The Five Biggest Myths About Learning

if you're interested in learning and you're on the internet you've probably heard a lot of different things about how people learn the problem is a lot of it is just wrong i made this video to help you understand the difference between the nonsense that's out there and the things that we're pretty sure are true let's start with myth number one actually scratch that i'm going to start with true things about learning first and then we'll see where those pesky myths fit in truth number one your brain is structured in a particular way different parts of the brain serve different functions for example the prefrontal cortex is associated with inhibitory control it helps you resist doing something that you otherwise would want to do the hippocampus is associated with emotions here's the myth the right brain is the artistic brain and the left brain is the analytical brain and one hemisphere dominates the other there are right brain people and left brain people and right brain people are more artistic or creative and left brain people are more analytical this is wrong on several different levels yes i did just say that different parts of the brain are associated with different brain processes but it's not that simple the prefrontal cortex is associated with inhibitory control but also a lot of other stuff yes the hippocampus is associated with emotions but also a lot of other stuff in most cases brain processes don't happen in just one part of the brain rather it's the interaction of several parts working together that creates a lot of the processes that we can think of memory for instance doesn't reside in any one part of the brain the hippocampus initially seems to play a role in encoding the memory but later those memories get passed up to the prefrontal cortex for abstraction and generalization and a bunch of other parts are involved too people often use the terms right brained and left brain to refer to creative and analytical personalities but this too is a misconception if you look at the tasks that say an artist and a mathematician perform what you find is that there are plenty of quote-unquote analytical tasks that the artist has to employ and plenty of creative or even artistic tasks that the mathematician has to employ it's not the structure of the brain that differentiates the artist from the mathematician rather it's the content inside of the brain the knowledge that these people have acquired the skills that they have and the demands of the tasks they are performing the kinds of problems they're solving the purposes for which they are working that's what's driving the differences truth number two sleep is one of the most critically important aspects of learning a lack of sleep rapidly decreases your cognitive abilities slow wave sleep and rem sleep which you go through in periods at night time are really vital for memory consolidation here's the myth that you can learn things subliminally while you sleep i'm not bringing this up because a lot of people believe it i don't think they do at least i hope they don't but it reveals something important about how we learn there is such a thing as implicit learning that happens all the time when you learn to ride a bike you learn through trial and error you learn that to turn left you actually need to go right first before you turn left but very few people consciously realize that they have learned this thing now when you learn your native language you learn to conform your sentences to be basically grammatically correct even though you have never learned explicitly what those grammatical rules are but during sleep your brain is inwardly focused if you're listening to french lessons while you're sleeping your brain just doesn't care it's too busy working on consolidating the memories and experiences that you had during the day actually listening to french might disturb your sleep and inhibit memory consolidation if you are a particularly light sleeper a better way of thinking about this is you getting a good night's sleep is already helping you to learn whatever it is you're learning you don't need to cram more stuff into your brain while you're sleeping now there are some interesting tricks to help your brain consolidate those memories more effectively while you're sleeping but that is for my next video on sleep and learning truth number three how much you learn and what you learn depends on your attention sleep poorly the night before your attention will suffer and you won't learn as effectively looking at your phone while you watch this not good for learning bombarded by information probably not going to learn that much how much focus you have at any given moment and what you are focusing on heavily influences what you are going to take away from that learning experience here's the myth that we only use 10 of our brains if someone was only using 10 of their brains they would be dead or in a coma or something your brain does a lot of things without you even thinking about it breathing listening walking feeling hungry brain activity is cyclical and adaptive are we using less of our brains when we're asleep our brain is certainly operating differently than when we're awake and maybe there is less overall activity does that mean we should stop sleeping no percentage of brain used is just a bad way of thinking about how effective our brain is a better way of thinking about it is just to think about well is our brain acting appropriately under the circumstances so is our brain resting when it should be resting is it focused when it should be focused are we feeling pain when we should be feeling pain truth number four two people can get very different things out of the same learning experience so imagine you and i go to a lecture on rocket science you might learn a lot and i might only learn a little the reasons that this happens are complex you may have come in with more prior knowledge than me so that lets you get more out of the lecture you may have paid more attention to certain parts of it we may have different study strategies we might have different motivations different interpretive frameworks maybe we have different spatial visualization abilities which let you grasp what was going on a little more easily we might have had different learning goals when we entered which oriented what we paid attention to here is the myth that you learned more from that lecture because you are an auditory learner and i didn't because i'm not this is the incredibly popular idea of learning styles which attempts to put students into different learning categories so people are visual learners or auditory learners or kinesthetic learners now there never was any evidence for this idea and the studies that have explicitly tested this idea just roundly reject it it also is completely inconsistent with what we know about how people learn there are other videos on youtube that do a great job of explaining why the idea of learning styles doesn't make any sense veritasium's video talks more about the empirical studies that have tested this idea and neurotransmissions video gets a little bit more into the history of this idea both are really good i would check them out i'll put links in the description below but it doesn't make sense from a logical standpoint either suppose you are going to learn to ride a bike how are you going to do that visually if you are a visual learner or think about geometry are you going to learn geometry auditorily points a and b are connected by a line of length 4. point d is also connected to point a sometimes people use the words learning styles to mean any kind of learning difference when they do that they're not exactly wrong it's just massively imprecise you are probably better at drawing than i am and you can potentially leverage your drawing skills to help you learn more effectively but maybe you suffer from dyslexia that's going to make reading more difficult for you but it's certainly not impossible to overcome these aren't learning styles they're just different abilities and challenges i could make tons of videos talking about how learning works wait a second that's exactly what i do on my channel but here's a better way of thinking about it many things influence how people learn some of these things have to do with the learner so do they have adequate prior knowledge to understand what's being said are they paying attention to the right things what are their skills and challenges some things have to do with the teacher and the teaching material is it focused on the right skills and concepts is it presented in a clear way is it sequenced in the right way effective learning is the confluence of many different factors truth number five what you learn depends on how that information is presented to you so for instance if you combine visuals and text together that's usually going to be better for the student than if you just use text or visuals alone but there are a lot of details about that that i'm not going to get into in this particular video what's not true is this thing humans retain 10 percent of what they learned from reading 20 percent of what they learned from audio visual 50 of what they learn when they see a demonstration up to 70 percent of what they learn when they practice what they learn and up to 90 percent of what they learn when they use it this is called dale's cone of experience it's 100 years old it has never been true and it is one of those myths that just won't die no matter how many times people debunk it a really good visualization can teach you a lot a really bad practice session might actually hurt your learning if you develop bad habits that you then have to try to undo in the future learning mode can influence how much we learn but there is a better way of thinking about it the kind of activity that's going to best help you learn depends upon your learning goals and where you are in the learning process so let's imagine that you never saw anyone ride a bike in your life well in that case it probably would make some sense to watch some people ride bikes before you yourself try to learn how to ride a bike but if you're already familiar with bike riding then no amount of watching more people ride more bikes is going to help your body learn the skill of riding the bike now at this point you can stop the video but you'd be missing the most important part what's better than knowing the truth being able to detect the truth unfortunately there is not one golden rule that distinguishes fact from fiction but there are patterns to these myths that apply to the ones we've looked at here and also ones that you will run across in the future so the question is what are these patterns untapped potential and effortless learning these are two themes that run through all of these myths you could be learning more if you only use that 90 of your brain learning a language is easy if you just listen to this while you sleep this is related to the grift often these myths are perpetuated by people who are trying to sell you something now that you know about learning styles time to buy our learning styles diagnostic surveys there's a slipperiness to myths okay so what you're saying is that everyone has one of these learning styles well people primarily use one learning style but that doesn't mean that they don't have access to the other learning styles but there are only three of them you know some systems use four learning styles some systems use five learning styles it really kind of depends wouldn't that make them inconsistent with each other i would say they're all versions of the same underlying truth advocates for many of these myths can retreat to a different position that's because there's a lack of specificity which 10 percent of the brain are we even talking about what does it mean to only learn 30 percent of what we hear at the same time there's a false precision fixed categories and percentages tend to crop up often how would we even measure how much of our brains we are using at any given time is that just general electrical activity or something are we looking at different parts of the brain and seeing how many of those parts are currently active these myths are almost always ideas or observations that grow to be generally accepted truths without actually being critically tested learning styles was just an idea that one person had and it grew to be massively popular before anyone actually tested out the idea to see if it was true myths also tend to be scientific stand-ins for cultural ideas so we want to say that there's a difference between creative people and analytical people and so we try to ground that in a scientific reality that doesn't exist i probably missed a bunch of other patterns as well feel free to add to this list in the comments but that's it if you liked this video it would help me tremendously if you clicked the like button finally i have a question for you did this approach that i took here where i talked about a related true idea first and then the myth and then i give you maybe a different way of thinking about it did this approach work for you you can let me know down below in the comments see you next time

Channel: Benjamin Keep, PhD, JD

Views: 32,067

Keywords: myths, busting myths, myths about learning, neuromyths, right-brain and left-brain, right-brain dominant person, sleep and learn, learning styles, 10 of your brain, 10 of your brain myth, cone of experience

Id: jcMk3e7u7zM

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Wed May 04 2022