cal Poly baseball team actually tried the experiment above for six weeks. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel share the team’s conclusion:

“Those who had practiced on the randomly interspersed pitches now displayed markedly better hitting relative to those who had practiced on one type of pitch thrown over and over.”

Massed practice is ineffective because it doesn’t mimic real life. Real life is messy. It doesn’t comport to tidy rules.

Pitchers don’t throw 15 changeups in a row. Changeups are only effective because they are unexpected. They catch hitters off balance. No pitcher in a game-time situation would throw that many of the same pitch in a row.

Similarly, client services teams don’t get 45 of the same cases in a row. Sales reps don’t face the same objection 45 times in a row.

When you’re learning something new, it’s best to practice different tasks back-to-back rather than batching similar tasks together. Create an environment similar to the one you’ll face when performing that task later. Don’t inflate your ego with the illusion of mastery by hammering 15 curveballs in a row.

5. Reflection is a powerful learning tool.

“Reflection can involve several cognitive activities that lead to stronger learning: retrieving knowledge and earlier training from memory, connecting these to new experiences, and visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time.” -Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel

What feels more productive after you’ve finished reading a book: beginning to read the next book in your stack or taking notes on the book you just finished?

To me, it always feels more productive to move on to the next new thing. But our brains often need time to reflect upon what we have learned.

Reflection helps us establish new mental models and form new connections between disparate facts.

“The learning benefits from the various cognitive activities that are engaged during reflection (retrieval, elaboration, generation) have been well established through empirical studies.” -Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel

Once you’ve finished learning something new, take the time to jot down a few notes about that topic. Write notes in the margins of your books. Journal about the TED talk you just watched. Talk to a friend about the Coursera class you just completed. Harness the power of reflection to retain new knowledge.

There are many myths about how we learn.

If you’ve committed to becoming a lifelong learner, it’s imperative to understand how your brain actually retains knowledge.

Rather than falling for popular learning myths, remember these five takeaways:

1. You don’t have a “learning style.”

2. Experiencing difficulty can help you learn better.

3. Self-quizzing is better than re-reading.

4. “Massed practice” is ineffective.

5. Reflection is a powerful learning tool.

Keep learning, my friends.