Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Is ChatGPT & Google Making You Dumber?

Dear friends, good afternoon! I am Tom Niklas, a seasoned writer and book reviewer. Welcome everyone to Tom's ReadVault, please subscribe to me and join us in reading 100 books a year together.

Today I want to share a great book with you that reveals the secrets of learning: "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning." I'm sure many of you wonder - why some naturally gifted people seem to easily pick up knowledge and skills. Are they just born smarter than us? I've always been curious about that too.

On the other hand, listeners often ask me, "Tom, how do you read so many books and still remember and talk about what you learned? What's your secret?" Honestly, I don't have one. I tell them I don't make any special effort to memorize stuff. They ask me how many times I read each book and I say just once. They don't believe me that I can remember things from reading a book only one time. I explain that it's not that I remember everything from one read-through. After I finish a book, I set it aside and don't think about it anymore. Then right before I'm going to share insights from that book, I'll spend an hour or so reviewing it - I'll take out a blank sheet of paper and sketch the main ideas and concepts. Then I'll flip through the book again to fill in anything I missed. That's my process.

It wasn't until I stumbled upon this book by chance that I realized some of the seemingly ordinary study methods I use to line up remarkably well with research-backed best practices for learning. The science of successful learning revealed in this book helped me understand a lot about effective learning habits and techniques.

For example, I remember back in school, lots of girls would color code and highlight their textbooks, taking meticulous notes and using tons of different colored highlighters. I'm sure many of you enjoy coloring in your books too! When they were done, those textbooks were a rainbow mess, so it seemed they had put in a ton of work. But then their test scores didn't always reflect all that effort.

One of the key points in this book is that repetitive reading and extensive note-taking provide very limited benefits for actual learning. I imagine this conclusion comes as a big surprise to many since it goes against what we've always assumed was the best way to study.

But the research presented in the book shows that the more notes you jot down while reading or the more lines and highlights you add, the less your brain bothers recording the information. We're wired to think that writing things down and rereading them helps us remember, when in fact it often doesn't work that way.

We may not fully grasp the learning process. That's why I had to share this book - it offers insights that could be game-changing for helping teens study more effectively. If we can solve the "I can't remember anything" problem and make learning feel effortless and scientific for kids, it would massively boost their performance. I think that would be hugely impactful for everyone, right?

I see the techniques outlined in this book as an upgraded version of what we previously discussed regarding "deliberate practice" - the idea that spending close to 10,000 hours deliberately practicing a skill, while incorporating focus, feedback, and ongoing refinement, can lead to expertise. This book takes a deeper look into deliberate practice, poses some thoughtful challenges to it, and offers forward-thinking enhancements.

Photo by Kristopher Allison on Unsplash

It kicks off with an illustrative story about a pilot named Matt Brown who suddenly loses engine power mid-flight. As the plane starts banking to one side, his brain scrambles to quickly recall everything he knows about the aircraft's weight and capacity limits, the risks of restarting the dead engine, and the angle needed to glide the plane down to safety. It's a heart-pounding flurry of split-second assessments and decisions that ultimately enables Matt to successfully emergency land the plane on a runway.

The point here is that when you're sitting in the pilot's seat responsible for keeping that plane in the sky, you don't have time to google search procedures or ask ChatGPT what to do. You probably can't even pull out the operating handbook. You have to rely entirely on the knowledge stored in your brain to rapidly calculate the next steps. So merely accumulating knowledge isn't enough - you need to develop mental models that you can automatically tap into to evaluate situations and identify solutions. That's what real learning looks like. We each go through this process of building mental models as we gain expertise in a skill.

Now, here's the first big, jaw-dropping challenge this book throws at traditional thinking around learning. After plenty of experiments and data analysis, researchers concluded that repeated reading is largely a waste of effort for retaining information long-term. That's because the more times we read something, the more we strengthen the illusion that we know it and have committed it to memory.

Especially when you're highlighting and underlining passages in a notebook, it makes you feel like you must have learned and retained the information. This phenomenon is similar to the “Google effect,” where having instant access to answers online means you don't bother truly absorbing knowledge into your brain.

Now that people rely so heavily on ChatGPT as well, they’re less inclined to put in the effort to actively study and comprehend information themselves. They just keep asking ChatGPT for answers without retaining anything.

There’s an example in the book involving a repeated reading test that education researchers conducted with psychologists. The first group read the same passage over and over back-to-back, while the second group read it once, and then re-read the passage one week later. When both groups were assessed, the people who re-read the passage after a week's delay retained far more than those who power-read it 10 times in a row. What was even more effective than re-reading after a week? Take a short quiz on the passage.