Wrapup to the Course by Terrence Sejnowski and Barbara Oakley

Welcome to the last video of Learning How To Learn. If you’re still listening to us, then you’ve come all the way through the course. And may remember at the beginning, I said that brains do not come with an instruction manual. So we have to write one ourselves. And that was one of our goals. In this final video, we want to tell you how much we’ve enjoyed teaching and learning. We’ve learned from you as we hoped you’ve learned from us. The truth is you’ve always been in the driver’s seat when it comes to your own learning. But now that you have a better feeling for what’s under your neural hood, you can use this to help you learn new things all during your lifetime.

What we’re hoping is that as the days and months will pass you’ll continue to bring to mind some of the key ideas you’ve learned in the course. Approaches such as switching your mode of thinking from focused to diffuse can help reduce your frustration and allow for more creative problem solving. Strengthening your chunking can give you a firmer grasp of the material. Even seemingly tiny changes in your daily approach to your work. Using the pomodoro technique, for example, can make a dramatic long-term difference in your learning and in your ultimate success.

Learning is so vitally important to our future that most of us spend 12 to 16 of our earliest years of our lives in school, culminating in high school or college. But the focus in formal education is on the product of learning, not the process of learning. In this course, we’ve tried to give you a better sense of the learning process. Although this is our last video, we hope it’s not our last chance to influence you. You have not truly learned something unless you can teach it to others. Teach those ideas to others and you will find that they will continue to resonate and deepen in your own mind. We hope you’ll also have discovered how powerful these ideas can be at helping you broaden your interest, passion, and expertise. Many people believe that what they’re initially, sort of, naturally good at is what they’re supposed to be doing in life. But I myself am living proof that passions can broaden, change, and grow. The world is evolving and a broad tool kit that allows you to learn effectively in many different subject areas is one of the most powerful assets you can have.

Best of luck in your life of learning.

Ditto that.