The Best Way to Learn as Shown by Research

00:00:00.000 | Okay, let's talk about how best to study and learn.

00:00:05.440 | And, of course, people have different learning styles.

00:00:08.560 | Some people prefer to learn by reading.

00:00:10.960 | Some people prefer to study in a group.

00:00:12.620 | Some people prefer to highlight.

00:00:14.520 | Some people call themselves auditory learners.

00:00:17.080 | Other people consider themselves visual learners.

00:00:19.840 | But guess what?

00:00:21.460 | When one looks at the research on preferred learning styles, pretty much all of that melts

00:00:26.240 | away.

00:00:27.300 | It turns out that the best way to study and learn is defined not by the medium in which

00:00:33.200 | that material arrives, whether or not it's auditory or visual or combined, whether or

00:00:37.760 | not you review slides or a textbook, or you watch small videos.

00:00:42.500 | It turns out that the best way to study and learn is to access components of your memory

00:00:48.780 | systems that offset forgetting.

00:00:52.460 | This is a theme I'm going to return to over and over again throughout today's episode.

00:00:56.860 | Rather than think about studying to learn and retain information, I want you to think

00:01:01.720 | about studying to offset the natural process of forgetting that everybody experiences when

00:01:08.160 | they are exposed to new material of any kind, cognitive or motor learning, musical learning,

00:01:14.360 | math, et cetera.

00:01:15.360 | Okay, so keep this in mind throughout today's episode.

00:01:18.280 | The best way to learn is to think about offsetting the natural forgetting of new information.

00:01:24.820 | You're trying to inoculate against forgetting.

00:01:28.080 | That is the way to remember things.

00:01:29.680 | That is the way to gain mastery over them.

00:01:32.300 | And I'm going to teach you how to best do that using the data gleaned from the peer

00:01:37.780 | reviewed literature.

00:01:39.340 | Now before I do that, I want to talk about what learning is.

00:01:42.320 | I promise to make this fairly brief because I've covered learning and so-called neuroplasticity

00:01:47.000 | before on this podcast.

00:01:49.240 | For those of you that have heard those discussions, this will serve as a refresher.

00:01:52.600 | For those of you that have not heard those discussions, this will be thorough enough

00:01:56.000 | for you to be able to digest all the rest of today's information.

00:02:01.120 | Neuroplasticity is this incredible feature of your nervous system, which of course includes

00:02:04.280 | your brain and your spinal cord, which is the ability for your nervous system to change

00:02:09.680 | in response to experience.

00:02:11.580 | So any form of learning involves neuroplasticity.

00:02:16.360 | Neuroplasticity we sometimes hear as neural plasticity, two words or neuroplasticity.

00:02:22.440 | Those are the same thing, essentially.

00:02:24.400 | The change that underlies neuroplasticity at the level of cells, which we call neurons

00:02:28.960 | or nerve cells, generally involves three different mechanisms.

00:02:33.640 | One is the strengthening of certain connections, what we call synaptic connections.

00:02:37.960 | Synapses are the location between neurons where they communicate with one another.

00:02:42.720 | It's actually a gap between the neurons.

00:02:44.360 | It is technically called the synaptic cleft.

00:02:46.780 | It's a gap.

00:02:47.780 | And within that gap, chemicals are passed across that gap that allow one neuron to activate

00:02:52.840 | other neurons or many neurons to activate many other neurons or to inhibit the activity

00:02:58.240 | of other neurons, okay?

00:02:59.780 | So one form of neuroplasticity is the strengthening of connections between neurons.

00:03:06.340 | Another form of neuroplasticity is the weakening of connections between neurons.

00:03:11.100 | And yet a third form of plasticity, which is often discussed in the media, but is very

00:03:16.220 | rare actually in the nervous system, especially the adult nervous system of humans, is neurogenesis

00:03:23.520 | or the addition of new neurons.

00:03:25.900 | Let's just get this out of the way upfront because the addition of new neurons, again,

00:03:30.300 | grabs so much attention in media articles, but it's responsible for a near trivial amount

00:03:36.240 | of the sort of neuroplasticity that is important for today's discussion or frankly for most

00:03:40.220 | all discussions.

00:03:41.580 | It is true you have a specialized set of neurons in your olfactory bulb that are responsible

00:03:45.780 | for smell as well as a specialized set of neurons in the so-called dentate gyrus of

00:03:49.900 | your hippocampus, an area of the brain that's important for memory in which new neurons

00:03:55.680 | appear to be added throughout the lifespan.

00:03:58.240 | But this is not the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans.

00:04:02.620 | Rather, the major mechanism by which learning and memory occurs in humans is the strengthening

00:04:07.260 | of existing connections and the weakening of existing connections or the formation of

00:04:13.820 | new connections between already existing neurons, not new neurons, okay?

00:04:20.180 | Now the removal or weakening of connections between neurons being an important component

00:04:25.260 | of neuroplasticity is very important for sake of today's discussion.

00:04:29.020 | I want to emphasize that when we hear about weakening of connections, we often think,

00:04:33.100 | well, that means forgetting, or that means the brain is getting less good.

00:04:37.300 | However, so much of the neuroplasticity that underlies, for instance, the acquisition of

00:04:42.380 | a new motor skill is actually the reflection of removal of connections.

00:04:47.820 | So we don't want to project any kind of value onto a discussion about adding new connections,

00:04:53.980 | removing new connections.

00:04:55.140 | Let's just leave it at this level mechanistically.

00:04:58.460 | When you hear about neuroplasticity, just know that it could be the consequence of strengthening

00:05:04.860 | of connections as well as weakening of connections.

00:05:09.220 | And that neither strengthening of connections in the nervous system nor weakening of connections

00:05:13.420 | can map directly to the formation or removal of say memories or information.

00:05:18.860 | Just know that these are the important mechanisms.

00:05:20.860 | In fact, if you look at a baby that is, let's say, I don't know, nine months old, their

00:05:26.700 | motor skills are not terrific typically compared to the motor skills that that child will have

00:05:31.580 | when they are six or seven years old.

00:05:33.660 | Just look at a kid trying to eat spaghetti or something of that sort, or eat anything

00:05:37.820 | when they're a small baby versus a toddler versus a young child versus an adolescent

00:05:43.340 | or teen.

00:05:44.340 | You know, despite the poor table manners of some adolescents and teens and some adults

00:05:48.700 | for that matter, they are still exhibiting far more precise motor movements than they

00:05:54.420 | did as an infant, of course.

00:05:57.100 | And believe it or not, the improvement in motor coordination that one observes in humans

00:06:02.820 | and other species for that matter from birth until the adolescence and teen years and adult

00:06:08.220 | years is largely the reflection of the removal.

00:06:11.860 | That's right, the removal of neural connections as opposed to the formation of neural connections.

00:06:17.820 | However, the neural connections that remain become much more robust, they become much

00:06:21.900 | more reliable.

00:06:22.900 | Okay, so that's the mechanistic backdrop for everything that we're going to talk about

00:06:26.260 | today, which is how to study and learn.

00:06:29.780 | And as I mentioned earlier in my introduction, most of learning and remembering new material

00:06:35.940 | is about offsetting the forgetting process that naturally occurs anytime we hear new

00:06:40.780 | information.

00:06:42.220 | So in keeping with what will ultimately reveal itself to be the dominant theme of today's

00:06:47.620 | discussion right now, and for reasons that will become clear later, I want you to take

00:06:53.500 | a brief quiz.

00:06:55.100 | Now the moment people hear quiz or test, typically it spikes their adrenaline, they start feeling

00:07:00.540 | stressed, but don't worry, you're going to keep your answers to yourself.

00:07:04.220 | And you're doing this for a very specific purpose.

00:07:06.540 | Here's my question, this is a two question quiz.

00:07:12.060 | How many different ways mechanistically speaking does neuroplasticity occur?

00:07:18.860 | Is it one mechanism, two mechanisms, or three mechanisms?

00:07:22.820 | Or is it four or five?

00:07:25.660 | Okay, can you name in your head two of the three major changes that the nervous system

00:07:32.980 | can undergo, which are reflective of neuroplasticity?

00:07:37.500 | Okay, so the answer to question was, is that there are three different modes of neuroplasticity,

00:07:43.880 | as you recall, or as you may not have been able to recall.

00:07:46.580 | And by the way, if you were not able to recall the three different modes of neuroplasticity

00:07:50.980 | or mechanisms underlying neuroplasticity, that is fine.

00:07:54.500 | As you'll soon realize, recognizing the errors in your information retention is another critical

00:08:01.740 | and very useful way to retain more information, even if you got the answer wrong or you didn't

00:08:07.100 | know.

00:08:08.100 | In fact, especially if you got the answer wrong or you didn't know.

00:08:12.400 | So the three ways are the strengthening of neural connections, second, the weakening

00:08:17.300 | of neural connections, and third, through neurogenesis, the addition of new neurons.

00:08:22.060 | Why did I provide this quiz?

00:08:23.540 | Why did I test you?

00:08:24.540 | Well, as you'll soon learn, if you look across the total body of research on how best to

00:08:30.100 | study and learn, it involves doing exactly what we just did, which is to periodically

00:08:34.980 | stop and test yourself on the material that you learned.

00:08:39.780 | Studying is not just a way of evaluating what knowledge you've acquired and which knowledge

00:08:44.540 | you have not managed to acquire, it also turns out to be the best tool for offsetting forgetting

00:08:51.540 | of any kind.

00:08:52.540 | And I'll go into the data that supports that statement in a moment.

00:08:55.900 | So yes, today we're going to get a little bit meta in the sense that we're going to

00:08:58.500 | be learning about optimal studying strategies and applying those as we go through this podcast.

00:09:04.940 | And no, there will not be a test at the end, although you're welcome to give yourself a

00:09:08.440 | test at the end.

00:09:09.440 | I'm going to provide you with an excellent zero cost, very fast tool that you can use

00:09:13.420 | to evaluate your knowledge and your ability to study and learn better as a consequence

00:09:17.880 | of having listened to this podcast versus had you not listened to this podcast.

00:09:22.660 | So if ever there was an incentive to listen to the end, there it is.

00:09:26.100 | [Music]

The Best Way to Learn as Shown by Research | Dr. Andrew Huberman

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