The Science of Learning How to Learn: Overcoming Barriers with Dr. Barbara Oakley

In this enlightening episode, seek to understand the science of how we learn with world-renowned expert Dr. Barbara Oakley. A Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Oakland University, best-selling author, and teacher of the world’s most popular massive open online course (MOOC), “Learning How to Learn,” she has helped millions develop effective strategies for mastering new skills. Dr. Oakley conducts research on learning, cognition, and educational practices, bringing insights from neuroscience and psychology into the classroom to help you overcome common learning barriers, master new subjects like math and science, and stop procrastinating. We discuss critical changes needed in education, the power of critical thinking, effective study tips, and the role of multidisciplinary approaches in personal growth. Whether you're an educator, parent, or simply looking to transform your learning abilities, this conversation is packed with actionable strategies to unlock your brain's full potential. 

You can find her work at: https://barbaraoakley.com/ and her book at
https://barbaraoakley.com/books/learning-how-to-learn/

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction & Lendo's Personal Learning Journey
• 4:17 Dr. Oakley's Early Learning Challenges & The Value of Math
• 9:48 The Power of Being Multidisciplinary
• 14:17 14:17 – Embracing "Late Bloomers" and Brain Maturation
• 17:57 17:57 – Critiquing Traditional Math Education Methods
• 23:40 The Kumon Method and Its Long-Term Impact
• 26:41 Defining Learning: Neural Connections and Memory
• 32:25 The Impact of AI and Technology on Learning
• 37:27 The Success of the 'Learning How to Learn' MOOC

Transcript

Lendo @superdaddyclub (00:00.194)
happened. Amazing. Okay, to everyone. Welcome to a Super Daddy Club podcast. Today we're honored to welcome Dr. Barbara Oakley. She's the brilliant mind behind learning how to learn one of the world's most popular massive online courses abbreviated MOOC with nearly 2.5 million learners in the first four years. And I think I the numbers up to like 5 million or something like that somewhere. But

Dr. Oakley's journey is nothing short of extraordinary, spanning continents and careers from serving as a U.S. Army signal officer and Russian translator on a Soviet trawler to earning advanced engineering degrees and becoming a professor at Oakland University. Her groundbreaking research has been featured in outlets like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times. She's the author of multiple books. She explores the fascinating connection between neuroscience and social behavior. Today, she joins us.

to share her expertise on how humans learn, the barriers children face, and the critical changes needed in education. Get ready for this insightful episode. And Dr. Barra, thank you so much for coming to Super Daddy Club.

Barb Oakley (01:10.565)
it's a pleasure to be here.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (01:13.76)
Absolutely, absolutely. Now I discovered your work, would say time has passed, but I think it was about 10 years ago. And the way I discovered it, like probably like so many people was that I had struggled throughout my entire life academically from just learning how to read when I was very young. And then when I grew a little bit older with mathematics, it was just the bane of my existence, like so many people again.

You know, I dug the sciences. I was good in biology, I avoided chemistry altogether. And then after high school with post-secondary education, I found myself in this conundrum where I needed those skills that I didn't have. And it showed when I first took my paramedic course and I failed the first time around. And some of the internal factors were simply that I didn't have the tools to be able to apply myself and to study like other children have. And I noticed it really

I very much noticed it then. And so I failed the course the first time around and had to figure out way to like teach myself all the skills that I could learn so I don't fail again the second time around. And I came back and I did very well. Now, then I started looking at university and I felt like I couldn't move forward without going back to what I called my high school bullies, which were all these courses that, you know, kicked my butt when I was younger. And I just felt like I'd owed it to myself, to my, you know, son in the future.

to just actually get these things out of the way and not let them be an impediment as to why they pursue any higher dreams of mine. And so in order for me to move forward with university, I had to basically redo my entire high school, 10, 11, 12, English, math, took biology over, took chemistry, and I did very well in all of those courses because I discovered your MOOC, I discovered your course.

And it gave me a lot of tools that helped me, mainly the Pomodoro. And that probably touched base on my ADHD, but to try and make a long story not too long, your course, I applied what I learned and not only did it help me with the upgrading portion, but university was a lot easier than I ever would have imagined. And not to say that it was all easy, that I wasn't challenged.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (03:37.912)
But because I was able to apply a lot of these methods and techniques, it made my learning journey so much better and so much easier. And that goes for millions of people who have taken your course. And so to get us started, if I remember correctly, your journey in education, despite being a distinguished academic, was not always all roses. Like you had to overcome a lot of challenges early on that make it that much more fascinating to hear your story. And I just wanted to know if you could

Take us through some of your journey early on, some of the challenges that you have to experience and overcome, yeah, early on, if you can.

Barb Oakley (04:17.007)
Well, first off, I just have to back up a minute and compliment you on something that I rarely hear but is so important. And that is, you said, I had to basically learn how to be successful, not only for myself, but for my son to be.

And people so often, you know, are focused only on themselves. And of course, that's important. But really, all of us always find that family is really, really important, too. And I think one of the strongest motivators we can have is to not just be thinking of our own success, but of how we can pass that success along to those we love.

And I think there's something special about learning that if we learn how to learn, it's the kind of skill you don't have to be rich. You're rich in the mind and you have a wealth that you can pass along to those you love. that's it's so important. And that is really a tribute to you that you understood that early on.

So my gracious thanks to you and you know, and how you framed things. But I too was a terrible learner early on. I mean, I was good at learning what I wanted to learn, but most things I didn't want to learn. So that meant I was kind of bad at a lot of things like math, for example.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (05:45.284)
Thank you.

Barb Oakley (06:13.069)
But I discovered that kind of through the vicissitudes and difficulties of life itself, that if you have some knowledge and ability in certain fields, that you can get a better job and you can earn a decent salary and actually do some interesting things. And so,

I began to realize that I had early on put myself into sort of a career box by thinking, I hate math and there's really no reason to actually learn math. Math is kind of, mean, because when you think about it, you can get by most days without doing anything mathematical. But the reality is that

Lendo @superdaddyclub (06:48.856)
Mm-hmm.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (07:08.312)
Mm-hmm.

Barb Oakley (07:12.229)
It's like you can also get by most days without lifting weights in a gym. But if you don't do any kind of physical exercise at all, you end up kind of in trouble sometimes when you end up, you can't lift your suitcase onto a luggage rack or you can't lift your baby because you're really kind of

puny and you haven't developed your muscles and you get sick because you aren't physically active. It's that way for cognitive skills. You may not use any one cognitive skill for a particular purpose, but if math is kind of like an all-purpose cognitive tool that gives you a bit of a mental workout and if you learn how to use math, it's

It's kind of a skill that comes in pretty handy that can allow you to be successful in learning the many kinds of analytical skills that are so necessary to be successful in today's life, which is very strongly analytically oriented. So anyway.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (08:12.6)
and

Lendo @superdaddyclub (08:35.068)
Mm-hmm.

Barb Oakley (08:37.405)
long story short, long story a bit shorter. When I got out of the military, I had learned a language and they taught me Russian at the Defense Language Institute. But then when I was trying to get out into the working world, nobody wanted to hire me for my Slavic languages and literature skills.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (08:40.863)
You

Barb Oakley (09:01.273)
So I went to the university, started at the lowest possible level of a remedial high school math, and slowly began climbing my way upwards. it really wasn't easy, but I learned that there are tricks to learning, and they're the same tricks that allowed me to be successful in learning language. And they work really well for analytical skills like learning math.

like learning programming and so forth. And now I'm a distinguished professor of engineering and I love math and science. it's, you know, you really, really can make substantial changes in your brain and in what you can succeed in doing.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (09:48.772)
Absolutely. What does it mean to be multidisciplinary for people nowadays? Because I feel like for a lot of students, we may have to be a little bit more creative with what we do with our degrees. Having a background in neuroscience and then the experience that you gain in the military, also engineering.

what does it say about being multidisciplinary? Because it's not something that I feel like everybody pursues right off the bat, right? The idea is be a paramedic for us or be a doctor or be a lawyer, be this one thing, but you are, you're able to do multiple things throughout your lives, your life. And I just wanted to know how that reflects on the broader society with where we are today.

Barb Oakley (10:36.975)
Well, let's take becoming a paramedic. That is not very easy to do. And it involves not only knowledge, but it also involves knowing how to grapple with your emotions in really, really difficult situations. And that is not easy to learn. So.

But once you get that skill, you become a paramedic, you get this experience out in the working world. I think what sometimes people can say is, okay, I'm good at this, but it wouldn't help me in doing something else. So I shouldn't really bother to try to do something different. But actually, a paramedic background is an extra.

extraordinary, you get this emotional intelligence. Plus, you you've got to be able to handle some of those numbers too, because you don't want to like kill your patient with the wrong dose of medication. And so that background, you could go into so many fields where it would turn out to be a real asset. Let's say that you decided to

Lendo @superdaddyclub (11:39.843)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Barb Oakley (11:59.781)
to become a computer programmer. Well, do you know one of the most difficult things for computer programming programmers? It is learning to handle yourself emotionally when you get really, really frustrated. Well, guess what? You're pretty good at being able to.

manage emotions because you have had to work in situations where you really have had to be able to do that. You can name your field that you would be interested in and I could tell you how paramedic training would help give you a creative and a really interesting background that could be helpful for whatever that field is. And the reality is

Virtually every field is like that. You bring this background with you that you think is just baggage that is not going to be helpful. And it is almost anything is going to be helpful when you decide to make a shift into something different.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (12:55.499)
Hmm.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (13:11.908)
You know, I kind of experienced that even just taking a small break in between high school and post-secondary and going to work in a factory in a warehouse that I was working at and over there you're moving a lot of boxes. You have to keep track of inventory. You have to tally up your numbers and make sure that everything is up to par at the end of the day. And I always felt like that did help improve my math skills a little bit.

And I've always encouraged adults to not let the fears that they experience as children within the learning systems be the same impediments that prevent them from moving forward because your brain at 22, 25, 30 is not the same as when you're younger, obviously, but it's what it's been the difference, the term that comes back to mind here, the different reference points that you've built.

throughout that journey. again, like you say, you start finding out where you can apply these and you'd be surprised as to how far that goes really.

Barb Oakley (14:17.477)
My beloved husband is, shall we say he has a bit of ADHD. You can be talking with him about some of most serious thing in the world and he'll be like, look at that bird out there. But that is part of his creativity. And the reality is that he really only, he dropped out of high school.

And he only really kind of came to his own in his mid and late 20s. It was like that's when his mind began maturing. And I think he's the more creative and he's a really intelligent person. And I really wouldn't want to have had it any other way. I think if he had just

been one of these superstar learners right off the bat instead of sort of a bad boy who was kind of getting into trouble because he was off doing whatever. I think he's just more creative and certainly a lot more fun. I mean, we've been married 40 years and I feel like I, know, it's always something new with him. It's just the way he is. So I don't know. I really like people who,

their mind opens a little later. My favorite scientist of all time is Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who not only won the Nobel Prize, but is now considered the father of modern neuroscience. He was a terrible student growing up. And it was only when he started getting into his twenties that his mind kind of began opening and he became mature enough.

to be able to crack open books and start learning in a beneficial way instead of just goofing around in classes and creating problems for everybody else.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (16:24.932)
That goofing around in class, I heard that it comes from boredom in parts. And I see it with my son too. He's intelligent. If you don't keep him occupied, as soon as he started feeling, for example, that math was easy for him or the level of math was being taught was easy, he started getting in trouble in class. But then what did I say also about the creatives? Because was it that school, the school system was more...

geared towards people with analytical mind, non ADHD brain who are meant to, who are good at sitting down and staying there focused for lengthy periods without any issues. Because I feel like a lot of people develop all these phobias along the way and we don't really on the regarding education, whether it's math, whether it's science or any other aspect of learning. And they don't, we move on through our lives without fully understanding what happened back there. And now we have children that

we gotta try and keep away from those same phobias that we had. Like right now, my son has learned the same level of math that I started having trouble with when I was younger. so, but again, going back to that point of earlier, because I went back and tried to challenge that aspect of my life, that reality of my life, it's helping me now, it's coming back. what was it about the educational system and how it was designed that...

people like your husband, the creatives or the ADHDer were not thriving in that environment or goofing around or not focused.

Barb Oakley (17:57.381)
You know, on the one hand, you have to acknowledge that.

Education systems have a tremendous challenge in trying to train the teachers, you know, and you have like all sorts of different teachers, good teachers, bad teachers. You have a system where you're trying to like get them to be able to teach people. And it's it is a really, really difficult job to teach all these different students with.

the imperfect tools that are human beings as well. You know, it's true that half of all teachers are below average. So that means that chances are not bad that your son could have some very bad math teachers somewhere along that road.

Having a riveting math teacher, that can be very, very difficult to find, but when you find them, they're golden. So, but I am convinced that in general, the way that math is taught in the U.S. can actually cripple students' abilities to learn in math and turn them deeply off of math.

And why is that? It is in part because educators are working so hard to make math fun, make it entertaining, make it, I mean, think about it this way. If you were learning how to play the guitar,

Barb Oakley (19:42.893)
And everybody always said, well, the way to really play the guitar and know how to play it well is to just play air guitar all the time because you can't make any mistakes that way. And it's really fun. But actually, children thrive on challenges as well. And as it turns out, there's a part of the brain which is the automatic basal ganglia system.

that when it learns the patterns of math, math can become so much easier. The way math is taught now, it's using that declarative hippocampal conscious system. You've to be conscious of everything you're doing. That's really hard. And it makes students kind of hate math. When you speak your native language,

You can do it intuitively. You don't have to think about it. When you learn math well, can do it, you can do a lot of it intuitively without even thinking about it. All that drudgery stuff like, you know, fractions and multiplication table. You can do that without even thinking about it. And that means that you get to think consciously about the more interesting things.

Right now, everything is just, you know, have to be conscious of what you're thinking. It's ways that of teaching mathematics that...

Lendo @superdaddyclub (21:12.42)
Mm-hmm.

Barb Oakley (21:26.969)
because that rote system of the basal ganglia is not made use of, it just makes it really tough and really stressful for students and the consequence. I mean, you look around me in school, like my school of engineering or schools of engineering throughout the U.S. or mathematics or programming, where do the professors come from?

They come from countries where there's still appreciation and respect for the some of the value of rote learning. But now we say, no, kids can't memorize the multiplication tables. That's bad. They can always just look it up. That's like saying, I would know how to speak math by just or speak Spanish by just looking it up on Google Translate. Of course, I can't speak Spanish that way.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (21:57.229)
Mm-hmm.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (22:14.659)
Mm-hmm.

Barb Oakley (22:26.819)
You have to internalize these kinds of things. And I've just gone off on a big rant, Lindo. Sorry about that.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (22:34.0)
No, please. I know some of these questions will cause that because I mean, it's very interesting when you're talking about the patterns. remember, well, calculus, my teacher pulled me on the side because I was having some challenges. And he told me that, Lendo, the reason why you're struggling is not entirely your fault. It's because of how you guys were taught math at those very early stages where there's a whole generation who were taught math.

very poorly or just straightforward wrongly. And I think it kind of touches based on the patterns, the patterns in mathematics and learning to recognize this because at the higher levels, the calculator won't like calculus, they tell you to put the calculator aside and you start panicking. And now you're starting to move ones and zeros and twos and threes and no more than that. But it's all about pattern recognition at that level. There's none of this.

stuff that you've been relying on for the most part, that you're going to be utilizing there. So it's almost like restarting from scratch all over again.

Barb Oakley (23:40.672)
Well.

So we have two daughters and we have two adopted sons who were refugees from Kosovo. So all of them I put into Kuman Mathematics. That's K-U-M-O-N. And it's a math program that was developed by a mathematician that helps teach you the patterns of math.

starting from an early age. So it's not like just you do a bunch of rote stuff. It's like you do this very specific practice. So you start seeing the difference between things. like our two, so our older daughter, she was never very good at math, but she had this extra 20 minutes a day and she ended up doing her,

medical residency at Stanford. So even though she wasn't, she would have been one those little girls that's like, you know, I can't do math, but she was very successful. younger daughter though, she was like, I'm the creative one. I'm an artist. I have nothing to do with math. I hate math, but I was like, there's one thing I get to pick that you must do and that's 20 minutes of extra math a day. And I did that for

over 10 years, so starting from when she was three all the way until she was like 14. And she hated it. And she was just, every day was this huge struggle because, you know, it's math time and stuff. But I mean, she had plenty of extra time still. And so she graduated, she went and got her bachelor's degree in art, studio art. And then,

Barb Oakley (25:37.153)
She went out in the working world as an artist. She hated it. Couldn't make much money. It wasn't very fun really. It's not like the artists you're thinking. And so she went back, her master's in statistics and the son of her professor, I met him when I was in Vietnam and he told me, he said, I just cannot figure out why you're

why my father picked your daughter to work with. He normally never picks American reared, you know, students who have gone through the American school system because they just don't have a feel for the numbers. He said, like, what is different? What was different about your daughter? And I was like, 10 years of, you know, 20 minutes of extra math practice a day. That's what was different. And she now has a very successful

career with data analysis and she's got a great feel for numbers.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (26:41.24)
Wow, wow. Okay, so let's take it back to the basics. What is learning? Like, can you describe what learning is? And also the other question that I had in addition, how does it differ from other species, our ability to learn? How does it differ from other species and perhaps other primates as well if there's any significant difference?

Barb Oakley (27:04.565)
You know, there's gradual differences. Let's take a planarium, which is this little tiny round worm. Planariums can learn. they, you you poke them and they'll learn to kind of stay away from certain areas. They can learn things. And actually, as you look, there's...

There's a wonderful book called, I think it's called The Evolution of Intelligence, but it talks about how learning evolved and became more complex as the critters developed. So, you know, have like an oyster and then you've got, you know, coral can't learn very well. It's kind of stuck.

But as animals became bilateral and they developed with two, you know, like a left and a right side, they began to be able to learn more effectively in all sorts of different ways. Like you can learn that, like a fish can learn that

If a light flashes that five seconds later, the fish will get a poke if it does not move to the other side of the aquarium. So you know what those fish will do? They will sit there, the light flashes and they'll just like leisurely like just kind of swim around and then like at four point.

you know, eight seconds right before they'll get poked, they'll go over to the other side of the aquarium. They're really quite clever. And that's a fish. So how do humans learn? Of course, we learn a lot, you know, in much more complex ways. But the ultimate thing that we're doing is when we learn something,

Barb Oakley (29:27.001)
we are making connections between neurons in long-term memory in the neocortex. So that little, that pattern, that clump of connected neurons is activated when we are accessing that memory. Now, unfortunately, educators and psychologists have said,

You know, they're well-meaning, but they're like, you don't need to remember things. You can always just look things up. But that means you don't form engrams of memory within you. And you can do really, you know, if, like, I can't speak Spanish if I'm always just going and looking it up on Google Translate.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (30:00.792)
Mm-hmm.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (30:17.346)
Mm-hmm.

Barb Oakley (30:18.977)
I can't speak the language of numbers if I'm always just going and looking it up on Google Translate. You have to have those links formed. It's an architecture within you that is formed when you are learning something. And that's kind of the fundamental basis of learning, not only for humans, but for many different kinds of vertebrates.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (30:47.876)
Before I go to my next question, it's still telling me that you have a window open with Riverside open somewhere else.

There's nothing on my side, but yeah, it's still saying that on your end, there's another riverside window open somewhere.

Barb Oakley (31:08.409)
This is really strange.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (31:10.392)
When multiple servers are open on the same browser, can cause issues during recording. Please close other tabs to avoid. You know what? you try to lower your window, sometimes there's like hidden tabs. If you just lower your window and pop it back open.

Barb Oakley (31:26.309)
I have only one other tab that's open.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (31:30.26)
then I'll just close the notification. We should be fine now. We'll just keep going. If we're getting a lot of static, it would have been more concerning, but we should be.

Barb Oakley (31:39.173)
This is yeah, really weird. Says there's a new chat message. Is it Ryan?

Barb Oakley (31:53.477)
Livestream chat. Ask your questions here for us to ask Barb about now.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (31:58.942)
no, that's, we can ignore that. That's if we're live. Yeah, we should be okay. Yeah. You know, it's very interesting when you say that because we have, we don't just have normal search engines today. We have AI powered search engines. so sometimes I try to explain and

Barb Oakley (32:05.976)
Okay.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (32:25.176)
I think it touches based on what you're saying here, but sometimes I try to explain why there's a difference in between if I'm carrying out a research project, me going and finding the research information, the papers and articles, reading through them, narrow down the information, take the information, put it on a different sheet and start creating a clean, start the process of creating a clean draft versus let's say, hey Chad, can you give me,

all the research and papers that Dr. Barbara Oakley has written throughout her career, right? Because now I always felt like there's a lot in the process that is missed. So at school, they are urging kids, they're trying to urge kids to find different ways of using AI, but they still try to get them to go through all of these steps because they matter. We're building...

a small little blocks of information that we're gathering that by the time that you're writing the essay, you've got a lot of points that you can refer to. You've got a lot of information that you've read through. And I used to even notice that back when I was younger doing presentation in front of classes where by the time I get to that presentation, I can talk endlessly because I've been reading for about two weeks, three weeks plus about this specific subject. And although not all the information made it.

but a lot of it came, is still present in my brain and can help me make inferences and whatnot. And so how do you see current technological trend affect how we learn? Because we don't just have calculators anymore. have, again, chat can write entire medical papers. So how do you see these advanced in technology affect how children in the future or adults also gonna be learning and applying what they're learning?

Barb Oakley (34:17.269)
When magazines first came out in the 1800s or so, people were appalled because they said, know, all these magazines, popular magazines are coming out. People are not going to really think in an in-depth way as they have prior to the advent of popular magazines being published.

You know, people always just kind of seem to get their knickers in a knot about new technologies and so forth. And it is absolutely true that if students truly believe that all they need is the answer and not the process of getting that answer, yeah, it will create a problem for those students.

But I think this problem is even arising because we never teach students how their brain works. I mean, can you believe it? It's like, you know, students will have 10 to 18 years of education, taking hundreds and hundreds of classes, and we never teach them simply how do they learn most effectively. It's just crazy. And so I think that...

You know, it's very clear that generative AI can be both helpful and harmful in learning because you can go in and like, if you're interested in something, you can start asking and going deeper and deeper and deeper. And then you're going to find some things where it answers you wrong. And then you start going in and looking elsewhere, you know, and you're digging deeper and deeper and learning more and more as a consequence of the fact that you have a tutor.

that's right there with you answering your questions, you know, not next week when you can meet the tutor, but right when you need it. So there will be good things and bad things coming out of generative AI, but for heaven's sakes, we don't want to not let students use generative AI. At the same time, we just need to acknowledge we're at the cutting edge of a freaking revolution that is

Barb Oakley (36:39.593)
fully on par with the printing press and the great revolution that that caused, except ours is faster moving. So we don't have all the answers to it. And that's okay. We're kind of figuring things out. But I think as long as we teach students how their brains learn and...

and then have them keep that in mind when they are using Chat GPT and test, test, test all the time. Low stakes quizzes where they cannot go and use Chat GPT just to make sure they are really getting it in their mind and they're not procrastinating in their learning.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (37:27.684)
Do you think that's why your MOOC was so successful? Because it simply taught people how their brains functions. Like daydreaming is not so bad for you. It actually can help you in the learning process with creativity, chunking, the importance of that, the different modes of thinking. Do you think that that's why your program was so successful in part?

Barb Oakley (37:57.749)
absolutely, plus it's funny. And it has great visuals that like normally you wouldn't be, you wouldn't have explained to you that your neuron has an axon on a dendritic spine and a spine that hooks on and they hook together and that's how you.

form the initial link that is involved in memory all sounds kind of super boring. But if you can learn that it's kind of like a space alien, neurons have legs, you know, that are kind of these amorphous and goofy things, and they have a bunch of toes on their legs, and they reach out and they, with their arm that's an axon, and they like to tickle the toe of an adjoining neuron, and you're learning about learning

but kind of in a really fun way, but a fun way that helps you grasp key ideas really quickly. And you have instructors that are enthusiastic and really at the top of the world. know, for example, my co-instructor Terry Sanosky is one of only 12 human beings who's simultaneously a member of all three national academies. We're not.

talking, know, somebody just kind of coming up with somebody, something in their backyard, you know, not to say I don't like barbecues that arise from the backyard. So, but, you know, it's giving you information in a really quick to assimilate way. And it just really boggles me. Like I, they invited me to speak at Harvard and, and I walked in the room and it was

And I was like, Collin, why are there so many people here? And it turned out our one little course had on the order of the same number of students as all of Harvard's massive open online courses and online courses put together for millions of dollars with hundreds of people. And yet some of the people in that meeting were like, know, the reason your course is so popular, just, you know.

Barb Oakley (40:22.997)
It makes things so fun. You know, you're just making it so easy for people. It's like, hello, there's nothing wrong with that. And not everybody can be a snobby Harvard student who's like top of the world. And, you know, it's okay to teach, you know, like people who are people. And that's actually where a lot of creativity actually comes from.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (40:54.34)
Can you expand on that? That's a lot of creativity where, that's where a lot of creativity comes from. Like, you, can you expand on that?

Barb Oakley (41:02.149)
Sure, I had a student in my class, he was terrible. mean, just, know, like I'd be, George, okay, what's the answer to this question? And George would be like, what? You know, staring out the window. But I really liked George. he, you know, cause I could sense that there was something like the very fact that he couldn't really focus really well, you know.

was also involved in why he thought about things in really different ways. In fact, I just was up at, you know, and I had breakfast with one of my favorite students who was in my electromagnetics class. And he just, he was like so goofy in class and.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (41:37.71)
Mm-hmm.

Barb Oakley (41:58.757)
Half the time he wasn't really even paying attention and stuff. And do you know he is now the head of a major medical imaging laboratory and he's got his PhD and he's really a superstar. My other goofy student was, he won the Boss Kettering Award for the most creative insights in at GM. I mean,

There is so much, there's this reservoir of creativity amongst seemingly normal people who aren't the class superstars. And even when they were studying IQ back in the 1930s, Terman was, he,

Lendo @superdaddyclub (42:38.592)
Mm-hmm.

Barb Oakley (42:52.197)
tested all the students in California to pick out the smartest ones, because they were going to be the ones to move and shake society. And as the decades went by, he found that not a lot of them turned into a mover and shaker of society. In fact, many of the ones who were turned down for the program did become the movers and shakers in society.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (43:10.104)
Mm-hmm.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (43:19.7)
Really, that's fascinating. That is fascinating. I almost want to ask what's going on with all these goofy kids in school, like in class. what's it like? Is it, I mean, just from my experience, I want to jump to is it like newer divergence? Is it ADHD? And we didn't just, we didn't know. To me, that's just based on to some degree on just maybe we didn't.

teach about kids, we didn't teach kids about how their brain functions because we didn't fully understand what was going on in the brains or we didn't figure out how to translate that to the general population and fully apply it yet. But I mean, in a silly way, what's up with all the goofy kids and how do you teach you even begin to recognize that, this kid is, it's not that they're just goofy. It's just what we're teaching them, perhaps the environment.

or maybe their attention is more focused towards this thing and we can focus on their strength versus trying to, I wanted to say to focus on the strengths versus the weakness, but I mean, there's a flaw in that thinking itself, but yeah, what are your thoughts?

Barb Oakley (44:33.209)
That's an interesting question. think, you know, people have tried to grapple with intelligence by, you know, putting it, putting a number on it and calling it IQ. But if you think about it,

I think there are lot of really smart, whatever smart is, kids who aren't able to focus. And so that means that they can be really disruptive in class and they can't focus intently for long periods of time to be learning things. they're actually they're...

there's some real intelligence there. It's their executive functioning system that isn't, there's some evidence, for example, that in kids who have dyslexia, what can happen is that,

if they have a very difficult, know, like something happened, like I have a friend who was kidnapped when she was young and she was taken, abducted, and they returned her like a day later, but she got dyslexia. so that can happen because of difficulties in your life. And what happens is your metabolic system within your brain,

it instead of pouring energy into the executive functioning network that allows you to focus, it pours energy instead into developing that sort of more diffuse default mode network, which helps make you diffusely aware of like potential bad things that could come out of the environment.

Barb Oakley (46:43.117)
So one thing that can happen in some kids is they can be really smart, but those executive functioning circuits, the executive circuits are not like really tuned in and enhanced as the child is developing. And that means that they can't focus as easily, but the smarts are all still there. You know, they just...

So there can be lots and lots of reasons that, you know, different students may not, they can have real intelligence, real creativity, but they can't manifest it as easily for a variety of things, of reasons. Also, but then,

There's so there's two different networks in the brain. There's like task positive networks that are involved in your ability to focus and then there's that diffuse default moment network related to creativity. Sometimes when I'm in China, for example, I will have teachers come up to me and say I have a problem. My students are not creative. And you think about that.

What is really happening in China, there's great respect for learning. So, and there's a lot of emphasis on doing well on tests, which means you focus, focus, focus all the time. And then when you take a break, sort of a societal way of taking a break involves mantra style meditation, which is focusing. And there is evidence that if you focus, focus, focus all the time,

Lendo @superdaddyclub (48:27.755)
Hmm.

Barb Oakley (48:32.901)
that that can suppress that more creative default mode network. So make it so it's not as strongly functioning. And then it's the education and cultural system itself that has sort of attuned children away from that sort of, know, messing around and, you know, that way of thinking that allows them to...

mind wander and daydream, which is affiliated with creativity. So culture matters, education systems matter. To my mind, the best of all education systems would be a wonderful combination of Asian and Western approaches to education that allow kids to have plenty of playtime, but also help them get the patterns, the important patterns of learning.

that matter so much, for example, in learning mathematics and learning language and so forth.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (49:39.012)
Yeah, very interesting, very interesting. There was the different modes of thinking. Can you kind of like dive deeper into those? Because it is not, I used to be a kid that daydreamed a lot and I used to feel guilty about it. But then throughout my learning, I came to understand that that is actually an important aspect of learning. And

that I'm probably sometimes even learning more while I'm daydreaming than when I'm actively learning. Especially when it came to mathematics, like you really gotta figure out where it went to put the pen down. And sometimes you put that pen down and you come back, you're like, of course, you know, fill up the gap. But yeah, I just wanted to know if you can expand on those two elements, those two modes of thinking a little bit more.

Barb Oakley (50:33.253)
So these two modes of thinking, researchers can see them, they can see like splotches of a place that is activated when you are focusing. You'll focus in a certain area, will activate if you're doing math, as opposed to when you're reading. But these are focused, they're generally on the left side of the brain, not always.

And then there's that much broader pattern of where different parts of the brain, all over the brain are connected. They kind of come to life in this network of the default mode network when you are mind wandering. And you are exactly right. We have made the mistake in the past of thinking that the only time we actually learn is when we're focusing.

But actually when you take that little break and that other network pops to life, that's allowing you to connect what you've just been focusing on with other things you already know and to think in innovative, creative new ways about what you're learning. So it's, you know, if your son is a daydreamer,

You know, focusing sometimes is important to kind of front load the material on, but you know, that daydreaming aspect of his personality is also a treasure.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (52:10.02)
So what was your advice for example to those folks who came to you and say like hey how can we make our students more creative if I'm not mistaken your words like what was your advice to them and will be even your advice to parents and educators.

Barb Oakley (52:28.485)
So ensure that the students are having a little bit of free time where they really don't have to be tracked and worked on, you know, and be learning every second during the day, you know, and that may or may not be acceptable within the culture and within the, you know, student in China who's studying for the big test at the end of high school.

you know, that's a scary time. But insofar as is possible, you know, just try to balance a little bit and ensure that there is a bit of free time. I also am a huge believer in the value of metaphor in promoting creative approaches. So let's say you are studying something and, you know, and you're finding it difficult, you're focusing on

Well, go and ask Claude, which is my favorite generative AI, for a metaphor that explains whatever the concept is you are struggling with in a very funny and creative way. And it will give you, you know, don't just ask for one metaphor, ask for five metaphors, ask for really different metaphors. And it will help almost stretch your brain.

I didn't think I could think about things that way. And a lot of times creativity can arise through metaphor.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (54:03.46)
Now, what does that say about being visual versus auditory learner, visual auditory learner, and the different learning styles? Are we really one or the other or is should we look at these differently? Should we look at these as let's just mix every one of them because we're getting different types of information from every modality, if we can say that. And

Yeah, like mixing them versus trying to focus more on whether we're one or the other. yeah, like what are your thoughts on the different learning styles?

Barb Oakley (54:44.537)
Well, if you talk to most psychologists, cognitive psychologists and educators nowadays, they're like, there's no such thing as learning styles. Learning styles is all bad, you know, because, you know, as soon as you might have a style where you prefer to learn through auditory mechanisms, that's not a style that's an ability, right?

It's like they're playing with words. mean, the reality is you can have someone with subclinical dyslexia who, in other words, they're not diagnosed with dyslexia, but they kind of have some of the symptoms and they can absolutely prefer to learn through auditory means and they learn better that way. So I get a little miffed sometimes at the ones who are.

you know, there's no such thing as learning styles because the reality is good neuroscientists have not really stepped into this fray. And the evidence being brought forth now to say there's no learning styles doesn't involve good, deep neuroscience. So anyway, I wrote a paper about that. But the bottom line is,

Some people can learn much better by hearing. Most people really do like to see visual information. And indeed, like more than half the synaptic connections in our brains are involved in the visual system. So it can be really helpful. I dream of a world where

Learning is truly informed, for example, by the information that has already been gleaned by wonderful neuroscientists like Jeff Zaks about how we become engaged in watching a movie and apply some of these same ideas involving engagement in moviemaking to

Barb Oakley (57:11.135)
how we can become engaged in the material that we're learning, you know, in school. It's just shocking to me. you know, I watch a video, I can stop the video, I can think about things. I can't stop a teacher, you know, and learn. You can learn so much more oftentimes by learning online. And yet that is...

Lendo @superdaddyclub (57:31.18)
Yes.

Barb Oakley (57:40.065)
often denigrated, I think because there's a little bit of nervousness on the part of some professors and teachers about the idea of learning online.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (57:51.33)
Yes, yes. There's this fascinating thing that I realized yesterday when I was reading about preparing for the show. And it was, if you look at social media shorts and how, you know, the general complaint right now is that they're destroying people's attention span and it's getting smaller and smaller and smaller. But when you think about, when you're building a social media short, you may start with a 10 minute video.

and you need to figure out what the point of that video is, what is the core message. You need to reduce that to 30 seconds. If you can do 50 seconds, golden. In the process of that, what are you doing? You're stripping all the braces, all the pause of how we speak naturally. You're removing any, and if they're not, you're stripping it down to the very core message. Matter of fact, what you also wanna do is you wanna take what the point of the video is and you wanna put it at the beginning because,

Once I know what the point is, I'll watch it. I'm more likely to watch it till the end. And when you actually, and when you think about Myers multimedia learning theory, and you, and I've only encountered this very recently, but when you think about what is positive throughout those theory, shorts,

Barb Oakley (58:55.301)
you know like a rat pressing that lever. I want to get to it, yeah.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (59:17.572)
touch on a lot of points of how media can be an effective tool for learning. Like it touches on a lot of that. Even when we thinking about, when I was reading about the success of your MOOC and the way you, wasn't you, there wasn't like a visual, let's say with the brains or the two sides of the brains and then, or sorry, two modes of learning. And then you on the side, you were embedded into the footage.

with the visuals behind and you're of like pointing at things. That's exactly what shorts look like today on TikTok. And they're effective in capturing and sustaining people's attention. If you structure them according to the specific guidelines and get a message across in a very specific manner. And I just wanted to know your thoughts on that because when I was reading the multimedia learning theory and I'm thinking about shorts.

I'm like, well, there's something here. It's not all terrible.

Barb Oakley (01:00:20.675)
Yeah, I mean, you said it all. It's great, actually. Get your right in, get you curious because you just saw a key idea. And there's nothing better than getting curiosity going to help motivate people to actually watch, you know, and learn things. That's how

thrillers are structured. You know, you get the big question and then you got to read, know, and then you're learning about, I don't know, submarines and how they function and so forth. And you're wading through all this stuff because you're really curious about what is going to happen to the submarine and the people on it. after this, you know, so yeah, it's you, you put your finger exactly on

Lendo @superdaddyclub (01:01:08.644)
That was really cool, yeah. We've gone over an hour, but do you have another like maybe 10 minutes of your time or you gotta go? Thank you, I'll try and be quick here. You teach about the deep connections between memory and procrastination. And I wanted to know if you could expand on that and just give us a little bit of information as to why we procrastinate and.

Barb Oakley (01:01:17.569)
or you for you. Yes.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (01:01:36.62)
What's the connection with the memory portion?

Barb Oakley (01:01:40.267)
so sometimes people will say, procrastination is not that bad because then you're gathering more information. And if you're putting together a report, you actually kind of know all the material if you procrastinate. And so then you're, you're, can do a better job putting together a good report. And, know, that's like,

The one circumstance where maybe procrastination isn't that bad, but the reality is in most cases, procrastination is maybe not a really good idea. And it is really bad to procrastinate when you are trying to learn things. mean, imagine a big weightlifter. It's a world championship. He's preparing.

It's the night before. So he works out a whole bunch to be able to, you know, to work, you know, to win the gold medal the next day. Of course that does not happen. No weightlifter sits there and procrastinates until the last minute because it takes time to build the muscular tissue. Muscular tissue is an excitable tissue

which is just exactly what neural tissue is. Excitable tissues take time to develop. So if you procrastinate until the last minute in your learning, you are not developing good neural structure. It's like, you you've got the puny structure of somebody who never lifts weights at all, and then you go out and you're trying to compete with world-class people. Yeah, of course you can't do it. It takes...

time to learn. it, I mean, you can cram and you can actually be successful. The night before, some people can cram successfully because they're using these really flimsy hippocampal connections to do their learning with.

Barb Oakley (01:03:56.035)
This will make it so the next day, sure, you can make the connections of learning. can you can maybe pass the test. But the next month when you are starting the new semester and you're supposed to already know this stuff, it'll be gone. You won't learn it. You won't. And that's when teachers start going, well, what is it with Tommy? You know, I thought you told me that you had taught Tommy this stuff last semester, but

He knows nothing about it. you know, of course, if Tommy procrastinated until the last second, you know, the night before, he's going to build really weak neural structures. If you practice day by day, so let's say you have five hours at a week, space out your learning so it's like an hour per day for five days, instead of cramming it all five hours one day on a Saturday.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (01:04:55.148)
Mm-hmm.

Barb Oakley (01:04:55.449)
because if you cram it all in one day, you go to sleep that night and every time you go to sleep, it practices with what you've been learning, especially if you bring it to mind right before you go to sleep in those, you know, a couple minutes, it'll practice. But look, you do five hours, you get one night of the brain practicing with the materials and that's it. Now you have a test on Friday.

Sorry, it's gonna start fading all the way. If you have five hours, you space it out, so it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you know, then you take the test on Friday, you have not only built those connections and reinforced them during the day, but each of those four evenings, you've also strengthened the connections as...

Lendo @superdaddyclub (01:05:29.025)
Mm-hmm.

Barb Oakley (01:05:52.747)
as your your little brain is going, yeah, okay, yeah, let's practice again with that. That was important and know, Barb just studied that during the day so it must be important and then I study it again the next day and my brain goes, that still must be important and so all I get not only the daily learning but the learning that is taking place through strengthening of connections during sleep and that

Lendo @superdaddyclub (01:06:09.527)
Hmm

Barb Oakley (01:06:20.111)
helps really learn much more effectively.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (01:06:24.61)
And that is effectively answering the question, do we enhance our short-term, long-term memory capacities essentially when we're learning something?

Barb Oakley (01:06:34.245)
Well, we don't really know. mean, some occasional neuroscientists will say we can expand our working memory capacity, but it's pretty hard to do very well. There is evidence that if we simply become literate, in other words, we learn how to read, that expands working memory capacity over what you would have had if you hadn't learned how to read.

But what is interesting is the more you learn about a topic, the more you can hold in working memory. So like, let's say that I said to you, Zdravstvte, kak vy pozhevayte? Okay, I say that to you and now I say, repeat it to me. It's pretty hard, you know, unless you've studied Russian.

There's nothing to stick through, you know, just, but like for me, I have studied Russian. So when I hear something in Russian, I can hold it in my short-term memory much more easily. if, so, but if I said, hello, how are you? And asked you to hold that, which is the same thing that I just said in Russian, you could hold that in your working memory easily because you speak

Lendo @superdaddyclub (01:07:35.972)
Hmm.

Barb Oakley (01:08:02.477)
You know, you're an English speaker. So you have intense knowledge of that. So you can in some sense do the equivalent of expanding your working memory capacity simply by learning more about a

Lendo @superdaddyclub (01:08:05.378)
Mm-hmm.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (01:08:21.164)
Wow, amazing, amazing. Thank you so much for sharing all this knowledge with us. It's been truly a pleasure. I've been waiting for this conversation for like eight years or so. way before this platform existed, I was like, when we start Super Daddy Club, if I ever start Super Daddy Club, I will have Barbara on. Like that's been a long, long, long time objective. So speaking to you today was simply, yeah, I'm in awe.

Barb Oakley (01:08:49.849)
Well, I have a sense that you are a super daddy, so it is a privilege to be able to share here.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (01:08:59.116)
Absolutely, thank you so much. Any final thoughts on your part, where can people find your work? Yeah, any final thoughts you want to share with our audience? Before we go.

Barb Oakley (01:09:10.19)
let's see, well, you can find lots more about me at BarbaraOakley.com.

So just take my name and go there. And also if you look for my courses of Coursera, there's my most recent one is on critical thinking. I also have another one on accelerating your learning with chat GPT. And then of course, the granddaddy at the mall learning how to learn. so lots of different things to help and lots of, I think, very good books.

So, and I should say the book, Uncommon Sense Teaching really lays out what we do know and how you can become a more effective teacher by learning.

Lendo @superdaddyclub (01:10:01.444)
Amazing. Thank you so much for everyone. Thank you Barbara. Thank you all for tuning in and we look forward to the next episode and well we look forward to releasing this episode period. But yeah, thank you all and have yourself a wonderful day. Bye. Okay, perfect. yeah, this is amazing. Thank you so

Barb Oakley (01:10:21.875)
You are.