By Gerry Murray. 06-09-2020
(Scroll down for a laugh)

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, 'Did you sleep good?' I said 'No, I made a few mistakes.’ ~ Steven Wright

At this time of the year our children, grandchildren, nieces/nephews, or perhaps even our partners go back to school or college. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, education has been disrupted and taken on different forms. The debate rages about the longer-term impact. 

So, regardless of COVID, I thought I’d take a look at how learning works and cite some of the most up to date research from the world of neuroscience. After all, our brains are fundamental to virtually everything we do. Perhaps, this can also help us support our children’s learning journey. 

Later I’ll answer the question posed at the outset. Although the specific research I’ll reference here concerns children - there’s less research on how adults learn - the four foundational principles outlined below seem to apply to us all when we want to learn something. 

Why do we need to understand how learning works? 

The short answer is that it is essential for our survival and development as a species. We’re constantly learning and updating what we know and adapting to this new knowledge or skills whether at work or in our private lives. And, the first years of a child’s life are critical to its future. 

What are the 4 foundations for learning? 

1. Attention. To learn something we need to be able to fully attend to it.  If we split our attention (the myth of multi-tasking) then our ability to pass something into memory for when we need it later is severely restricted. 

2. Active Engagement. This means you actively engage in exploring the subject or skill you’re learning. Of tremendous value here is the concept of curiosity because when we’re curious we get a release of Dopamine in the body and Dopamine aids both motivation and memory. However, for active engagement, learning should also be broken down into short regular manageable chunks. As I’ve said before, one-off 2-3 day trainings delivered with Powerpoints are mostly a waste of time and money. 

3. Error-Feedback. We learn best by making errors. The important thing is to reduce the errors over time. There’s no failure, only feedback. Therefore, making errors must be viewed as an essential part of learning. If, however, errors are punished we activate our fight/flight/freeze response shutting down our critical faculties and destroying our intrinsic motivation in the process. Therefore, no real learning takes place. This is where having a Growth Mindset (see previous post) is an essential ingredient, as is a psychologically safe environment. Many schools and even organisations get this one horribly wrong! 

4. Consolidation. And, this is where sleep comes into play, literally! Research is beginning to show the importance of quality sleep in processing your day. When you’ve satisfied the aforementioned three criteria then your brain starts to sort and consolidate your learning whilst you sleep. Researchers even go as far as to suggest that skills (eg practising the piano) be repeated immediately before going to bed, whereas more cognitive stuff should be acquired in the afternoon. Repetition and regular revision is also a critical part of consolidating your learning. Dare I say it? Practice makes Perfect, or in the case of your brain Practice makes Permanent. 

And, it may come as no surprise that a good night’s sleep will also help you with you points 1, 2 & 3!

How to learn more

I’ve consulted several works on this topic. However, if you’ve got children at school, are a teacher or responsible for developing people I highly recommend the new book by Professor Stanislas Dehaene - How We Learn: The New Science of Education and the Brain. Not only does he present the latest research on how children learn, but he also shows how this research is being used in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). You might be interested to know that AI still has a long way to go.

Education, in general, and many Learning & Development departments in organisations (and even trainers!) have been slow to embrace the science and, sadly, still cling on to out-dated and disproved theories of learning e.g. learning styles, right-brain versus left-brain people, etc. 

The consequences speak for themselves. 

It’s also probably worth sleeping on it...

Gerry

Humour

A retired boxer goes to see his doctor because he’s having trouble sleeping. “Have you tried counting sheep?” the doctor asks.
“I tried,” the boxer explains, “but every time I get to the number nine I stand up.”

I will not sleep
until I find a cure for insomnia.

Son: “Dad, can I sleep in your bed tonight? I’m scared...”
Dad: “No, son. I can’t risk the monster following you in here.”

I trained myself to have lucid dreams every time I go to sleep.
It’s exactly what I imagined it to be.

A father puts his 3-year old daughter to bed. His daughter wanted to say a prayer before sleeping, so the father listened.
“God bless mommy, God bless daddy, God bless grandma, Goodbye grandpa”
The father asked, “why did you say goodbye grandpa?”
The little girl said, “I don’t know, it just seemed like the right thing to say.”
The next morning, the family received news that the grandfather had died. The father thought that it was just a very lucky coincidence.
A few months later, he tucked his daughter into bed, and she said a prayer. “God bless mommy, God bless daddy, goodbye grandma.” And of course, the next day, the grandmother died. The father realized that his daughter could apparently predict the family deaths and that this was no coincidence.
A few weeks later, he tucked his daughter into bed, and her prayer went “God bless mommy and goodbye daddy.” Her father went into shock. He stood up all night waiting for the worse, and then sunrise came. He decided to just stay at work the entire day to be safe. He stayed at his office until midnight came. When it did, nothing happened.
He breathed a sigh of relief. When he came home, his wife asked why he was home so late.
“I had the worst day of my life.” said the father. 
“If you think your day was hard, you won’t believe what happened to me, my boss died in the middle of a meeting!”