Karen Kim is a virtuoso violinist. When we spoke with her, Kim was second violin in the world- renowned string ensemble Parker Quartet, who play much of their material from memory, a rarity in classical music. Second violin is often largely accompanimental, and the mnemonic for memorizing the harmonies is the main melodic theme. “You sing the melody in your head,” Kim says, “and you know that when the
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melody goes to this place, you change harmony.” 27 The harmonies of some works, like fugues, with up to four themes that pass around the group in intricate ways, are especially challenging to memorize. “You need to know that while I’m playing the second theme, you’re playing the fi rst. Memorizing the fugues is very diffi cult. I need to learn everybody else’s part better. Then I start to recognize patterns that I maybe knew intellectually before, but I wasn’t listening out for them.
Memorizing the harmonies is a big part of knowing the architecture of the piece, the map of it.” When the quartet is mastering a new piece, they spend a lot of time playing through things slowly without the sheet music, and then gradually speeding it up. Think Vince Dooley gradually synchronizing the different positions on the Georgia Bulldogs football team as they tailor their plays to take on a new Saturday night opponent. Or the neurosurgeon Mike Ebersold, examining a gunshot victim in the emergency room and methodically rehearsing what he’s likely to encounter in a brain surgery that he’s about to perform.
Seeing the pattern of physical movements as a kind of choreography, visualizing a complex melody as it is handed off like a football from one player to another, “seeing the map of it”: all are mnemonic cues to memory and per for mance.
With continued retrieval, complex material can become second nature to a person and the mnemonic cues are no longer needed: you consolidate concepts like Newton’s 3 laws of motion into mental models that you use as a kind of short-hand. Through repeated use, your brain encodes and “chunks”
sequences of motor and cognitive actions, and your ability to recall and apply them becomes as automatic as habit.
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The Takeaway
It comes down to the simple but no less profound truth that effortful learning changes the brain, building new connections and capability. This single fact— that our intellectual abilities are not fi xed from birth but are, to a considerable degree, ours to shape— is a resounding answer to the nagging voice that too often asks us “Why bother?” We make the effort because the effort itself extends the boundaries of our abilities.
What we do shapes who we become and what we’re capable of doing. The more we do, the more we can do. To embrace this principle and reap its benefi ts is to be sustained through life by a growth mindset.
And it comes down to the simple fact that the path to complex mastery or expert per for mance does not necessarily start from exceptional genes, but it most certainly entails self- discipline, grit, and per sis tence; with these qualities in healthy mea sure, if you want to become an expert, you probably can. And what ever you are striving to master, whether it’s a poem you wrote for a friend’s birthday, the concept of classical conditioning in psychology, or the second violin part in Hayden’s Fifth Symphony, conscious mnemonic devices can help to or ga nize and cue the learning for ready retrieval until sustained, deliberate practice and repeated use form the deeper encoding and subconscious mastery that characterize expert per for mance.
8
Make It Stick
No matter what you may set your sights on doing or becoming, if you want to be a contender, it’s mastering the ability to learn that will get you in the game and keep you there.
In the preceding chapters, we resisted the temptation to become overtly prescriptive, feeling that if we laid out the big ideas from the empirical research and illustrated them well through examples, you could reach your own conclusions about how best to apply them. But early readers of those chapters urged us to get specifi c with practical advice. So we do that here.
We start with tips for students, thinking in par tic u lar of high school, college, and graduate school students. Then we speak to lifelong learners, to teachers, and fi nally to trainers.
While the fundamental principles are consistent across these groups, the settings, life stages, and learning materials differ.
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To help you envision how to apply these tips, we tell the stories of several people who, one way or another, have already found their way to these strategies and are using them to great effect.
Learning Tips for Students
Remember that the most successful students are those who take charge of their own learning and follow a simple but disciplined strategy. You may not have been taught how to do this, but you can do it, and you will likely surprise yourself with the results.
Embrace the fact that signifi cant learning is often, or even usually, somewhat diffi cult. You will experience setbacks. These are signs of effort, not of failure. Setbacks come with striving, and striving builds expertise. Effortful learning changes your brain, making new connections, building mental models, increasing your capability. The implication of this is powerful: Your intellectual abilities lie to a large degree within your own control. Knowing that this is so makes the diffi culties worth tackling.
Following are three keystone study strategies. Make a habit of them and structure your time so as to pursue them with regularity.
Practice Retrieving New Learning from MemoryWhat does this mean? “Retrieval practice” means self- quizzing.
Retrieving knowledge and skill from memory should become your primary study strategy in place of rereading.
How to use retrieval practice as a study strategy: When you read a text or study lecture notes, pause periodically to ask yourself questions like these, without looking in the text: What are the key ideas? What terms or ideas are new to me? How
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would I defi ne them? How do the ideas relate to what I already know?
Many textbooks have study questions at the ends of the chapters, and these are good fodder for self- quizzing. Generating questions for yourself and writing down the answers is also a good way to study.
Set aside a little time every week throughout the semester to quiz yourself on the material in a course, both the current week’s work and material covered in prior weeks.
When you quiz yourself, check your answers to make sure that your judgments of what you know and don’t know are accurate.
Use quizzing to identify areas of weak mastery, and focus your studying to make them strong.
The harder it is for you to recall new learning from memory, the greater the benefi t of doing so. Making errors will not set you back, so long as you check your answers and correct your mistakes.
What your intuition tells you to do: Most studiers focus on underlining and highlighting text and lecture notes and slides.
They dedicate their time to rereading these, becoming fl uent in the text and terminology, because this feels like learning.
Why retrieval practice is better: After one or two reviews of a text, self- quizzing is far more potent for learning than additional rereading. Why might this be so? This is explained more fully in Chapter 2, but here are some of the high points.
The familiarity with a text that is gained from rereading creates illusions of knowing, but these are not reliable indicators of mastery of the material. Fluency with a text has two strikes against it: it is a misleading indicator of what you have learned, and it creates the false impression that you will remember the material.
By contrast, quizzing yourself on the main ideas and the meanings behind the terms helps you to focus on the central
