What are different styles?

What are different methods that you think people can think? If someone's listening right now and they're like, Andrew, well, I want to learn a new instrument or I want to learn a new language, or maybe it's, I want to learn how to start a podcast or I want to learn how to play a sport or whatever it may be, how can someone start thinking about how they should approach learning? Terrific question.

And fortunately, nowadays we can look to studies done in humans that define some very key principles.

The first principle is that the whole process of neuroplasticity and learning is really a two-stage process.

First, there must be focus and alertness. That focus and alertness is associated with the release of neurochemicals, so-called neuromodulators, things like acetylcholine in particular, which sort of acts as a highlighter pen, if you will, for certain connections in the brain to later be reinforced.

And the neurochemical adrenaline, which is also called epinephrine, is associated with an increase in kind of agitation and alertness. Acetylcholine, think of it as kind of a spotlight or a highlighter pen for certain connections in the brain.

So you need alertness and focus.

And then the second stage is that it is only during periods of deep rest, in particular sleep, and something that I call non-sleep deep rest, things like yoga nidra, things like shallow naps, things like forms of meditation that don't involve a lot of focused concentration.

You're a far more experienced meditator than I, so I'm outside my wheelhouse when I'm talking about meditation.

But it is only periods of intense focus and alertness followed by periods of deep rest that allow the nervous system to change.

And there is an abundance of evidence for that. So that's the first thing to understand.

The brain actually rewires during deep sleep and rest because during deep sleep and rest, naps, yoga nidra, deep sleep, there's a replay of the very same cells in the brain that were active during learning, oftentimes in reverse for reasons that are still not understood, but at a much higher repetition rate.

So you're actually getting repetitions while you sleep.

This is why one will strain to learn a language or a motor skill or maths or something like that over and over and over.

It doesn't happen.

You take a couple of nights sleep, take a break from it, and all of a sudden it's there.

It's because it happens in rest. Now, there's some other things that one can do to enhance this process further that are arrived to us from good data.

First of all, there's a so-called ultradian rhythm, which is the 90 minute cycles during which we can focus pretty well for a duration of about 90 minutes, of course, flickering in and out of focus.

Nobody really focuses for 90 minutes straight unless they've built up that capacity or they are very interested in what they're learning.

They're just wrapped with attention.

Usually people flicker in and out.

And of course, nowadays, there's a lot of literature and ideas about ways to maintain focus.

Put the phone away, limit noise.

Some people like background noise.

Some people like music, some don't.

It's very contextual, highly individualized.

But 90 minutes is sort of the batch of time that the brain can focus really hard on one thing before it needs a true rest of an hour or two before you can go back to learning or working very hard. The other thing is that there's some very interesting data showing that shallow naps or NSDR, non-sleep deep rest done within four hours of one of these 90 minute learning bouts can be very beneficial for accelerating learning.

And then there are these incredible data on so-called gap effects.

So there've been studies now of skills that are physical skills, mental skills, where people will, for instance, try to learn scales on the piano or a math problem or a spatial problem or a physical skill.

And then at random, every so often a buzzer will go off and the person will just be told to do nothing.

Sit their eyes closed or eyes open and do nothing.

Just stop the learning process for about 10 seconds and then return to doing what they're doing.

These are these little micro rests.

It turns out that during those micro rests, the hippocampus or brain areas, you know, that's associated with learning and memory and the neocortex also associated with learning and memory undergoes replay of the thing that the individual is trying to learn at 20 times the speed, also in reverse, just as in sleep.

And that can lead and has been shown to lead to accelerations in learning. So there are these ways, I wouldn't even think of them as hacks because the word hack is a little tricky because when I think of the word hack, it seems like doing something with an object or a tool that wasn't designed for that purpose, right?

The nervous system already harbors these mechanisms and one can access them through these little micro rests.

So whether or not you're a child or an adult, every so often when trying to learn something, just pause for 10 seconds or so, do your best to just clear your mind.

Of course, it's very hard to clear the mind, but do your best to clear the mind and then go back to the learning task as it were.

And that has been shown to significantly accelerate the learning process and the retention of newly learned information. And then the last thing you touched on earlier, which is this notion of incremental learning.

You said you like to throw yourself into something as kind of a litmus test of whether or not you enjoy it or not.

Turns out that from beautiful work done by my colleague at Stanford School of Medicine, Eric Knudson, has shown that yes, it's true that early in development in humans, this would be up until the mid twenties, we can learn things in larger batches and much more easily than we can later in life.

However, if one batches that work into smaller increments, and so for instance, deciding maybe set a timer, turning the phone off otherwise, and saying, I'm going to spend three minutes, just three minutes in trying to intensely learn this thing, even if I feel like I'm failing.

If one does that repeatedly, those little increments of learning can lead to an outsized amount of learning overall.

And so the nervous system loves incremental learning.

It loves to batch things into focused little bouts.

And if that's already the tools that you've built up, which it sounds like you have, wonderful.

But if somebody is out there trying, struggling to learn, really trying to break things down into very brief periods of intense focus, that is the cue by which during sleep, the nervous system will change itself.

And this has been shown over and over and over again, even in very late life individuals that people in their, we like to think life could go on further than this, but people in their eighties and nineties still have neuroplasticity.

There's even evidence that new neurons can be produced in the hippocampus of people in their late eighties and nineties.

So the capacity is there.