How to study?

  "Outsmart Your Brain

By Daniel T. Willingham

(Gallery, 321 pages, $28.99)

Much has been made of ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence algorithm, and its potential to disrupt education. We have already seen that it can write college essays and take graduate exams with alarming aptitude. At the very least, we'll need new guards against students who rely on ChapGPT to cheat. One might even ask why we should bother to continue teaching pupils to remember and write things at all, given this new tool. But, for the foreseeable future, the human brain will have its advantages, and we still need practice loading our minds with content and extracting their insights. School will survive.

And while AI has its fancy feats, the old noggin still has a few tricks up its skull, if we can suss them out. Unfortunately, formal education offers little by way of a user's guide. Many students flail around as they search for their own ways to organize knowledge and get through the curriculum -- or not. Fortunately, Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, helps fill that gap with his charming and practical new book, "Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy."

There's something counterintuitive about the notion that the brain needs a user's guide. What could the mind know better than itself? The fact that even those who study cognition need such a guide is all the more surprising. But there's knowing the science, there's knowing how to apply it -- and then there's knowing how to get yourself to apply it. It's not a straight shot. As a college student of cognitive neuroscience, I still relied all too often on all-nighters, an established recipe for anxiety and underperformance. In his personable manner, Mr. Willingham recalls: "Until graduate school, my time management system was a mix of writing things on my hand, apologies, and excuses."

His book is aimed most directly at high-school and college students -- people in the world of lectures, exams and lab projects. But much of the advice also applies more widely to anyone who must learn by listening or reading, work in groups, assess what they know, or get anything done at all. It's a course on learning how to learn and on metacognition in general -- how to think about how you think.

Mr. Willingham structures his book cogently. There are 14 chapters covering how to understand a lecture, read a book, take and organize notes, study for a test, take a test, learn from a test performance and so on. Each has several tersely articulated tips, 94 in all, along with bolded text, bullet points and "in a sentence" takeaways. You can skip around. Chapters also include advice for instructors.

Some tips may seem obvious, others less so. But even the obvious-seeming ones merit close study. Consider the tip, which in this case acts as a metatip, "Be Clear About What It Means to 'Know' Something." When someone tells you something and it makes sense, Mr. Willingham explains, that doesn't mean you "know" it. You still have to explain it and put it to use.

Of the less obvious variety, Mr. Willingham counsels that although rereading notes and books are among the most common strategies for studying -- they quickly render the material familiar and therefore feel productive -- they are among the least effective.

Better to prepare study questions and try to answer them.

Memory retrieval feels hard and useless at first, like trying and failing to do a push-up, but that's precisely why it works. You must build new muscle.

Later chapters stray further from strictly academic affairs. One highlights the planning fallacy, our habitual overoptimism about sticking to work timelines. Tips to help us adhere to our schedules include using a calendar, making regular to-do-lists, setting aside regular blocks of time each day to work, revising short- and long-term goals, and preparing contingency plans. Another chapter, on procrastination, suggests creating work habits, breaking projects into unintimidating chunks, and telling yourself to "Just Start, and You'll See That It's Not That Bad."

From the chapter on staying focused: We all know the advice to work in quiet locations and silence our phones, yet some of us still try to multitask or quickly answer texts in the middle of a thought. We underestimate how long it takes to get back on track after switching attention from one thing to another.

Two chapters consider emotional factors in learning, exploring how to cope with anxiety and how to gain self-confidence. Mr. Willingham encouragingly tells us not to expect to eliminate anxiety. Count any bit of progress toward a goal as a win, even if you find the experience nauseating: Maybe ask a simple question of a speaker on the path toward learning how to speak in public yourself. Learn to normalize, evaluate and re-engage: Everyone gets nervous; it's not the end of the world, and there are always next steps. To gain self-confidence, compare yourself to your past self, not to others. Recognize that success in work or in life relies on many factors in tandem. A 'B' student with other talents can still go far.

A guidebook like "Outsmart Your Brain" should be required reading for any college student and for many professionals. The problem is not that our brains are black boxes, their innards mysterious. It's that we think they're not. We often assume we know what works for us and no one can tell us different. (Worth noting: Mr. Willingham has shown the idea of different learning styles to be hogwash.) It's only when we try something new that we see what we've been missing. Whether the advice in the book seems banal or bizarre, give it a shot. Document the results. Changing how you do homework might feel like more homework -- or even like a form of contortion -- but few investments in life will be better repaid than learning how to learn.

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Mr. Hutson is the author of "The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane."" [1]

1. You Too Can Be An 'A' Student
Hutson, Matthew.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 08 Feb 2023: A.13.