Khan Academy Live! In Khanversation with Barbara Oakley

So Sal here at Khan Academy worldwide headquarters, and I'm excited to be here with Barbara Oakley, who's an expert on learning and learning how to learn. So Barbara, let me just start with a question that I'm sure many of Khan Academy users or young people around the world, frankly all people, have faced. You're trying to learn something, and you're looking at a textbook or a teacher's giving a lecture, and all of a sudden it's just not making sense. You keep trying to pound your head on it. What's going on in the brain at that time, and is the only option to just keep trying to power forward?

Oh no, the last thing you want to do is keep powering forward. I mean, ultimately you want to do that, but if you're really stuck and you're very frustrated, as I used to get when I was trying to study when I was growing up, the best thing to do is to back off and get your mind completely off what you're stuck on. And I mean completely off.

So either study something very different or go out for a walk, or just do something that gets your mind off of it. As soon as you get your mind off it, it turns out that opens up a completely different set of neural circuits. It's the difference between task positive, where you're focusing, and task negative, where you're not focusing at all. These other circuits are what allows you to begin making sense of the stuff that you've been struggling with.

So as long as you're focusing on it, you're actually keeping yourself stuck because you're not allowing these other neural circuits to kind of kick into gear. So that's why people say back off when you get frustrated. I never understood that before, and now I do. It's very powerful.

So what you're saying actually backs up my experience. I remember in college when I used to take these, you know, these kind of very difficult math proof classes, and these proofs, the first time you look at them, I'd be like, "I don't know." But I got into a habit—I kind of fell into it—of I would read the proofs and make sure I understood, or read what I was trying to prove and make sure I understood it. And then I would go to sleep, and then I'd wake up, and the next morning it was like I just kind of got out of the work. I delegated it to my brain, and it just happened.

And you're saying that that actually is based in science?

It's based in really good science. In fact, there's some great research out that shows that as you sleep at night, that's when those little dendritic spines will, like, explode out and make those synaptic connections, and it happens when you're sleeping. So if you've learned, you've studied, focused during the day, you go to sleep at night—that's when the neural architecture is actually popping out and forming. So that's why sleep can be such an important part of learning.

And how do you know this? I mean, have you all actually looked at—do you have people trying to learn something, and then you put them in an MRI? How do you know?

Well, Guangyung at NYU has done some fantastic research published in Science, and it studies what happens to neurons when you sleep at night. Often some of these studies involve mice because we don't want to dissect little living creatures and so forth, for some reason.

But it really gives us a great understanding of how that architecture is growing while we sleep. There's another thing. When you go to sleep, well during the day, as the day goes by, you get this sort of little toxic stuff that's coming out of your cells. So that's why at night you feel kind of mentally fatigued. But when you go to sleep, what happens is your brain cells shrink.

This allows the metabolic, I mean the sort of cerebral fluids to wash away those toxins, and that's why in the morning you feel so much fresher. You don't want to go a night without sleep or with a very small amount of sleep because that can't wash those toxins away. And then the next day you're working with a poisoned brain, which isn't a good idea.

So making this very tangible—if I have an exam coming up, let's say next week, what would you, based on what you know and basically what the science tells us, what would be the optimal strategy? And let's just say I don't know much of what is covered on the exam. In a week from now, how would you tell me to approach that?

Don't sit there and say, "I'm going to do 10 hours of studying the day before the exam." Instead, say, "I'm going to take—let's say you have 10 hours available—parse that out. Do an hour, hour and a half each day." And each day as you're learning, that night when you go to sleep, you're making some more connections. The next night you've studied some, and you're making more connections. As each day goes by, you're building a really solid set of connections.

If you wait until the day before and then cram, you're building very poor connections because you only have one night of sleep to actually do the connections. And sometimes it's even worse. I remember from college what most students do is actually use that last night of sleep to study those 10 hours, and then they go in without any sleep oftentimes.

It sounds like the worst possible thing.

It is! And then what sometimes happens is they'll come to me and say, "I suffer from test anxiety." And actually, test anxiety is very real. Some people study really hard and they get very nervous. But other people use poor study strategies, and then they freeze on the test. It's because they didn't actually learn the material well.

We don't teach about how the brain learns very much; that's part of why people make these kinds of sometimes tragic mistakes.

So if this makes sense—and I think even before knowing about the science, a lot of students, all of us intuitively know, "Yes, I should probably start working on it sooner. I shouldn't do it last minute."

So why do we as humans do that? Why do we put it off to the last minute?

Oh, because when you even just think about something you don't like or don't want to do, it activates the insular cortex, the portion of the brain that experiences pain. So the brain, naturally enough, skitters away from that thought to a new thought that's like, "Oh, this is so much more fun," and it'll go surfing the web or doing whatever is more fun, and you've just procrastinated.

So a very powerful way of tackling this kind of thing is to use something called the Pomodoro Technique.

Pomodoro?

Pomodoro. And that was invented by an Italian, Francesco Cirillo, and Pomodoro is Italian for tomato. It's so simple. What this does is it sneaks your brain past that tendency to go away from whatever is painful. You just set a timer for 25 minutes.

You get rid of anything that's possibly a distraction—so no little ringy thingies on your cell phone or that kind of thing and no pop-ups on your computer. But then, you set that timer for 25 minutes, and you focus as intently as you can for 25 minutes, realizing that we all, of course, have these monkey minds, and you may catch yourself and have to bring yourself back.

But the most important part is when you're done with the 25 minutes, you relax; you reward yourself with something. What that’s doing is that's actually allowing you to get into the diffuse mode—this more task-negative, relaxing thing where you're consolidating what you've just learned. So this is a big reason why this technique is so powerful.

And is there something magic about the 25 minutes? Why not 15 minutes or 40 minutes?

Oh, there is! Very good questions! So, the magic is that—remember that pain in the brain? Well, it goes away after about 20 minutes. So 25 minutes is that perfect sweet spot that kind of starts getting you in the flow. You may even find, "Oh wait, I'm at 25 minutes; it says I should stop." Well, sometimes I'm in the flow, so I'll just keep right on going, and that's okay.

If I go 25, 45, two hours, whatever, when I do stop, I reward myself, and that helps program my brain to enjoy the focusing process even more. It's like Pavlov with the dogs. He'd ring a bell, and then after a while, the dogs knew they were going to get a reward, so they'd enjoy that time in between.

We're even like that as humans; we can begin enjoying that focusing period.

So, make sure I understand: it's not that you have to stop at 25 minutes; it's just that at 25 minutes the bell rings, you've earned the right for guilt-free whatever it might be—surfing the web, going for a walk—and that even that time is still productive?

You shouldn't have guilt associated with it. You did your focus time. But you're also saying that you're getting into this default mode, as you describe, and that's where your brain, if you go for a walk, you're starting to form the connections based on what you just focused.

That's right! We often think that if you're relaxing and you're not focusing, you're not doing any work. But actually, your brain is doing a lot of productive, yet subconscious work when you're taking these breaks, which is part of why these breaks are so important.

And they also—if you focus, focus, focus all the time, there is some evidence that it might actually reduce your creativity, reduce the ability of the default mode to kind of kick into play. So, when you're taking these little breaks, you're actually also sort of encouraging your creativity. And when the bell rings, but you're in your flow, and if you're getting—if you're feeling like this is really good, I'm—and the pain—I mean, that is fascinating!

It's literally because I don’t feel physical pain. I mean, there are all sorts of things I’m procrastinating on—at least 20 things right now—and I don't feel pain. But you're saying it's triggering the same part of the brain.

Well, everybody procrastinates because when you're working on one thing, you're not working on another thing. But you're a little bit different to use as a model case for procrastination because you don't think like a lot of people do. For me, a lot of people, probably a good thing for life—but a lot of times you can get really—you can have a lot of good things, good options on the table, and then you may not feel that pain in the brain.

For me, usually there's something—I'll have this thing I want to work on, this thing, this thing to say, and I'll work happily away, and there's this one thing, and I've been putting it off, and that's the one that can kick in that pain-in-the-brain sort of feeling.

And it's really, yeah, I mean, you definitely avoid it. And it's some—it's like a subconscious pain, almost.

But just to finish that point about this; I'm fascinated by this, you know, the Pomodoro and the timer. If you're feeling in the flow, you don't have to stop; you can keep going?

Yes! And what I'll often do is I'll have a little timer on my computer. I'm using it; I'm working away, maybe on something, and I don't have my sound turned on on the computer, so I can always just go check and see, "Oh, has it expired or not?" But it doesn't actually kick me out and say, "Check, do you want to quit now?" I can just decide that, you know, when I feel free.

But there are a lot of great apps using the Pomodoro technique, so people like to use these apps a lot of the time, and they'll collect Pomodoros. So Forest is a very popular app. If you complete a Pomodoro, you plant a tree; if you don't, you kill a tree.

But you can come collect like two to three Pomodoros on a certain topic and another number on another topic, if you like, if you're sort of—that helps your productivity. It's a great approach. For me, I generally just love to work, so I'm working away, but occasionally I will find myself surfing the web, and there's this one thing I should be doing, so I'll set the timer and get going with the Pomodoro.

And I can feel it now: my brain is trained— as soon as I set that timer, I start kind of working away and actually getting excited about even stuff I don't like. It's a great technique!

And there might be skeptics out there saying, "Okay, you know, Professor Oakley, she's saying it, but she's a fancy professor." You said, "My brain might be wired differently," and they might say, "Your brain is probably wired differently. You're a professor; you've done—has this always—you know, has learning been for you most of your life?"

Well, before I talk about that, I should mention, I teach a very large course called "Learning How to Learn" with Terri Sejnowski on learning. And I have to say that out of two and a half million students, it almost seems sometimes like I've heard from them all, and they love the Pomodoro technique.

So I've just got a lot of feedback; it really helps for everybody, not just people like me, but people like me. Well, my own background is I hated math and science when I was growing up. I flunked my way through elementary, middle, and high school math and science. I just didn't have the math gene; I knew I couldn't do it.

And then when I was 26 years old, I was getting out of the military, and, you know, for some weird reason, nobody wanted to get me with my Slavic languages and literature degree. And I thought maybe I should see if I can learn something new—like maybe even this math stuff.

Because I could see the officers I worked with—they had great job opportunities; they were often West Point engineers. I started with remedial high school algebra and started working my way up. But now, I mean, it worked—I'm a professor of engineering.

But if you use some of these ideas about learning, I found that the way I learned Russian at the Defense Language Institute is actually very similar to how you learn in math and science. And when I applied those same techniques, which are actually the techniques that involve how your brain really learns, it worked. If I'd known then what I know now about learning, I still could have made it much easier.

So after the military, you went on this wanting to go back into the math, but at that time you did not know about these techniques. What was different about it when you were learning it in your 20s versus when you first tried to learn it when you were 14 or 15?

I didn't have to have a job when I was 14 or 15, because I was supported by my parents. I lived in that home; there was urgency to it. There was high stakes. And I think part of it too is I looked at the future and I thought, you know, we know language and culture is always going to be really important, but in today's world, math and science is really important as well.

And it's not like you have to become an engineer or a computer scientist, but if you have some knowledge of those fields, it really broadens your ability to get decent jobs today. So I always say I did the thing everybody told me: I followed my passion; I learned a language, but I didn't broaden my passion, and that left me in a box. So today, I often encourage people: it's great to follow your passion, but broaden it also, and you'll find that it's really helpful in today's working world.

And how did you—so you went back into math, motivated to some degree by economics, and it seems like you learned it. How did you fall into this area of research? When you went back to grad school, did you say, "I want, you know, this learning is interesting to me because there's a phase in my life where I had trouble and now I figured it out"? Or did you—how did you get to this field, which is a fascinating one? I think it applies to everyone. What was the trigger that got you interested?

Oh, good question! So I did kind of just dink around a lot in my life. I mean, I was in the military as enlisted in an officer. I worked at the South Pole Station in Antarctica.

And I wouldn’t categorize that as dinking around— that seems was kind of hardcore dinking, I guess.

Yes, that's quite impressive dinking!

And I used to work as a translator for the—you know, for the Russians on Soviet trawlers up in the Bering Sea. But in all of these kinds of things—now see there's one problem, though: see, I'm not like you. You have this incredible working memory. My working memory is like one thing at a time, and when I get on, I get it, and it's like, "Oh, it's shiny," and then I get distracted.

We are more similar than you imagine!

So what was the question again?

For real, for real.

Oh yeah, no, that was a—how did you get interested? Maybe I do have slightly longer working memory if that was for real.

But how did you get interested in this field?

The thing is, I—well, it just—a student asked a question and said he found out because I was just a typical professor. You know what, maybe with a little bit lower working memory than many professors, but I did my engineering research and so forth.

And one day, but I’d love to write, and so on the side, I’d write, but I keep it hidden because tenure and all that kind of stuff. So one day, a student asked me how he found out I was terrible at math growing up and said, “You know, how’d you do it? How’d you change your brain?”

And I thought, “How did I change my brain?” So I wrote him a little email, and then I thought, well, because of the past books I’d written, I knew a little about neuroscience and cognitive psychology, and I thought, well, you know, I should put together some of these ideas because a lot of information that’s out there on learning comes from education or some from the field of cognitive psychology. But there's actually all this incredible research that's being done in the field of neuroscience.

So I put together a manuscript, and that became the book of mine for numbers. I just kind of wrote a book about it, and it turned out really super popular. And I was just surprised because it was kind of a little side venture for me because I just thought I was going to do my normal engineering stuff, and then people really liked it. It was a very fresh approach, I think, to learning that brought in a lot of times—there's great, great information about how to learn effectively, but it really only encompasses a small portion of what is truly needed to know how to learn effectively.

So for example, you find these great books in cognitive psychology, and they don't even mention that procrastination is like the number-one issue for students and how do you tackle that? There's just so much information that's not being put together.

So I like to synthesize and stand on the shoulders of these great researchers but bring in a lot of different ideas, and so I just kind of backed into it accidentally.

Because it is fascinating because there is all this research going on that I actually had no idea about until starting to look at some of your work, and it is so practical. It is so relevant to frankly everyone, but no one was really communicating—or maybe communicating it in the right way.

Why isn't this part of, you know—why isn't every orientation at every school, in college and workplace, start off with these techniques? Because it seems like it's not just school; it seems like even in the workplace, you know, "I've got to get that memo out to my coworker by Wednesday. I'll do it Tuesday night."

Why isn't this more widespread in your sense?

I think that it's really only in the last 10 years or so that we have gotten a good understanding of how the brain works or a better understanding. There's still a long way to go, and it hasn't caught up with modern pedagogy.

If you asked, let's say you ask someone to create an online course on how do you learn effectively, or yes, some university, a major university to produce such a course, they'd say, "Great! We'll do it for teachers."

And if you said, "No, actually normal people, ordinary people would like to know this too," they'd say, "Good! We'll produce a course and it will have two weeks on the history of education, two more weeks on theories of education, two more weeks on how babies learn, little bit on how people learn it, but no neuroscience—maybe just one lecture because it's too hard."

So what Terry and I did was kind of flip that on its head and say, "Well, let's start from neuroscience. If it's too advanced, we'll use some metaphors to help bring you along." And it actually is easy stuff, and it's so useful, and that's why the "Learning How to Learn" course is so incredibly popular.

It's simple and easy kinds of information, but I think some of it too is—let's say you are a professor of cognitive psychology, and you've just spent the last 30 years of your life researching issues related to working memory. You know, there's part of you that screams, "Well, it can't be that easy! You know, I've been working forever on this thing, and she's making it just like..." But it actually is—the fundamental ideas are really, really easy for anybody to understand.

And so I've been working with Terry and Greg Hammons to make some great videos for kids now that also explains some of these ideas because everybody says these ideas about learning are so simple that anybody can learn. I wish I'd known them when I was a kid, and actually, that's true.

So that's what we've been working on.

Yeah, it's so surprising, because one, they seem—they make intuitive sense—but then when you back it up with the neuroscience, then it—are there skeptics here? It feels like, you know, you could say the sky is blue and there will be skeptics. There will be someone who will say, "Are there people say, 'Well, no, that's not exactly right. You know, sometimes it's better to pull an all-nighter.' I don't know. Are you hearing pushback from anyone?"

No, I mean, every great once in a while you get pushback—anybody will get pushback. But when you're working with one of the world's greatest neuroscientists, all I kind of have to do is say, "Okay, you want to argue about the neuroscience, go talk to this guy."

And Terry is really one of the world leaders, but I think if you use a metaphorical approach to explain some of these fundamental ideas and you say, "I'm using a metaphor, this is the main idea," it's kind of hard to argue with that.

And going back to the very practical tips, I guess you could say—you know, we talk about this importance of sleep. Would you say that is there any research or even rules of thumb about maybe the best time to study—morning, evening, or is that kind of the jury's out on that?

Jury's out because some people—well, some people are morning people, others are night owls. They do find that as the day goes by, your metabolites will come out and you're getting accumulating toxins.

But even so, some people just seem to be able to perform better at night, and so, you know, blossom that. I wish I could be that way. But there's just—everyone's different.

We do find that there's about four hours or so of really intense sort of time you can do deliberate practice and do something that's really hard. So for example, if you're a concert pianist, about four hours is your best practice time—mathematician or whatever.

But you can still get a lot done. Sleep, though, there do seem to be a few people that have this short sleep gene that can get by on three or four hours of sleep.

I want that gene! Can they maybe, you know, introduce it somehow?

But for most people, you need around eight hours or so; younger people need more sleep. Naps can help, but they can't really replace a good, solid block of sleep at night.

It's interesting—it's connected to Khan Academy, this four-hour number that you mentioned. It definitely syncs with my personal experience because when I make videos—videos are actually quite mentally taxing to do because most of them, they're done in real time. So you're trying to do the problem in real time, but at the same time, there's a part of your brain that's making sure, "Are you saying all the right things? Would this be understandable for someone? Are you speaking cohesively?" You know, all of these types of things.

And since I've started this journey on Khan Academy, about four hours is my cap. After four hours, I really can't produce more. And then I try to do, you know, less mentally-intensive things, but it is amazing—I kind of just hit a wall after about four hours.

Yep, I find that myself. So people say, "Well, then we should only have four hours in the workday." And I wish! But actually, four hours are really intense, and then the other hours, as you can still be very productive just doing things that are a little less intellectually demanding.

Yeah, and my old boss—and I didn't realize his advice was based in sound neuroscience—but even when I worked at a hedge fund, you know, finance and hedge funds are only associated with people working 80 hours a week and always on and all this, he was very adamant that as soon as the markets closed—you know, we were in Boston at 4:30; when we were out in California, it was at 1:30. He'd say, "Go home, recharge! Make sure you get a night's sleep."

Because our whole job is to make good decisions and to avoid bad ones. And as soon as you—but I think he's also implicitly saying that look— you’ve been studying all these stocks and doing all this analysis all day, part of it is let those—let that default mode happen so you might start seeing some insights.

I think that's very true—it's very good advice. I think another piece of advice that I give—and I don't know that there's actually neuroscience based on this—but is to try during your recharge hours to learn about something that's completely unrelated to whatever your main task is.

And I think what that does is that allows you to think more creatively. Let's say that you're trying to really learn about investing. So you read all the books about investing. Well, you're actually reading all the same books about investing that everybody else is reading.

If you are learning something completely different, just a tiny bit of the time, you will bring through metaphor and analogy creative new ideas and new approaches to whatever you're learning about.

That's fascinating because I sometimes—you see this pattern in people's lives that when they're school-aged, they're studying multiple subjects. But then as soon as they get into their field of specialty, they start only reading or doing in that field of specialty.

And what you're suggesting—and it does seem right; I am curious—maybe someone will do research on this eventually that you might be doing yourself the best service. Do that four hours, maybe do three hours of the thing that you have to do in the next week or whatever the next year, and then maybe give yourself some time to do something completely different. Don’t feel bad about it; it might actually be forming connections that you don't even appreciate.

That's exactly right—I couldn't agree more!

Well, I have many more questions, but I want to open it up to those of y'all in the audience. Any questions?

Yes, Julia, can you talk about how you learn during the course of your life? Like, they say a young child can learn a language, and after a certain age, you can't really develop the same language skills. You know, when you get older, your brain starts to slow down; is there truth to that?

And repeat the question just for folks.

So does your brain slow down when you're older, and can you still learn languages and so forth? And the answer is, yeah, there's a little evidence that you slow down.

Part of the reason you slow down is you have so many more connections that it's kind of hard to do the search and accessing of what you're trying to remember and learn and so forth. It is—there's only a certain window when you can learn a language with an appropriate accent, but you can still learn a language!

In fact, there are plenty of examples—there's a whole language learner ecosystem with some terrific individuals, Benny the Irish Polyglot, for example, who will introduce you to people who are even in their 60s and 70s and are learning new languages.

But have you ever met those kinds of really—they're older people, and they're kind of curmudgeons, and they think their way is right no matter what? You don't want to be like that person.

So the best way to avoid that is to keep your learning; keep your mind open to new things. And so I think these are the kinds of things you make available to everyone in a way that whatever level you're at, you can start there and then move upwards in so many different ways.

I have to admit, I used your videos to help improve my statistics scores because you had such a great approach for kind of weaving in different ideas about Poisson and binomial and how they're related. And then my younger daughter said the reason I passed calculus and she did very well was because of Khan Academy's videos.

So you've done some great work.

Thank you! I'm flattered, and it's a team effort, and you're making a brown man blush! So congratulations!

No, but, and look, I will also admit I also use Khan Academy because I think my working memory is shorter than you give me credit for. But no, no, it is—everyone has to relearn and review. And I actually met a Nobel Prize winner in economics who said that he was using the Khan Academy videos to refresh on certain parts of economics because he had gotten so deep in his specialty that when he had to review some more of the basic ideas, it was a good refresher.

So there's no shame—no shame in that!

That's right! I think that's the—that's what I love about the Khan Academy approach, is when you have those gaps—and everybody's got those gaps—if you're climbing higher in that particular subject matter, you can go and fill in those gaps so much more easily with the videos that are available, and we have thousands of practice items too! This is my little plug!

But yes, that's a yes!

Tester knowledge—yes! Could you share more about what are some of the concepts behind learning how to learn?

Oh, okay! So we've talked about focused and diffuse, and then there's also in the Pomodoro technique, creating sets of links of neural links and practicing with those sets of neural links so that you build stronger sets. What that does is see—give an example of that. What does it mean to practice with sets of neural links?

Okay! So I'll give an example. When our younger daughter was learning to back up the car, she was—I mean it was really, really hard for her; I mean it is hard for anybody. Do you look in the front mirror? Do you look in the side mirrors? Do you look behind you? Which way do you go? And then you’re off in the ditch.

So what is happening is you have a very limited working memory that can usually hold a maximum of around four items, and so what you're trying to kind of hold all these concepts at once—and it’s difficult.

But once you have learned to back up a car, so you've learned it, you practice with it, you really know it. What you've done is you've kind of parked this new set of long-term links in or of links in your long-term memory.

And what's happening with your working memory is it's going, "Oh, I want to back up the car." Well, I've only got four arms that I can work with. "Well, I already know how to do this; I'm just going to reach out to this subroutine that I've parked out in long-term memory. I'll grab that, pull that into my working memory, and oh yes, while I'm doing that, my other arms of my attentional octopus are free, so I can be listening to the radio, maybe checking to see if my seatbelt is fastened."

This is what happens in a lot of learning. If you have practiced and created this nice set of neural links, then what happens when you're taking a test is you take the test and you're going, "You know, well, now wait a minute, now they want me to put a binomial distribution together with a geometric. They're being a little tricky here."

But you can hold them both up into working memory because you've got these nice procedural fluency sets of links you've already set up, so you can just connect them in the limited working memory that you do have.

So the more—you—experts are differentiated from normal non-experts by the fact that they have all sorts of sets of neural links that they've created and parked in long-term memory, and they can access them and bring them up into working memory whenever they want to.

And so that is such an important part of learning. We often just think, "Well, you should conceptually understand this idea, so you should pull it all into working memory and really have it all in mind." But our working memory is really restricted; you can’t have it all in mind.

So you want to practice enough that important parts of what you’re learning are already parked down in your long-term memory. And this is—let's say you're learning to play a musical instrument. So you learn a chord, and then you get that part in long-term memory, now you connect that up with another chord and maybe another, and then suddenly you can play part of a song.

And if you practice enough, you can just get it started, and it’ll play on its own.

Actually, that's another story, but same for learning a language. If you're learning and you practice with the different conjugation verb conjugations, it becomes very natural, very automatic.

And so really the important—a really important part of learning is creating these nice sets of long-term memory links that you can just instantly pull into working memory whenever you need to.

So where would those be kind of the headline concepts that you talk about?

So is the focus and the default mode network—sometimes I call it diffuse? Yes, so focus and diffuse, right? The Pomodoro, and then this idea of getting things—and I like that—kind of these mental tentacles, the extra arms that we can build through practice by reinforcing those networks as much as we can, right?

So, working memory is in your—or your prefrontal cortex, and it can connect into the long-term sets of links that you’ve created. So that's another really important thing.

If—here's often— we think that students’ best traits are really bad traits. What I mean by this is sometimes we'll think, "Oh well, you've got a poor working memory; that's really bad." But actually, I am here to tell you—and it's not just self-justification—that having a poor working memory can actually be a really good thing.

And the reason for that is remember those four arms of that attentional octopus in your working memory? Well, some people are just—they have really retentive working memories, and other people are a little more like me: "You know, they got it; it's all in my—it's shiny." And then something falls out.

Research has shown that individuals that have problems with their working memory are often very creative. And indeed, my hero in science is a man named Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Cajal was a terrible student—awful working memory; couldn't really retain stuff very easily; was a troubled student, got kicked out of school several times—and ended up winning the Nobel Prize.

He is now considered the father of modern neuroscience, and Cajal was once asked, "How did you do it? I mean, what's your secret that can help us?"

He said, "I am no genius." And he wasn't. He really struggled to try to learn something new. But he said, "I was successful because I was persistent, and I was flexible when the data told me I was wrong."

He said, "I've worked with many geniuses, and the challenge with geniuses is they can be so smart that they get used to always being right. And then in adult life, they can tend to jump to conclusions without having all the data, and when they’re wrong, they aren’t used to being wrong, so they can’t change their mind. Instead, they’ll use their considerable intellect to justify what they’ve been wrong at."

So, I think the real point here is if you're one of those slower thinkers that really kind of has to struggle, congratulations! You can sometimes do things even geniuses cannot.

Yeah, and that makes you question the whole title of genius, because obviously by most definitions, the gentleman you just spoke of would be—but it's just not in the traditional—you know, he can’t memorize dictionaries and whatever else, but clearly, he made insights that weren’t available to others, and that flexibility is a form of genius in and of itself.

I think so, yes!

Other questions?

Yes, I—hi, Barb! I notice you sprinkle a lot of humor in your videos, and I was wondering if you can say a few words about the role of humor in learning.

Oh, so the challenge for me is I'm not very funny. So I have to script it so carefully because it just doesn't necessarily come naturally.

This one fifth grader was taking our course, and she said, "I never understood that professors could be so witty." And I’m like, "I scripted that witty!"

Are you reading a script right now?

No, I’ve just prepared that very carefully!

But I was making the point that you're overly self-deprecating; you clearly are witty without a script, but I'll let you continue your story!

Wow, I've heard it for the maestro!

But I think that people—a lot of times, university professors, it is hard to be funny. I mean, some people are funny naturally, and that's just the way they are, but a lot of people, it doesn’t come naturally.

And so it's not something that they—when they're teaching, they would prefer to just teach the topic and not also have to worry about humor, and you can understand that.

But the online world, I think of it as a mixture of academia with Silicon Valley with Hollywood. And if you're going to be really competitive in the online world, it's not like universities, you know—it’s not like grandma’s university anymore.

It's something that you've got to be competitive with everything else that's going out there. If you have quality material, and if you have a course that's just a staid presentation of the material versus a course that presents the same material but it’s got some nice humor in it, people are going to pick the funny course every time.

So I think that simply hasn’t received enough attention from research in MOOC makers. And I think it's such a—being funny, even when it's hard, is important because it helps people to connect with who the instructor is and to have more fun with the material just as the instructor is doing.

Well, the point you're bringing is an interesting one because you're making a market-based argument that people will be drawn to the funnier courses. But I do suspect that—I'm curious if neuroscience has even come up with anything, or it should be an area of study.

The intuition would be if people are able to laugh a little bit, it de-stresses them, it opens their mind up so that they're less likely to be stressed as the new information's coming in—which actually might lead to better learning.

But it is interesting—humor is such a big thing in our society; it's such a big thing of what makes us us, but it doesn't seem to be that studied.

There has been a very good paper, I believe, from 2015, that's a meta-analysis of humor studies, and actually, it kind of concluded—the verdict is out as to whether humor is helpful.

And I think part of that is—just sounds like a very non-funny study—it sounds not much fun to read!

Well, actually, it was okay. One of the things I think—they make the mistake of looking at a particular topic and saying, “Okay, we've got five minutes of funny and five minutes of non-funny,” you know, a little bit of humor, no humor, but that's the wrong way to look at humor.

You can't dissect it into a topic; it’s a course. Does it uplift people's affect through the course? And that really has not been studied, and it's a tone. And I wonder—I mean, I know we're going a little off-topic, but just from an evolutionary biology point of view, humor and laughing.

It's funny because, you know, an alien might be afraid if we're baring our teeth and we're going—you know, it almost seems threatening. But we view it as a—you know, somehow it's crept into who we are as organisms, and it seems to be, at least, you know, some of our related organisms, at least seem to relate to it.

But it is fascinating!

It is! I should say there’s been a little bit of research on full courses and so forth, but there's a lot—from a neuroscientific perspective, there's a lot of similarity between that "aha" creative insight and the "ah, you're starting to laugh about something."

There's a lot of neural overlap there, so I think you're right when you say that it relaxes people. And we tend to think of the default mode network as only arising, like, when you take a few minutes, a break, and so forth.

But actually, the default mode network can arise just momentarily—even when you blink. In fact, martial arts experts like to launch attacks when you blink—not because you're not looking so much as your brain is temporarily disconnected from the outside world and you go into default mode during that blink.

And so then even when you're—I think when you're learning something and you take that tiny "aha" laughing break, my suspicion—and I haven't seen research evidence to this effect—is you temporarily go into default mode, and it is—you're able to come back and look at things with a fresh perspective as a result.

I now understand why my offensive charges in the past weren't as successful; I was—I timed them wrong!

And there we go!

There were other questions?

Yeah, actually, I think we have some questions over here.

Oh, from students?

Yeah, Tristan.

So, one of the main problems I have is that I'm not good at starting something that I don't like to do, such as math. Do you have any advice on starting something you just haven't been able to start before because you think it's going to take a really long time?

Oh, that I so sympathize with you because I hated math for so long. The thing for me is you hate a topic until you start getting traction with it. You get better at it, and math can take a little while to get better at.

So I just go the completely different way. I'm like, use the Pomodoro technique—it means a tiny bit of something you don't like. 25 minutes is, in the greater scheme of things, anybody can do 25 minutes.

So when you're sitting down, don't sit there and go, "I'm going to do my math." And what that’s doing is activating the pain. Say, "I'm sitting down to do a Pomodoro," and that tricks your brain so you don't experience the pain quite so much, and then just, "Oh, I got to do my 25 minutes."

Now, if you're like me, I will sit there sometimes and I—something I don’t want to do, I really work; you know, I set the timer, I'm on the Pomodoro, I'm walking away, and you know—and I can't help; I look up because I'm kind of proud of myself how much work I've done and I've just done two minutes of the Pomodoro, and my mind screams, "I can't do 23 more minutes."

But then I just do the Zen thing: I let that thought flow right on by, and I continue working for the 25, and then I give myself a nice reward—maybe listen to my favorite song, go do a computer game, whatever you want to do.

I think if you try this approach, it might be very helpful for you.

Krishna?

Yeah, so as a student, I don't always get to decide when my classes are, or like what my breaks are. So how can I really implement the Pomodoro technique when I’m in my classes or in my goal time trying to get work done?

Oh, okay! So the Pomodoro technique kind of presumes that you’ve got 25 minutes available to do that, and you block everything else out.

So what you want to do is if you have self-directed time available, whatever that time is, just put away all distractions and try to work with as much focus as you can on that topic during that time that you have available.

So 25 minutes is great; it’s kind of optimal in a way, but whatever you do have—one of the core ideas of the Pomodoro is to not allow yourself to be distracted by other things.

Because if, let's say you're listening to songs with music in it, it can be okay to listen to music as long as it's not loud, and as long as it doesn't have lyrics in it. If it has someone singing, your part of your working memory is going to be following along with those words.

And if you're doing something—writing in writing, or you're reading something, it can interfere because you've got that limited working memory. So it's a really good thing to just do the Pomodoro, or do that period of time and try to block everything out that you can.

Don't be switching tasks; in other words, "Oh, I'm doing this for two minutes. Oh, now I got to do this." Well, I'm doing this—sometimes you'll have to because of what's being taught, but as much as you can try to keep your focus because the longer you're on there, the kind of the deeper—it's like you're building these networks, this connection.

You're bringing in all the mind, and you want to just keep that without multitasking, because if you're going to another task, it's like you're ripping out of those neurons, and now you're going to another set of neurons, and then you've got to go back to that set of original neurons, and that can be really tiring.

So hopefully this might help.

Is there a—we talk about the 25 minutes. We don't want to get too prescriptive, but is there kind of a sense of how long the diffuse time is? Is there a ratio that people think is good?

This is not studied enough. What I just hear anecdotally is if you have a fair bit of work to do, then maybe five to ten minutes, something like that. If you have trouble getting yourself back on task after you’re taking a break, set a timer for the break.

Some people like to have a timer that’s a ticking timer when they're doing their Pomodoro because it helps remind them to keep on task. For me, I like silence when I'm doing it.

But five to ten minutes, and then after you've done several in a row, then maybe take a 15-minute break—25 minutes on, five to ten minutes off.

It would speak to Grashawn's question—you know, we have a lab school downstairs, and one of the goals of it is to think about what school should be like.

And so even this technique—and we already have a principle around as much active learning as possible versus passive learning—but even that act of learning? You know, we might have to get everyone timers or something to think about how to do this, followed by maybe 10, 15-minute breaks could be really interesting.

And I'd have to point out when it comes to active learning, there's a large meta-analysis that was done of STEM learning, and what they found was that one in three students would drop out of STEM programs—science, technology, engineering, and math—if it was just traditionally taught.

But only one in five would drop out if it was active learning, and part of what's going on, I think there’s some truth to this, is when you're active learning, you're not just passively watching someone—you are, in some sense, like, here's your dendrite on your neuron, you are almost pulling a dendritic spine to start coming out and making a little connection.

And that’s what active—that’s almost, I think, maybe studies will show this—we'll see. But that’s almost why when you’re really working on something hard with deliberate practice, it almost hurts.

Now, I can relate this to why I cannot play the piano today. When my parents wanted me to play the piano, I found out, though, I was not a dumb kid. I found out that as long as they were hearing music come out, they didn't mind whatever I was doing.

So I learned a song, and I would—I played that song over and over. I put a comic book up, and I could just play that song over and over for an hour while I was reading my comic book, and I could read my comic book!

That's actually quite impressive if you learned a song really well!

But did I advance in my studies? No, I didn't because I wasn't doing deliberate practice. I wasn't pushing myself beyond, and so that is the essence of why deliberate practice—kind of focusing on the harder stuff, a little bit out of your comfort zone—stretching you a little bit, zone of proximal development, goldilocks zone, whatever people call it.

You did not do that.

I did not do that, and now I cannot play the piano!

You do many other things very well.

Other—maybe we have time for one or two more questions?

Yeah, I had a quick question. There's this phrase, it's like riding a bike, and something that you haven't done for a while, but have learned, you might be able to pick that up very quickly.

That doesn't seem to be the case for all things that one learns, so I was wondering, is it to do with the learning, the activity type, or what is it to actually increase retention of things that you've already learned?

That's a very good question. From an evolutionary perspective, we think of what we learn—actually, there are two different types of things that we learn. And one is like evolutionarily primary, and that is things like learning to speak a language and so forth.

Well, evolutionarily secondary learning are things like learning to read, learning how to write, learning how to do math. Those come with more difficulty, and that is why a lot of times teachers with great intent will say, "Oh, learning should always be as fun when you're in high school as it was when you were a little kid or baby."

Well, that's when you were learning things that came naturally to human beings like speaking a language or native language. So I think that when you’re learning something, yeah, it depends a lot on whether it’s a primary or a secondary type of learning thing. And it also depends—there’s a—it’s a really complicated subject.

So for example, if I try to learn Spanish now, I learned Russian before, and it will come out sometimes in Russian whether I like it or not! And if I have a little bit of vodka, it comes—the Russian comes back even more easily!

So vodka in particular—like vodka, in particular, vodka from the freezer!

We're not advocating that, for sure!

But it is funny how the environmental cues that you had can also be helpful!

And so I unfortunately, I think we're all out of time. But thank you so much for this, I think for everyone watching, for all of us here at Khan Academy. I think personally, we're all going to maybe get some timers or use some of these apps, but I think it really does—it is very tangibly useful to have some of these frameworks.

And I think as we think about Khan Academy, even the product and the experience, as we think about how we do practice on Khan Academy, and all these things, I think it'll be really valuable for us to say maybe some of these ideas that we learned from Professor Oakley will be—could make a big difference here.

So thank you so much! And for any of you who are interested to do a web search for Professor Barbara Oakley, you'll see all sorts of interesting things!