Is there a right or wrong way to learn? Dr. Stephen Kosslyn is an expert on the science of learning, with more than 30 years of experience working at elite institutions such as Harvard and Stanford. He also thinks that higher education could learn a lot about how people learn, and that's why he became the Founding Dean and Chief Learning Officer of the Minerva Schools at KGI. On this podcast, Dr. Kosslyn explains how people learn and how his institution is changing the way learning is approached — one student at a time. Resources from Dr. Stephen Kosslyn: Minerva Schools at KGI "Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education" "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" Studies and research discussed: Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics | 2014 study Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses | Inside Higher Ed Tutors See Stereotypes and Gender Bias in SAT. Testers See None of the Above. | New York Times New Evidence of Racial Bias on SAT | Inside Higher Ed Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans | Claude M. Steele. Stanford University, 1995 Stereotype Susceptibility: Identity Salience and Shifts in Quantitative Performance | Margaret Shih, Todd L. Pittinsky, Nalini Ambady, 1999 Twenty Years of Stereotype Threat Research: A Review of Psychological Mediators | National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine "Cognitive Psychology: Mind And Brain" "Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate" Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter withCody Gough andAshley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Is there a right or wrong way to learn? Dr. Stephen Kosslyn is an expert on the science of learning, with more than 30 years of experience working at elite institutions such as Harvard and Stanford. He also thinks that higher education could learn a lot about how people learn, and that's why he became the Founding Dean and Chief Learning Officer of the Minerva Schools at KGI. On this podcast, Dr. Kosslyn explains how people learn and how his institution is changing the way learning is approached — one student at a time.
Resources from Dr. Stephen Kosslyn:
Studies and research discussed:
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-future-of-learning-is-now-thanks-to-science
CODY GOUGH: I'm curious. If I'm a person and I want to learn something outside of an institution, is there a best way to do it?
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Well, there's an actually immense scientific literature on learning. I mean, it's just incredible how much it's been learned about the nature of learning. And it's also incredible how little of that is made it out of the journal pages and out of the lab, and into actual classrooms.
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CODY GOUGH: Hi, I'm Cody Gough, with the learned-- curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, we're going to learn how to learn.
CODY GOUGH: Every day, we learn what we don't know because learning-- I mean, because curiosity makes you smarter.
ASHLEY HAMER: This is the Curiosity podcast.
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CODY GOUGH: We're going to talk about learning today. But first, let's talk about the Minerva schools. Our guest today is Dr. Stephen Kosslyn, and he's the founding dean and the Chief Learning Officer of the Minerva schools at KGI, the Keck Graduate Institute.
ASHLEY HAMER: This matters because Minerva is a new type of university. And it was put together using decades of research about learning, which Dr. Kosslyn knows a thing or two about. He's a cognitive neuroscientist, researcher, and educator, and has published more than 300 scientific papers and 14 books. Plus, he spent 30 years at Harvard University in a variety of positions, including Dean of social sciences.
CODY GOUGH: In 2017, Dr. Kosslyn and Minerva CEO, Ben Nelson, published a book called, Building the Intentional University, Minerva and the Future of Higher Education. It outlines the school's vision and acts as a blueprint for transforming higher education. It's pretty lofty stuff.
ASHLEY HAMER: Today, Dr. Kosslyn will talk about how you can learn, whether you're inside or outside of the classroom. But in the process. You'll learn a lot about the Minerva schools and how they're rethinking higher education. And believe us when we say you don't need to have a college education to get something out of this episode.
CODY GOUGH: How would you describe the Minerva schools and what it's trying to accomplish, that's different than what traditional institutions are trying to accomplish?
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: I think of the Minerva curriculum is oriented around a simple idea, which is, we want our students to be able to adapt to a changing world after they graduate. So that's the key idea. We want our students to be able to succeed at jobs that don't even exist yet. So the entire curriculum, the pedagogy, everything has been set up with that goal in mind.
CODY GOUGH: How does learning work and how can we apply it better great?
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Great question. So if you look at the literature, scientific literature on learning-- there's an immense amount-- and I reviewed, not all of it. I don't know if anybody could read all of it, but a lot of it. I pulled out 16 principles. 16 principles, and organize those into two big maxims. So one of them is, I call it, think it through. So let me ask you a question. At the end of the day when you're lying in bed and you're reflecting what happened during the day, what percentage of what you remember do you think you intentionally tried to learn during the day?
CODY GOUGH: Things like what I had for breakfast, what I did during lunch time. Intentionally? Zero.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Yeah, so I've asked at least 100 people this now. And the modal response is probably 5%. And I'm thinking, that might be a little on the high side. But it depends what people do, and so forth. But my point is, an enormous amount of what we learn is a byproduct of paying attention and thinking about stuff at the time. You don't actually try to learn it, it just sticks as a byproduct. So that's the principles that lie under this maxim. Think it through so you can be selective. So for example, there's something called deliberate practice.
So I lived for a while in France and I decided I wanted to be able to interact with people. So I try to learn the language, which I'm terrible at but got a tutor and did OK. And learning the pronunciation, what I would do is I'd say a word, and then she would repeat it back the way it was supposed to sound. She's a native speaker. And I would listen for the disparity between what I said and what she said, and then I say it again, trying to minimize the difference, trying to be more like her. That's called deliberate practice. Where I'm thinking it through, but I'm focusing on one particular aspect of it. In this case, it was the sound of it.
So that's one principle, deliberate practice, that falls under that maxim, some eight or something to do. Most of those principles will work, whether you try to learn it or not, if you're just paying attention and processing. But there's a second layer of principles where you can intentionally try to learn. You can layer on top of what you're going to learn automatically by using associations, forming and using associations.
So for example, when you meet someone new and you want to learn their name. It turns out you already know their name, unless they're from some other culture. But for the most part, you probably met somebody with most names in this culture already, or at least heard of them, and you're familiar with the name. So the trick now is not to store new name, but to set up an association between the name you already know and this new person. And there are various tricks you can use to do that. So I'll give you one.
I know another Cody. So when I met you, what I did was visualize that Cody and mentally imagine morphing his face into yours. And I did that three times. Next time I see you, I'm going to remember that connection between you and the previous Cody. And I'll be able to apply that name to you. So I set up a new association between what I already had there. And it took some work. So that's the trick. If you want to intentionally remember something, take some work. But if something grabs you and you get engaged, you can remember a lot of it just automatically. It's pretty cool.
So if you want to really design an educational system that's going to be effective, the first thing you should think about is what's going to grab the students, what's going to really result in their being engaged. We know a lot about the circumstances in which people are likely to learn and the circumstances under which they're likely not to learn. And in fact, there's a really good example of a circumstance that people are really unlikely to learn and that's used very widely. Any idea what that might be?
CODY GOUGH: I do, because I'm familiar with your work. And I'm guessing it's going to be lectures?
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Yes. That's fantastic. Exactly right. Lecture has been around for thousands of years. There are fantastic way to teach because they scale so well. You can lecture to 10,000 people as easily as 10, but they are a terrible, terrible way to learn. If you look at the science of learning, what we've learned from studying how this works, you couldn't intentionally design a much worse, a worse way to try to get people to learn than what we typically do in lectures. We know that being active and being engaged is crucial. So what typically happens at a lecture?
CODY GOUGH: You are not engaged.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Most people. Most people are not engaged. You can try to engage yourself with the lecture, but it takes a lot of work and it's got to be interactive. It's not going to be functional. It's not really possible to be that interactive with the lecture because you disrupt it. Because they got a script they're following. And they don't want to be constantly peppered with questions. So it's hard to be an active listener in a lecture.
CODY GOUGH: Is there a difference in disciplines where this applies? Because I'm thinking about my friends that went to medical school, and they are required to learn a lot about the body and there's a lot of memorization involved. Is what you're saying more applicable to certain disciplines?
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: No, don't think so. So you'll pick up a fair amount by paying close attention. So a lot of medical education, at least especially after the second year, involves being in clinics and doing rounds and actually seeing real patients. And if you pay attention to what's going on, you're going to learn a lot. Just by paying attention to being engaged. Same set of processes.
During the first couple of years, we have to learn all that science stuff. Yeah, there's a lot of memorization. And memorization is going to involve this more intentional stuff where you-- you can use these techniques that have worked out, mnemonic techniques that will help you remember more effectively.
CODY GOUGH: When you're talking about learning, is there a difference between memorization, or memorizing something versus knowledge? I mean, what skills of the brain are being underserved, specifically with our current system?
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Let's do a little terminological clarification. So learning is the front end. That's the acquisition of information, where you get it into your brain. Memory is the retention of what's gotten in there, and the ability to dig it out when you need it. So the flip sides of the same coin. If you didn't get it in, you'd have no memory. So once you start breaking things down that way, you can start asking questions. Well, what are effective ways to get things in, in the first place? And what are effective ways to hang onto them?
So for example, there's something called the generation principle. Oh, by the way, all of this is in that book. There's a chapter called The Science of Learning, which I happen to have written, which goes through these 16 principles. It discusses what I call the generation principle, where it turns out that just recalling information, will strengthen the memory of it. So every time you use information, you actually make your memory stronger. So this is one of the reasons-- by the way, not the only one-- but one of the reasons why a good way to learn something is by teaching it to somebody else. Because when you're trying to teach it, you've got to really remember it and deal with it.
CODY GOUGH: I've heard that from many teachers is that they learn as much from having to teach it as they do from--
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Yeah, it's more than that though. It's also organizing it. So organizing it helps you set up those associations. So one of the reasons associations are so important is you often have information that's in there, they have trouble digging out. So very often, people talk about the memory as if it were a lock and you need a key to unlock it. And the key is the cues that are coming in, and the ones that you supply through free association and so on. So the more keys you have at unlock that lock, more ways you can get to it, the better it's going to be. And those ways are associations. So the more ways you can get to what store, the more likely it is you can effectively dig it out when you need it.
ASHLEY HAMER: Teaching a subject to better understand it was a famous strategy of Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman. He was so good at explaining dense scientific topics that people actually called him the great explainer. No matter the concept, Feynman believed that if you couldn't reduce it to a lesson a college freshman could understand, you didn't really understand it yourself. When Feynman was a student at Princeton, he had a four step process he used to understand everything he learned. And you can do it too.
First, pick a topic you want to understand and write down everything you know about it on a notebook page. As you study, add every new thing you learn to that page. Next, pretend to teach your topic to a classroom. The simpler your explanation, the better. Once you hit gaps in your knowledge, go back to the books and revisit the harder concepts until you can explain them. Finally, connect the facts to analogies you're familiar with to help strengthen your understanding. Our piece on the Feynman technique is the all time most popular article on curiosity.com. And you can find it in the show notes.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: The bottom line of this is a huge amount is known about this stuff. It's a really amazing amount and it is not used systematically in every class anywhere, but in Minerva, as far as I know.
CODY GOUGH: To your point about lectures, it is very cost effective. I can teach 500 students in a lecture hall with one professor. That's really great for me when it comes to the bottom line. How do you address cost issues?
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: So there are two aspects to it. One is, what you spend. So I was recently in South Korea and I was visiting a huge university there. And I'm walking across their manicured lawns and admiring these beautiful buildings. And then I start thinking, someone's going to be cutting these lawns, someone's also watering these lawns. Those buildings are really beautiful, but what happens when the roof starts to leak? And just the whole operations and maintenance stuff like, awesome, incredible, expensive. So we saw that.
The only thing we own here, computers. That's it. So we rent residence halls. It's completely different model. We have residence halls, we have no campus. We have no classrooms. So we have software that's been developed for real time seminars, where there's a professor and there are 19 students, and they are interacting in real time. And we don't need to rent the space for that. And in fact, it turns out that because the software was built with the idea of teaching seminars, we were able to build a whole bunch of tools into it, which made teaching really effective.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wait, what's the difference between a lecture and a seminar? A lecture is your classic image of a college course. An instructor stands at a podium, in a big hall full of hundreds of students, who sit-in silence while they listen and take notes. A seminar is smaller and more interactive. A few dozen students discuss, and debate, and grapple with the concepts they're studying. And sometimes even present material themselves.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: So we've built an educational environment with active learning in mind, inspired by the science of learning. So we have no lectures. It's all seminars. And it's all debates, and roleplaying, and group problem solving. But it's been structured in a way that's informed by the science of learning to keep people engaged, so that they will learn. And in fact, we have great evidence that they did learn.
There is something called the Council to Aid Education, it is a nonprofit that developed a test called the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the CLA. There's the CLA plus now, which we used, which was designed to allow you to assess learning over the course of four years in a college, and also compare across universities which ones are actually doing better. So there's a book, there's a famous book called, Academically Adrift. The subtitle summarizes the entire book, which is minimal learning on college campuses. They use this test to assess how much learning was actually taking place. And I think it was hundreds of different colleges. And the answer was, well, subtitle.
ASHLEY HAMER: Academically Adrift track the academic gains of 2,300 students at 24 four year colleges and universities. It found that during the first two years of school, 45% of students didn't demonstrate any significant improvement in critical thinking, analytic reasoning, or other higher level skills. Over four years, 36% of students didn't demonstrate significant gains. The author say the main reason for this is quote, "lack of rigor." Teachers aren't assigning enough work and students aren't doing enough studying, they say.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: What does the test test? It tests critical thinking, problem solving, various aspects of verbal expression. We gave it to our students at the beginning of the first year before they started and then at the end of the first year, after one year. Begin in the first year, they score in the 78th percentile. So 50th percentile, by definition, is the middle. It's the average. So our students came in 78, they're bright. We selected them that way. That's the beginning.
At the end of the first year, 99th percentile. This is compared to seniors in other places. So after one year at Minerva, you were scoring in the 99th percentile compared to seniors other places. Oh, and by the way, our average scores were the absolute highest of any of the hundred plus places that administer the test. Moreover, the swing from 78th percentile of 99th, 21 points, was the largest that the Council to Aid Education apparently had ever recorded.
So this is based on one year, all seminars, all active learning, all with a curriculum that explicitly teaches critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction. So we've never looked at the items of the test. We're not teaching to the test. But if in fact what we're doing is effective, they should have done really well by the end of the year. And they did. So it seems to be working.
CODY GOUGH: I have to ask, how does one teach critical thinking? It seems so abstract to me.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: You are absolutely right. So if you Google, this is an interesting thing to do. For quote marks around critical thinking and Google it, you'll get millions and millions of hits. OK, start reading them. They're all over the map. They almost nothing to do with each other. Why? Because you were right. The concept is abstract. It's not one thing. It turns out, critical thinking is a very heterogeneous collection of separate things that have been grouped together.
So for example, a lot of people think critical thinking is evaluating claims. So I can say, here's a claim, lectures are a great way to teach but a bad way to learn. Well, you might try to evaluate that. You might-- what would you do? I'm going to ask you, what would you do?
CODY GOUGH: I would think about that and use my previous experience, and try to imagine other people's experiences. And then mix it all together and try to come up with a conclusion.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Yep, so you do things like try to think of a counterexample, think of what the assumptions are, think of the logic, that stuff. All right, that's a kind of critical thinking. Now compare that to if you were trying to advise someone whether they should take a year off or go to college immediately. Say, so now, you set up a payoff matrix in your head. What's to be gained, what's to be lost. And we, as human beings, our brains are set up so we have loss aversion. So we're especially sensitive to that, should be aware of that. Notice that the kind of critical thinking you use in that comparison contrast has almost no overlap with how you evaluate claims.
Now think about other kinds of critical things. Try to figure out what the problem is before you try to solve it. People often will leap into trying to solve a problem before they're really clear on exactly what it is. So that kind of critical thinking involves, well, what are the range of possibilities? OK, and then when you start thinking about how to frame the problem, thinking about what tools are available. Blah, blah, blah. It's very different. The point is critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, effective interaction, all those things, those core competencies we focus on are not one thing. They're collection of different things, each of them is. And until we figure that out, which in retrospect now seems perfectly obvious but was not obvious to us, until we figure that out, we could not figure out how to teach critical thinking.
So once we did, we said, OK, let's teach evaluating claims. So how do we do that? Well, there are various heuristics out there. We can have people role play. We can have them do problem solving, and so forth. And we did.
CODY GOUGH: And just like that? You've taught critical thinking just by some role playing and problem solving?
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Well, we have to-- the trick is you always start with a learning outcome. In this case, we want them to learn to evaluate claims, say, what aspect. And then we break that down into specific activity learning goals that characterize an activity, they're going to do an active learning. So it could be debate, could be problem solving, it could be role playing, whatever. There's lots and lots of different kinds of active learning things. But they've been designed to draw on the science of learning, to get them engaged, to have them setting up the right kind of associations, give them feedback so they can do deliberate practice, all this stuff that we built in. So the key though, the absolute key, is to have a clear goal as to what you want them to achieve at the end of the session.
So every Minerva class starts with, here's the learning goals. Here's what we're going to be addressing. Tell them that. And at the end, we return to them say, OK, you think it was successful. What do you think? So we've designed the activities with the goals in mind. But you know what? We're in the fourth year of doing this now. They've gotten better and better. We didn't get it right the first time. It's been iterating. We'll probably never get it perfect, but it's getting better. Because we get feedback from not only the students, not only faculty, but co-employers.
So we have our students doing internships over the summer. And at the end of the internships, we have a structured interview for their supervisors to find out how well they did, with respect to the stuff they should have learned. The practical knowledge. And the results have been spectacular. I mean, I think it's 100% of the employers would like to have our students again.
CODY GOUGH: Wow. Now you've looked at traditional institutions as well. Are there any organizations, or activities or disciplines that you think do better at teaching this type of critical thinking that are accessible more broadly? Or do you just think this is completely unique to Minerva? I mean, what you're saying, I'm trying to think, where can I go learn how to critically think better? And other than your institution, I can't think of anything.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Well, we have a master's program, which would be a perfect place to learn this kind of thing. I strongly recommend looking into that. Master's and decision analysis, I believe it's now called. So that's the critical thing, obviously, is a big component of that. But you have a point. I mean, many, many institutions have not one, sometimes up to three, courses in critical thinking. But they invariably miss a crucial fact from the science of learning. Let me start off with that anecdote.
It's an introductory physics class at a distinguished institution, which will go unnamed, and is for non majors. So the professor decides got to have some real world examples to get them interested and engaged. So he decides to use a lot of baseball examples. A lot of physics in baseball, hitting the bat and all that. So he used so many baseball examples that he had run out of examples by the time he got to the final. So for the final, he use football. The reaction, not fair. The whole class was based on baseball. And for the final, you tricked us. You switched the subject. This is called a failure of transfer.
One of the hardest problems in the science of learning is taking what you learn in one context and generalizing it, using it in another context. This was an egregious case because it's called near transfer. They're actually pretty similar to each other, but there are many cases of what's called far transfer, where on the surface, they don't look very similar at all, but the underlying principles are the same. So the problem is because the way our brains are set up, if you teach critical thinking in the context of philosophy, or close reading in English or chemistry, you name it.
So people will learn it but vis-a-vis that particular subject matter, they won't extend it beyond that. They won't transfer. The only way you can get transfer that I'm aware of is you have to teach them the principles. And you need a lot of varied examples of how those principles are applied in different kinds of contexts. If you don't do both of those, it's very, very difficult. A lot of data on this that's difficult for people to spontaneously transfer. It's even sometimes difficult when they're cued and they're given hints.
CODY GOUGH: And the transferability, is that the type of thing that is assessed by this college assessment that Minerva performed so well in?
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: That's right. So for us, that it should have been near transfer because we were teaching them critical thinking and problem solving-- creative thinking. We're very close to problem solving. And this got problem solving as a component. The creative thinking involves design and other kinds of things. It's not just problem solving, it's broader. And of course, we, in fact-- communication involve reading and writing, and things like that. So that should have fed into-- so there should have been transfer, but it wouldn't be identical because it's not exactly what we taught them. It's not even using the same kind of content. So it should have-- if we're successful, it should have transferred. And it did. But it's near transfer. It's pretty similar stuff.
CODY GOUGH: Sure. And this test is able to assess that. Because my first reaction when you mentioned a test, is I think of ACTs and SATs, and other tests that are standardized, which probably contribute to some of the problems that we're talking about with scalability of education.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Yeah, so we don't use any of those tests, by the way.
CODY GOUGH: For your applications, for your admissions?
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: No. They're culture specific. If you come from a certain kind of family, you can raise your scores by 200 points, by the way. By getting the right kind of tutor, pay for that. It's just they're not fair. And they look like they're culture specific also, which we don't like.
ASHLEY HAMER: It's true. When it comes to average scores on the SAT, white and Asian students have historically done better than Black and Hispanic students, wealthier students have done better than poor students, and boys have done better than girls. It's not necessarily the tests fault, and test designers and researchers are hard at work trying to figure out why these gaps exist. But critics tout plenty of examples of questions that they say are biased. Verbal questions that use cultural expressions that are used more often in white culture than in Black culture, for instance, or math questions that are literally about the ratio of high performing boys to girls in math classes.
The College Board fully revamped the SAT in 2016. And they stressed that every new question is reviewed by a range of people from all walks of life to ensure the language isn't ambiguous or biased. Still, this is such a complex issue that will probably see more debate over its fairness in the years to come.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: So Minerva, 80% of our students are not Americans. We believe ability is distributed all around the world. And so don't have to grow bias for anything, actually. It's very blind admissions process, we're not even aware of, in some cases, what gender, country, people are applying from. So what we did here is started by defining what we want our students to be able to do when they graduated and then backed into it. So everything we're doing was propelled by the goals we had for what we wanted students to be able to do after they got out. So very different approach.
So once you get these kind of basic ideas, the idea of active learning, the idea of having a goal. This is such a fundamental idea, that you actually want them to learn something specific when they get out. Here's what we want you to be able to do and know.
CODY GOUGH: This actually sounds like a thing that people can apply on an individual level. So one of our past podcast episodes they interviewed an autodidact who taught himself chemistry using Wikipedia and YouTube videos, essentially, because he ran a distillery and he wanted to know, can I age rum and whiskey 20 years in just six days. And he found out a way to do it. And this is a thing people have tried for hundreds of years to do. And his thing was, I was outcome specific. I had a goal and I wanted to achieve this goal. It wasn't, I want to learn chemistry, or I just want to learn something. Because learning, in and of itself, is a goal. It doesn't necessarily get you to those outcomes that you're talking about.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: So there's a little tension here. I mean, I agree with that and it sounds like, what a guy. But there's a funny thing, that it's good to have furniture of the mind. It's good to know some random stuff that you don't really know exactly when it's going to come in handy. But it's even better if you've got stuff that you know is going to come in handy, but you can generalize it and bring it into new contexts. But it shouldn't-- I don't think vocational learning is a great thing, by the way.
So vocational learning is the extreme of what you just said, where you really learn something very, very practical. I'm going to learn how to make buggy whips. OK, really, really good ones. Or I'm going to learn how to service carburetors. 10 years from now, most cars will be electric or something. So you don't want to focus really narrowly on one set of practical goals. So practical knowledge, as a term, was-- which I used, which is probably a bad idea in retrospect because people confuse it with vocational, which is not, or pre-professional, which is not. It's really very broad. But the idea is, it's broad in a generative way that you can use in unanticipated contexts to further your goals. So it's worth knowing some random stuff because you just can't tell sometimes, it turns out to be useful.
But it shouldn't all be random stuff. It shouldn't all be just learning for learning's sake, which is unfortunately from my perspective, a mantra in many universities. Learning for learning's sake.
CODY GOUGH: Do you think that someday, this new learning style can go down to high school and even middle school education?
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Oh, absolutely, without question. In fact, one of the striking things about the literature on active learning, it's actually more effective-- it's effective for everybody. But it's more, even more, even more effective for women in STEM fields-- science, technology, engineering, math-- and for disadvantaged minorities.
So the delta, the comparison of how well people do in active learning compared to traditional lectures, is even bigger advantage in those conditions. It's a beautiful meta analysis of this by Freeman et al. In 2014, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which meta analysis, they go through hundreds of studies and show that there are these threats in them. So I would expect going down to high school, at least middle school, I suspect. But high school, I'm quite confident that it's a much better way to teach.
CODY GOUGH: Fascinating. Is there a reason for the women and people of underprivileged backgrounds, why is that?
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Well, I can speculate. I don't know what's the answer, but I can speculate. I think a lot of the reason that disadvantaged minorities and women do poorly in certain contexts has to do with things like stereotype threat. So this is Claude Steele, he's work at Stanford. What they did, things like, give you the parts of the math SAT. And before you take it, I ask you to write down your race, or not. Turns out that if you write down your race, and you're African-American, you do significantly worse on the math component than if you didn't write down your race. It doesn't make any difference if you're white.
So he thinks that what's going on is that even if you don't believe it, you know there's a stereotype that African-Americans aren't going to be as good at math. And he calls the phenomenon stereotype threat. So if you think that other people believe this, it's going to make you nervous and edgy. You won't do as well. So the most beautiful study of this, that I'm aware of, was by a woman named Nalani Ambady, who looked at Asian women. And she had them write down either their race or their gender before doing a math test. And what she showed was, if they wrote down their gender, they did worse than if they didn't write down anything. If they wrote down they were Asian, guess what happened.
CODY GOUGH: They did better?
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Yeah, stereotypes.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Isn't that amazing, yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: The Claude Steele study about stereotype threat that Dr. Kosslyn mentioned was co-authored by Joshua Aronson and published in 1995. In the more than two decades since then, that study has been cited around 5,000 times, as other researchers have dug further into the effect. Across more than 300 studies looking into stereotype threat in tests of intelligence, memory, math, driving, child care skills, and even golf putting, research has shown that there isn't a single cause or a single fix for it. Even in the original study, the African-American participants only experienced stereotype threat when the math test was framed as a test of their intellectual ability. When it was presented as a lab test to study problem solving, the performance gap vanished.
Even stranger, stereotype threat doesn't only affect stigmatized groups like women and minorities. Caucasian men, for example, perform worse on math tests when they think they'll be compared to Asian men. And they do worse on physical tests when they're framed as testing natural athletic ability. The leading theory for why this happens is that when you're reminded that there's a stereotype about you, you focus on proving that stereotype wrong instead of just doing the best you can on the task at hand.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: So you ask why I think active learning is more effective, why there's a bigger delta? I think there's some stereotype threat going on in those fields, STEM for women. And I think in general, knowing that you're going to be put to the test, I mean, we don't do any testing. There's no midterms, no finals. We assess them in a rolling basis.
So you always know where you are, but it also gets rid of a lot of anxiety. So that by getting rid of these proof points, where it's high stakes, you've got all this anxiety and has a huge advantage. It has so many advantages, it plays into what we know about how learning works. It just plays right into it. And it also relieves these other things. I mean, this meta analysis I mentioned, there was an editorial written where they asked if it was ethical to continue using lectures in traditional teaching now knowing this.
CODY GOUGH: We do a lot of unethical things as a society for cost reasons, or for whatever reasons.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: But that's what it comes down to. So if in fact you couldn't offer an education at all, if you didn't have lectures because you can't afford it, then the ethics become more complicated. So one of the things we're working on here is a new way, something brand new, to do active learning at scale. So this is something that we're just developing right now so you can get the best of both worlds. And that is going to be really cool.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, I'm really excited to see what you've got planned. And if anybody wants to read more about this, again, the new book is Building the Intentional University, Minerva and the future of Higher Education, which is like a roadmap, I mean, it really reads almost like a blueprint for how you're going to accomplish this step by step, which is really very, very detailed and interesting. And you mentioned the benefits of knowing random information a little bit ago. I'd like to wrap up our conversation with our final segment. We call it the curiosity challenge, where I'll take something from curiosity.com, give you a break for a second, and quiz you about something pretty random.
In April 2016, a wealthy donor gave the University of Miami a $2.2 million endowment to produce the first academic chair for the study of a particular subject in the United States. This is an interdisciplinary appointment in the College of Arts and Sciences. And I'll give you a hint. It has to do with religion. So can you tell me what was the subject, that this was the first academic chair of at University of Miami?
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: It has to do with-- is it, well, I'm going to, of course, being an academic, I'm much better asking questions than answering them. So my impulse is to start asking you more questions to try to converge on what the answer is. I don't know, whether dolphins have any kind of spiritual sense.
[LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: That would be really great for University of Miami, Miami dolphins. This was actually the University of Miami, as of April 2016, had the United States first academic chair for the study of atheism in the United States.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: The study of atheism?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, and this was from a wealthy atheist donor named Louis J. Appignani, and said quote, "I'm trying to eliminate discrimination against atheists, so this is a step in the right direction to make atheism legitimate," unquote.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: I want to see someone actually support agnostics. Lenny Bruce once said, an agnostic is an atheist with an insurance policy.
[LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: I love that quote.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I'd like to see some more study of that. All right, it's my turn to ask you a question?
CODY GOUGH: Sure is, yeah.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: OK, it's got two parts. So I'm a musician. Not professional, but I do it for fun. I play bass. I have for many years. And when do you think the first electric bass was actually marketed, and how long do you think it took after that before it became mass marketed? So this is in the context of a standard rock band. It has got a lead guitar player or a rhythm guitar player, a bass player, and a drummer. I think Beatles. OK, so when do you think the first electric bass was sold and how long did it take before it was actually mass market?
CODY GOUGH: Sure. I grew up listening to an oldies station and I know that a lot of those bands still played with an upright bass, which I thought was cool. So I'm going to say it was probably not until the 70s. Let's go maybe 1973.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: It turns out that the bass was actually-- an electric bass-- invented in the 30s, but it took about 20 years. So it's in 50s, which is interesting to me, anyway. And it's got so many advantages. But anyway, I guess we're going to end on that note.
[LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, it does have advantages. But people are still buying vinyl records. And we're like eight pieces of technology past that already. So some people just prefer the traditional style.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Yeah, it's true. But the electric-- you have so much flexibility. I just read a quote from somebody else, fantastic bass player. I can't pronounce his name. His last name is John, he's from India. I can't pronounce his first name so I won't try, but he played the bass on the live version of Lou Reed's Rock and Roll Animal, which is one of the big intro to Sweet Jane. It's one of the best, in my opinion, bass lines, sets of bass.
And afterwards, he commended this guy, Pakrish, or something like that. I can't pronounce his first name, John, that you should use the entire neck, you paid for it. So the idea is that you're not just staying at the very low end, that you want to use the whole thing. And you can hear it. The live version of Sweet Jane on Rock and Roll album. Listen to the bass on that, it is fantastic.
CODY GOUGH: I will do that. Well, thank you, again, so much, Dr. Stephen Kosslyn, for joining me on the Curiosity podcast. This is all really great. Well, links to all your books and everything in the show notes, of course.
STEPHEN KOSSLYN: Well, thanks. This has been fun. I've really appreciated your time and interest. Thanks very much.
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ASHLEY HAMER: Let's dig into the extra credit question. This week's question comes from Rhea Sharma, who writes, why did all plants evolve to be green? If you have a question you'd like answered on a future episode, send it in to podcast@curiosity.com. The answer, after this.
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CODY GOUGH: We've got a super quick and super exciting update about one of our recent guests.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, do you remember our conversation with Dr. Louis Rosenberg about swarm intelligence? His company, Unanimous AI, just won Best in Show at South by Southwest.
CODY GOUGH: We wanted to say congratulations to Dr. Rosenberg and his team for such an awesome accomplishment, but we're actually breaking him up because of a completely different story.
ASHLEY HAMER: You might remember that on our podcast, Dr. Rosenberg talked about how swarm intelligence predicted the Kentucky Derby superfecta in 2016. Basically, correctly guessing the right pick on a bet with 540 to 1 odds. Newsweek wrote about how a $20 bet turned into $11,000 in what they described as the Holy Grail of gambling.
CODY GOUGH: So here's where it gets crazy. Unanimous AI posted its predictions for all 10 English Premier League matchups.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wait, what's that?
CODY GOUGH: It's soccer, Ashley, or what the rest of the world calls football. Anyway, Unanimous AI posted its predictions for all 10 English Premier League matchups in the first week of March, and they were 100% accurate. These odds were even crazier than the Kentucky Derby superfecta. And one Curiosity podcast listener bet $1.
ASHLEY HAMER: And won $1,089.
CODY GOUGH: From $1 bet.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, now obviously, please don't gamble all your money away. And please get help if you think you might have a gambling problem. After all, Unanimous AI did predict the Patriots would win the 2018 Super Bowl. And I think they didn't.
CODY GOUGH: They didn't.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK. Their predictions are very good, but not perfect.
CODY GOUGH: But we can now, officially, say that it pays to listen to the Curiosity podcast. You never know what you'll learn, so please tell at least one friend about our show. And it'll be a safe bet to say that we will really, really appreciate it.
ASHLEY HAMER: And for more information on swarm intelligence, visit unanimous.ai.
CODY GOUGH: Or check out our podcast because it was so good.
ASHLEY HAMER: It was great.
Ready for the answer to this week's extra credit question? Rhea Sharma asked why plants evolve to be green. The answer is really complicated. I was amazed at how complicated this was. The short answer is that scientists don't actually know. I mean, of course, plants are green because they contain chlorophyll, which reflects green light. But get this. Sunlight is white, and therefore contains all the colors. But the sun's particular flavor of white light has more green wavelengths than any other color. So why evolve to absorb blue light and red light but reflect green?
There are a lot of theories and we can't get into all of them, but I'll give you one. Scientists believe that the earliest life on Earth was actually purple. It used a chemical other than chlorophyll to absorb sunlight. And that actually absorbed green wavelengths. That might have given other organisms a reason to evolve in such a way that they absorbed all the leftover wavelengths those purple critters didn't use. Still, that doesn't explain why most plants are green today. You can get into all the theories behind this fascinating question on curiosity.com.
CODY GOUGH: We will be back next week to talk about privacy in the digital age. That's all for this week for the learning podcast--
CODY GOUGH: No.
CODY GOUGH: --for the Curiosity podcast. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm Ashley Hamer.
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SPEAKER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.