Given what we know about learning differences, what’s the takeaway?
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Be the one in charge. There’s an old truism from sales school that says you can’t shoot a deer from the lodge. The same goes for learning: you have to suit up, get out the door, and fi nd what you’re after. Mastery, especially of complex ideas, skills, and pro cesses, is a quest. It is not a grade on a test, something bestowed by a coach, or a quality that simply seeps into your being with old age and gray hair.
Embrace the notion of successful intelligence. Go wide: don’t roost in a pigeonhole of your preferred learning style but take command of your resources and tap all of your “intelligences”
to master the knowledge or skill you want to possess. Describe what you want to know, do, or accomplish. Then list the competencies required, what you need to learn, and where you can fi nd the knowledge or skill. Then go get it.
Consider your expertise to be in a state of continuing development, practice dynamic testing as a learning strategy to discover your weaknesses, and focus on improving yourself in those areas. It’s smart to build on your strengths, but you will become ever more competent and versatile if you also use testing and trial and error to continue to improve in the areas where your knowledge or per for mance are not pulling their weight.
Adopt active learning strategies like retrieval practice, spacing, and interleaving. Be aggressive. Like those with dyslexia who have become high achievers, develop workarounds or compensating skills for impediments or holes in your aptitudes.
Don’t rely on what feels best: like a good pi lot checking his instruments, use quizzing, peer review, and the other tools described in Chapter 5 to make sure your judgment of what you know and can do is accurate, and that your strategies are moving you toward your goals.
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Don’t assume that you’re doing something wrong if the learning feels hard. Remember that diffi culties you can overcome with greater cognitive effort will more than repay you in the depth and durability of your learning.
Distill the underlying principles; build the structure. If you’re an example learner, study examples two at a time or more, rather than one by one, asking yourself in what ways they are alike and different. Are the differences such that they require different solutions, or are the similarities such that they respond to a common solution?
Break your idea or desired competency down into its component parts. If you think you are a low structure-builder or an example learner trying to learn new material, pause periodically and ask what the central ideas are, what the rules are.
Describe each idea and recall the related points. Which are the big ideas, and which are supporting concepts or nuances?
If you were to test yourself on the main ideas, how would you describe them?
What kind of scaffold or framework can you imagine that holds these central ideas together? If we borrowed the winding stair meta phor as a structure for Bruce Hendry’s investment model, it might work something like this. Spiral stairs have three parts: a center post, treads, and risers. Let’s say the center post is the thing that connects us from where we are (down here) to where we want to be (up there): it’s the investment opportunity. Each tread is an element of the deal that protects us from losing money and dropping back, and each riser is an element that lifts us up a notch. Treads and risers must both be present for the stairs to function and for a deal to be attractive. Knowing the scrap value of boxcars is a tread— Bruce knows he won’t get less than that for his investment. Another tread is the guaranteed lease income while his
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capital is tied up. What are some risers? Impending scarcity, which will raise values. The like- new condition of the cars, which is latent value. A deal that doesn’t have treads and risers will not protect the downside or reliably deliver the upside.
Structure is all around us and available to us through the poet’s medium of meta phor. A tree, with its roots, trunk, and branches. A river. A village, encompassing streets and blocks, houses and stores and offi ces. The structure of the village explains how these elements are interconnected so that the village has a life and a signifi cance that would not exist if these elements were scattered randomly across an empty landscape.
By abstracting the underlying rules and piecing them into a structure, you go for more than knowledge. You go for knowhow. And that kind of mastery will put you ahead.
7
Increase Your Abilities
In a famous study from the 1970s, a researcher showed nursery school children one at a time into a room with no distractions except for a marshmallow resting on a tray on a desk. As the researcher left the room, the child was told he could eat the marshmallow now, or, if he waited for fi fteen minutes, he would be rewarded with a second marshmallow.
Walter Mischel and his graduate students observed through a mirror as the children faced their dilemma. Some popped the marshmallow into their mouths the moment the researcher left, but others were able to wait. To help themselves hold back, these kids tried anything they could think of. They were observed to “cover their eyes with their hands or turn around so that they can’t see the tray, start kicking the desk, or tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal,” the researchers wrote.
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Of more than six hundred children who took part in the experiment, only one- third succeeded in resisting temptation long enough to get the second marshmallow.
A series of follow- up studies, the most recent in 2011, found that the nursery school children who had been more successful in delaying gratifi cation in this exercise grew up to be more successful in school and in their careers.
The marshmallow study is sublime in its simplicity and as a meta phor for life. We are born with the gift of our genes, but to a surprising degree our success is also determined by focus and self- discipline, which are the offspring of motivation and one’s sense of personal empowerment.1
Consider James Paterson, a spirited, thirty- something Welshman, and his unwitting seduction by the power of mnemonic devices and the world of memory competitions. The word
“mnemonic” is from the Greek word for memory. Mnemonic devices are mental tools that can take many forms but generally are used to help hold a large volume of new material in memory, cued for ready recall.
James fi rst learned of mnemonics when one of his university instructors fl eetingly mentioned their utility during a lecture. He went straight home, searched the web, bought a book. If he could learn these techniques, he fi gured, he could memorize his classwork in short order and have a lot more time to hang out with friends. He started practicing memorizing things: names and dates for his psychology classes and the textbook page numbers where they were cited. He also practiced parlor tricks, like memorizing the sequence of playing cards in a shuffl ed deck or strings of random numbers read from lists made up by friends. He spent long hours honing his techniques, becoming adept and the life of the party among his social set. The year was 2006, and when he learned of a memory competition to be held in Cambridge, En gland, he
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decided on a lark to enter it. There he surprised himself by taking fi rst place in the beginner category, a per for mance for which he pocketed a cool 1,000 euros. He was hooked. Figur-ing he had nothing to lose by taking a fl yer, he went on to compete in his fi rst World Memory Championships, in London, that same year.
With mnemonics James had fi gured to pocket some easy facts to ace his exams without spending the time and effort to fully master the material, but he discovered something entirely different, as we will recount shortly.
Memory athletes, as these competitors call themselves, all get their start in different ways. Nelson Dellis, the 2012 US
Memory Champion, began after his grandmother died of Alzheimer’s disease. Nelson watched her decline over time, with her ability to remember being the fi rst cognitive faculty to go.
Although only in his twenties, Nelson wondered if he were destined for the same fate and what he could do about it. He discovered mind sports, hoping that if he could develop his memory to great capacity, then he might have reserves if the disease did strike him later in life. Nelson is another memory athlete on his way up, and he has started a Foundation, Climb for Memory, to raise awareness about and funds for research for this terrible disease. Nelson also climbs mountains (twice reaching near the summit of Mt. Everest), hence the name. We meet others in this chapter who, like Paterson and Dellis, have sought successfully to raise their cognitive abilities in one way or another.
The brain is remarkably plastic, to use the term applied in neuroscience, even into old age for most people. In this chapter’s discussion of raising intellectual abilities, we review some of the questions science is trying to answer about the brain’s
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ability to change itself throughout life and people’s ability to infl uence those changes and to raise their IQs. We then describe three known cognitive strategies for getting more out of the mental horse power you’ve already got.
In a sense the infant brain is like the infant nation. When John Fremont arrived with his expeditionary force at Pueblo de Los Angeles in 1846 in the US campaign to take western territory from Mexico, he had no way to report his progress to President James Polk in Washington except to send his scout, Kit Carson, across the continent on his mule— a round-trip of nearly six thousand miles over mountains, deserts, wil-derness and prairies. Fremont pressed Carson to whip himself into a lather, not even to stop to shoot game along the way but to sustain himself by eating the mules as they broke down and needed replacing. That such a journey would be required reveals the undeveloped state of the country. The fi ve- foot-four- inch, 140- pound Carson was the best we had for getting word from one coast to the other. Despite the continent’s boundless natural assets, the fl edgling nation had little in the way of capability. To become mighty, it would need cities, universities, factories, farms and seaports, and the roads, trains, and telegraph lines to connect them.2
It’s the same with a brain. We come into the world endowed with the raw material of our genes, but we become capable through the learning and development of mental models and neural pathways that enable us to reason, solve, and create.
We have been raised to think that the brain is hardwired and our intellectual potential is more or less set from birth. We now know otherwise. Average IQs have risen over the past century with changes in living conditions. When people suffer brain damage from strokes or accidents, scientists have seen the brain somehow reassign duties so that adjacent networks of neurons take over the work of damaged areas, enabling
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people to regain lost capacities. Competitions between
“memory athletes” like James Paterson and Nelson Dellis have emerged as an international sport among people who have trained themselves to perform astonishing acts of recall. Expert per for mance in medicine, science, music, chess, or sports has been shown to be the product not just of innate gifts, as had long been thought, but of skills laid down layer by layer, through thousands of hours of dedicated practice. In short, research and the modern record have shown that we and our brains are capable of much greater feats than scientists would have thought possible even a few de cades ago.
Neuroplasticity
All knowledge and memory are physiological phenomena, held in our neurons and neural pathways. The idea that the brain is not hardwired but plastic, mutable, something that reorganizes itself with each new task, is a recent revelation, and we are just at the frontiers of understanding what it means and how it works.
In a helpful review of the neuroscience, John T. Bruer took on this question as it relates to the initial development and stabilization of the brain’s circuitry and our ability to bolster the intellectual ability of our children through early stimulation. We’re born with about 100 billion nerve cells, called neurons. A synapse is a connection between neurons, enabling them to pass signals. For a period shortly before and after birth, we undergo “an exuberant burst of synapse formation,”
in which the brain wires itself: the neurons sprout micro-scopic branches, called axons, that reach out in search of tiny nubs on other neurons, called dendrites. When axon meets dendrite, a synapse is formed. In order for some axons to fi nd their target dendrites they must travel vast distances to com-
