Learning is hard. Using your phone is easy. That's a bummer because learning important things can really make your life better. I mean, you can understand the world more clearly or have more opportunities and work, or just become a smarter human being. That's a lot of work and the stuff that's on your phone.

Well, that's a lot more appealing, but what if we could make learning as addictive as all of those apps that are beckoning to you from your phone? This was an idea that went viral back in 2023, when the CEO of Duolingo gave a Ted talk claiming you could use social media virality and addictiveness and attention engineering to make learning really easy.

Well, in November of that year, I dedicated a podcast episode to investigating this idea. Now it was a really popular episode because I read some perhaps unexpected conclusions. What I want to show you here is a clip from that episode to get to all of my big ideas, I think you're going to find it really interesting.

Enjoy it. Can we make learning as addictive as social media? Last week, I talked briefly on the show about a Ted talk that has been going viral recently. It was done by Louis Von Ahn, the co-founder of Duolingo. Today, I want to take a deeper look at this question.

I want to draw from the science of motivation and distraction to argue. Number one, Von Ahn specific claims about making learning as addictive as social media are doomed to failure. But number two, if we look more closely at how the brain actually functions, we can find there is a lasting and effective way to make learning more appealing.

And yes, even more appealing to social media. It's just going to be different than the Duolingo approach. In the second argument, we are going to see a more general playbook for cultivating a deeper life in general. All right, so let's jump into this. I want to start with the video.

I'll put it up here on the screen. For those who are watching, you can see this is Louis Von Ahn giving his talk. I wrote down here the main points from his talk so that we can be on the same page here. So what does he argue in this?

Well, he argues that Duolingo wants to give equal access to education for everyone. This is why they're moving language learning onto mobile phones. They use a freemium model. Some people pay for it, or you can watch the ads, the people paying for it, help subsidize the people who can't afford to pay to it.

So you get more people to see it to make learning more engaging. Duolingo uses techniques like streaks, notifications, and a fun mascot that game of social media apps use the hook users to make the learning more addictive. They're showing you can use addictive techniques for good. Millions use the apps to learn languages more than in all U.S.

high schools combined. Von Ahn hopes that these techniques can be applied to teaching other subjects like math on phones. So we can even take a closer look. I'm going to switch to another video here that will just show us some actual app usage of Duolingo in progress. So I have that up here on the screen now.

You can see if you're watching this as opposed to just listening, I'll narrate it to you. I'll narrate if you're just listening. You'll see you're selecting avatars. You're clicking on things. Questions are coming up. Quick, bright graphics so you can see what's happening. There's an avatar that looks nice.

There's an owl that looks really fun. Things are moving around. Questions are coming up. So it does really look like a really sort of friendly, colorful app. And so it's supposed to have this addictive feel so that when you feel that urge to pull your phone out of your pocket instead of going to TikTok.

So when we go to Duolingo, there's an owl with glasses. We're going to have fun with this. Let's go. All right. So let me start by saying a couple of things I like about Duolingo. I want to give credit where credit is due. Using applications on the internet to make information more accessible, especially information you can use to better yourself in terms of learning is a really good idea.

I think it was a really good idea when Khan Academy did this, for example, having a very easy to grok visual format for teaching mathematics and then making those mathematic lessons widely available. That did a lot of good. That is the internet being used towards its full potential. We're going to see similar leaps in the ability for people to teach themselves material delivered through the internet.

Similar leaps are about to happen due to the integration of large language models like ChatGPT and learning. They're actually very good at this. ChatGPT and related language model based chat tools are really good. You can go back and forth and ask it questions, for example, about a mathematics technique.

Well, can you give me an example of this? Why did you do this here? We are going to see big changes happening in terms of tutoring and education with those tools as well. This is all great. The internet bringing more information to more people. But what about this idea that we can make a learning app as addictive as social media so that people will pull out this app instead of something else?

And over time will essentially addict people to learning and increase the level of learning in the world. Well, here is where I think we need to get a little bit more wary. And to understand my weariness here, we actually are going to have to look a little bit deeper about how the brain gets motivated to do things.

There are two separate types of motivational systems that are relevant to this discussion. If we're going to understand the problem with Von Ahn strategy and if we're going to understand an alternative that might work better, we have to understand these systems. And so to help us understand the first system, I'm bringing an article up here on my screen.

The title is Dopamine, Smartphones, and You, A Battle for Your Time. This is written by Trevor Haynes. And what I like about this article is that it does a good job of explaining the dopamine system, which is going to be the relevant system when we think about the urge to pull out a phone and do something on the phone.

So when we think about addictiveness, quote unquote, surrounding apps, this is the system that's at play. I'm going to read a couple of quotes from this article that will be relevant for our purpose here. Here's the first quote that I want to read. Dopamine is a chemical produced by our brains that plays a starring role in motivating behavior.

It gets released when we take a bite of delicious food, when we have sex, after we exercise, and importantly, when we have successful social interactions. If you can do all four of those things at the same time, you're really winning. In an evolutionary context, it rewards us for beneficial behaviors and motivates us to repeat them.

So this is sort of what we've heard about dopamine. It's kind of the layman's understanding. It has something to do with motivating us to do pleasurable behaviors. Let's look a little bit deeper here. Every time a response to a stimulus results in a reward, these associations, so the associations mediated by the dopamine system, become stronger through a process called long-term potentiation.

This process strengthens frequently used connections between brain cells called neurons by increasing the intensity at which they respond to particular stimuli. Now, this is really important. When we look closer at the mechanisms of the dopamine system, we see a Pavlovian aspect to it. There's a response, some sort of stimuli, and there's a response to that stimuli that feels good.

So this is an immediate thing. Stimuli response, stimuli response. So what's building up here in neurons is this immediate connection. I pull out this app, and almost right away, I'm seeing something that triggers an emotional reaction, be it an outrage if I'm looking at a sort of outrage peddler on Twitter, or amusement if I'm looking at, you know, TikTok videos from a curated list that's towards funny videos.

And your brain builds this stimuli response, stimuli response type of connection. The dopamine system then plays off of this and says, let's go do this behavior right now to get the response right away. So there's a real immediacy there. I have one more quote here, just to give us another technical term.

Research and reward learning and addiction have recently focused on a feature of our dopamine neurons called reward prediction error encoding. These prediction errors serve as dopamine-mediated feedback signals in our brains. We're constantly, the system is constantly monitoring this very tight feedback loop. There's a particular stimulus, and what type of response do we get?

And where it has learned that a stimulus gives you often a positive response, then it really drives you to do it. Now, this was the effect. All of this was unlocked. When this effect was uncovered in the context of apps on phones accidentally by Facebook. This happened about a decade ago.

Facebook engineers, we've talked about this before, but it's worth repeating. Facebook engineers had this very pragmatic idea that we are going to add the like button to our Facebook mobile app because it is highly inefficient when a Facebook post is generating lots of simple, positive, affirmative responses, don't have much information, lots of congrats, great, that's awesome.

And the Facebook engineers were very pragmatic, and they said, here's the problem. I post a triumph. Everyone's saying great and congratulations. And you have 30 or 40 of these short exclamatory comments. You don't realize that three pages into this comment is the guy who's saying, hey, in the background, there's a Yeti stealing your Jeep.

And that's like the interesting comment probably about this picture, but you don't find out about the Yeti stealing the Jeep in the background because it's buried. So he said, oh, well, add a like button. So if all you're going to do is say, that's great, you click the like button and we can save the comments for more meaningful information, like letting people know there's a Yeti stealing their Jeep.

This was the idea behind the like button. They turn it on. Almost immediately, they noticed, my God, people are using the app a lot more. And the reason was, is that the accumulation of likes was a positive reward signal. The clicking of the app, that little white F in the blue box on your phone was a very clear stimulus.

Boom. You press that stimulus and often you get this nice reward of people liked what I did. That created a association. So now we get these reward prediction error encoding neurons involved. Once that association was very strong, your, your dopamine system is like, click that button, click that button.

And people would click it more and more and more. That was the birth of the attention engineering era that we're in now. That was the realization among attention economy platforms that if we hack the dopamine system, we can 5x, 6x. Now in the case of TikTok, probably 10x engagement on these apps.

And that's just more data, more ads to sell. So that is the system that's at play when you keep pulling out your phone. So what Von Ahn is saying in his TED talk is let's try to win at that game. You know, let's make this sort of fun. And there'll be a nice reward because when you click on the app, there's an owl wearing glasses and stars fly around and you have streaks.

And that dopamine system will say, hey, let's, let's take out this app and let's play it. All right. Here's the problem about that. If you had nothing else going on on your phone, if it was your phone had the weather app and Duolingo, that's a nice reward. And you might feel compelled to pull out the Duolingo and play with it.

The problem is, is that you are competing with TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, mobile games. You're competing with applications that are also trying to hack the dopamine system. So now you need to out reward them. You want your dopamine neurons associated with Duolingo to have a stronger reward response, a notably stronger reward response than these other attention engineered applications.

And the reason why I think that is almost likely not going to happen is because you cannot engineer the reality, cannot engineer out the reality that learning requires strain. Learning is hard. This is something I've talked about first in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. I think this also comes up in deep work.

I think this also comes up in my book, Digital Minimalism. This comes up time and again, this notion that how do you learn a complicated new procedure, it's through a process known as deliberate practice, deliberate practice forces you to strain yourself with the activity at hand, be it conceptual or physical, pass where you're comfortable.

And it's in that strain pass where you're comfortable, that you're able to actually move forward your capabilities. If you want to play a guitar lick faster, you have to actually push yourself past where you can comfortably play that guitar lick. And at first you have to concentrate that on that, playing that guitar lick faster with your full concentration, really stretching yourself.

And it's really hard. You're making mistakes. You're giving it your full attention not to make mistakes. You know what happens? You get better at it. And eventually that speed becomes easier. I know that analogy because I actually captured that in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, where I talked about deliberate practice.

I spent time with a professional guitar player and I documented journalistically the amount of strain this guy had practicing. Trying to move his, the speed of his fingers on guitar picking faster. He would concentrate so hard that he would forget to take a breath. And then after a while, he would have the savage intake gasp as his body was trying to stave off him going unconscious from lack of oxygen.

That's how hard he was concentrating, but that's what actually makes you better. Same thing applies for conceptual goals, be it learning Spanish or calculus. You have to stretch yourself past where you're comfortable to make a higher level comfortable. Now, I used to have this debate all the time on my website at calnewport.com with my articles and on my newsletter, because people would often take these type of activities and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, you got to get in a flow state.

And I had to keep coming back and saying, this isn't a flow state. The flow state, a concept that was, you know, invented and studied by the late great performance psychologist Anders Ericsson. It was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who I had corresponded some with, actually. Flow states, you lose yourself in the activity.

Flow states, time seems to disappear. It's the downhill skier just getting lost in executing the ski route and you're completely lost in the activity. Flow states are very pleasurable. Deliberate practice is not. You can get lost playing a song you really know well on stage and get lost in the music.

You never get lost when you're practicing a song because you're pushing yourself so damn hard that you're like, oh my God, this is, this is miserable. So learning is hard. It requires strain. To try to learn without strain would be like saying, I want to grow a muscle without ever having to tire my muscles.

Isn't there a way I could grow my biceps bigger without having to actually lift heavy things in a way that's heavier than I'm used to? No, you have to actually overload your muscle before it can grow. The same thing happens cognitively. So learning is always going to have that strain.

It's not pleasant. And so you can add as many owls with glasses and streaks as you want around it, but TikTok doesn't have the unpleasant strain. It's just like saying, if I want you to eat more broccoli, I can put it in a Happy Meal box. It could be in like a fun wrapper where confetti flies open when you open the wrapper.

But when you get down to it, the broccoli is still going to be pretty bitter and the French fries are going to taste much better. And in the end, I'm like, I'm going to eat the French fries if it's just they're both sitting there in front of me. So I'm not sure that when you take an activity, meaningful as it is, that has an inherent cognitive strain to it as part of its character, that you are going to be able to win in the dopamine neuron game against other types of stimulus reward pairings that don't have that strain.

The reward is simply much more pure with TikTok. Just like if you wanted to compare TikTok to meth, the reward for meth is probably much stronger than TikTok because now you have a substance that is crossing the blood brain barrier. Right. So if I'm a meth addict, I'm like, well, I like TikTok, but what I really like is some meth.

Just like if I'm using TikTok, I might say, well, I really like Duolingo, but my God, I want to use some TikTok. So if it's just an apples to apples comparison of reward stimulus game, these attention engineered applications that we think of as modern social media just have the upper hand on any type of learning app.

OK, so does that mean that we're out of luck, that basically social media is going to take all of our time? No, we're not out of luck. And the reason why is because there are other systems and in particular, one other system that our brain uses to motivate behavior that is not built off of this near term stimulus reward dopamine neuron mediated system.

We have another system that is at the core of how humans have done what we have done. It's at the core of what defines humans versus almost any other species. It helps explains why humans are so successful in a way that other smart animals like ravens or dolphins are not.

And that's going to be our ability. To build motivation based off of future predictions. So let me tell you what I mean here. I'm going to bring up an article for those who are watching instead of listening. I'm going to bring up an article that will help us make sense of this.

This was an article that was written by Jane McGonigal for TED. It's called Mental Time Travel is a Great Decision-Making Tool. This is how to use it. I like this article because it has a good summary of the otherwise complicated neuroscience. I'm going to skip way ahead here to what I think is the relevant portion.

I'm reading now from the article. Scientists call this form of imagination episodic future thinking or EFT. EFT is often described as a kind of mental time travel. Because your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there.

EFT is not an escape from reality. It is a way of playing with reality to discover risks and opportunities you might not have considered. EFT is not a daydream in which you fantasize about waking up in a world where your problems are magically solved. It is a way of connecting who you are today with what you might really feel and do in the future.

More quotes. Because EFT allows us to pre-feel different possible futures, it's a powerful decision-making, planning, and motivational tool. It helps us decide, is this a world I want to wake up in? What do I need to do to be ready for it? Should I change what I'm doing today to make this future more or less likely?

According to fMRI studies, EFT involves heightened activity and increased connectivity between 11 distinct brain regions. Compare this to simply remembering a past event, which activates just six of those 11 regions of the brain. To get a little more technical here, during EFT, your brain goes on a hunt for realistic details and plausible ideas.

To do this, it activates the hippocampus, the seat of memory and learning, and digs through your memories, plus any other facts and ideas you've stored away. Depending on what kind of future you're imagining, the hippocampus identifies the most relevant stuff and retrieves and recombines it into a new scene.

One last thing to say about that. Those are called clues to the future. Your brain fires up the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, otherwise known by the catchy acronym VMPFC, a region that's heavily used whenever you set goals and track your progress. Like the hippocampus, the VMPFC can suggest any goals you've had or previously considered.

One of the most interesting things about the EFT is that the motivations that pop into your mind first are likely to be closely linked to your deepest values and most essential needs. Like always learning something new, helping others, pushing yourself to do brave things, taking care of your family, being creative, or putting new ideas or art into the world.

You still have to figure out the best way for your future you to achieve these future goals. So then the Putamen, P-U-T-A-M-E-N, also part of the motivation reward system, kicks in. The Putamen, which I'm almost certainly saying wrong, helps keep track of what specific actions and behaviors typically lead to positive results for you.

It's the part of the brain that knows things like, I feel better when I get some fresh air. Okay, I read all those technical details so you could get a lay of the land that this is a different type of motivational system. It is based on you projecting yourself into the future, imagining a result in the future that is very positive because you have evidence from your past that will be positive, and it connects to your deeply held values and goals.

This then fires up other parts of your brain that gives you motivation to do the thing right now that's going to help lead you to that future state. EFT is a different motivational system than the dopamine system. It is a system that can beat the dopamine system. This is critical to human survival.

This is why you can have at the caveman times some nice-looking food. Okay, there's honey on the ground, and I really want honey. I like honey. I need sugar. My dopamine neurons say, eat that honey. My God, eat that honey. That's going to feel good. But also, I know there's a bear nearby because there's honey on the ground.

And the EFT system says the thing about bears is they tend to eat you, and that's not good. And so we're going to override the dopamine system that says, go get that honey, because we don't want to be eaten by a bear, which is something that might happen here.

The EFT system is what allows us to rise above our base instincts and say, let's invent the axe. Let's invent the wheel. Let's invent systems of philosophy. It's what allows us to do human flourishing and creative actions. The ideas, the leaps of creative thinking that Yuval Harari in Sapiens identifies as the crux that makes humans humans, what makes our species what they are.

So this EFT style motivation is more powerful because it's what allows us to do big and great things. It's what allows us to rise above our base instincts in a way that a tiger cannot or a house cat cannot. So when we think about, hey, how do we learn more?

We don't want to play the dopamine game. We don't want to say, how do I make learning feel the same as checking Facebook to see if I get those likes? We instead want to master our EFT system, the episodic future thinking system. And what this means is we have to fill up that hippocampus with all sorts of concrete details and experiences and memories that allow us to connect, allow us to connect this behavior with very positive futures.

It requires us to have really deeply instilled values about what we care about so that we can then say, this activity that I know a lot about now leads me to something that I feel really strongly about. Now, I talk about this a lot in the context of the deep life as lifestyle centric planning, where you start with this clear vision of what you want your life to look like and use that to work backwards to build plans.

This is no accident. This is no mere contrivance. This is a instruction manual to fully leveraging your EFT. So if you want to learn more, you have to expose yourself to as many resonant examples as possible of people who have learned and you admire. People who are really well learned and what they do in their life or how they approach the world resonates with you on a deep level.

You need to watch these documentaries, read these profiles, read the biographies, look for these type of videos, meet these people in real life. Go to their talks, go to their presentations. You need to surround yourself in examples of people who have converted a love of learning into a life that really resonates with you.

And then you need to clarify your values of what is the value here that's at stake and make that a big part of your vision for yourself and your life. Be it engaging ideas in a way that is above base rancor or maybe about taking your mind and pushing to its fullest potential so you can have impact on the world.

Maybe there's a religious impulse here, a sort of Newtonian interest in trying to uncover the workings of God. You know, that there's almost a religious impulse to be able to understand things better. Maybe it's, I want to support my family and my brain is going to be one way I can do this.

There's whatever it is. You have a clear value and you expose yourself to example after example that resonates about people who have pursued this value. And they're showing you tangibly in their example, something you really want. You do these things, your EFT system can kick your dopamine system's butt.

And you say, yeah, there's a TikTok is there and it's going to give me a little reward in the moment. It's going to feel good. But this future I'm projecting feels even better. And so, you know what, I'm not going to take out TikTok. I'm going to read. I'm going to go watch this movie.

I am going to go through the discomfort of stretching my mind past what it can do or not, whether or not there's an owl wearing glasses or an avatar stars issued out when I do it. So, I mean, I think Vaughn Ahn is on to something when he says, we shouldn't just say, take learning for granted and say, learning is good.

You should learn more. Here's a workbook. We really should think about how do you make learning desirable? And I think it's fantastic that he is thinking about that. That is, he is identifying learning as this sort of tier one activity that can improve people's situation, that can improve the world in so many different ways.

I'm arguing, though, the right way to spread that's less about playing the dopamine game and more about playing the EFT game. And this applies not just to learning, but almost to any type of activity that will take a shallow life and make it deeper. So when we understand the brain, we get a more nuanced playbook for how we convince ourselves to work towards the best vision of our future and not just the most desirable understanding of what could happen right now.

Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.