1-1 Introduction – About Mindshift

I’m Barbara Oakley.

And I’m Terry Sejnowski. Welcome to Mindshift.

We created the MOOC: Learning How to Learn which to our surprise became the world’s largest and most popular MOOC, to give you the specifics about how to learn more effectively. In this MOOC, we’re going to grow things even bigger, so you can learn not only more effectively but more broadly. In other words, we will help you to develop a learning lifestyle.

Who you are today, is not the same person who went to sleep last night. We now know, that your experiences during the day are integrated into your brain circuits while you are asleep. So, that you wake up in the morning, your brain is updated. You can take advantage of this to become a different person than you were last week, or last month, or last year because you brain is different and you can guide the process.

To begin with, I’m going to tell you about one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me. Something that cause one of my biggest most embarrassing failures. . Yes, everybody, including me, has failures and false starts. Now, you may know that I basically flunked my way through elementary, middle and High school Math and Science. When I was young, the only thing I thought I could do. The only thing I was interested in was trying to learn a new language. Any new language since all I spoke was English. If you speak English as an additional language you are so lucky. So, that’s why I enlisted in the army right out of High school, because the military would actually pay me to learn a new language. Although, I wasn’t of Russian heritage, I decided to learn Russian, and I did learn Russian. The army even gave me a scholarship, and I got my first degree, a bachelors degree in slavic languages and literature. I was all set, as a language expert I expected to go into military intelligence. To use my skills, that was pretty much the only place my new language skills could be used. Didn’t happen, it like. Really didn’t happen, they only put me into the signal corps. That meant, that I would be responsible for all sorts of electrical communication systems. From cables, and telephones, to advanced electrical switching systems. I was horrified. And it wasn’t like I was some kind of brilliant, intellectual superstar who turned it all around and charged ahead to immediately excel anyway. In fact, I graduated last in my class in signal officer training school. I didn’t even know what a volt was, much less than how a telephone worked. Here I was stalking a field I hated, doing a job I couldn’t really understand. I was so terrible at my job, that we all eventually agreed that I should move into something far less technical. Those four years as a military officer were very difficult. I was lonely, stationed thousands of miles from my home and family. And well, I was a failure. What’s funny about this, is that it’s actually one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. Believe it or not, I’m now a professor of engineering and I love my job. In this MOOC, we’re going to talk about what I learned on the path to my change in thinking, my mind shift. We’re going to talk not only about some of the changes I’ve experienced. And inspirational and insightful stories of other people’s growth and change. But, we’re also going to be exploring what science is telling us about how we can change. This course is about how you can do and be much more than you ever might think. It’s about how you can grow from failure to success. It’s about how you can broaden your horizons and be more than you ever thought you could be, no matter what your age, or your past. It’s about how you’ll feel better and be healthier because of a learning lifestyle. And, it’s about how to look around you, at what you’re learning, in your place, in what’s unfolding in the society around you. So you can be what you want to be, given the real world constraints that life puts on us all. No, this isn’t a course based on magic, where we promise to somehow turn you into a genius and make all your wishes for learning and careers come true. But you’ll see, that by using certain mental tricks and insights you can often learn more and do more. Far more than you might have ever dreamed, we’ll talk about what science tells us about how we learn and change. We’ll build on what you already know to take your life’s learning fantastic new directions. You might think, well, I’ve taken aptitude tests. The experts are telling me what I should be doing. And besides, I can feel inside what I’m good at. But remember, all those aptitude tests and internal feelings are just reflections of what you’re good at right now. They don’t give you a clue about how you can shift and shifting your thinking, mind shift is what this course is all about. Are you ready? Lets get started.