Most of us can learn anything, if we're taught how. Yet few of us find this to be the case. Why? Because we lack the skills we need to deal with the resistance and frustration we inevitably face when learning difficult topics.

Barbara Oakley wants to change that. Author of the book, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science, and Professor of Engineering at Oakland University, she shares techniques for mastering any subject. And these are techniques over 2 million people have experienced in her incredibly popular MOOC, Learning How to Learn.

In this interview we discuss:

How she made the leap from self-described high school math "flunky" to accomplished engineering professor

What inspired her to make the shift from Russian linguist to engineer

How offering interesting learning hooks can help people learn content more effectively

How a diffuse or relaxed mode of thinking helps us organize what we learn

The importance of toggling between focused and diffuse thinking to learn

The fact that learning difficult things is hard

How sleep helps us build the neural architecture we need to learn new things

How we can be strategic in our approach to learning

Why you actually need content knowledge to become an expert - we cannot outsource it

How repetition, practice, and seeing things from different perspectives builds important neural patterns for expertise

Why conceptual chunking -- memorizing and understanding -- help us create these neural patterns

How our prefrontal cortex relaxes when we know something, so that we can build on that knowledge to solve more complex problems

What it means to have an illusion of competence when it comes to learning

How we can check our understanding by seeing if we can explain it to a five year old

How neural reuse theory, or learning something new by attaching it to something we already know, is a powerful learning tool

Why teachers should emphasize how simple something difficult can be to learn

How interleaving helps us learn when to use one technique versus another

How transfer helps us use learning we have done in one area in a new area and how it is best learned by doing

How we can reframe procrastination by focusing on the process not the product

How breaking the work into tiny tasks helps us overcome procrastination

Links to Episode Topics

@barbaraoakley

https://barbaraoakley.com/

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/

Bayes Theorem

Negative binomial

Geometric distribution

Pomodoro Technique and Francesco Cirillo

Terry Sejnowski

Lynda.com

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