How We Learn (34 page)

Chapter Seven: Quitting Before You’re Ahead

1
reads a letter attributed to Mozart
Brewster Ghiselin, ed.,
The Creative Process: Reflections of Invention in the Arts and Sciences
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

2
while actually writing
Joseph Heller’s description of his writing process is taken from an interview he did with George Plimpton, “The Art of Fiction No. 51,”
The Paris Review
, No. 60, Winter 1974.

3
and sometimes ending in failure
Ghiselin,
The Creative Process
, 85–91.

4
until the bill was paid
Bluma Zeigarnik, “On Finished and Unfinished Tasks,” from
A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Company, 1938), 300–14.

5
as rapidly and correctly as possible
Ibid
., 307.

6
a genuine need arises
Ibid
., 307.

7
destroyed her papers
A. V. Zeigarnik, “Bluma Zeigarnik: A Memoir,”
Gestalt Theory
2007, Vol. 29, No. 3, 256–68.

8
the effect of goals on perception
Henk Aarts, Ap Dijksterhuis, and Peter Vries, “On the Psychology of Drinking: Being Thirsty and Perceptually Ready,”
British Journal of Psychology
92, 2001, 631–42.

9
under other circumstances
Ibid
., 188.

10
ears as magnets
Eudora Welty’s interview with Linda Kuehl appears in “The Art of Fiction No. 47,”
The Paris Review
, No. 55, Fall 1972.

11
She was failing them
Ronda Leathers Dively,
Preludes to Insight: Creativity, Incubation, and Expository Writing
(New York: Hampton Press, 2006).

12
in a professional journal
Ibid
., 98.

13
knowledge of the subject
Ibid
., 101.

Chapter Eight: Being Mixed Up

1
University of Ottawa
R. Kerr and B. Booth, “Specific and Varied Practice of Motor Skill,”
Perceptual and Motor Skills
, Vol. 46, No. 2, April 1978, 395–401.

2
enhance movement awareness
Ibid
., 401.

3
common badminton serves
Sinah Goode and Richard A. Magill, “Contextual Interference Effects in Learning Three Badminton Serves,”
Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport
, 1986, Vol. 57, No. 4, 308–14.

4
appraise the effectiveness of practice
Ibid
., 312.

5
a list of fifty names
T. K. Landauer and R. A. Bjork, “Optimum Rehearsal Patterns and Name Learning,” In M. M. Gruneberg, P. E. Morris, and R. N. Sykes, eds.,
Practical Aspects of Memory
(London: Academic Press, 1978), 625–32.

6
published in 1992
Richard A. Schmidt and Robert A. Bjork, “New Conceptualizations of Practice: Common Principles in Three Paradigms Suggest New Concepts for Training,”
Psychological Science
, Vol. 3, No. 4, July 1992, 207–17.

7
performance capabilities
Ibid
., 215.

8
such as spatial patterns
Nelson Goodman, “The Status of Style Author,”
Critical Inquiry
, Vol. 1, No. 4, June 1975, 799–811.

9
the same thing in their experiment
Nate Kornell and Robert A. Bjork, “Learning Concepts and Categories: Is Spacing the ‘Enemy of Induction’?”
Psychological Science
, Vol. 19, No. 6, 2008, 585–92.

10
all of an artist’s paintings together
Ibid
., 590.

11
became bitterly contentious
For more on the Math wars, see Alice Crary and Stephen Wilson, “The Faulty Logic of the ‘Math Wars,’ ”
New York Times
, June 16, 2013; John A. Van de Walle, “Reform Mathematics vs. The Basics: Understanding the Conflict and Dealing with It,” presented at the 77th Annual Meeting of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, April 23, 1999, and reprinted on
mathematicallysane.com
on April 1, 2003, at
www.mathematicallysane.com/reform-mathematics-vs-the-basics/
.

12
Oklahoma City
Not much has been written about Saxon. I relied on conversations with Doug Rohrer, Department of Psychology, University of South Florida, as well as information from an obituary written by a classmate at West Point (class of 1949), published on
www.west-point.org
, and biographical information provided by his publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

13
base sides
Kelli Taylor and Doug Rohrer, “The Effects of Interleaved Practice,”
Applied Cognitive Psychology
24, 2010, 837–48.

14
value of the word problem
Ibid
., 846.

Chapter Nine: Learning Without Thinking

1
almost always accurate—read
Dave Baldwin, “Unraveling the Batter’s Brain,”
baseballanalysts.com
, September 17, 2009; Terry Bahill and David G. Baldwin, “The Rising Fastball and Other Perceptual Illusions of Batters,”
Biomedical Engineering Principles in Sports
. G. K. Hung and J.M. Pallis, eds. (New York: Kluwer Academic, 2004), 257–87; A. Terry Bahill, David Baldwin, and Jayendran Venkateswaran, “Predicting a Baseball’s Path,”
Scientific American
, May–June 2005, Vol. 93, No. 3, 218–25.

2
and this is no small thing
Philip J. Kellman and Patrick Garrigan, “Perceptual Learning and Human Expertise,”
Physics of Life Reviews
6, 2009, 53–84.

3
masters’ memory
William G. Chase and Herbert A. Simon, “Perception in Chess,”
Cognitive Psychology
4, 1973, 55–81.

4
“
wasn’t wanted there,” Gibson said years later
Interview with Eleanor Gibson by Marion Eppler in Middlebury, VT, July 4–5, 1998, as part of Society for Research in Child Development Oral History Project; available at
www.srcd.org
.

5
conducted with her husband in 1949
James J. Gibson and Eleanor J. Gibson, “Perceptual Learning: Differentiation or Enrichment?”
Psychological Review
, Vol. 62, No. 1, 1955, 32–41.

6
subtleties of energy
Ibid
., 34.

7
achievement of this goal
Eleanor J. Gibson,
Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development
(New York: Meredith Corporation, 1969), 4.

8
instrument panel as a guide
All details about John F. Kennedy Jr.’s fatal flight are from the National Transportation Safety Board’s Probable Cause Report, NTSB identification number NYC99MA178, released on July 6, 2000. It is available at
www.ntsb.gov
.

9
through space, respectively
For my understanding of how pilots learn to fly and the layout of the cockpit in small private planes, I relied on information from Philip J. Kellman, professor, cognitive psychology, UCLA, and flights in his small plane between Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo, CA.

10
or PLM
Philip J. Kellman and Mary K. Kaiser, “Perceptual Learning Modules in Flight Training,”
Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomic Society Annual Meeting
, 1994 38, 1183–87.

11
other training contexts
Ibid.
, 1187.

12
four times higher
Stephanie Guerlain, et al, “Improving Surgical Pattern Recognition Through Repetitive Viewing of Video Clips,”
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics—Part A: Systems and Humans
, Vol. 34, No. 6, Nov. 2004, 699–707.

Chapter Ten: You Snooze, You Win

1
snakes biting their tails
August Kekule is reported to have described his dream at the German Chemical Society meeting in 1890; the story has circulated widely since then, for instance in Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen, “Sleep On It: How Snoozing Makes You Smarter,”
Scientific American
, August/September 2008.

2
stopping to rest
Jerome M. Siegel, “Sleep Viewed as a State of Adaptive Inactivity,”
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
, Vol. 10, Oct. 2009, 747–53.

3
better flight abilities
Ibid
., 751.

4
intellectual and physical
Robert Stickgold, “Sleep-dependent Memory Consolidation,”
Nature
, Vol. 437, Oct. 27, 2005, 1272–78.

5
experiment on sleep
Chip Brown, “The Stubborn Scientist Who Unraveled a Mystery of the Night,”
Smithsonian
, Oct. 2003,
www.smithsonianmag.com
.

6
the journal
Science
Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman, “Regularly Occurring Periods of Eye Motility and Concomitant Phenomena, During Sleep,”
Science
, Vol. 118, Sept. 4, 1953, 273–74.

7
a simple game
Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen, Peter T. Hu, Jessica D. Payne, Debra Titone, and Matthew P. Walker, “Human Relational Memory Requires Time and Sleep,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
, May 1, 2007, Vol. 104, No. 18, 7723–28.

8
Naples Federico II
A. Giuditta, M. V. Ambrosini, P. Montagnese, P. Mandile, M. Cotugno, G. Grassi Zucconi, and S. Vescia, “The sequential hypothesis of the function of sleep,”
Behavioural Brain Research
, Vol. 69, 1995, 157–66.

9
deep sleep and REM
Sara Mednick, Ken Nakayama, and Robert Stickgold, “Sleep-dependent Learning: A Nap Is as Good as a Night,”
Nature Neuroscience
, Vol. 6, No. 7, 2003, 697–98.

10
valuable inferences that were made
Giulio Tononi, Chiara Cirelli, “Sleep Function and Synaptic Homeostasis,”
Sleep Medicine Reviews
10, 2006, 49–62.

11
integrating the new material with the old
D. Ji and M. A. Wilson, “Coordinated memory replay in the visual cortex and hippocampus during sleep,”
Nature Neuroscience
, Vol. 10, No. 1, Jan. 2007, 100–107.

Conclusion: The Foraging Brain

1
camping trip that never ends
Steven Pinker,
How the Mind Works
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 188.

2
evolutionary history
J. Tooby and I. DeVore, “The Reconstruction
of Hominid Behavioral Evolution Through Strategic Modeling,” from
The Evolution of Human Behavior
, Warren G. Kinzey, ed. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987), 209.

3
academic and motor domains
Annu Rev Neurosci
. 2008;31:69–89. doi: 10.1146/annurev.neuro.31.061307.090723.
Trends Neurosci
. 2008 Sep;31(9):469-77. doi: 10.1016/j.tins.2008.06.008. Epub Aug 5, 2008.

4
Meaning Maintenance Model
Travis Proulx and Michael Inzlicht, “The Five ‘A’s of Meaning Maintenance: Finding Meaning in the Theories of Sense-Making,”
Psychological Inquiry
23, 2012, 317–35.

5
we discussed in chapter 10
Travis Proulx and Steven J. Heine, “Connections from Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar,”
Psychological Science
, Vol. 20, No. 9, 1125–31.

About the Author

BENEDICT CAREY
is an award-winning science reporter who has been at
The New York Times
since 2004, and is one of the newspaper’s most-emailed reporters. He graduated from the University of Colorado with a bachelor’s degree in math and from Northwestern University with a master’s in journalism, and has written about health and science for twenty-five years. He lives in New York City.

www.BenedictJCarey.com
@BenCareyNYT