Book Review: How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens, 2014Random House 978–0812993882 272 pages

How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens, Benedict Carey, 2014 Random House 9780812993882, 272 pages

Numerous books have been published on the science of learning, and How We Learn is in that collection. Written by Benedict Carey, a science reporter, this book covers how the brain collects, organizes, and retains information, and how these processes are key to determining what information we learn and how well we remember it.

Carey divides the book into four parts. The first part, on basic learning theory, covers how the biology of the brain plays into learning and how forgetting is actually an important part of learning. Imagine how difficult retrieval of information would be if you remembered everything you experienced with any of your senses! Forgetting weeds out the unimportant information, such as what happened on your routine commute to work. Understanding why the brain lets go of certain information and retains others helps you use the brain's natural mechanisms to remember the information you want to save.

The logical follow-up question is how do you make sure what is retained is what you want? This is covered in the second part of the book. Carey first looks at the effect of context on what is learned. For example, if the context makes the information important, it is more likely to be stored. Next, Carey covers the importance of spacing out study time, which strengthens the ability to recall information. By repeatedly requiring the brain to pull the information out of storage, the links to the information are strengthened and it is easier to remember it. Carey also discusses the importance of testing to remember information. “Testing” in this case means asking yourself questions related to the material you are trying to remember to see if you can answer them without help from prompts or notes. Rapid feedback is important in this testing: accurate information is retained better if corrections to inaccuracies are quickly identified and performed.

Now that we have strategies to remember lots of information, we need strategies to be able to apply it. Part of this application is problem-solving, which is covered in the third part of the book. The best techniques for problem-solving are generally counter-intuitive. How many of us and our students go all-in for problem solving, stubbornly plugging away until we come up with a workable solution? This works, sometimes, but it's not the most effective way to solve problems. Instead, quitting the problem-solving process temporarily, letting ideas percolate for a while, mulling them over and coming back after a rest, and working on something else while letting the problem sit are methods that let your brain work on the problem over time, sort through information and make connections between discrete bits of information. I was an unconscious adopter of this method during my undergrad studies in chemical engineering. There were so many times I walked out of class or wrestled with homework problems having no idea what was going on, gave up on things for the day, came back the next day with a much more solid grasp on the material, and easily finished up problems. I had no idea why this was the case so often, but I knew it worked. Now I know why: my brain had sorted itself out during the downtime.

A lot of this offline processing is done subconsciously. How the subconscious can help learning is covered in the final section of the book. Carey discusses how the subconscious can make connections between things that the conscious mind may not, as well as how important sleep is for memory. In particular, he discusses how memory consolidation works during sleep and what strategies to use to promote different parts of the consolidation process. Staying up late versus getting up early accomplish different things, so it's important to think about what you need to do the next day when making that choice.

If you've already read several books about the science of learning (e.g. How Learning Works by Ambrose and others or Make It Stick by McDaniel and Brown), this book won't have a lot of new content for you. However, if you're new to the subject, have graduate students who are preparing to teach and could use a pedagogical boost, or have undergraduates with unfortunate study habits who are wondering why their usual study methods aren't working anymore, this book is an excellent introduction. It has a casual, friendly tone that makes you feel like the author is a well-versed tour guide. While the scientific rigor is not the strongest I've seen in books on education, the content does have support from the literature and is in agreement with other books on the science of learning. Overall, this is a good book for a newcomer to the topic and serves as a good reference guide to those with more experience in the science of learning.