Protocols to Remember Everything You Learn | Dr. Alan Castel & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Mnemonics & Information Batching

00:00pneumonics and ways that we um try and batch and learn information by pairing it to other things. Trying to remember a room full of people's names and you know you [snorts] uh could pair the first letter of their name with a fruit or what you know people do these things.

00:13To me that seems like a very inefficient way to learn because you're adding more information that you need to store away. So the first question is is that the best way to learn large batches of information? I think it's almost a workaround and that's the first kind of problem people say is I can't remember names and by their nature names used to be descriptive of person's occupation.

00:37Someone's a baker we call them Mr. Baker but that's of course evolved with time and names you know I tell people if you can't remember someone's name that's probably a natural forgetting but you remember if you had an interesting conversation or you remember if you can trust them that's probably more important.

00:54So then to engage our kind of knowledge base so that we can remember names we need to make this arbitrary link and so I tell people my last name is pastel Castell you know Castell rhymes with pastel and my grandfather used pastels let's say and so people can then make this link but like you say that's effortful it takes time it takes time away from kind of the essence of something else we could talk about and it also leads to these kind of predictable memory errors so people say oh I remember his name was Pastell when in fact it's Castell Well, so I think we

01:26have to almost trick our memory into remembering things that might be somewhat arbitrary and that becomes more pronounced as we get older. You know, there's more Davids, there's more Andrews, and it's just more interference. And so to get around that, we have to, you know, use deliberate practice, retrieval practice, use the name several times.

01:44But I tell my students whose names I often forget that I'll still remember topics we've talked about or you know you know how they felt about something. And I think that's more important than sometimes just remembering a name to remember chemistry or uh some other subject that involves nomenclature.

02:01I uh not everyday terms unless you're a chemist but to really understand the deeper mechanics of that thing and remember that what are some better

Deep Semantic Learning Levels

02:15tools. I want to say and I'm not a memory researcher that it might be helpful to think in terms of verbs not labels. So rather than thinking about a particular element just in terms of its name, but think about how it interacts with something else or um how it gives or receives a charge in uh you know certain conditions.

02:34Absolutely. I think that's what you're looking for is deeper learning, deeper semantic learning. And this has been referred to as levels of processing. So I was working at a very low level of processing when I'm, you know, making up happy Henry, you know, for hydrogen and helium.

02:47Um, but if you can start to visualize things or interact with them and that's why we want to have, you know, chemistry labs or places where I found chemistry very abstract. I think that's why I didn't really engage with it. But I found psychology to be something that we were interacting with every day.

03:02I was making these memory errors. I saw my parents and grandparents remembering and forgetting things and I thought, you know, how does that happen? And the brain is so complex that I don't think we'll ever completely understand, you know, why this me memory error might happen.

03:16But I think this awareness um is really important and a lot of good learning happens through making mistakes. Um you know I you know

Why Failure Leads to Learning

03:25I play piano and I you know struggle but I know when I make a mistake I'm going to have to work on this. Um and I see that with my children. You learn a lot by making these mistakes. And I think that illustrates also how our memory works that just seeing something many times doesn't mean you'll remember it well.

03:40And this is a classic demonstration that you know you've seen a penny many times. you don't remember all the features on the penny. I've updated that to the Apple logo. You know, you've seen the Apple logo so many times, of course, you know all the features, but then when you quiz people and test them, and I do this in my class, people aren't sure.

03:56Is the bite on the left or the right hand side? Is there a stem or a leaf? Um, but if you make people draw it while they're looking at it, they're going to remember it better while they're looking at the actual while they're looking at it. Or if they actually the best way to remember something is to again failures.

04:12I'll have you draw it without looking at it and you struggle. Wait, is it on the left or right? Is it stem or a leaf? And you're starting to question all of these things. Then when you look at the logo again, you're going to engage in better learning than if you hadn't done that errorful kind of trial beforehand.

04:27Even if you don't redraw it correctly. Exactly. Yeah. [clears throat] So this sort of thing is you know in a in a academic setting we don't want failure. We want people to do well. But I think the sort of retrieval failure with some you know corrective feedback is really beneficial and that's kind of how you learn through life.

04:47You know you make mistakes and then you correct them. But if you're constantly just doing it the right way, you're not really noticing these features. And we've tried to extend this to other domains like you know it's called habituation. You stop noticing things around you, like where the nearest fire extinguisher is, let's say.

05:02And I guarantee hopefully there's one somewhere nearby and you've probably walked by it many times, but you stop noticing it. And it's only until you'll need it, you'll realize, wait, where is it? And so we've done this study where you have to instead of me telling you where it is, you have to get up and find it.

05:19And so now you're engaging with the environment, you're going to go look for it and be like, gosh, it's been there the whole time. have walked by it so many times, have never noticed it. And I think that's the difference between seeing something and noticing it.

05:31So someone who studies vision, we know a lot of information reaches the retina, but then how much of it reaches our kind of more conscious level and not all of it does. And I think that's what makes

Neuroplasticity & the Learning Gap

05:43psychology interesting. Yeah. The big revelation for me when learning about neuroplasticity, and it was such an obvious one once I heard it, uh, was that if you can perform a mental or physical task, there's no reason for your brain to change.

05:56You clearly already have the circuit. So, it's the gap between desired performance and current performance that actually triggers the opportunity for plasticity. Yeah. And those can be uncomfortable positions, right, where it's like, I don't know this.

06:11Am I am I going to be able to learn it? And I think that's the this metacognitive aspect of when are you aware of that. And a lot of learning now is unsupervised learning. You know, it's not that you're going in classrooms and teachers are telling you what to do.

06:24You want to learn a new instrument, you might do a lot of it on YouTube, right? You're going to try and figure it out. You want to learn a new language. You want to learn how to communicate with people. There's going to be a lot of trial and error.

06:33And I think kind of the best learners are the ones who persist um who are curious because that's how you're going to get a lot of feedback asking not just lots of questions but the right questions. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the frustration and agitation I do believe that's the you know the release of uh catakolamines you know epinephrine norepinephrine and those change the millu around synapses and um let them change you know all the things that we want to avoid are the things that actually allow us to learn.

07:06It could be that people that are very good at learning and have this willingness to embrace so-called beginner's mind. Like, you know, like, okay, they're excellent in one domain and they're perfectly happy to be a raw beginner in a different domain.

07:16I always wonder if they experience agitation the same way that anyone else would, but that they don't have the same relationship to it. Like, oh, here's that autonomic arousal again, you know, here it is. And maybe they don't conceptualize as frustration.

07:30So in terms of getting better at learning and remembering things um have you or any other laboratories parsed kind of people's um framework around it like I know there's a vast literature around growth mindset but I'm I'm thinking more in terms of how people think about their own levels of frustration because if you go oh like here I am frustrated again awesome let's go now's the opportunity versus h like I'm I'm terrible at this I know I should push through I I just wonder whether or mindset can actually make a difference.

Curiosity & Knowledge Gaps

08:03I think it can. I think our goals can play a big role. A lot of the learning we do is sometimes, you know, learning to take a test or learning, you know, something because it'll be on a test. But as we get through life, we realize if you're interested in bird watching or music or skateboarding, you know, a lot of this is going to be observational learning.

08:19It's going to be talking to other people. So, I think it comes down to curiosity, which is almost closing this knowledge gap where here I am, but I want to be here. How can I get from here to here? And some of it is there's a strong motivation there.

08:31And that's something we've started to study with older adults as well because um we know memory declines happen with age, but not all things change equally. And in fact, there are certain memory systems that might actually remain stable or even improve.

08:45And I think some of the keys here are curiosity, being interested in, you know, listening to a podcast, talking to someone else, closing that knowledge gap, and then kind of extending that and going further. And I I sometimes find there's topics that I'm not so interested in, but then there's some that I will almost become obsessive about that it's like I'm going to watch that YouTube video and the next one and the next one and then it's 45 minutes later.

09:08And I think that that can be, you know, kind of a waste of time in some ways, but it shows that our brain is craving this information. And uh that's something that I'm really curious about how that will change as we get older. And some of our research suggests that as we get older, we're more selective about what we focus on.

09:26And I think that can be beneficial. So maybe you don't waste as much time on learn trying to learn everything, but you're more focused on the things you want to learn about. Do we know that it's important to continue to seek out new information as we get older in order to maintain our memory?

09:43Or is it sufficient to just make some effort to remember the past, what we need to do to get through our day? You know, I think this gets down to this question. People think I really should be striving to to keep my memory.

Memory Retention as We Age

09:57Everyone wants to keep their memory. Sure, that makes sense. But how hard should people push to learn new information as opposed to you maintaining what they've got? Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's a little bit of both. And you want to have that sort of balance.

10:08So, if you know, if you if you play piano, my father in his 80s and 90s still plays piano. I don't think he's learning new pieces, but he's strengthening the the pieces he knows, and that keeps him sharp. Um, on the other hand, being exposed to new things, if you're traveling, if you're talking to different people, that can be really important for things like even neurogenesis.

10:28You want to, you know, develop new brain cells, which we know doesn't just stop as we, you know, reach a certain age. So, it's probably a bit of both. And people ask me, you know, what's the best thing to keep my brain sharp as a cross word puzzles?

10:40And that's interesting because I think as we get older, our actual verbal knowledge is maintained, if not improved. So in a way you're strengthening a strength and I think that can be beneficial but probably the other things to do are do new things you know go outside and appreciate the birds or talk to someone who has a different perspective or you go to a different restaurant even all of these things I find as I get older I have a lot of routines but it's when I start to violate these routines take a different way to work or you know try something different at a restaurant I

11:14can almost feel like wow that was a different experience today I did something else and I I think it's a I think both are really important. We do get set in our ways. That's a it's

Benefits of Breaking Daily Routines

11:24a real thing. You know, habits can be healthy and we can talk more about that because there those routines, you know, I drove this way and I didn't get into a car accident or I even noticed my students in my classes after the first couple of weeks, they all sit in the same seats.

11:35I'm always like, why? Why is that? And it's like, well, I didn't get attacked by a snake here, so it's safe. Maybe evolutionarily it makes sense. But I will sometimes halfway through the quarter say, "Okay, I want everyone to get up and switch sides and sit somewhere else."

11:50And students are like, "This is terrible. Like I have to move." But there's some benefits to having a different perspective uh both physically and possibly mentally that you're going to then remember things differently. And I know if I've taken a class in a different classroom every year, I can almost revisit each of those rooms and try and recall what I learned.

12:07But if you learn all in the same spot, there's a lot of interference. So I think there there can be benefits to changing our habits. Um but it can be uncomfortable especially at first. [music]