Barbara Oakley flunked math — then became a professor of engineering. She didn’t get smarter. She got better at learning. In this episode, she explains how anyone can build brainpower using science-backed techniques like chunking, spaced repetition, and the Pomodoro method. If you want to learn faster (and remember more), this is for you.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Transcript
Barbara is the creator and instructor of Learning to Learn, with over one million enrolled students.
In this fascinating interview, we cover many aspects of learning, including how to make it stick so we remember more and forget less, how to be more efficient so we learn more quickly, and how to remove the barriers that get in the way of effective learning.
Here are a few highlights from our conversation:
- How she changed her brain from hating math and science to loving it so much she now teaches engineering to college students
- What neuroscience can tell us about how to learn more effectively
- The two modes of your brain and how that impacts what and how you learn
- Why backing off can sometimes be the best thing you can do when learning something new
- How to “chunk” your learning so new knowledge is woven into prior knowledge making it easily accessible
- The best ways to develop new patterns of learning in our brains
- How to practice a skill so you can blast through plateaus and improve more quickly
- Her favorite tactic for dealing with procrastination so you can spend more time learning
- The activities she recommends that rapidly increase neural connections like fertilizer on the brain
- Whether memorization has a place in learning anymore, or simply a barrier to true understanding
- The truth about “learning types” and how identifying as a visual or auditory learner might be setting yourself up for failure.
…and a whole lot more.
If you want to be the most efficient learner you can be, and have more fun doing it, you won’t want to miss this discussion.
