The secret to learning?

Original post:  Apr 29, 2014

What if it takes more than practice to actually pick up a skill?

In his book "Outliers", Malcolm Gladwell theorized that 10,000 hours of practice seemed to be the threshold for true excellence in a given field. What he might have missed in this theory was the fact that it might take more than just hitting a specific whole number. In Peter Brown's book "Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning," he discusses what he believes is a more effective method to actually gain proficiency in the "real world" application of learning.

He argues for spacing out practices to allow time to forget what you have learned. These gaps may seem as if they slow down progress, but they serve an important function:

Almost everywhere you look, you find examples of massed practice: colleges that offer concentration in a single subject with the promise of fast learning, continuing education seminars for professionals where training is condensed into a single weekend. Cramming for exams is a form of massed practice. It feels like a productive strategy, and it may get you through the next day’s midterm, but most of the material will be long forgotten by the time you sit down for the final. Spacing out your practice feels less productive for the very reason that some forgetting has set in and you’ve got to work harder to recall the concepts. It doesn’t feel like you’re on top of it. What you don’t sense in the moment is that this added effort is making the learning stronger.

He applied these concepts in surgical training:

The benefits of spacing out practice sessions are long established, but for a vivid example consider this study of thirty-eight surgical residents. They took a series of four short lessons in microsurgery: how to reattach tiny vessels. Each lesson included some instruction followed by some practice. Half the docs completed all four lessons in a single day, which is the normal in-service schedule. The others completed the same four lessons but with a week’s interval between them.

In a test given a month after their last session, those whose lessons had been spaced a week apart outperformed their colleagues in all areas—elapsed time to complete a surgery, number of hand movements, and success at reattaching the severed, pulsating aortas of live rats. The difference in performance between the two groups was impressive. The residents who had taken all four sessions in a single day not only scored lower on all measures, but 16 percent of them damaged the rats’ vessels beyond repair and were unable to complete their surgeries.

Why is spaced practice more effective than massed practice? It appears that embedding new learning in long-term memory requires a process of consolidation, in which memory traces (the brain’s representations of the new learning) are strengthened, given meaning, and connected to prior knowledge—a pro cess that unfolds over hours and may take several days. Rapid fire practice leans on short-term memory. Durable learning, however, requires time for mental rehearsal and the other processes of consolidation. Hence, spaced practice works better. The increased effort required to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consolidation, further strengthening memory.

Here is a link to the full article which also discusses other examples of this theory:  Ditch the 10,000 hour rule! Why Malcolm Gladwell’s famous advice falls short - Salon.com

Experiences? Priceless.

Original post:  Mar 18, 2014

Over the weekend, we had two events that we had to prep for. On Saturday, we hosted a small dinner party. Since our house normally has the "lived in" look, it required a fair amount of intensive work to clean up. Part of our problem is that our boys tend to take over the whole house. Their toys and books often get scattered where they were last used. The boys "forget" to put them away.

As we started to sort through piles of things, we began to walk down memory lane. There were books that we had read to them countless times. Most of them had cycled through starbursts of activity and then faded. It was the same way with many of the toys. There were spurts of popularity and then they get broken or forgotten.

On Sunday, we had a different experience entirely. The high school drama club had performed excerpts from their play. The boys came home and asked us to go to see "Beauty and the Beast." It was even more exciting for them because one of their black belt instructors at karate was actually starring in the role of the Beast. We all had a good time.

As I thought about the weekend, I realized that this excerpt I found below is actually true. It's from a  

longer piece by author James Wallman discussing the concept of "Stuffocation." In this interview and his book, he advocates for experiences over material goods:

So there are five key reasons why experiences are better than material goods at making us happy. The first thing is something that social scientists call “hedonic adaptation.” And that’s simply a way of saying that with material goods you get bored of things quickly, whereas with experiences you don’t. The great example is the mobile phone. When you first get it you press the buttons, you play with it, you tell your friends about it, you’re excited. A week later, not so excited. A month later, ehh. Three months later it’s part of the furniture. You just get used to the thing being around.

The second thing is “positive reinterpretation.” That’s basically, if you buy a bad material good, let’s say a pair of shoes that actually don’t fit that well or a pair that squeak or that coat that swishes or makes a weird noise when you’re walking, there’s nothing you can do about that. It’s just a bad decision. That’s it. But with an experience, if it goes wrong, it doesn’t really go wrong at all.

Think about being on a long bus ride, and you’ve sat next to a person who’s sick – literally sick – all over you. And there are chickens on the bus, the windows won’t open or shut, you bang your head, the seat is really uncomfortable, and you break your coccyx and you’re just in agonizing pain, it’s supposed to be a one-hour journey and it takes three days. At the time, that’s a really horrible thing to be going through. But the more you tell it, the better it is, right? There’s that magic. The magic of a bad experience is that it’s almost like there’s no such thing as a bad experience. That’s probably my favorite reason.

The third reason why experiences are better than material goods – and this actually references the status anxiety – is that experiences are much harder to compare than material goods. And that means that we don’t get the same kind of tension that comes with comparing things. You know, if you’ve ever bought a handbag, and your colleague turns up the next day with the better one – let’s say you got the one from Top Shop, and it’s a great bag, but your colleague got the Gucci one, and there’s no doubt about it, it’s a better bag. Or I have a Nissan, it’s a very plain, average car, and one of my neighbors has a Porsche, another one has an Audi. And there’s no doubt about it that they have nicer cars than me.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that for a holiday your neighbor goes to the Four Seasons in Hawaii, or the Maldives, or one of those amazing islands off Brazil and stays in a five-star resort, and drinks champagne from the refrigerators, which are on the beach. And you go to Wales for a rainy camping holiday. Or you drink warm beer on the beach, or whatever it might be. Now there’s no doubt about it that they had a swankier holiday than you. But did they have a better holiday? Is chilled champagne on the beach better than warm beer? People often smile at me when I say this, and say of course they did.

But actually, you might be really wealthy and having what looks like an amazing time, but you might not be happy and having fun. It’s much more about the people you’re with and what you’re doing. But anyway, from that basis, it’s much harder to compare experiences than it is material goods.

Here is the link to the full article: http://www.salon.com/2014/03/08/buy_less_do_more_5_reasons_why_experiences_make_us_happier_than_things/