Barbara Oakley - How Neuroscience Is Changing What We Know about Learning. INTED2019 Keynote Speech

thank you so much it's such a pleasure to be here today and I think you're in for a great treat here at in Ted so I have to begin by just giving you a little bit of a sense of what it's like for me in a typical February March timeframe when I'm going to work at my day job in Michigan so here we go yeah I'm getting ready for work and I teach this course called learning how to learn it's a massive open online course of MOOC and my co-instructor in that is Terry Sadowski who's the Francis Crick professor at the Salk Institute and here's Terry going to work at his day job so this is gives you a little sense of some of the power of online learning is it helps not only students to get together from all over the world but also faculty can write together in a new forum to create intriguing new new materials so yeah I'm just a little Midwestern professor and I was shocked I was invited to speak at Harvard I was a nervous wreck I mean it's Harvard and I walked into the room and I was even more nervous because the room was packed standing room only and I wondered why are there so many people here and it turns out our one little course made for less than five thousand dollars mostly in my basement had on the order of the same number of students as all of Harvard's online and massive online courses put together made for millions of dollars with hundreds of people so what this tells you is that people are hungry for fresh approaches to learning and they're starving to get really innovative new insights that can help them in their learning so so I should back off just a little bit and give you a sense of where I'm coming from as a human just as Tony did earlier so here's just a little sense of me growing up I I grew up moving all over the United States so by the time I hit about 15 years old I'd lived in ten different places now normally I mean that can be a very good thing except for one scholastic issue and that is the fact that math is extraordinarily sequential so if you fall off anywhere along the way your love you can be lost well when I was moving from Texas to Massachusetts when I was about seven years old they were suddenly way far ahead of me in the multiplication tables well you might think oh but she just caught right up right well no I didn't catch right up I I'd never really cared for math in the first place I just didn't think you know it was useful at all and I certainly didn't think I had no math gene and so when they were far ahead of me I just thought well I just can't do this and I ended up flunking my way through elementary middle and high school math and science which is kind of ironic since I'm standing here in front of you today as a professor of engineering and I am the real deal I mean I've published in pop and top journals I've I teach advanced graduate level engineering courses and so one day though one day one of my students found out about my past as a sordid horrible math flunky and he asked me how did you do it how did you change your brain and I thought about it I thought how did I change my brain because I was just this little kid and and I like this picture because it is truly the last cute picture of me but but I just I loved animals and I like knitting and weaving and all those kinds of things that I I didn't know what I can possibly be when I grew up I knew it couldn't be anything analytical and especially at that time the US what is it's not like Europe it's not like you're comfortable with other languages I I thought wouldn't it be cool if I could learn another language and so Wow that was that became my passion I became so excited about that but there was no way to you know I couldn't afford to go to college but I found out there was one way to learn a new language and actually get paid for it and that was to join the army so that's me looking really nervous about to throw a grenade and if you knew how close II I actually am you would know why I look so nervous but I I did learn another language I learned Russian and I ended up working on Soviet trawlers up in the Bering Sea and I just loved having new adventures and seeing the world through new perspectives so I also ended up working at the South Pole Station in Antarctica and and that's where I met my husband so I always say I had to go to the end of the earth to do that man but but the thing is by the time I reached age 26 I found something that really surprised me and that was I had I done everything people it said I'd followed my passion done what I thought was really inside me and I found out that I haven't really been thinking about the world and its needs and by that I mean no recruiter was not gonna my door saying oh we've got to have your Slavic languages and literature skills so I thought what can what can I do again and I remembered when I worked with all these West Point engineers I'd look at their textbooks it looks something like this these kind of wild equations and I remember looking at him and thinking that looks kind of like a foreign language and then I began to realize not wait a minute aren't I supposed to be open to new adventures and learning new perspectives why don't I see if maybe I can change my brain rewire myself and learn in math and science so at age 26 I did exactly that I went back to the University started at remedial high school algebra and began to learn how to learn in this very very different subject but I found something interesting that actually the commonalities of learning in a language are very similar to learning in math and science and in fact if I had known know then what I know now about how you learn effectively I could have made it so much easier on myself so let's let's talk about some of the fundamental ideas that are growing from neuroscience about how we learn and how we can change ourselves so let's look at at the brain and one of the brain's fundamental sorts of building blocks and that is the neuron now there's about a hundred billion neurons in the brain and I wish you could see yourselves your your your faces are kind of going oh gosh this is where she's gonna get to the really boring science stuff so let's spice it up a little bit we've got whoo here's our analogy for a neuron and you can see there's kind of that big lump over there that's the nucleus and then our space alien which is the representative of our neuron has legs on it and those legs are called dendrites and on the legs there's all these little toes I mean it's a space alien and in reality those little toes are called dendritic spines so then the neuron has almost like an arm that reaches out and that arm is called an axon and what neurons do is they reach out with their arms and they tickle the toes of the next neuron so that's what neurons do that's their job they they reach out and communicate and send a signal to the next neuron now so here we can see how this signal is propagating along it's more or less an electrical signal that moves along and passes from one neuron to the next it is a bit more complicated than that we've got here we've got neuron that's the signals coming along it's actually then sort of translated into neurotransmitters that come along and pass the signal along chemically but I'm an electrical engineer so I'll just call it an electrical signal and that's pretty much good enough so when you learn anything what you're doing is you're creating sets of links between neurons so for our purposes here we've got something like five neurons together and and we can think I mean it's actually probably more and sometimes many more but let's say that you learn a chord of the guitar you're making a set of connections between a certain number of neurons or you're learning how to conjugate a verb in ukranian or you're trying to learn a dance step or how to take a derivative in math so any of those things you're learning you're creating a nice set of links and as you practice with what you've learned those connections build a strengthen so so you can almost think of it as a set of neural links and the more you practice and use those sets of links the stronger and and thicker those links become now what happens if you don't practice so let's say you understood a concept when a professor was teaching it or a teacher was providing it in class and you wait for a couple of weeks so you understood it at one time then you wait before you review it and then two weeks later you go to look at the actual material and suddenly what you understood before doesn't seem to make sense at all you can't understand it again and what has happened in the meantime is your little sort of synaptic janitor has gone wrong and knocked off some of those neural connections so that that's why you can't understand again what you had even understood before so this is what is happening when you're learning is you have little as you're learning as you're learning something here even right now a little dendritic spine is beginning to poke out from a dendrite and then the real time when it emerges all the way is tonight when you will go to sleep so when you sleep that's when those dendritic spines just pop out and make the connections and practice with those connections so this is why it's so important for students to to a practice and to get a good sleep here you can see a light microscopy image this is an image of a neuron before learning and before sleep and this is the same exact image or a same exact neuron after learning and after sleep and if you look where there's these blue triangles they are indicating new dendritic spines that have popped out and emerged as a consequence of the fact you've learned something and then you've gone to sleep at night so this is uh this is why it's so important to space out your learning to have a little bit of practice all in sever over a number of days if you have ten hours of study and you do it all in one day you don't have time for each evening for those synaptic connections to grow and your little synaptic janitor can more easily sweep those patterns away this is why sometimes students who are very smart and they get used to cramming so they just procrastinate then they cram at the very last minute and then it works for a while but sometimes when they get to college they get to like the middle of a more difficult course and suddenly they're struggling because they haven't laid a solid foundation they haven't really learned how to do that so i learning you can kind of think through analogy it's a little bit like building a brick wall you want to lay a layer bricks lay the mortar then more bricks and let that mortar dry so it takes a little time as you're building the wall to Heights if you don't do that you'll have this sort of poor neural structure and it's not very good for learning so it's almost we can think of it a little bit like by thinking about this weightlifter we can look at this weightlifter and we know this guy did not sit there the night before the big need and start to cram but because we can't see that something quite similar to muscular development is going on with neural development and neural structure we often think I'm sure it's mush up there you can just cram the night before but that's actually not true and speaking of this fantastic weight lifter I do have to bring to mind one of the latest sort of insights we have that's relevant to learning we've often known that exercise can be a valuable adjunct to to your learning it helps enhance your ability to learn and remember but we haven't known why I mean why would exercise it's not much to do with your brain at all but now we've found it was like in the last year and a half researchers have discovered part of the magic behind why exercise is so important and it has to do with when you exercise you put forth in your brain a factor called brain-derived neurotropic factor and we can abbreviate that to BDNF and BDNF as it turns out seems to allow neurons to more easily make connections and we can actually see that in using light microscopy here's an image of a neuron before BDNF is essentially sprinkled on this neuron and here is in the same neuron after application of BDNF look at all those little dendritic spines that have just erupted can you see it's a lot easier to make connections with these neuron and with these dendritic spines because they're just hanging around there waiting to get connected to something so I actually said I should switch perspectives because there's so many different aspects of learning great learning is like baking a cake it has so many different ingredients and what I should talk about is the difference between working memory and long-term memory so working memory is what you hold temporarily in mind so maybe google send you a code so for seven three to five so you repeat it to yourself for seven three to five as you go and you enter it into some other device so you're holding it temporarily and working memory and long-term memory is sort of where you store long term information how your mother's face looks the names of your friends maybe even something you've learned in school so where is what's where in the brain where is working memory where is long-term memory it turns out that working memory is sort of in the prefrontal cortex so it's towards mostly towards the front of your brain and it's almost like it has these four arms like an octopus that can that can hold four different items pieces of information so here we go there's our working memory with the octopus and it's forearms and and whereas long-term memory its mmm it's more scattered throughout your brain but for our purposes we're going to imagine that it's just it's in this locker or set of lockers and within those lockers are a set of neural links and you've created those neural links by practicing and learning this material so when you're learning something your working memory is often working very very hard what it's trying to do is it's trying to create a set of links and once it's got that set of links then your attentional octopus can just reach out it's like this subroutine and it can grab it pull it to mind and then you can work a math problem conjugated verb do do whatever you want not because you're thinking and holding it in in mind but because you've already analyzed it and you can just grab that set of links so this brings me to my younger daughter Rachel and I needed someone if you're wondering why perhaps the the massive open online learning how to learn course was made so inexpensively it's because whenever I needed someone for a bit part I would just ask our daughters and they they work cheap they worked for food so so so I remember one night at the dinner table I said I need to have someone modeling backing up a car really badly as when you're first learning how to backup a car my younger daughter Rachel says mom I got this I can do this sir so here you see no Rachel modeling what it was like for her when not long before she had been learning how to backup a car and you can see her little faces just look oh did you look at the side mirror in the back beer waited up front the back watch which way she turned and then next thing you know off she goes into the ditch so so what this is showing when you're first learning to backup a car you're working memory is kind of going really a little crazy it's got a heavy cognitive load and you don't have any or no working memory arms or left for anything else but when you have learned how to backup the car all you have to do is think you know I'm gonna back up the car and you pull that set of links to mind and voila you've got a light cognitive load you've got arms that are available for other things like what's that song on the radio or is my seatbelt fastened so the more you can help your students develop these sets of links that they can pull to mind the better they can do in your course because for example when you hint a test to them they their working memory goes oh yeah you know I've got this stuff you're just asking me to connect this idea with this idea and maybe with this other idea and voila you can make all those connections so I I think the challenge for some students is because they don't know how their brain works they they they've studied by just reading the material they haven't actively worked with it with their working memory and put those sets of links into long-term memory and then when you give them the test they're trying to figure it out and they think that's test anxiety but actually sometimes it's not in fact many times it's not it's just that they haven't created the sets of links in long term memory so what we know is that experts of any kind are are there one common factor is that they they have lots and lots of sets of links so that's the common a common factor of experts anywhere in any subject whether it's playing chess learning a musical instrument learning a foreign language learning in math and science something physical whatever you're learning you're creating those sets of links that make it easier for your long-term memory to work now sometimes we think some of our best traits are really bad traits and I'll give you an example of this in my classes I'll be teaching for example probability and statistics for engineers and I might ask a really difficult question and one of my students will write in the front arm right up they've got the answer they're good and you can all see the other students in the class say you know I'm what's in it for me I'm never gonna be that kind of a fast thinker and the reality is it is true some people are really fast thinkers it's like they have racecar dreams but others they are slower in how they think they they get like hikers they can get to the finish line but it takes a much longer to do that but think about what the hiker sees racecar brain everything goes by the floor hiker brain they can reach out they can touch the leaves on the trees they can smell the pine in the air see the little paths they have a completely different experience and in some ways much richer and my hero in science is a great Spaniard named Santiago Ramon y Cajal and qahal was a terrible student he had a poor working memory which actually gave him some advantages but he was kicked out of school as a you know a problematic student time after time and yet he became what is known as the father of modern neuroscience won the Nobel Prize and Cole was once asked what was behind your success and he said well um I was persistent of course we we understand persistence would be a very valuable thing but he said also he said I was flexible and by this he meant well he said I have worked with many geniuses and I am no genius and he wasn't he had really struggled in his learning had a poor working memory and but he said the problem with geniuses is they're so smart they grow up being right and they don't get used to get being wrong and to correcting their errors and so what geniuses can do is they can become inflexible they're used to thinking very quickly solving everything very quickly when they're wrong they can't change their mind so they can jump to conclusions and again be inflexible about changing so if you or your students are slower thinkers rejoice because sometimes you will be able to do what even geniuses cannot so I thank you so much for your attention it's a privilege to share you

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Length: 27min 21sec (1641 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2019