Episode 8 – Brain Science for Success

[0:00:09 Speaker 0] Hello everyone and welcome to your eighth episode of The Sounds of Success. This episode we’re going to be talking about the psychology of Wording and we have two very amazing guests and one of them will be very familiar to

[0:00:23 Speaker 3] y’all is our first repeat guest on the podcast. Yeah, for sure.

[0:00:29 Speaker 0] And so that will be Misha Abraham, the assistant director of the Singer Learning Center. If you all remember the episode that we did about using the learning center for tutoring for studying for finals, really all sorts of workshops and study tips and skills and everything. She will be back today and we will also be having dr Michael Mach with us.

[0:00:49 Speaker 1] And dr Mark

[0:00:50 Speaker 0] is a professor of neuroscience and he is specifically from the Center for Learning and Memory

[0:00:55 Speaker 3] at and t all of his research is about understanding the brain and how learning contributes to how the brain and cells and snaps his work. So it was really interesting to bring him in to talk about the science of learning and what’s going on in your brain when we’re trying to figure out this college experience, definitely. And so we’re

[0:01:16 Speaker 0] hoping to start off on a little bit of a crash course of how the brain learns and a little bit more about what it means to learn. And then we will hopefully start talking about what are ways that you could have a more effective learning status coming up to your final season, which is coming up very very soon.

[0:01:37 Speaker 3] Yeah. What to do what not to do in studying for finals? Right.

[0:01:42 Speaker 0] Exactly, exactly.

[0:01:44 Speaker 3] Alright, well, without further ado let’s head into the interview today, we have to really fantastic guests on the sounds of success One you may remember from before our first repeat guest Initial Abraham from the Senior Learning Center. Thanks for joining us for so excited to have you again.

[0:02:05 Speaker 1] Thank you. I appreciate being here.

[0:02:08 Speaker 3] Yeah. And then a very special guest today. We have Dr Michael Mach from the neuro neuro neuroscience department, wow, I really need to get my neuroscience going to be ready for this podcast today on a rainy friday afternoon Dr Mark. We’re really excited to have you here. I see. You come from all over the place, you spent some time in New Orleans and then you’re at stanford. How long have you been at UT now?

[0:02:34 Speaker 2] Well, thank you for having me. I’ve been at UT austin 14 years, but I was at the Ut Med school in Houston for 19 before that, so I’ve worked for the University of texas for 33 a half years now.

[0:02:46 Speaker 3] Oh, you got that state service. We were just talking about all of that in one of our meetings earlier this week. Yeah, well, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us here today for our listeners who don’t know doctor mok is a brain expert. We brought him in today to kind of talk to us a little bit about how our brains work. You know, it’s this weird thing where we all have a brain, we don’t even really think about how it works, like we just know that it works and we’re glad that it does right? So I think you’re going to help us maybe understand what’s going on behind the curtain of our eyes a little bit when it comes to learning and the psychology of learning. So again, thank you so much for being with us here today. It’s really great to have experts like you on campus. Come talk to us about some of these topics. So I guess our first question is really for both of you, but a little bit more so for dr mark, how did you first get interested in how the brain works and how it relates to how we learn in the mechanics of the brain?

[0:03:45 Speaker 2] Well, I got interested in neuroscience as an undergraduate in University of New Orleans, I started working in a lab and it was one of those situations where the fish had found the ocean, I I realized that it was something that I really enjoyed. And so I had the good fortune of going to graduate school. And it was in graduate school that I started working on brain systems and the system that I happen to work on. The cerebellum is a system that learns. And so then understanding learning and neural plasticity and such became part of my toolset for what I needed to know about to make progress and to to push the ball forward with understanding the cerebellum,

[0:04:22 Speaker 0] wow.

[0:04:24 Speaker 3] So for our listeners who maybe aren’t as familiar with the brain as you are, what’s the cerebellum? What is that? What is that part of our brain? And what’s it’s kind of primary function,

[0:04:34 Speaker 2] It’s the part of the brain that you grab. If you grab the back of your neck, you’re wrapping your hands around the cerebellum. It’s most known for motor coordination when you think of muscle memory, When people use the phrase muscle memory, there’s no memory in your muscles, that’s actually the cerebellum. So it’s a part of the brain that learns to predict things and that’s actually how we make movements accurate as the cerebellum predicts, that if we’re going to make this movement, this is how we do it when it makes a mistake that it has an input that informs of that and then it uses learning than to do a better job next time,

[0:05:07 Speaker 3] interesting. So it’s kind of like the autopilot part of our

[0:05:10 Speaker 2] brains. Well, that’s one of the interesting things about the cerebellum is, whatever it does, it’s below our level of consciousness and in a way that that’s good, it unencumbered us. We don’t, when you reach for something, you don’t think about it, your hand just goes there and in fact, people with sarah Beller damage, they can move and they can reach for a cup, but they have to stop it, it’s not very accurate and they have to stop and think about it. So the fact that we don’t have to stop and think about it, it just happens unconsciously, is in fact a big part of what the cerebellum does for us.

[0:05:41 Speaker 0] That is so interesting, because I’ve never thought about the fact that I don’t have to think about moving my hand to pick something up. That’s really cool.

[0:05:51 Speaker 2] When we, when we teach this to our students, one of the first things we have to convince them of is that the calculations that underlie making movements are really complicated. We do it so effortlessly and so well, it seems like a simple thing. It’s actually an incredibly complicated thing. It only seems simple because we have parts of our brain that do it so well,

[0:06:10 Speaker 0] wow, what about you and Asia, how about you? And how did you get interested in cellular and molecular biology? Because I think that’s what you did at UT before your masters, Right?

[0:06:22 Speaker 1] Yeah. My background in biology and I actually took a developmental biology class here at UT and kind of fell in love with that. And that’s actually what I got my Masters degree and is a developmental biology specifically inner ear development of a zebrafish which is so specific but dr michael will probably know a little bit about developmental biology as well. That definitely is included in in many things that they talk about neuroscience. But I think I talked about this last time I was here was just being very interested in learning during my master’s degree. I found myself just really fascinated by how I was delivering information how students were learning. You know I taught a lot of labs as a T. A. You tend to teach a lot of labs which are a lot of hands on experimental. I’m seeing students learning through that model really made me interested in. You know why do we teach the way we do, what are ways that we teach or ways that people learn that’s more or less effective. And so I wrote my master’s thesis on that and then came to U. T. And started working at Sanger and started becoming again interested in what are the modes that we conduct academic support? So why is tutoring effective or why is group study effective? What are the different ways that we provide instruction but also teach students how to learn? And so I got my Masters degree in stem education and took a wonderful class with dr veronica Yanan instructional psychology and if anybody I highly recommend watching some of her videos as well. She’s got some wonderful videos about learning and that’s kind of how I got into understanding a little bit more about what are the effective ways of learning and how can we get that across to students?

[0:08:00 Speaker 0] Mhm definitely a great topic for this time of the year right now. I know that my students are all first year students. They are gearing up for their second round of finals ever and they are just freaking out. So every time they’re freaking out, you know, we tell them, go to office hours, make a study group, go to the Singer Learning Center, do this and this and this so that you review your material better. But at the end of the day, I don’t really know what about those things? Makes it more likely for you to make a better grade. What about those things? Have you digest material and learn more effectively? And so I think for them and also for me, I would really like to understand a little bit more in depth about the psychology of learning and how we implement that and how it is actually effective.

[0:08:47 Speaker 1] Yeah, definitely. I mean, I can talk a little bit. I know one of your questions was, what is it about seeing her programming? What is it about how we build our programs that help students learn? So that’s anger. We kind of think about our programs in two spectrums or two axes if you will and one of the axes is 1 to 1 services. So that means that you are getting kind of one on one kind of usually content expertise through like tutoring or something like that. So I’m a student let’s say, and I’m taking 10, 3 oh one, I can set up a one on one appointment with a peer tutor who has been successful in that class and I can really do something very individualized and very specific for me and I kind of get my misconceptions or you know, really hone in on what’s what’s not working for me, what I need to learn better, content wise And then we have what we call the one too many services and that is things like group study where there is usually some kind of content expert in the room, but it’s in a group collaborative setting and we know a lot, there’s a lot of evidence to show that collaborative learning actually is highly beneficial and in fact, so I’m a constructivist that’s like an approach to learning that we believe that learning happens in interactions with each other. That’s a lot of where learning happens. Um and so I highly encourage you to think about if you are sitting by yourself and you are grinding through something and it’s just not, it’s not clicking for you. I think there’s sort of an individualistic approach that may not work for you and going to something like a group study can be really helpful. So we have this sort of 1-1, 1 too many access. And then we also, like I said, have content services and that is again specific to a lot of the stem courses, but also history, you know, american studies. We have S. I. For those classes, we have other things like that. And then we also have more study skills approach, so it’s not specific to of course, but it’s just evidence based approaches that we know work really well. So they’re high utility strategies that you know, that will help you learn how to self quiz or do retrieval practice or help take better notes or do better reading more meta cognitive types of reading strategies. So that’s a kind of two axes that I generally talk about and it is based on this idea that there’s context for learning of course. Like I’m not going to study the same way for biology that I would for history and so sometimes you need to talk to a content expert to help you figure out the content. Sometimes you need more help on the study effectiveness side. And then also sometimes you need a personalised approach and sometimes you need a group approach. So that’s why we provide so many like a plethora of services and we want students to not just try one but try all. Yeah.

[0:11:22 Speaker 3] Yeah. Yeah. That makes me think about you know, kind of maybe dr mark, you could kind of fill in some of the blanks for this. For me, we do talk about everybody’s different, you know, everybody studies different methodologies work different for different people. You know what’s going on under the hood that makes a group study session, make you remember something versus a one on one session versus being by yourself cramming.

[0:11:45 Speaker 2] Well the one of the key principles that cognitive psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists have discovered about learning is that it needs to be effortful when it’s passive, that we just don’t remember that well. And it’s particularly effective when we study through retrieval. So when you’re sitting grounding things out, like Misha said, you’re just in your own head and you’re just looking at your notes and you’re looking at him again and you’re looking at them again. But in a group setting you’re you’re talking, hey what do you remember about that lecture? Will I remember this that’s retrieval, right? Somebody had to retrieve that memory. We talk a lot about this in my classes and I find it useful to think of it this way. We have to remind ourselves that our memories are not tape recorders. We’re actually designed and forget most of what we experience. And obviously we don’t forget everything because colleges exist and we learn and such. And so it turns out there’s a set of rules that our brains used to determine. What am I going to forget and what am I going to remember? And if you think about it, if you knew those rules then that would constitute a really effective study strategy. And so cognitive psychologists have identified many of these rules and one of them is retrieval rather than passive. So what does that mean? So student has notes from the class and there’s an exam coming up on monday until they sit down and they start looking at their notes and then they look at them and it doesn’t take very long before they have this really strong sense that they really know those notes. The trouble is is that number one, we have different kinds of memory and that one is actually based on what’s known as familiarity. So the words become familiar but that’s a very shallow and very quickly forgotten form of memory. And this is really, I like to talk about the fallacy of familiarity. It gives its insidious in a way it gives students the sense that they really know it man those notes. I’m so tired of looking at those notes. I know every dot on those notes. Well then come monday and they sit down for the exam and they can’t there’s a whole bunch of things they can’t remember. That’s the policy of familiarity. Instead recall learning is like this instead of looking at your not set them down and see what you can remember from them from your own memory. Recall them. You may have a lot of work to do. There may not be much and then you glance and say, oh I forgot this whole thing or oh I got that wrong and then you do it again. But it’s one of the cues that our brains take that this is important to learn. If we keep trying to recall it, I need this information. What was it? That’s a cue to our brains to remember it. If you’re just glancing at things even over and over again, that’s not a particularly effective que to say, hey, we should remember this

[0:14:23 Speaker 3] interesting.

[0:14:23 Speaker 0] I really like that you brought that up because I had had a conversation with some friends during a final exam season when I was still an undergrad and we were joking about how like, oh you know how, when you’re studying and you’re convincing yourself that all of this is starting to look like common sense and so you stop studying And we were joking about how the moment that we thought something was common sense, we knew it was over that once we got to the exam, that definitely was not common sense.

[0:14:51 Speaker 3] So that that

[0:14:52 Speaker 0] puts that puts what we were talking about in some very specific terms. And I

[0:14:57 Speaker 1] really appreciate

[0:14:58 Speaker 0] that because I always had this feeling that I knew I was wrong. But now it’s good to know that I was definitely Yeah, I was. Yeah,

[0:15:06 Speaker 2] well professors experience this in a pretty heartbreaking way. So we have students come to our offices after an exam and they say I studied so hard. Sure I couldn’t have studied harder. They’ll quote you how many hours they studied. But when I got to the exam I didn’t know half of what I needed to know. And so then they’ll make an internal attribution. I’m stupid or I’m not. And right. All it really is is they fell for the fallacy of familiarity. They had a false sense that they understood it because it was familiar and had all they had to do was study differently so that they understood it and could recall it. I tell my students if you think about an exam, what I’m asking you to do is explain to me what you’ve learned when you study. If this is the group thing, I think you sit around a group and you say what if the professor asked this? What would you say? Well I would say this. Well I would say that. Oh I like your answer more than mine. Right. And so people are recalling. People are hearing other points of view. Oh I like the way you phrased that better than I want to phrase it. And all of these things are accused to put it in a form of memory that’s really resilient. But that familiarity thing is fleeting and it’s not resilient at all. That’s why they come to your office and say I knew this, but I didn’t do well on your exam. They had just made the wrong kind of memory.

[0:16:30 Speaker 0] Why

[0:16:31 Speaker 2] do we do it so much? Because it feels good. It feels easy,

[0:16:36 Speaker 0] good. Rewriting your notes over and over again is so easy

[0:16:41 Speaker 2] and it feels good. We learn familiarity pretty quickly and it gives us this strong sense. And so in the moment it’s a very rewarding way to study. Wow, I just spent an hour. I know that stuff like crazy. Well no you don’t. It’s almost kind of mean that we have that form of memory because it lies to us that we know it better than we do. And I personally all due respect to people who do get anxious. I think many of the instances where people say well I don’t do well in exams because I haven’t test anxiety what they have is that they have fallen for the fallacy of familiarity. They get anxious because they’re doing poorly. They didn’t do poorly because they were anxious and if they would just study more effectively and the sad thing is that they could study fewer hours and it would be more effective.

[0:17:32 Speaker 0] Yeah.

[0:17:33 Speaker 1] Yeah. We actually we do a test anxiety type of appointment. So you know we’re learning specialist I’m a professional staff member and we have about right now we have about eight of us and a large majority of us take test anxiety appointments and dr Marx point test anxiety is not in the D. S. Um it’s not like a diagnosable like a disorder or anything like that. You know

[0:17:53 Speaker 3] it’s not necessarily accommodations for, you

[0:17:56 Speaker 1] can’t get accommodations unfortunately for it yet anyway. But to his point I think that’s a really important point is when students come to a test anxiety appointment. What I do is a two pronged approach. I’m not just going to address your anxiety. I will will certainly give you some techniques to kind of address the physiological and psychological things that are happening to try to self calm. Because of course when you’re at that high level of anxiety you can’t really think exactly. To dr Marx Point A test is a thinking task, right? I think a lot of students don’t also understand that it is not a an indication of your intelligence or other things but it is like how well can you explain these concepts back to me or to make inferences or to connect concepts that we’ve talked about? It is a thinking test part of your job on a test is to think if you are at such a high level of anxiety that you can’t think, you have to self calm. But the second problem that we take is let’s actually look at your study strategies because almost nine times out of 10, almost nine times out of 10, the student will tell me I spent 50 hours studying for this test and when I asked them what specifically did you do, it was rereading, it was rewriting notes, It was even having flashcards but looking at the back of the card to remember what was on the back of the card. Right? So yeah, you know Dr Mark is, he has his hand on his

[0:19:10 Speaker 3] head. Yeah,

[0:19:12 Speaker 1] and that’s absolutely what and hear like dr mok said very accurate, it feels really good, It’s like a little, probably, you know, based on some neurotransmitter that it feels kind of good to, to, you know, you get a little goosed by the idea of oh okay, did I get it right or? Okay. I’m looking at the Oh yeah, I remember that. That’s what the answer is and it gives us a little bit of a flood of excitement that, you know, maybe we got it right in the moment. But without any assistance, can you still do that? Can you still retrieve that information or even anything even more complex than that? You know, not just tell me the date of this historical event. Tell me all the socio political events that led to that event. That’s heavy cognitive lifting that you have to do on an exam. And if you’re not, if you’re not practicing that muscle, you know, I use this analogy with students, A lot of sports analogies tend to work really well with students, but if you are working out only one arm and that one is very strong, but you are being asked to hit a baseball or lift a heavy weight with the other arm on an exam, That’s what are on a high stakes game or something. That’s why it feels so hard on a test and that’s why nothing feels familiar and you feel like you can’t recognize anything because of this idea of familiarity. You know that Dr Mark was talking about

[0:20:25 Speaker 0] how much of that do you think is because students feel like working harder and grinding harder is equal to learning the equal amount of things. Does that make sense? Like how much of this do you feel like students are just trying to do as much as they can and not thinking about how they can better do that. Because I, I find I agree with Nietzsche that a lot of my students are like, I’m struggling in this class and I asked them, what are you doing there? Like I literally rewrote all of my notes a million times. I went through so many sheets of paper and like, I still don’t know, it’s just, I I don’t know a lot of the times, it feels like they are just able to say like I do worked on this so hard, but the method of which they are working like they could have studied smarter instead of studying harder, you know?

[0:21:12 Speaker 1] Yeah. I mean to reiterate everything the doctor mark mentioned the familiarity also makes you feel good and also it kind of helps us feel that we are being good students. I think with this like hustle grind culture that we exist in, you know saying like I stayed up 16 hours and I haven’t slept in days and you know the idea that I am working so much harder than everybody else were trying to compare yourself in that way. There’s a little bit of that. But I think also I tell students in learning specialist appointments when I talk about retrieval practice, when I say, Hey, I want you to do 10 practice problems. You know, in the next couple of days, I want you to put away all your notes. I want you to do it as if it were a test. Right? So you don’t have any materials with you. I tell them two things I say it’s going to. I feel so strange because you will not have any any other access to anything other than your mind what you remember. So it’s going to feel very strange because all of the practices you’ve been doing have been, oh, my notes are here, I can check my textbook, I can check everything. So it’s going to feel very weird and b you’re going to get things wrong and setting people up saying that and like, setting that as the expectation and normalizing or de stigmatizing that, like, incorrectness or getting things wrong is somehow that’s like that, or that doesn’t mean you’re learning. I think that’s a really important thing to say to students that you’re absolutely get things wrong. That’s also part of the learning process though. So I think that de stigmatizing that saying getting things wrong, I mean, that’s often what we hear from. I think students really misunderstand that if you’re in class and you don’t get a clicker question right, or even you’re doing homework and you get something wrong, it’s not an indication that you’re a bad student or that somehow you’re unintelligent. It just means that you’re like in the process of learning it. Um and I think that’s very hard for sometimes for high achieving students, especially right, who have been getting things right their whole lives. It’s very hard for them to kind of internalize that.

[0:23:06 Speaker 3] So there’s this, there’s this difference between being active and being productive, right? So what are some changes students can make to make their activity productivity?

[0:23:18 Speaker 2] Everything Misha was saying that recall based learning, there’s another key element students and this really runs against this, this, this gunner achievement mentality, there’s a lot of evidence. So there is the concept that is pervasive through all neuroscience, learning literature, of space versus mass practice. That, and the easiest way to explain it is, let’s say that you’ve got a total of three hours to study for exams. A lot of people will sit down and do a three hour study session, better to do 4 45 minutes. Study sessions with breaks in between. It may sound crazy, But there’s a fair amount of evidence that when you sit down to study something, anything beyond about 45 minutes to an hour is diminishing returns. You’re almost being your head against the wall. And in fact this is so important. There’s a concept known as inter leaving. So let’s say that she niches laughing good.

[0:24:15 Speaker 0] Yes.

[0:24:16 Speaker 1] No, I mean all these all super well evidence practices that we just don’t talk about.

[0:24:22 Speaker 2] It’s real simple. Let’s say that you have to test next week, right? And you’ve got five hours you’ve got five hours for each to study. A total of 10 hours, first of all. Don’t do what everybody does, which is make a pot of coffee and study for five hours for examining on saturday and five hours, for example. That’s the worst of all possibilities.

[0:24:41 Speaker 3] Mistake number one,

[0:24:43 Speaker 2] Stick. No two. Just just convince yourself that anything beyond an hour is kind of wasting your time. Yeah, that’s a hard one. Okay, so you’re going to space it out. But then you can also enter leave study subject a for an hour, take a little walk, get a snack, study subject, B for an hour, take a little walk, get a snack, go back to A and here is something that’s actually a little harder. You have to mentally shift gears. But that effort effort is another uh Another of these signals to your brain that you are making such an effort to remember this. Let’s go out, let’s go ahead and stamp it in. Okay, And this is the effort. Learning part. Uh one of the other things that students hate to hear is everybody has their preferred modality. I’m a visual learner, I’m a verbal learner. I’m this uh there’s a lot of evidence that if you really want to learn something, don’t use your best mortality. That’s because that’s less effort.

[0:25:43 Speaker 1] I’m so happy. Dr Mark talked about that. You know, one of your questions that you would send us ahead of time was about, um you know, what kind of study practices could, you know, maybe you’re ineffective or harmful And I cannot state enough that this idea of learning styles is something that we need to eradicate from the K through 12 system and through the average Google’s there’s literally doctor what can probably speak to this. There’s literally no evidence to show that learning styles is actually a thing. So we I think it’s a it’s an intervention that a lot of people feel good about because it identifies you as a specific type of learner. But actually, first of all, as dr mok said, it’s actually more effortful to try to learn something in a different modality. But essentially you just want to learn it as many modalities as you can. Right? So, and I also will challenge people like I’m a biologist. And if I handed if I I mean I’m a biologist, I know this content pretty well. If you handed me a paragraph of text that said, you know, describe what a protein looked like. And I told myself, well, I’m I’m I’m a reader. You know, I only process through reading. I’m not going to be able to tell you what a protein looks like based on a set of text. You

[0:26:52 Speaker 3] know, you need to see their like setting yourself up for disaster already. Right.

[0:26:56 Speaker 1] Right. So I think a lot of students can be told in there. K through 12 system, you’re a visual learner, auditory learner kinesthetic and there’s really no evidence for that. So it can do some harm if students are going through their classes thinking, oh, well my faculty member doesn’t teach me that way. So I guess I’m just out of luck. You know, I don’t know what to do. And I really think that that’s um, that’s something that I would love to to kind of white clean for many, many, many places that learning styles idea. There are learning preferences as dr Mark mentioned it, but yet trying lots of different modalities is probably the best, the best option.

[0:27:30 Speaker 3] That’s interesting. You know, there’s things that I do in my class and I teach a class for first year students on basically like how to get acclimated to college and we do, there is a an assessment on, you know, what type of learner you are, but I follow that up with a ted talk that kind of says exactly what you are saying is that styles are bogus and it’s been interesting to see people react to that and like why did you even make me take this assessment just to tell me that this is bogus, like, well, I don’t know why do you think I did that and try to get into a deeper conversation about what is a learning style and why is that effective or not effective for me to think about? And um you know, it’s interesting to hear

[0:28:09 Speaker 1] that uh

[0:28:10 Speaker 3] yeah, it makes a lot of sense. You know, if your right arm is stronger than your left arm, then you’re going to have to work harder on that left arm to get it to be up to the speed. Same speed as your as your right arm is.

[0:28:20 Speaker 1] Absolutely. And I’ll um like I said, dr veronica yan, who’s who’s also in the in the educational psychology department here at UT um she came and did a training for our our peer educators and she did she presented a lot of wonderful research. One of my favorite um experiments that they did on this idea of inter leaving. Is that they, you know, because I think sometimes students are like, oh yeah, that that’s not gonna work for, you know, of course that’s you know, that I that I’m not familiar with. You know, I need to study for five hours because it’s really hard material. Well they took they took novices um in an art, you know, with art history, like people who didn’t have any experience with art or art history. And they took two different groups control and experimental control group saw a block of paintings of the same painter all in one go. So like five paintings in a row of Picasso and then five paintings in a row of you know, the next painter and so on. And so they sell blocks of them. And then the other groups saw them inter leaved, right? So they saw different and these are like wildly different styles, wildly wildly different styles. And of course you would imagine that the group who saw in blocks most people would predict that the blocked one would get a better score when tested on here is a totally new painting you’ve never seen before based on the style. Who do you predict painted this painting? Um The initial results are that, you know, the people who saw the block to do do a little bit better, but over time inter leaved students. So students who saw the paintings in a totally disordered style or disordered sequence do better. So it’s actually so beneficial for you to be doing as Dr Mark mentioned an hour of history and an hour biology and then an hour of chemistry not doing the same subject for hours and hours on end. There’s really just not a lot of evidence to show that that is beneficial for your learning,

[0:30:15 Speaker 0] wow. I would have never guessed because I was always that student in college where I was like, I have to do this all in one city or it’s not going to work, but now I’m learning that I was

[0:30:25 Speaker 1] wrong. And that’s the thing is um to kind of talk about the work part and like Dr Mark mentioned what feels good part. I think a lot of the reasons people don’t do it because it doesn’t feel good, it feels so exhausting and effortful to do it and that’s why, you know, we choose generally choose not to do it that way.

[0:30:45 Speaker 3] That’s funny when it comes to like working out, like that’s what you’re looking for, right, like you want to be tired and you want to leave the gym feeling like you gave it your all but studying, I don’t know, I don’t feel like we feel good about ourselves and we leave the PCL just wiped.

[0:31:02 Speaker 0] Yeah, because I know that I always tell my students they just finished registering, but I was telling them, you know, like, don’t be afraid of registering for hard classes, like hard classes are fun and as I was talking about that, I realized that all the classes from undergrad that I remember learning the most from were the ones that kicked my butt, the ones that I had to really struggle. Yes, but all of those classes that were really easy, I can tell you a single fact those classes.

[0:31:31 Speaker 3] So telling. Absolutely,

[0:31:34 Speaker 2] yeah. There’s things that professors can do to tap in this as well. And one of them, I tell my students that very thing, I make my class difficult for a reason, not, not not to suit my ego or not because I’m sadistic or just, but because they’ll remember it better and it will engage a form of learning that will last a lot longer than if we just kind of coast through the material.

[0:32:03 Speaker 0] Yeah. So doctor mok, what are the things that you do in your classroom that other professors who aren’t neuroscience experts doing in their classrooms?

[0:32:14 Speaker 2] Oh gosh, well, I’m talking about neuroscience for one thing.

[0:32:17 Speaker 0] But

[0:32:20 Speaker 2] one of them that I’ve started to do just in the last two or three years that I’ll admit is not always popular with the students is that there’s also evidence that is part of this theme of struggle is that there’s a there’s been some very clever experiments that show if you, if somebody struggles with the concept and they even they even don’t get it and there’s a sense of failure and then you come back sometimes later and explain it to them. They’ll understand it better and they’ll they’ll remember it longer. And so there’s something about struggle that is again one of these signals and it’s very counterintuitive. You would think, well, when I’m struggling, I’m moving in the wrong direction. True. So for example, I tell them flat out, Look, the Homeworks are very hard. I make the home works hard so that the exam will be easier. They like that second part.

[0:33:16 Speaker 0] But

[0:33:18 Speaker 2] so for example, many of my homeworks are, I’ve written them to their little programs that run in their browsers, their virtual experiments. And so one way to do that and they’re literally uh recreations of famous neuroscience experiments that uh, it’s a, it’s a thing with me. Science is a form of discovery. But then a lot of times when we teach it, we just tell them the answers and I try to like factor in the sense of discovery and not just the, the process. So one way to do that would be to say give them a list, Here’s five things, test this, make this graph, uh plot this against that because that’s what the famous scientists did to do that. And sometimes I do that. And sometimes I just explain to them the premise your record, this is a virtual recording from a squid axon. And you can do this and you can do that and you can measure this. And then I just say discover something

[0:34:15 Speaker 3] mm leaving it open ended

[0:34:16 Speaker 2] in it becomes a a bit of a personality test. There there’s a lot of students who are not happy with me

[0:34:26 Speaker 0] who

[0:34:28 Speaker 2] really sort of fall into the sense and they’ll come back and I’ve had people literally slap a piece of paper down on the podium as they are turning in their homework saying I didn’t get anything out of this and kind of start back to your chair and then they would come back and tell me later, you know, I didn’t get up. But then when you explain to the class, I realized I was so close and there was something about that whole thing, they’ll never forget it. They’ll never forget that concept because they were so close and frustrated and didn’t get it. And then there it was, and it was so easy when it was said that way. And so I asked people, one of the things that I ask my students is trust this process, It’s not always fun. You’re going to have low frustrating moments, but trust it as a process. Yeah, that’s those are those magic moments. It’s an act of faith and some of them do and some of them don’t. But uh, I feel compelled, like, like you and many others that if this is what we know about how learning works, then we should we should teach in a way that encourages our students to learn that way.

[0:35:35 Speaker 3] Absolutely, yeah. I warned a lot of first year students about the fact that, you know, these introductory courses with three or four exams and that’s, it is kind of the opposite of what the best educational practices are. And I’m sorry for that. And a lot of it has to do with medieval tradition uh in in the university. Uh you know, not just hours, but you know, throughout time it, the original universities, you only took one test, right, Which isn’t what, you know, psychology and neuroscience and education are telling us are the best ways for people to learn. It’s he’s having lots of chances to get it wrong with, low stakes is ideal, but not all, not all courses are designed that way. Well, let’s see, I think we probably have time for this, this last question, and this one is definitely a speculative one, as we’re still in it and, you know, there will probably be decades of study about it after this time period. But what do you think the pandemic is doing to our ability to learn and our students, how their learning in class, virtually. Um, and what, how do you think that will impact us as we move back to being in person? At least at. Ut

[0:36:49 Speaker 2] well, like you say, this is speculation, but one thing that I sort of hope it’s reminded us all of is that education is more than watching a video and writing down some facts and then repeating it to somebody. And here here when we get away from the, I’m gonna lecture and you’re going to take notes style. As long as we get away from that. I I think I hope what it taught us is there is kind of a magic to being in a classroom when we’re using when we’re using the classroom well, Uh, and following these principles, uh, there’s a reason we come together and there’s a reason that we have these buildings and, and, and it can be effective and its meeting on zoom and watching videos that were recorded last week are a poor substitute for that. And I hope in the same way that when you’ve been sick, then just you gain an appreciation for how nice it is to just feel well. Well,

[0:37:50 Speaker 3] when

[0:37:51 Speaker 2] we can all get back into the classroom, we can all be in there and just sort of appreciate the fact that we’re able to be in the classroom and engage it more and use the magic, you know, generate and use the magic that can happen in the classroom.

[0:38:07 Speaker 3] Yeah, that’s an interesting way of looking at it. You know, like we have these tools have got technology as a tool in the book is a tool and lectures or a tool, but not every tool is right for every situation right? There are some situations where in person learning is probably better and there are others where virtual learning might be better, but it all comes down to, is this the right tool for what I’m trying to teach in this environment to these students?

[0:38:31 Speaker 0] Yeah. Yeah, I do agree with you dr mok about just the magic of the classroom. I feel like, you know, as much as I love our zoom discussions with our students and everything and I know that they’re able to get a lot out of it, I just feel like being in person and writing off the energy of other people around you really, really helps with the learning process, especially when you’re really deep in a conversation or a discussion about difficult topic. I think that being next to other people and witnessing kind of like the fireworks going off in their head when they make a connection is just so special and I can all wait to see that one day, but for now zoom will do.

[0:39:12 Speaker 1] Yeah, I will say one thing that we’ve been talking about at Sanger’s, the staff is just um, realizing that there are going to be some folks who are coming to the university who have maybe had close to two years of like virtual learning, which, you know, as Dr Mark mentioned has been a plethora of different modalities. Some have been like, here’s a pre recording and you know, go ahead and watch it and take down what makes sense. And um, maybe maybe respond to some discussion questions, you know, it really just depends. And then some faculty have done an amazing job that I’ve seen, who have been able to really engage students in a different way and use a lot of really amazing technology. But um, I think the thing that we’re really concerned is a, yeah, just students coming back, coming to the university, maybe for the first time, are coming back to the university and that just being a jarring experience to have to develop more interpersonal skills and be able to interact with others when they haven’t really been able to been able to or been been doing that in the past maybe two years. And, you know, just some of the, again, you know, we talk a lot about study skills and some of the basics, quote unquote basics, you know, things like note taking or reading effectiveness. And again, this isn’t any, this is not me saying anything inherently bad about students. It’s just if you’ve been doing this for two years and you’ve just been watching recordings of things or you’ve just been kind of been been been able to be passive. That’s just the thing that we’re concerned about is students coming in and feeling like, wow, I maybe not equipped yet to really engage in these classes in the way that my professors are expecting me or for me to be successful. So I mean, this is just my usual plug to send students the Singer if they need help. But that’s, yeah, that’s just definitely a thing that I want students to know. Like we’re thinking of you, we know that the last two years close to two years will have been kind of a really bizarre learning experience for some of them and we recognize that that’s going to be an adjustment.

[0:41:10 Speaker 3] Yeah, I hadn’t really thought about the need for, you know, in some of the support work that we do, like we are going to have to, you know, that’ll be one of the tips we add, like tips for getting the most out of class. Like not only where you sit, but you know how much you engage and actually asking questions and raising your hand. And it’s been real easy to just kind of be cameras often passive. But as as we start to transition back, I think we’re going to have to coach our students to take risks in the classroom

[0:41:37 Speaker 2] again, because

[0:41:39 Speaker 0] something a lot of my students have said is that they have been treating their online lectures as if it is a podcast. So they’re listening to like a chemistry 301 lecture as they’re cleaning their room, were doing their dishes and that is just the most passive way to learn that I could possibly

[0:41:58 Speaker 3] think of. Yeah.

[0:42:00 Speaker 1] And y’all, y’all ask, y’all had a question here about flipped classrooms and that’s definitely, I think a lot of students really are not expecting that type of instruction really. Like, I mean it’s called flip for a reason because a lot of the learning, the kind of content that the sort of like learning the facts and the, and the, you know, the definitions and things like that that happens on your own or, you know, by yourself and then going to classes where application happens. And so, um, I do think that that’s going to be a big change from having my camera off and not, not really listening or, you know, kind of that passive approach. It’s um, some of them are going to come to campus and, and have to be in those classes and it’s going to be a real head changer so hopefully they start to recognize. But again as all of the things that dr Mark and I have talked about it’s like that’s how deep learning happens. It doesn’t make me feel is good or may not be as familiar to them. But that will really create deep learning for them

[0:42:57 Speaker 2] if you don’t mind I’d like to give a plug for saying her as well thank you. I one of the things I tell my students is do not suffer alone if you’re doing poorly in class. Don’t suffer alone now. I usually mean that in terms of come see me go see A. T. A. But don’t just expect that if you don’t change anything you’re going to do differently next time. And U. T. Has so many of these things designed to help students. And if you’re having trouble make use of them. These people like Misha and these people are they’re they’re experts. They’re very good and helping you get around whatever problems you’re having so don’t suffer alone

[0:43:35 Speaker 0] for sure. Thank you thank you. You know we tell them all the time. We tell them all the time. But usually what we hear is they’ll go to one appointment, they come back. They’re like oh my gosh you are so right. It was so helpful.

[0:43:49 Speaker 3] I don’t know why I put it off for so long. So that’s

[0:43:53 Speaker 0] that’s great. We’ll definitely be plugging that again as finals comes up. But thank you all so much. I got a lot out of this definitely rethinking some of the study tips that I used as a college student will definitely be adjusting what I say to our students as well because I was a big proponent of the study style.

[0:44:14 Speaker 3] Yeah

[0:44:16 Speaker 0] so that was a good eye opening conversation.

[0:44:19 Speaker 3] Yeah, thank you all so much. You know, it’s always great to be able to bring in people that are smarter than us to talk about these things. Uh, thanks for helping. I guess, the prestige of the podcast, bringing your expertise with us here today, we really do appreciate you taking the time to chat with us.

[0:44:38 Speaker 2] Thank you for having me. Thank you for having us. It was

[0:44:40 Speaker 3] fun. Yeah, anytime. Well, we just might have you come back for something else in the future, or, you know, would love to put together a presentation or something that kind of gives gives our students and some better, better information about how they can study smarter, not harder. And I know that you all have a session like that and Singer, um, so anything we can do to to partner, we’re down to do it. Same. Absolutely. Yeah. Well that was a fantastic interview from Dr Makin Isha. I really enjoyed that so much

[0:45:15 Speaker 1] and I’m going to

[0:45:16 Speaker 0] be honest a lot of it. I feel like if I was a freshman and um an older student came and told me any of that I would not listen I would not listen to a single word

[0:45:26 Speaker 1] they’re saying

[0:45:26 Speaker 0] but we didn’t like that,

[0:45:29 Speaker 3] that’s why we bring. Exactly.

[0:45:31 Speaker 0] Exactly. Exactly. He would have listened to a professor of neuroscience and the assistant director of the Single Learning Center. I think I would listen to those people.

[0:45:41 Speaker 3] Yeah it was really telling you know how great to be able to take a class from a professor who knows the best way to help your brain actually learn the content.

[0:45:54 Speaker 0] When DR Mark was talking about how his assignments are really kind of him trying to recreate famous science experiments, enforcing the students to make those same discoveries. It struck fear in my heart I think I would be so scared to be in his class but I also feel like I would really enjoy it because now that I um you know I’m out of college I realized that my last two years of college where I was taking more upper division classes that really expected me to you know do a ton of work to learn a certain concept. Those were the ones that gave me a ton more skills and how I think about other concepts to. And so I think that I think that ultimately he’s right let that really is how you learn the best.

[0:46:39 Speaker 3] I think there’s a lot to what you were saying about the hardest classes are the ones that you remember the most. Like you may be hated it while you’re in it, but on the other side of it, like, maybe you have the most appreciation for it. Like, certainly the class that I’m always talking about was I had a class in grad school and you know, I always talk about how that was the hardest class that I ever took, but I got I also got an A in it, and I still remember a lot of the things from that class, and you know, maybe I remember less from some of the other classes that little bit easier,

[0:47:09 Speaker 0] definitely. And something else that just really shook me to my core is when all three of you said that learning styles are fake, and to be honest, that hit me about as hard as if somebody told the astrology was fake, I think I would have also shut them down, but because I believe in astrology, but you know what, I was listening to dr mok and the whole thing about how, yes, you might have a prefer method of learning, but that method of learning might not get you to learn as much as you would like to, because it’s so much easier for you and you should challenge yourself to learn a little bit more out of your comfort zone. And so I think, I think I really took that to heart. Um it was definitely an eye opening conversation because I was not expecting that at all. Mhm.

[0:47:58 Speaker 3] Mhm. Yeah, it’s kind of like the the easy way is never the best way, right? Like uh in using some of the sports analogies or the workout analogies, like we’re always looking for like the easy fix, right? Like what’s what’s the easy way to get an a what’s the easy way to lose weight um or get in shape and you know the answer nobody loves to hear is like you know eat right and exercise. And I think the same thing kind of is true for studying and learning is to push yourself. You know learning should should be taxing and it should be something that you have to work at if it was if it was easier

[0:48:39 Speaker 0] because so like I was talking about earlier, a lot of my students registered this week and a lot of them were asking me you know Christina, what’s the easiest elective at E. T. Christina? What was your easiest class that you took? Can I take that class? And I’m just like I will not be telling you

[0:48:56 Speaker 3] usually when students asked me that question yeah when they asked me that question I send them to a link, I send them a link to another. You start

[0:49:06 Speaker 0] doing that. I should start

[0:49:07 Speaker 3] doing that. Because

[0:49:08 Speaker 0] one I don’t think I took any easy electives. I think my only easy electives were like the physical education classes. But those are really hard because they forced me to work out. I don’t like working out and so I don’t think that I even have any easy elective

[0:49:23 Speaker 3] and

[0:49:25 Speaker 0] they’re all super early in the morning so I can’t think of a single easy elective. I think a better question to ask is what are the most interesting electives or the most unique electives Or like a great professor that you recommend. But if you’re going to take an elective you might as well take one that you care about that. You find interesting something that won’t bore you to death. And you know taking the university’s easiest class will most likely bore you to death.

[0:49:53 Speaker 3] Mhm. Sure. Yeah. You know you being interested in in whatever you’re studying is always I think the first step towards being successful in that class or in that subject right is taking an interest in you know every subject has lots of different lenses to look at it through right? Like so it’s just about finding that lens that works for you in any particular subject to really make it come alive and be more interesting for you. It’s you know just like what they talked about in the in the in the interview to is not just studying the same thing for the whole time right? Like mixing it up and I you know I used T. V. As an analogy I know in in in the binging world you know most people are used to watching like a whole season of the same show that’s not how I would like to watch tv and I know that’s controversial but there’s a reason why, I know, I know but there’s a reason why for years and years and years shows are only an hour long, right? Because that’s about how long you can focus on one given story or subject and then they would go to a totally different show with a different set of cast of characters that you don’t get stuck in the same way of thinking like over and over and over for hours and hours and hours. Uh so anyhow, but I know I know that’s very controversial, that’s not the way uh Tv is uh is consumed these days I guess. That was really

[0:51:22 Speaker 0] awesome. I am so glad that we have them come this week. They definitely both combined have um you know, way more knowledge than both of us have combined to on this topic. Yeah. And so that was a really great learning experience for us. Hopefully it was a great learning experience for our listeners as well.

[0:51:42 Speaker 3] And we know everybody’s heading into finals and the year’s almost over. So hang in there and congrats y’all. I mean, we made it through what has to be one of the weirdest years in the history of the university. So everyone should be proud. I’m proud of us for getting this podcast up and going and running all year long. So thank you all for being part of this journey with us this year.

[0:52:05 Speaker 0] You’re all going to do great on your finals. We believe in you. Remember, treat us like a great podcast to listen to you when you’re cleaning your room, but do not treat your chemistry three or one lecture. It’s

[0:52:15 Speaker 3] a podcast for cleaning your room. That’s good advice. That’s good advice. Well I guess that’s all the time we have for this week. Thank you all so much for listening. My name is Phil Butler. I’m Christina buoy. And

[0:52:27 Speaker 1] until next

[0:52:28 Speaker 3] time we hope that all of your endeavors

[0:52:30 Speaker 2] are a success.

[0:52:37 Speaker 3] Mm. Mhm