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Why Asking Questions Might Not Be the Best Way to Teach
More than 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Socrates wandered around Athens asking questions, an approach to finding truth that thinkers have venerated ever since. In modern times, the Socratic method...
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How Your Dreams Can Make You Smarter
It’s late in the evening: time to close the book and turn off the computer. You’re done for the day. What you may not realize, however, is that the learning process actually continues — in your dreams....
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What Your Eyes Say About Who You Are
As you read these words, try paying attention to something you usually never notice: the movements of your eyes. While you scan these lines of text, or glance at that ad over there or look up from the...
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Why ‘I Hate Religion, But I Love Jesus’ Is So Popular
The hottest video on YouTube right now is a 5-minute spoken-word composition titled “Why I Hate Religion, But I Love Jesus.” Recorded by 22-year-old Seattle resident Jefferson Bethke, the clip has been...
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Couch Potatoes, Rejoice! Learning Can Be Passive
You’ve heard it before, and it’s true: we learn by doing. But we also learn by watching. Whether it’s a salsa teacher running through a dance sequence, a tennis coach demonstrating proper serving...
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Speaking Thark: What Invented Languages Can Teach Us
John Carter, the big-budget Disney movie that opened last Friday, has been billed as Indiana Jones on Mars. But the film boasts more than a rakish hero battling giant green aliens. It also features an...
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What the Jazz Greats Knew About Creativity
The improvisational flights of jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane are so transporting that they can seem almost otherworldly — especially when the listener is aware that these musicians...
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The Secret to Grace Under Pressure
How do you gear yourself up for a big test, an important presentation, or any other high-pressure situation? Maybe your internal monologue goes something like this: “OK, this is really important. A lot...
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How To Speak Like A Native
Can an adult learn to speak a second language with the accent of a native? Not likely, but new research suggests that we would make better progress, and be understood more easily by our conversational...
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What We Can Learn from First-Generation College Students
First-generation college students — undergraduates whose parents did not attend university — have reason to be proud. They’ve made it, against daunting odds. But once they get on campus, many of these...
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Can You Instill Mental Toughness?
To be mentally tough is to resist the urge to give up in the face of failure, to maintain focus and determination in pursuit of one’s goals, and to emerge from adversity even stronger than before....
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Why Floundering Is Good
Call it the “learning paradox”: the more you struggle and even fail while you’re trying to master new information, the better you’re likely to recall and apply that information later. The learning...
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Special or Not? Teach Kids To Figure It Out
By now you’ve probably heard about the “you’re not special” speech, when English teacher David McCullough told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School: “Do not get the idea you’re anything special....
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Born to Be Bright: Is There a Gene for Learning?
Earlier this month, researcher Kevin Beaver of Florida State University reported that he and his co-authors had identified genetic markers associated with academic achievement. In their study,...
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How to Use Technology to Make You Smarter
Can a calculator make you smarter? The QAMA calculator can. You use it just like a regular calculator, plugging in the numbers of the problem you want to solve — but QAMA won’t give you the answer...
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Highlighting Is a Waste of Time: The Best and Worst Learning Techniques
In a world as fast-changing and full of information as our own, every one of us — from schoolchildren to college students to working adults — needs to know how to learn well. Yet evidence suggests that...
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How to Increase Your Stamina to Learn
A lot has been said lately about the phenomenon of MOOCs, or massive open online courses. But here’s one fact you may not have heard in all the hype: less than 10% of people who sign up for a MOOC...
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How to Raise a Group’s IQ
What makes a group intelligent? That is: What enables a team of people to effectively solve problems and produce solutions? You might think a group’s IQ would be simply the average intelligence of the...
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8 New Ways of Looking at Intelligence
The science of learning is a relatively new discipline born of an agglomeration of fields: cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience. As with anything to do with our idiosyncratic and...
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We Still Need Information Stored in Our Heads Not ‘in the Cloud’
Is technology making us stupid — or smarter than we’ve ever been? Author Nicholas Carr memorably made the case for the former in his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains....
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