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Episode 34: Tom Vanderbilt: Beginners
17 Plays3 years ago
Bestselling author known for making complex topics accessible to readers, Tom Vanderbilt's recent book is Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. Rather than buying into the idea that learning is for kids, Tom takes the "beginner's mind" to challenging new skills, such as singing, juggling, and jewelery making, where he starts at ground zero and works to achieve a level of competence. Rolf, Joe, and Tom discuss the value of learning for its own sake, brain plasticisty in new skill learning, how drawing can be a meditative practice while shifting processing to earlier regions in the brain, and many other topics.
We forgot to ask about a CogNation discount, but Tom Vanderbilt's book is available here at Amazon
Special Guest: Tom Vanderbilt.
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Transcript
Introduction to Tom Vanderbilt and His Work
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to Cognation. I'm Rolf Nelson. And I'm Joe Hardy. This week's guest is Tom Vanderbilt, a bestselling author and journalist. He's been a contributor to Rolling Stone, New York Times Magazine, Wired, and other magazines. And he is also probably best known for his book Traffic, Why We Drive the Way We Do, which gave people insights into something they spend a lot of time doing, but they don't know a whole lot about.
00:00:35
Speaker
Tom managed to unearth so much about a seemingly mundane topic and present it in an accessible way. For me, to this day, it makes me more aware of the space that I'm in when I'm driving.
The Beginner's Mindset and Lifelong Learning
00:00:46
Speaker
Your current book is Beginners, The Joy and Power of Lifelong Learning. This is about getting back to the beginner's mind as you take on new and unfamiliar tasks as an adult. So you talk about
00:00:58
Speaker
Something that you notice that people seem to think that learning is for kids, you know, as you go to science museums and you see adults board sitting around on their cell phones and the kids are there to learn, but the adults are there to stand around and just wait for them.
00:01:14
Speaker
So in your new book you talk about a number of different skills that you learned. So you picked up a number of new skills with the restriction that they weren't ones that you'd necessarily use for work or they weren't productive kinds of skills. So in the end you picked out
00:01:31
Speaker
Let's see, it was chess, juggling, singing, surfing, drawing, and even jewelry making, and I don't know if I missed any there. So out of all these experiences, maybe you want to talk a little bit about what some of the commonalities are in starting from zero and
00:01:52
Speaker
being an absolute beginner and trying to gain some competence. What kinds of things are enjoyable? What things are annoying about the process? Is there anything you can generalize or take out of all these different experiences that you've had? Sure. And just to say, it's a pleasure to be with you both. And yeah, I think there's a process of being a beginner overall that I think is replicated across all of these things that I went through.
Learning New Skills: Challenges and Joys
00:02:21
Speaker
It's just a very common experience we've all probably gone through. Maybe some of us haven't gone through it as much in our later years as when we're younger. But what beginner's mind refers to is this concept from Zen Buddhism of trying to think again like a child to free your mind from preconception. And for someone like me, that is a very difficult thing as a 50-year-old to free my mind from preconception. I tend to have
00:02:48
Speaker
like many people do nowadays, an opinion about everything. And if you go on Twitter, you're almost expected to be an expert in everything. So for me, it was very liberating to wander into skill-based learning, which I could have an opinion about surfing, but it's not going to actually help me at all. I mean, this was a feeling of being completely unmoored, of really leaving my comfort zone and having to work through a number of novel
00:03:19
Speaker
problems. And I sort of found that, you know, process replicated through through all this. And, you know, one thing that that stands out in my mind, in my memory is just the notion of my head hurting. And I think, you know, we kind of think about the thing we sometimes forget about learning is that it can actually be painful and that there's, you know, I don't know what how to describe the exact mechanism going on there. But to be something like a
00:03:47
Speaker
beginner reader and there's a great example of this in
00:03:51
Speaker
book called How We Learn by Stanislaus DeHain, if I'm saying his name right. But a beginner reader, if you ran a brain scan of that process, there would be all of these areas firing and being activated. And your brain would sort of be on fire. And there's a huge amount of effort and activity involved there. And as you get better, all of that sort of quiets down and gets made automatic and trimmed.
00:04:20
Speaker
trimmed away and the only way to sort of revisit that great burst of activity would be to do something as he gives the example, you know, to make the letters really hard to read or to space them weirdly or to drop all the vowels. Then you'd be faced with this new puzzle. You'd sort of become a big, a slight beginner again in the act of reading. You'd have to go through it all. So yeah, I just, my memory of a lot of these things is just, just my head hurting. And then, and then finally getting good at something,
00:04:48
Speaker
quieting that pain, but then it was time to try to take it to the next level and then the sort of pain began all over again. So that sounds, you're really selling it here. I mean, but the good news is, is that the learning curve, I mean, I'd like to, you know, correct this misconception a lot of people have when they say a steep learning curve. Yes. And thank you for this, because this is something that I did appreciate that you treated learning curves correctly in here. So yeah.
00:05:14
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, people think and I myself thought this that, oh, it means it's something difficult. If it's a steep learning curve, it's hard to climb that curve of learning, but actually just refers to progress versus time. So if it's steep, you're actually making a lot of progress in a quick amount of time. And I found that for most of these things, that is one great thing about being a beginner is you do make huge amounts of progress in the beginning progress that seems
00:05:41
Speaker
not quite life-changing, but it's definitely life-expanding where you can go from being a not something, a not surfer, a not snowboarder, a not cellist to being just this very beginning of being that thing. And of course then there will be plateaus that come, but it is sort of a very intoxicating process and combined with that sort of neural activation, we were talking about that. For me, it just had me really feeling
00:06:10
Speaker
sort of alive. And that is the sense of that beginner's mind that it just really feeling immersed in something and feeling energized and using my body and brain in new ways.
00:06:22
Speaker
Okay, so you mentioned that some skills are becoming automatic, and I think this is a great feature of the process of going from a novice to an expert is you get an automaticity of a lot of the lower-level kinds of things that you need to do. And I like the way that you talk about this in the book.
00:06:44
Speaker
At the beginning you're overwhelmed with the number of options that you have and gradually as you become an expert and also some of those parts of skill learning become automatic as you're learning to play piano. At first you're thinking very carefully about I need to hit a C, I need to hit a B.
00:07:03
Speaker
And then after a while, those low-level movements are largely automatic. And your conscious thinking is moving on to something at a little bit of a higher level, how to balance, how to think about this at a higher level. So I like the description. So you're talking about how your mind is, you've got this huge cognitive overload as you have no idea what to do at first. And then your options are pared down. And then it feels nicer that you
00:07:33
Speaker
you don't have as much to think about. So have you gotten used to this process of being overwhelmed and now you can manage it a little bit better? And it seems as though you actually enjoy it. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm not overwhelmed in the things that I was trying to do in the book, at least at the level I'm trying to do them. But I mean, just the other day, I started a new process of learning with my
00:08:00
Speaker
daughter, which is indoor rock climbing. And this is something that, you know, is a physical challenge, but there's also a mental challenge there as well. You know, I was looking at, you know, if anyone's not familiar with this genre, you know, it's an indoor climbing gym, there's a giant wall, and there's all these little different accoutrements sort of nailed to the wall that are that are holds. And, you know, you can try to muscle your way up in some way that's really inefficient, some of these routes, but
Human Learning vs. AI
00:08:30
Speaker
There's also a more elegant way to do it, which is really sort of a three-dimensional puzzle to sort of grab it the right way and put your feet in the right places. Again, there's this whole vast learning curve that, of course, the first few times I'm going up, I'm just
00:08:43
Speaker
my body and brain are sort of both panicking and I'm just trying to not die. But then after a few of those routes, I was getting a little bit better starting to appreciate that. But you're right. It strikes me that what you were mentioning before about these lower level forms of thinking, one thing that unites the traffic book with this book is that
00:09:07
Speaker
the process of being a beginner driver is very similar to some of what I was going through. And I remember mentioning in traffic, talking to some people who, you know, describing that process of being a beginner driver that, you know, the driver looks at the hood of their car, because they're, they're not really comfortable with this idea, this projectile moving in space, they're clinging to the idea of their own body, and they have yet to
00:09:31
Speaker
kind of incorporate that with experience, you'll learn that looking down the road, looking as far down the road as possible to anticipate things is your best option. But in the beginning, beginners pay so much attention to rules, rules that actually sometimes override what's actually happening in the environment. And there's some examples of this with AI cars that are being developed, self-driving cars that, for example, if you're going down the highway at 55 miles an hour,
00:10:01
Speaker
and another car merges in front of you, some of the early AI cars would slam on the brakes, regardless. Even if the car was just doing that merge, and they were a little closer to you than is comfortable, but a human driver would just gradually allow a little bit more space to enter. But for the computer, it was obstacle detected, slam on brakes. So that was sort of the beginner driver in software version.
00:10:30
Speaker
That's another process that begins to happen, which I find fascinating. And I quote the chess grandmaster Jonathan Rous, and that expertise means running out of unfamiliar mistakes. I like that quote, too. I really enjoyed that quote. Yeah, and I still have many unfamiliar mistakes I'm making in my various processes, so I wouldn't claim to be at that expert level. But there you have it.
00:10:56
Speaker
One of the things I think that relates to this podcast, too, is we talk about machine learning and the way that machines learn versus the way that people learn. And you had an interesting passage in your book where you talk about the process of acquiring chess. And you suggested that for a while, the way that you were trying to do it is just by brute force, like the way that a machine learning algorithm would do it, that you
00:11:22
Speaker
just get you know you you play get a result play get a result and eventually hope to sort of acquire this through these kinds of implicit processes where your daughter was was more uh theory i guess would you say theory driven or sort of learned what kinds of right moves to make for good reasons
00:11:42
Speaker
And I think this is insightful that there's a strong reason to believe that learning it in this rule-based and the way that your daughter's learning it is a much better way to learn it. Yeah. I mean, this is the famous Anders Ericsson and other people, but he sort of made it most popular as well as Malcolm Gladwell. But the 10,000 hours was a deliberate practice where
00:12:06
Speaker
you know, not just playing a game, but playing a game and then analyzing it preferably with someone who's an expert or authority and really understanding either what went wrong when you lost or what went right when you won. And, you know, that takes time and effort. And then my daughter sometimes would actually spend more time in the analytical process with her coach than the actual game had taken.
00:12:32
Speaker
And this is one of the struggles of learning is that there's sort of the idea of.
00:12:38
Speaker
of fun, but then there's also this idea of getting better and, you know, which... This was an interesting... I actually remember sitting next to Anders Ericsson at a conference once and he, because he was under the impression that play or just sort of goofing around with something that wasn't of any value at all, that you should be doing this kind of more directed, focused kind of practice. And I didn't have a great answer for that, but I did have the sense that play was certainly more valuable than that.
00:13:08
Speaker
Yeah, I would think so. I mean, particularly for, I mean, with certain things like chess, I guess these are very structured environments. These are not, I think it's Robin Hargrave, if I have the name right, a psychologist who's quoted in the book Range by David Epstein talking about these wicked environments where things often change quite a bit. So something like surfing is a very dynamic
Deliberate Practice vs. Exploration in Learning
00:13:34
Speaker
environment, the ocean is always changing, waves are changing up to the very minute you catch one. So this is where deliberate practice runs into certain limits where you can try to analyze, but sometimes it's actually impossible to tell what went wrong. So you really just have to sort of try and try over again and try different things. And this brings me back to something I mentioned in the book quite a bit and featured this idea of the way infants learn.
00:14:02
Speaker
And I went to NYU's Infant Action Laboratory to look at the process of mobility. And it's not like infants are doing deliberate practice. They are just playfully exploring rooms and environments to acquire this walking ability or crawling ability. And they get a feedback in the form of a smile from their parents, but it's not like they get some sort of videotaped analysis of how they were walking or are doing some sort of drills.
00:14:32
Speaker
playing with no real goals in mind. This is something that also surprises people that infants don't necessarily walk more toward their parents or toward some attractive toy. They just walk. So within that, which I think is a very playful process. And for them, walking is learning. They walk so they can actually learn more. They can explore more environments. So I think, yeah, in certain things, chess is obviously a much more structured environment.
00:15:02
Speaker
there's no mystery generally as to why one won or lost. And it does reward a very, very close study and doing things like analyzing grandmaster games. But people are people are human. I mean, there's a great endorphin rush that comes in playing five minute games of blitz chess and winning or losing. And then if you lose, you quickly reload and try another one. And that's a very powerful
00:15:29
Speaker
thing that if you listen to, I spent a lot of time listening to a chess podcast and people on that podcast are always lamenting that they're not studying more, that they're just playing more. Waste of time, I'm sure, yeah. Yeah. It probably depends a lot on the type of activity to your point. I mean, with babies and walking, walking is a thing that in some sense is pre-programmed into the brain that humans are predisposed to walking
00:15:57
Speaker
And you talked about that in the book as well. It's sort of this sort of almost reflex towards walking that babies are born with. And there, you know, just having opportunity to express that is the way that that is quote unquote learned. It's in some sense a fundamentally different type of learning process than chess, which is it can only some aspects of it can only be acquired through deliberate
00:16:26
Speaker
effort and practice because there's nothing inherent about the process of chess for a human. There's no drive to play chess per se. You're not born with anything.
00:16:38
Speaker
pre-programmed about how to play chess. So I think depending on the type of activity and the type of skill, obviously there's going to be very different types of learning processes that take place there. Yeah. I think that's a good point. One thing that I think this may relate to is, Tom, you brought up Alison Gopnik's work. And I think of her book, The Scientist in the Crib, where she talks about the way that kids are essentially like little scientists forming hypotheses and going around collecting data for inferences.
00:17:07
Speaker
And things like that. And maybe that's the second kind of learning that you're thinking about, Joe, where it's more data collection and less sort of innate programming for these things. Yeah. And that speaks of another example from the book I was just mentioning, Stanislaus de Heen's book.
00:17:26
Speaker
gives the example of an infant sitting in a high chair, dropping their spoon 10 times in a row. This frustrates parents immensely, but it's not that they can't hold it. It's that he makes the point that they're experimenting and they're kind of running these hypotheses about gravity or physics that maybe in some cases... Collecting as much data as they can.
00:17:50
Speaker
Yeah, which I think was a part of my learning processes as well. Just learning how to fall while surfing or learning what works in juggling or playing around with my voice and trying to get to. So yeah, it's a very good question, this whole thing. And I make the point in the book that humans just wouldn't have the time to perform that kind of brute force
00:18:19
Speaker
unsupervised learning acquisition that something like DeepMind did to create their chess supercomputer. Sure, where you can turn in just millions of games in a short amount of time. You just couldn't process that as a human, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I would side with Ericsson here that it is definitely a more efficient way to get better if that is your only goal. But I think even the most jaded
00:18:45
Speaker
Grandmaster still still enjoys I mean there's been a meme going around the chess world this week about sort of a goofy unconventional opening which is nicknamed the bong cloud because you would only play it if you were actually stoned. It's a terrible opening and Magnus Carlsen the champion played it.
00:19:02
Speaker
in a match against Hikaru, another grandmaster, and they both just had a great laugh about it. So, you know, even there. Even someone at that serious level is still thinking about, is still using play in a way. Yeah. Well, I think that was another interesting aspect to some of the activities that you engaged in in the book, which is, to me, it seems like anyway, a lot of it is about connecting to other people.
00:19:27
Speaker
through that process of learning. So whether it was with your daughter or the other people you were learning with, doing something that you're not good at and exposing yourself in that way is kind of a great way to connect with other people. Absolutely. My general experience was finding that, especially courses that were oriented toward beginners or that had a range of skill levels in whatever the activity was,
00:19:54
Speaker
that this was a group of almost self-selecting people that were people that had that quality of intellectual humility that didn't necessarily think they already knew everything or were quite willing to expose their own failings and just put themselves out there and make those mistakes. And I was sort of struck that something like a choir is really what educational theorists call community of practice where just this kind of
00:20:22
Speaker
the sum is greater than the individuals here. And that not only am I sort of bonding over the experience with these people, but I'm actually learning from them as it goes on. And perhaps even more important than learning, once I acquire a bit of knowledge myself, suddenly a new person would enter the choir with that sort of deer in the headlights look at which I could recognize. And then I would actually give them a few tips and teaching is sort of an underappreciated
00:20:49
Speaker
part of that whole learning experience itself. I mean, that's a very powerful way to complete the cycle too. And I think is invaluable in terms of consolidating your own knowledge. I think in the medical profession, they see one, do one, teach one. There's some sort of cliche like that. So yeah, that's what I was trying to do.
Cognitive Benefits of Learning New Skills
00:21:10
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting to think about with all these processes, what's going on in the brain.
00:21:16
Speaker
Ralph and I have studied neuroplasticity a bit and I was thinking a lot about the processes of neuroplasticity and how the brain changes with practice and what the benefits of that might be for the person doing something new as a beginner as I was reading the book. And it really highlights a bunch of different aspects of that. But one of the things that comes up is the idea of
00:21:46
Speaker
Transferability so this notion that okay. So if I learn something new some sort of new cognitive skill Obviously, I get better the thing that I practice that's not controversial in any way. It's it's easily understood But it's also appears to be the case that when I try something new and learn something Get better at a cognitive task that I actually get better at other things as well but it's
00:22:15
Speaker
Confoundingly difficult to prove that that's the case for a variety of reasons. One of which is that people who, there's this confound between, as you say, there's a kind of person who takes on new skills and new tasks. And they tend to get better at things because they're trying bunches of new things. They may already also have cognitive skills, cognitive abilities that are above where other people start.
00:22:41
Speaker
So it's hard to tease these things apart, but I'm a big believer in the power of transfer. I do believe that if you can learn to learn and that if you practice one thing, it actually helps you get better other things because there's aspects of the thing that you're learning that transfer to these other skills. So I'm curious about your experience with that. If you sensed any improvement in your ability to learn the next thing from learning the past things.
00:23:12
Speaker
I mean, probably, but I'm not sure if it's just, you know, how to describe it, a, you know, sort of motivational or, you know, sort of giving me a positive mindset. You know, I don't know that there was anything in the actual methodology because something like juggling balls is very different than, let's say, juggling a soccer ball where you use your feet to sort of kick. So, I mean,
00:23:41
Speaker
I guess one generally helps with a person's agility, which could then be transferred. Yeah, I guess my answer would be, I would think it kind of helps in the very broadest sense of something like agility. But some of the research I've seen suggests that skills are very, specific skills are somewhat non-transferable because there's just various mechanisms going on there that are different. And I sort of had an experience of this myself
00:24:10
Speaker
And I mentioned it, I think only in a footnote in the book, but I went down to Alabama to ride a very interesting bicycle with a guy named Dustin Sandlin, who hosts a YouTube channel called Smarter Every Day. But this bike was sort of a trick bike. You would turn the handlebars to the left and it would steer to the right.
00:24:28
Speaker
And I went down to Alabama as a very keen cyclist who's been riding a lot and takes pride in his ability to do things like ride no-handed and do wheelies, all these fun things. And I thought in the back of my head, I'm going to just nail this thing in an afternoon. And I found it so utterly challenging and destabilizing to, I mean, just actually sitting on the bicycle
00:24:53
Speaker
was actually problematic. It completely threw off my vestibular system. And I think maybe one answer is I have so much memory of an experience with a traditional bicycle, essentially. So it's over-learned, essentially. Exactly. Yeah. And he made the point that his kids had had an easier time with this bike than either he or I. He took six months to try to learn to ride this thing.
00:25:20
Speaker
his kids got it faster, perhaps they had less experience, regular bicycle riding was less overlearned. So same bike in essence, same skill, just differently programmed and completely necessitating a whole different set of responses and activities. So that to me was very eye-opening.
00:25:44
Speaker
You also did choose a lot of skills that seemed fairly non-overlapping, and maybe that was intentional that you didn't choose things that were similar to each other. Yeah, I was trying to go for a liberal arts kind of breadth or something. And the thing that, and I'm still trying to come up with a great answer, and I get asked a lot, and I'd be curious on your take of this, is that there's
00:26:08
Speaker
seems to be very proven things that happen to the brain when we try to learn a new skill, like juggling. There is a plasticity change that does happen. I've seen it incorrectly reported often that the brain expands when you
00:26:27
Speaker
when you learn a new skill, which seems to be not true, you're not actually adding volume. But then after a few weeks, you learn the thing and you shift to automatic behavior and it goes away. And the question is, did I actually have any sort of
00:26:49
Speaker
overall, what was there any overall improvement? And, you know, am I sort of better in any way now than I was a week ago? Or am I just sort of shifting this stuff around? I mean, my instinct is that, you know, in the same way that exercise is good for the body that it could be good to do these things and keep shifting that plasticity around while you still have it. But at the end of the day, I'm not you know, I'm not sure what, you know, the evidence seems elusive a little bit that
00:27:19
Speaker
juggling would, or any other skill would actually firmly help me in some kind of way. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's kind of what I was getting at there. It's like, there's, there is a lot of, uh, I mean, there's a lot of research that shows that people who remain, who do act, especially as you get older, this is something that comes up in the aging literature where people who stay engaged and cognitively demanding tasks as they get older tend to be better off cognitively in their old age.
Causality in Cognitive Engagement and Aging
00:27:49
Speaker
There's a lot of literature on this. But again, it's a very difficult thing to study over the long term because is it the case that people who are better off as they get older, were they already better off to start with? And is that why they engage with more cognitively demanding activities because they're
00:28:09
Speaker
They have more cognitive abilities to begin with, for example. So the direction of causality is challenging to pick apart. But there's also patterns in the data that suggest that it is the case that people who
00:28:23
Speaker
do things that challenge them as they get older, whether it be, you know, take dance classes or, you know, do crossword puzzles or, you know, engage in social activity are benefited in their cognition as they get older. Not that it prevents Alzheimer's disease, but that
00:28:40
Speaker
they're able to solve cognitive problems more flexibly and efficiently as they get older. And so this is the payoff for all of that. All of that. Yeah, I guess this is what what Denise Park and colleagues found that, you know, learning something like digital photography does seem to increase performance on this more general cognitive battery, especially learning within a group. So
00:29:11
Speaker
One of the general skills that I might have anticipated, might have improved would be multiple object tracking. So that's something that gets studied a lot is following lots of different objects, say, as they're moving around in the air or somewhere else. But it sounds as though the way that you learned juggling was less about keeping track of lots of objects in the air than it was about following a kind of algorithm.
00:29:29
Speaker
you know, where that exactly comes from, I don't know, but...
00:29:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you're always you always have a general sort of peripheral awareness of where things are, but you're trying not to fixate too much because, you know, as we talked about before, you need to sort of automize automatize this and you'll just sort of, it's like thinking about your steps as you're walking, you'll just sort of mess up that process, you need to
00:30:02
Speaker
in trying to do juggling tricks that I've not yet mastered, like five balls. I'm I think I have a higher awareness of those individual objects and how they're betraying me by not going where they want to. But but yeah, at this point, three ball juggling, I'm definitely not thinking about those as objects at all. It's more just this kind of figure eight thing that I'm sketching in the air. I think the only time I maybe I think about it is when one goes awry. But but like the chess grand master, I've
00:30:32
Speaker
that's happened so many times that can usually adjust for that and correct. But talking about transfer, there's also juggling pins and other objects and there's not as much transfer there as I would like. Juggling pins is much harder for me than juggling balls. So yes, there's a general sort of maybe agility tracking thing that you pick up, but it's still in some ways a new skill, which is frustrating.
00:31:01
Speaker
So I wonder if we could talk about the, let's see, you have a chapter where you, and I love this phrase, you talk about learning the skill of drawing as meditation with benefits. I wonder if you wanted to say something more about what you mean by the practice of drawing and what you experience when you're doing it. Sure. And I just preface this with someone who actually hasn't done meditation. So I'm just sort of guessing at what that process might feel like. But, you know, I just found that
00:31:30
Speaker
especially for someone like many people these days who's quite aware of the fleeting passage of time and the sense of things being very busy and by always having multiple screens on my computer and constantly getting text messages and a very divided, fragmented experience of life that your drawing just took me into this deep place of focus just by necessity because I, you know, not being
00:31:59
Speaker
that skilled in it, I really needed to spend a lot of time looking. And one of the things about drawing that you see in artists is that they make more glances between their paper and the object that you're drawing than the beginners do. So it really rewards close study, obviously, about the entire act of drawing. And to me, that was just a zone where I lost track of any external reality, basically, whether that be my hunger or
00:32:29
Speaker
the passage of time. And so these chunks of time would pass where I was just completely in the kind of cliched flow state. But, you know, when I say benefits, at the end of it, I had this, this, you know, 2D representation of reality on my, you know, nice picture that I could go home with. So I felt like I'd gone through some cleansing, almost therapeutic experience. At the same time, I was I was actually performing
00:32:55
Speaker
some sort of function, you know, as aesthetic or otherwise. So I just found it very, you know, almost like taking a trip, but I was, I didn't leave the room, but I just, you know, was looking at things in an entirely new
Drawing as Meditation and Cognitive Shift
00:33:09
Speaker
way. So that's kind of the sense I was trying to get at.
00:33:11
Speaker
I love that. The way that I think about some of this stuff, and I'm terrible at drawing, and I know exactly why, because I have too much conceptual overlay of things. As someone who studies visual perception, I think of this as
00:33:30
Speaker
you know, basic visual information comes into the eye, goes to the back of the head, and sort of flows forward. The basic process is you start out with low-level features. So in early visual processing, you've just got these lines and primitive basic features. And then as you move forward, you're adding assumptions about the world, you know, assuming that things are generally circular or, you know, right-angled and
00:33:56
Speaker
And then moving forward, you're getting more conceptual. You're adding assumptions about what objects things are and things like that. So in vision, you can notice both of these things. You can notice high-level vision. You can look at something and see it as a chair or a desk or whatever it is.
00:34:18
Speaker
But you can also notice the low-level features too. So you can sort of zoom in and out so you can see those individual literal lines and bits. And then you're operating really more on sort of a literal early representation of things. And one thing I wanted to mention to you is that there's a great research study from a few years ago. I don't know if you came across this, but
00:34:41
Speaker
If you wanted a shortcut to drawing, there's a researcher, Alan Snyder, who's an Australian researcher who found that by applying TMS, which is transcranial magnetic stimulation, just a magnetic zap to your left hemisphere, he can actually induce better drawing. So you're deactivating some of that conceptual stuff and you can access some of your more literal mind a little bit. So the process that you're going through,
00:35:09
Speaker
could even potentially be short cut a little bit. I don't know if you're up for that, just to improve drawing. I think it's probably more fun as a meditative experience than being zapped in the head, but I thought that might be interesting. That's an interesting, you mentioned TMS because it was one of those things along with certain
00:35:28
Speaker
you know, pharmaceuticals that I sort of didn't go, you know, I'm very curious about some of the work that's been done there. I didn't want to go there because my whole point was to try to do things a little more slowly and deliberately and, you know, kind of avoid some of these shortcuts. But I'm very, very intrigued. And yeah, I mean, just just since you bring it up, I mean, I think, you know, as someone who did a little bit of work with with visual illusions in traffic with with, you know, like Simons and Shabrie and invisible gorilla and all that stuff. And it made sense to me that
00:35:58
Speaker
in an environment like driving where you're moving at this artificially high speed and that things would, the world might look a little strange there, but it was another thing entirely to be sitting in a room and be trying to draw this chair and having my result be so wrong in sort of a measurement way where the instructor said, oh, actually there's the back of the chair is as high as the seat is wide.
00:36:27
Speaker
to my actual eye did not appear that way at all. And the chair is two feet away from me. I'm not moving, yet still I can't grasp this fundamental reality. And it just sort of raises that idea of how much of the world is essentially a construct that we're creating with the predictive brain and all sorts of other mechanisms. And that, yeah, I felt like sometimes I was,
00:36:54
Speaker
like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, you know, popping the blue pill or is it the red pill that suddenly allows him to see the world as it as it quote unquote really is. Yeah, I think the the idea of the predictive brain that you bring up ties a lot of these things together. Because it's a non intuitive fact about the way that the brain works that a lot of the time
00:37:16
Speaker
when you're observing say a natural scene. So like visually you're, you're looking at the outdoors, for example, sort of natural scene that you've experienced a lot in the past and is also consistent with the environment in which the species evolved. The amount of brain activity that you're exerting is actually relatively low because the expectation of what you're experiencing from a top down perspective matches
00:37:46
Speaker
your bottom up input experience. So the actual amount of exertion that the brain needs to, our metaphors of exercise kind of creep in here, but you know, the amount of activity that the brain needs to utilize to process that information accurately is low because the prior probability matches what you're experiencing in the moment and being in these situations where you're
Unlearning and Adaptation in Older Learners
00:38:16
Speaker
where you're putting yourself in a place where you don't have a lot of prior experience or your prior experience doesn't match the inputs that you're getting. It actually causes the brain to need to operate in a different way. It's an interesting thing. It kind of gets back to this idea of it's different. Is it good? Does it matter from a positive benefit perspective? But it definitely is different. Yeah, which brings us back to the backwards.
00:38:45
Speaker
bicycle and yeah, the input was definitely not matching my prediction of how a bicycle should behave. So it's sort of, you know, no one's done the study, but I'd be kind of curious to know what mechanisms are at work in trying to learn it. Is it the same brain areas that would be involved in a regular bike riding process, just somehow with a different program overlaid? Is it an unlearning, if that's an actual
00:39:15
Speaker
thing that exists, I'm not sure. There must be some unlearning going on because it seems as though you were kind of jolted into awareness of what it is that you were doing that you're normally so, it's normally a fluid and happens so easily, right? Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's made it that much more difficult to learn because there was something I already knew that was getting in the way that had to be sort of
00:39:39
Speaker
you not only had to learn the new thing, you had to cancel the old thing, which, you know, metaphorically, I wonder if that's something that challenges older learners in general in that, you know, as I think I mentioned in the book, something like language, you know, I've had five decades of being exposed to English and speaking English and the way in my brain is sort of tuned to that grammar. So that would make picking up something like Mandarin Chinese,
00:40:08
Speaker
almost not impossible, but a great task for me because I've. Because of the depth of your use of English, yeah. Yeah, I mean, exactly. You have so many prior experiences with these examples in English and the amount of your expectation about what you're going to be hearing is so ingrained there. It kind of gets back also to the idea of how much of learning has to do with
00:40:36
Speaker
learning from specific examples versus the sort of deliberate practice. And one of the things that comes up there is that the amount of learning that happens in a lifetime is just so enormous that it is inevitable in some sense that the older brain will be somewhat overwhelmed by all the things that it has encountered and learned over the years. You have to imagine that would have something to do with
00:41:06
Speaker
why it's harder to learn new things as you get older. But there is also like, yeah, sorry, go ahead. No, I was just gonna say, and then just the additional, let's say other pressures that enter into it, such as, I mean, the very notion of pressure that adults put a lot, you know, higher expectation on their own performance, I think in, in trying to learn something new, then then a child does, it's not a nice low pressure environment. And we might not have the same
00:41:35
Speaker
supportive network around us. We don't have the sheer amount of time available. Yeah, I mean, that just strikes me. There are so many things that challenge the older learner. One of which also is that, you know, for me and other people doing things like this, these are hobbies I'm trying to essentially pick up. It's not a life or death skill like or a crucial skill like language or walking that
00:42:01
Speaker
infants really want to do that. And like you say, it's already programmed there as well. But I mean, it's not vital to my life that I learn how to sing. So it takes that much more sort of motivation and external pressure in a sense.
00:42:21
Speaker
Well, I'm mindful of our time now, and maybe we have time for another couple questions here. One of the things that I wanted to ask is, OK, so you've been doing this for a few years, and it seems like it's ingrained itself in you. Does beginning ever get old? Maybe it's an odd question, but maybe you see what I mean.
00:42:50
Speaker
It's a new question, but a good one. Maybe another way to think about it is that I do also enjoy mastery. That's right. That's the alternative. That's what I'm thinking. Would you rather be in the mastery mode or a beginner mode? I guess it's nice to have both, if only for the perspective. And of course, you have to start
00:43:17
Speaker
you have to start somewhere, you have to be a beginner, you don't just graduate to mastery. And time is limited if we're going to take even 10,000 hours as a very rough benchmark or 5,000 hours even. I mean, who would have that much time to acquire that many more skills? So I mean, it's a nice refuge to be able to go back to
00:43:40
Speaker
something like, oh, let's say cycling, where I rode cycling, where I can do that very comfortably and feel and handle unfamiliar mistakes and all that sort of thing. But does it get old? It hasn't for me yet. I mean, well, what does get old, though, is being, of course, stuck in a certain skill and really not making progress. And that's where the motivation
00:44:08
Speaker
kid can falter and then you have to kind of make a decision, what is this for? How far do I want to take this? Am I happy with this level of achievement?
Navigating Overconfidence in Skill Acquisition
00:44:20
Speaker
But I think anything, the English writer G.K. Chesterton had this wonderful quote, anything worth doing is worth doing badly. So there are many things that I would love to take a crack at, maybe even just once or twice, just to kind of get a sense for
00:44:37
Speaker
what they're like, because, you know, as someone who loves reading, I mean, most of these things really, you know, can't be experienced until you actually do them in the same way that, you know, make the point in the book that the procedural and declarative knowledge are two entirely different things, two different parts of the brain or two different activities. And you can only read about something up to a certain point before you just have to go out and try to do it to fully understand what that person is going through.
00:45:05
Speaker
So another thing you mentioned in the book is, and I forget if you mentioned this directly, but so there's a tendency for people who know a little bit about a skill to overestimate the degree to which they
00:45:21
Speaker
They know about it, and this is referred to in general as the Dunning-Kruger effect. You've thought about this, you're aware of it. Do you ever feel the Dunning-Kruger effect sneaking in if you've required a little bit of mastery of something? I'm sure it has. I'm trying to come up with an example here, but it's interesting. It does show out in the data in all sorts of interesting ways about surgeons making more errors after
00:45:47
Speaker
a few months of experience versus day one, or I'm sure I haven't done the study, but perhaps in the driving literature that, in fact, I do vaguely remember something about this. The most beginner drivers are actually pretty good. It's that after a year of experience where you're still quite young, but you feel you have the experience. So that sets up this sort of dangerous situation. I've probably gotten
00:46:14
Speaker
a bit into trouble with something like surfing. If the waves are bigger than I'm used to, it's kind of a non-linear thing that happens in the ocean where going from three to five feet, it's not just a two foot wave increase. It's more like a 5X increase in terms of the scale of difficulty there. So if you overestimate your skill there, you could be in some serious trouble.
00:46:40
Speaker
Yes. Which I have been. Something like singing, you'll embarrass yourself and you'll make an awful noise, but it's not going to. Yeah. It's not going to kill you. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I guess you get, you think you've acquired the basic knowledge of how to do something, but the conditions may change and the difficulty may scale up.
00:47:09
Speaker
and those initial conditions you had don't quite apply and you might need some new tricks to sort of get there. Yeah, but I can't think of a very specific example. Okay, so before we wrap up here, is there anything additional that you'd like to talk about that we haven't gotten to?
Learning with Children and New Ventures
00:47:28
Speaker
No, I mean, there's some things that I didn't quite cover as much that I'm getting into a little bit now, such as the idea of, I mean, it's implicit in the book, but the idea of
00:47:38
Speaker
of learning things with your children as a novice. I find this very interesting and sort of powerful experience that when I asked actually people like Alison Gopnik, you do know of any research about this. I mean, just and she said, no, you know, it's sort of when I tried to find information myself about even the idea of coal learning or whatever it is, you call it learning something with your children. I just there's not a huge school of
00:48:07
Speaker
thought out there about this. You find a lot of information about how to make your child a better learner, how to encourage learning in your child. But adults are sort of written out of that equation. And I mean, the one thing I could come up with is the Suzuki, the famous Suzuki school of music instruction, which the parent is expected to learn at the same time piano or cello to serve sort of as a positive role model and to also gain a bit of empathy
00:48:38
Speaker
for what the child is going through as a beginner, rather than just being that sort of impatient parent yelling on the sidelines, yelling at the soccer team to get better or something, when the parent doesn't even play soccer themselves. So I don't know, this is sort of just a personal project of mine that kind of relates to the whole idea of how much more important I think parents and family are in the educational process than formal schooling, but something that we often neglect, I think.
00:49:08
Speaker
And otherwise, I'm just open to other new skills that I should try to learn if you guys are fond of anything in particular. Well, I think I'm now convinced by your idea of drawing because it has a lot of appeal to me now after your description of it. Is there anything that you're thinking of picking up next?
00:49:33
Speaker
Well, thinking of drawing, I would love to do sculpture to sort of, you know, work back to the three dimensional media and sort of see how that process goes.
Brain Stimulation and Learning Enhancement
00:49:43
Speaker
And now I'm wondering if there's some, you know, some kind of transcranial direct stimulation or something I can do that would actually would help with that process. But you can look into that. But then that would actually be a great avenue for future research. I know the research is still very novel here, as is the technology, I suppose, but but they're
00:50:02
Speaker
have been some selective gains cited in performance and learning. As I've seen, would that be correct, do you think, to say that? With transcranial magnetic stimulation? We've actually talked about some of that stuff on this show. And there's some increases in learning with transcranial direct current stimulation, basically the ones that are cooking a 9-volt battery up to your brain.
00:50:33
Speaker
you know, I'm still a little hesitant to do it myself, but there seem to be some effects that that are positive. I don't know if the jury's 100% in yet. Yeah, no, I mean, there's there's there's it's an ongoing area of research and a lot of interesting stuff going on there for sure. I'm not doing it myself. Yeah, speaks to where I where I land on it.
00:50:57
Speaker
Okay. Well, Tom Vanderbilt, thank you so much for being with us today. Really enjoyed this conversation. And again, the new book is Beginners, The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. Thanks, Tom. Thanks for coming on the show. My pleasure. Thank you, guys.
00:51:23
Speaker
Thanks for listening, everybody. If you want to reach us, you can email us at cognationpodcast at gmail.com.