How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now

Practice regularly. One-shot learning is not enough—children need to consolidate what they have learned to render it automatic, unconscious, and reflexive. Such routinization frees up our prefrontal and parietal circuits, allowing them to attend to other activities. The most effective strategy is to space out learning: a little bit every day. Spaci

Let students sleep. Sleep is an essential ingredient of our learning algorithm. Our brain benefits each time we sleep, even when we nap. So, let us make sure that our children sleep long and deep.

Keep children active, curious, engaged, and autonomous. Passive students do not learn much. Make them more active. Engage their intelligence so that their minds sparkle with curiosity and constantly generate new hypotheses. But do not expect them to discover everything on their own: guide them through a structured curriculum.

overly illustrated textbooks and excessively decorated classrooms only distract children from their primary task and prevent them from concentrating.

Brain imaging shows that during sleep, the neural circuits that we used during the preceding day get reactivated.16 After playing hours of Tetris, gamers were scanned the following night: they literally hallucinated a cascade of geometric shapes in their dreams, and their eyes made corresponding movements, from top to bottom.

Accept and correct mistakes. To update their mental models, our brain areas must exchange error messages. Error is therefore the very condition of learning. Let us not punish errors, but correct them quickly, by giving children detailed but stress-free feedback. According to the Education Endowment Foundation’s synthesis, the quality of the feedbac

If, on the other hand, knowledge must be maintained for several months or years, the revision interval should be extended proportionately. The rule of thumb is to review the information at intervals of approximately 20 percent of the desired memory duration—for instance, rehearse after two months if you want a memory to last about ten months.

“Making learning conditions more difficult, thus requiring students to engage more cognitive effort, often leads to enhanced retention.”

information: it can only replay what it has already experienced. To learn a skill as complex as a new language, the only thing that works is practice during the day, then sleep during the night to reactivate and consolidate what we acquired.