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xzainaby's review against another edition
4.0
It took me a while to finish book; well, 5 months approximately. However, it’s one of the most informative books I have ever read. It supplies you with many studies, researches, experts opinions and examples with detailed explanation to make you understand the concept completely. So, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in learning about their mind.
forgottensecret's review
4.0
'No, this book is about something that is, at once, more humble and grand: How to integrate the exotica of new subjects into daily life, in a way that makes them seep under our skin. How to make learning more a part of living and less an isolated chore. We will mine the latest science to unearth the tools necessary to pull this off, and to do so without feeling buried or oppressed.'
Benedict felt the same as many of us do when we study: there must be a more effective way, self-discipline and effort is what will be my vehicle to ride past the other students in my class. But the science of learning is clear in its condemnation of really ineffective (highly popular) strategies. In terms of where the science of learning is, it's almost the way in which we in the West laugh at some tribal cultures for using such ineffective, magic-thinking laden remedies to solve real medical problems which can be solved with a 20th century medicine. Similarly, students with the repeated rereading, highlighting is their way of chanting the incantations to prevent against polio rather than take the vaccine.
He reasons abstractly firstly that the science of learning study of what the brain is doing. I think this is a useful framing, where he describes: 'The average human brain contains 100 billion neurons, the cells that make up its grey matter. Most of these cells link to thousands of other neurons, forming a universe of intertwining networks that communicate in a ceaseless,silent electric storm with a storage capacity, in digital terms, of a million gigabytes.' More specifically how are memories stored? 'The memory exists in the brain as a network of linked cells. These cells activate - or 'fire' - together, like a net of lights in a department store Christmas display. When the blue lights blink on, the image of a sleigh appears; when the reds come on, it's a snowflake. In much the same way, our neural networks produce patterns that the brain reads as images, thoughts and feelings.' I find this incredibly interesting and implies a way to encode information. There more that you can view a problem in multiple perspectives, or if you take an abstract concept like Rolle's Theorem in Analysis, and imagine it as a snake or a hill, this is on a higher-level way just the activation of more neural networks. The addition of these vivid retrieval cues by way of analogy are not to be seen as fanciful or unrelated; you are the one that gets to relate them, irrespective of what anyone else might say. It is however important to return again and activate the same neuron network, the same sequence of Christmas lights (just as you don't drive in a different way each time, repetition deepens the trench): 'The neuron network that forms a specific memory is not a random collection. It includes many of the same cells that flared when a specific memory was first formed.' On a brain level, why is repetition important? 'The connections between the cells, called synapses, thicken with repeated use, facilitating faster transmission of signals.' A crude analogy is neurons are the Lego pieces and synapses are the connections between them.
He distinguishes between episodic and semantic memories. Episodic memories are autobiographical, whereas semantic are embedded in 'a web of associations', like the capital of a country. One vital update one must make to their view of the brain is to withdraw the belief that it it acts like a computer, where we can just look for the image or document identically each time. Instead, 'The brain does not store facts, ideas and experiences like a computer does, as a file that is clicked open, always displaying the identical image. It embeds them in networks of perceptions, facts, and thoughts, slightly different combinations of which bubble up each time. And that just retrieved memory does not overwrite the previous one but intertwines and overlaps with it'. So the act of retrieval changes the memory, it as if whenever you looked at the Mona Lisa her features were altered each time.
Although we may bemoan forgetting, we can actually view it in a more favourable light: 'Normal forgetting is also helpful for subsequent learning. I think of this as the muscle-building property of forgetting: Some 'breakdown' must occur for us to strengthen learning when we revisit the material. Without a little forgetting, you get no benefit from further study. It is what allows learning to build, like an exercises muscle.' One might contest this by reciting capital after capital, but this applies mainly to complex memories that rather than isolated facts: 'Yet no complex memory comes back exactly the same way twice, in part because the forgetting filter blocks some relevant details along with many irrelevant ones.'
Robert Bjork and his wife Elizabeth put forward the theory that memory 'has two strengths, a storage strength and a retrieval strength.' Storage strength is a measure of how well learning something is, with the multiplication table being a clear example. This type of strength can increase, but never decrease. This absolutely astounding idea means that everything in your past that you've deliberately committed to memory: your past mobile numbers, home address, mum's car registration, ex-girlfriend's family names are 'all there, and for good.' This may seem impossible, but Carey points us back to what he spoke about earlier about how the brain with its x amount of gigabytes is capable of holding that amount. 'Volume is not an issue'. So if no memory is ever truly lost, then why the heck can't we access them all at will? Bjork finds rather that it's just 'not currently accessible. Its retrieval strength is low, or near zero.' Retrieval strength 'is a measure of how easily a nugget of information comes to mind'. This too will increase with repeated study, but if you do not reinforce the maths concept or the historical facts, the 'retrieval strength drops off quickly and its capacity is relatively small (compared to storage).' In fact, 'at any given time, we can pull up only a limited number of items in connection with any given cue or reminder.' This is a vital thing to remember. So if you want to recall all the associated facts to Teddy Roosevelt, you can't do it. It is impossible to have all 1000 rush to your mind, only a few triggers will happen: 'Thousands of other quack associations, some meaningful at the time they formed, are entirely off the radar.' To make concrete this 'Forget to Learn' theory of Bjorks, Carey illustrates it by using a great analogy of imagining being at a party with everyone you've ever met in attendance. Mum and dad have high storage, high retrieval, whereas a second grade teacher is low retrieval for the name but high storage for recognising what they look like. Just as we learned in Make it Stick, under a different reason, the more effortful the retrieval of a memory, 'the greater the subsequent spike in retrieval and storage strength (learning).' This is the type of desirable difficulty which is familiar. Why would we need two types of strength for information? The Bjorks argue because as a nomadic hominid, we would have to continually refresh our mental map for the continually altering terrain, weather and predators. Retrieval strength updates this information quickly, and lives for the day. Storage strength is there for the recurrence of seasons, it plans for the future.
If you choose to read any books on memory, you inevitably come to a story about Solomon Shereshevsky who was a newspaper reporter and patient of Alexander Luria, a neurophysiologist at the University of Moscow. One watches movies like A Beautiful Mind or Good Will Hunting in bewilderment, and S (as he is sometimes called) eclipses both of the characters in those movies. He is a man who doesn't need to take notes, as he just remembers. You or I might have trouble recaling a random list of integers, or a poem. But S could hold on to that information for at times a decade. This is detailed in Lucia's book 'The Mind of a Mnemonist'. What separated S from everyone else? He had a condition called synesthesia, which causes perceptions to be mixed with unusual vividness: 'Sounds have shapes, colors; letters have taste, fragrance. "Even numbers reminds me of images. Take the number one. This is a proud, well-built man twirling his moustache. Two is a high-spirited woman, three a gloomy person.' Fundamentally then what did this do (which is exactly what Make it Stick mentioned)? 'He attached an unusual number of cues to each thing he memorised, including internally generated images and details of the learning environment, like the sound of Luria's voice.' So if you read any book or study maths, increase the number of retrieval cues by amping up the vividness, the number of senses in use. A technique I do use is one which Daniel Willingham gives to his students: 'I tell them to put the notes aside and create an entirely new outline, reorganising the material. It forces you to think about the material again, and in a different way.'
The next chapter of 3 in Part Two: Retention deals with the now famous Spacing Effect. As you have began your second term at university, it is perhaps soothing/depressing to know that for Henry Roedinger III, his students 'arrive for the second term, and they don't remember anything from the first time. It's like they never took my class.' So distributed learning is not necessarily spending more time studying, its rather spreading that time out of a longer period. This can be encapsulated in Jost's Law which says that studying something again immediately after you've just learned it doesn't deepen the memory, but waiting for some time to pass like an hour or a day will. This is essentially a repeat of what Ebbinghaus found with his Forgetting Curve. This eventually led to Piotr Wozniak developing SuperMemo, after his successful optimisation in learning English. In SuperMemo, he developed an algorithm which allowed him to best retain vocabulary by prompting him after periods from initial study. A family called the Bahricks published on their data on spaced repetition, where they conducted spaced repetition practice over two years. Part of the reason spaced repetition works is due to the Forget to Learn theory, where it does so in two ways: 'actively, by filtering out competing facts, and passively in that some forgetting allows subsequent practice to deepen learning, like an exercised muscle.' The Bahricks offered their own insights that 'With longer spaces, you're forgetting more, but you find out what your weaknesses are and you correct form them. You find out which mediators -which cues, which associations, or hints you used for each word - are working and which aren't. And if they're not working, you come up with new ones.' Based on that insight and the idea of retrieval strength, one could possibly make the case that learning is essentially the ability to make your retrieval cues so vivid that you can retrieve whatever information you've actually understood. The retrieval cue is meaningless in math for say Rolle's Theorem if you don't understand how to use it in different contexts, its limitations, how to explain it to a 10 year old, etc. But you can plug in a more vivid, concrete cue to bring Rolle's theorem to mind like a vivid experience glued to it. Carey gives his own spacing periods for optimal learning which depend on how close the test is. At the end of the chapter, Carey quotes from William James in 1901 who cautions cramming: 'Cramming seeks to stamp things in intense application before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form few associations. On the other hand, the same thing recurring on different days in different contexts, read, recited, referred to again and again, related to other things and reviewed gets well wrought into mental structure.' William James even then points to the idea that the way to learn anything is to activate as many Christmas lights as possible in your mind, as many associations to the one idea.
In his final chapter on Retention, Carey seeks to explain what is actually happening behind the scenes of testing. He isn't trying to explain away the kids who do so effortlessly (which I am convinced Anders Ericsson would contend), but initially provides an anecdote of Winston Churchill testing badly for an entrance exam to Harrow, so we are in good company. He then goes on to explain the miscreant, the ghoul which should scare any soon-to-be test taker: the fluency illusion. This is seen altogether when reading a book, or highlighting, where everything feels really easy, that because I understand the notes now or the chapter, that this is an indication that I will in the future. Fluency is a trick of judgement, the Joker to our Batman. This is the inverse of desirable difficulty: the easier something is to recall to mind, the smaller the increase in learning. The villain behind the scenes of any test failure isn't test anxiety or having an aberration but rather the fluency illusion which has seduced us through the weeks and months leading up to the exam. Francis Bacon, in 1620 is an advocate of active retrieval, advising us to recite a thing ten times and then recite it now and again rather than just read it twenty times. William James agrees in 1890 with the same sentiment. What must one do to test better? With the roundabout logic of 'better testing through testing'. A really big change in perspective is that testing is not simply a measurement of learning but is instead the way in which you learn. The act of retrieving is learning itself: Testing = learning; Rereading = Illusion. Arthur Gates speculated of those students who received classical educations, what is the ideal ratio of reading to reciting? 1/3 of the time reading, 2/3 of the time reciting. This is an absolute game changer if followed through with! In understanding why AR works: it does so because by its very nature it is a desirable difficulty, it is harder than rereading - which deepens the storage strength and retrieval strength. Roediger expands on this by saying that we don't recall the memory, we are in fact re-storing in memory in a different way like the shifting Mona Lisa. 'Not only has storage level spiked; the memory itself has new and different connections. It's now linked to other related facts that we've also retrieved. The network of cells holding the memory has itself been altered.'
Highly recommended for those interested in retaining more of what they read.
(On a reviewer note: all the above evidence would point to cease from quoting, and rewrite in your own words as a desirable difficulty)
Benedict felt the same as many of us do when we study: there must be a more effective way, self-discipline and effort is what will be my vehicle to ride past the other students in my class. But the science of learning is clear in its condemnation of really ineffective (highly popular) strategies. In terms of where the science of learning is, it's almost the way in which we in the West laugh at some tribal cultures for using such ineffective, magic-thinking laden remedies to solve real medical problems which can be solved with a 20th century medicine. Similarly, students with the repeated rereading, highlighting is their way of chanting the incantations to prevent against polio rather than take the vaccine.
He reasons abstractly firstly that the science of learning study of what the brain is doing. I think this is a useful framing, where he describes: 'The average human brain contains 100 billion neurons, the cells that make up its grey matter. Most of these cells link to thousands of other neurons, forming a universe of intertwining networks that communicate in a ceaseless,silent electric storm with a storage capacity, in digital terms, of a million gigabytes.' More specifically how are memories stored? 'The memory exists in the brain as a network of linked cells. These cells activate - or 'fire' - together, like a net of lights in a department store Christmas display. When the blue lights blink on, the image of a sleigh appears; when the reds come on, it's a snowflake. In much the same way, our neural networks produce patterns that the brain reads as images, thoughts and feelings.' I find this incredibly interesting and implies a way to encode information. There more that you can view a problem in multiple perspectives, or if you take an abstract concept like Rolle's Theorem in Analysis, and imagine it as a snake or a hill, this is on a higher-level way just the activation of more neural networks. The addition of these vivid retrieval cues by way of analogy are not to be seen as fanciful or unrelated; you are the one that gets to relate them, irrespective of what anyone else might say. It is however important to return again and activate the same neuron network, the same sequence of Christmas lights (just as you don't drive in a different way each time, repetition deepens the trench): 'The neuron network that forms a specific memory is not a random collection. It includes many of the same cells that flared when a specific memory was first formed.' On a brain level, why is repetition important? 'The connections between the cells, called synapses, thicken with repeated use, facilitating faster transmission of signals.' A crude analogy is neurons are the Lego pieces and synapses are the connections between them.
He distinguishes between episodic and semantic memories. Episodic memories are autobiographical, whereas semantic are embedded in 'a web of associations', like the capital of a country. One vital update one must make to their view of the brain is to withdraw the belief that it it acts like a computer, where we can just look for the image or document identically each time. Instead, 'The brain does not store facts, ideas and experiences like a computer does, as a file that is clicked open, always displaying the identical image. It embeds them in networks of perceptions, facts, and thoughts, slightly different combinations of which bubble up each time. And that just retrieved memory does not overwrite the previous one but intertwines and overlaps with it'. So the act of retrieval changes the memory, it as if whenever you looked at the Mona Lisa her features were altered each time.
Although we may bemoan forgetting, we can actually view it in a more favourable light: 'Normal forgetting is also helpful for subsequent learning. I think of this as the muscle-building property of forgetting: Some 'breakdown' must occur for us to strengthen learning when we revisit the material. Without a little forgetting, you get no benefit from further study. It is what allows learning to build, like an exercises muscle.' One might contest this by reciting capital after capital, but this applies mainly to complex memories that rather than isolated facts: 'Yet no complex memory comes back exactly the same way twice, in part because the forgetting filter blocks some relevant details along with many irrelevant ones.'
Robert Bjork and his wife Elizabeth put forward the theory that memory 'has two strengths, a storage strength and a retrieval strength.' Storage strength is a measure of how well learning something is, with the multiplication table being a clear example. This type of strength can increase, but never decrease. This absolutely astounding idea means that everything in your past that you've deliberately committed to memory: your past mobile numbers, home address, mum's car registration, ex-girlfriend's family names are 'all there, and for good.' This may seem impossible, but Carey points us back to what he spoke about earlier about how the brain with its x amount of gigabytes is capable of holding that amount. 'Volume is not an issue'. So if no memory is ever truly lost, then why the heck can't we access them all at will? Bjork finds rather that it's just 'not currently accessible. Its retrieval strength is low, or near zero.' Retrieval strength 'is a measure of how easily a nugget of information comes to mind'. This too will increase with repeated study, but if you do not reinforce the maths concept or the historical facts, the 'retrieval strength drops off quickly and its capacity is relatively small (compared to storage).' In fact, 'at any given time, we can pull up only a limited number of items in connection with any given cue or reminder.' This is a vital thing to remember. So if you want to recall all the associated facts to Teddy Roosevelt, you can't do it. It is impossible to have all 1000 rush to your mind, only a few triggers will happen: 'Thousands of other quack associations, some meaningful at the time they formed, are entirely off the radar.' To make concrete this 'Forget to Learn' theory of Bjorks, Carey illustrates it by using a great analogy of imagining being at a party with everyone you've ever met in attendance. Mum and dad have high storage, high retrieval, whereas a second grade teacher is low retrieval for the name but high storage for recognising what they look like. Just as we learned in Make it Stick, under a different reason, the more effortful the retrieval of a memory, 'the greater the subsequent spike in retrieval and storage strength (learning).' This is the type of desirable difficulty which is familiar. Why would we need two types of strength for information? The Bjorks argue because as a nomadic hominid, we would have to continually refresh our mental map for the continually altering terrain, weather and predators. Retrieval strength updates this information quickly, and lives for the day. Storage strength is there for the recurrence of seasons, it plans for the future.
If you choose to read any books on memory, you inevitably come to a story about Solomon Shereshevsky who was a newspaper reporter and patient of Alexander Luria, a neurophysiologist at the University of Moscow. One watches movies like A Beautiful Mind or Good Will Hunting in bewilderment, and S (as he is sometimes called) eclipses both of the characters in those movies. He is a man who doesn't need to take notes, as he just remembers. You or I might have trouble recaling a random list of integers, or a poem. But S could hold on to that information for at times a decade. This is detailed in Lucia's book 'The Mind of a Mnemonist'. What separated S from everyone else? He had a condition called synesthesia, which causes perceptions to be mixed with unusual vividness: 'Sounds have shapes, colors; letters have taste, fragrance. "Even numbers reminds me of images. Take the number one. This is a proud, well-built man twirling his moustache. Two is a high-spirited woman, three a gloomy person.' Fundamentally then what did this do (which is exactly what Make it Stick mentioned)? 'He attached an unusual number of cues to each thing he memorised, including internally generated images and details of the learning environment, like the sound of Luria's voice.' So if you read any book or study maths, increase the number of retrieval cues by amping up the vividness, the number of senses in use. A technique I do use is one which Daniel Willingham gives to his students: 'I tell them to put the notes aside and create an entirely new outline, reorganising the material. It forces you to think about the material again, and in a different way.'
The next chapter of 3 in Part Two: Retention deals with the now famous Spacing Effect. As you have began your second term at university, it is perhaps soothing/depressing to know that for Henry Roedinger III, his students 'arrive for the second term, and they don't remember anything from the first time. It's like they never took my class.' So distributed learning is not necessarily spending more time studying, its rather spreading that time out of a longer period. This can be encapsulated in Jost's Law which says that studying something again immediately after you've just learned it doesn't deepen the memory, but waiting for some time to pass like an hour or a day will. This is essentially a repeat of what Ebbinghaus found with his Forgetting Curve. This eventually led to Piotr Wozniak developing SuperMemo, after his successful optimisation in learning English. In SuperMemo, he developed an algorithm which allowed him to best retain vocabulary by prompting him after periods from initial study. A family called the Bahricks published on their data on spaced repetition, where they conducted spaced repetition practice over two years. Part of the reason spaced repetition works is due to the Forget to Learn theory, where it does so in two ways: 'actively, by filtering out competing facts, and passively in that some forgetting allows subsequent practice to deepen learning, like an exercised muscle.' The Bahricks offered their own insights that 'With longer spaces, you're forgetting more, but you find out what your weaknesses are and you correct form them. You find out which mediators -which cues, which associations, or hints you used for each word - are working and which aren't. And if they're not working, you come up with new ones.' Based on that insight and the idea of retrieval strength, one could possibly make the case that learning is essentially the ability to make your retrieval cues so vivid that you can retrieve whatever information you've actually understood. The retrieval cue is meaningless in math for say Rolle's Theorem if you don't understand how to use it in different contexts, its limitations, how to explain it to a 10 year old, etc. But you can plug in a more vivid, concrete cue to bring Rolle's theorem to mind like a vivid experience glued to it. Carey gives his own spacing periods for optimal learning which depend on how close the test is. At the end of the chapter, Carey quotes from William James in 1901 who cautions cramming: 'Cramming seeks to stamp things in intense application before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form few associations. On the other hand, the same thing recurring on different days in different contexts, read, recited, referred to again and again, related to other things and reviewed gets well wrought into mental structure.' William James even then points to the idea that the way to learn anything is to activate as many Christmas lights as possible in your mind, as many associations to the one idea.
In his final chapter on Retention, Carey seeks to explain what is actually happening behind the scenes of testing. He isn't trying to explain away the kids who do so effortlessly (which I am convinced Anders Ericsson would contend), but initially provides an anecdote of Winston Churchill testing badly for an entrance exam to Harrow, so we are in good company. He then goes on to explain the miscreant, the ghoul which should scare any soon-to-be test taker: the fluency illusion. This is seen altogether when reading a book, or highlighting, where everything feels really easy, that because I understand the notes now or the chapter, that this is an indication that I will in the future. Fluency is a trick of judgement, the Joker to our Batman. This is the inverse of desirable difficulty: the easier something is to recall to mind, the smaller the increase in learning. The villain behind the scenes of any test failure isn't test anxiety or having an aberration but rather the fluency illusion which has seduced us through the weeks and months leading up to the exam. Francis Bacon, in 1620 is an advocate of active retrieval, advising us to recite a thing ten times and then recite it now and again rather than just read it twenty times. William James agrees in 1890 with the same sentiment. What must one do to test better? With the roundabout logic of 'better testing through testing'. A really big change in perspective is that testing is not simply a measurement of learning but is instead the way in which you learn. The act of retrieving is learning itself: Testing = learning; Rereading = Illusion. Arthur Gates speculated of those students who received classical educations, what is the ideal ratio of reading to reciting? 1/3 of the time reading, 2/3 of the time reciting. This is an absolute game changer if followed through with! In understanding why AR works: it does so because by its very nature it is a desirable difficulty, it is harder than rereading - which deepens the storage strength and retrieval strength. Roediger expands on this by saying that we don't recall the memory, we are in fact re-storing in memory in a different way like the shifting Mona Lisa. 'Not only has storage level spiked; the memory itself has new and different connections. It's now linked to other related facts that we've also retrieved. The network of cells holding the memory has itself been altered.'
Highly recommended for those interested in retaining more of what they read.
(On a reviewer note: all the above evidence would point to cease from quoting, and rewrite in your own words as a desirable difficulty)
pinkcharmette's review
3.0
in my opinion the only new info i got from this book was the actual experiment from which the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve was derived from but I have previous knowledge on this topic and that is the reason why. I also enjoyed the part about percolation and of the perceptual learning modules for heightened pattern recognition. I will recommend this if you are looking for an introduction to the science of learning.
ezgorzynski's review against another edition
3.0
I feel like the title of this book was a little misleading, it was more about remembering than learning. I got some interesting ideas from it though and I liked the style of writing. It was very sitting in a coffee house talking friendly.
marillenbaum's review
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.25
Helpful and informative, it outlines how the things that might seem to make a bad student can in fact assist with learning. Incredibly helpful for the would be student.
pixiebix's review
4.0
Fantastic stuff!
I don't think a non-fiction book (not including memoirs) has ever made me totally rethink my understanding of a topic this much. How We Learn truly does debunk every single myth about effective study and learning. If I was in full-time education right now, this would literally become my bible. Carey shows that a holistic, varied, and relaxed approach to studying is not just a nice add-on; it's an absolute necessity if meaningful learning is to take place. I'll never try to learn about anything again without keeping these principles in mind.
I don't think a non-fiction book (not including memoirs) has ever made me totally rethink my understanding of a topic this much. How We Learn truly does debunk every single myth about effective study and learning. If I was in full-time education right now, this would literally become my bible. Carey shows that a holistic, varied, and relaxed approach to studying is not just a nice add-on; it's an absolute necessity if meaningful learning is to take place. I'll never try to learn about anything again without keeping these principles in mind.
blairmahoney's review
5.0
Very informative for anyone looking to find a scientific study of what methods are effective in learning. Will definitely inform many of my practices as a teacher.
meowsonyou's review
3.0
in my opinion the only new info i got from this book was the actual experiment from which the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve was derived from but I have previous knowledge on this topic and that is the reason why. I also enjoyed the part about percolation and of the perceptual learning modules for heightened pattern recognition. I will recommend this if you are looking for an introduction to the science of learning.
tegmo's review against another edition
3.0
This is a very approachable, readable, and well researched science non-fiction book. The science of learning has clearly come a long way in its short lifetime but still has a long way to go. The biggest take away I had from this book is that what we think of as “learning” isn’t actually beneficial for long term retention of information and quick recall.
As an educator and a learner this book gave me food for thought on how I could incorporate the science of learning into my instruction and how I could structure my own study for better results. However, this book did not seem intended to provide practical and concrete strategies to put that science into practice. This seemed like a lost opportunity as most people reading about learning are likely learners themselves or educators looking for scientifically backed strategies to increase learning. Likewise, the structure of the writing which provided a historical outline of different aspects of learning science and theory was interesting but made it difficult to parse which theories have the most scientific backing in current research. A good book that falls short of being very good.
As an educator and a learner this book gave me food for thought on how I could incorporate the science of learning into my instruction and how I could structure my own study for better results. However, this book did not seem intended to provide practical and concrete strategies to put that science into practice. This seemed like a lost opportunity as most people reading about learning are likely learners themselves or educators looking for scientifically backed strategies to increase learning. Likewise, the structure of the writing which provided a historical outline of different aspects of learning science and theory was interesting but made it difficult to parse which theories have the most scientific backing in current research. A good book that falls short of being very good.