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Practice Speaking Test 5 Noise Pollution

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Do Schools kill Creativity Discussion Questions

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Do Schools kill Creativity Discussion Questions

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Do Schools Kill Creativity - Discussion Questions

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School and Education Discussion Questions

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Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

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Lynne Malcolm: Our brains are attracted to the known and familiar. At the same time, we're hungry for the new and different. Our uniquely human creativity lives in this tension.

David Eagleman: One of the things that has always intrigued me is that there is a difference between humans and the rest of the animal species. We've built whole civilisations, we build radio programs, we build cars, we build all these things, and other species don't do that. And when you fly over a city it's like the whole thing has risen like a motherboard out of the earth, but when you fly over a forest, animals have been living there for millions of years, nothing much has happened there. The surprising part is that our brains are very similar. I mean, they run on the same principles, they are made out of the same sorts of neurons, and so I've been very interested in this issue about what caused us to run away, to be such a different species than others.

Lynne Malcolm: It's All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm. My guest today is Professor David Eagleman, neuroscientist from Stanford University and best-selling science author. His latest book The Runaway Species: How human creativity remakes the world is co-authored with his friend and music composer Anthony Brandt. It weaves together the arts and sciences to explore the nature and process of creativity, and why we need it more than ever for a challenging future.

David Eagleman explains that we humans have what he calls creative software which makes us restless and compels us to keep inventing.

David Eagleman: We had a massive expansion of the wrinkly part on the outside of the brain called the cortex, and that's what really differentiates us from our neighbours in the animal kingdom, we just have a lot more cortex. And one of the things this has allowed is most animals have very little room in between the input and the output, so they act essentially reflexively as stimulus comes in and they react to it in a certain way. Humans have a lot of territory in between the in and the out, and so that allows us to take in ideas and chew on them and consider them in different ways and maybe act, maybe not, that's part of it.

The other thing is that we've got this massive prefrontal cortex which is the area behind the forehead, and this is what allows us to unhook from our moment in space and time and think about possible futures and where we might be and what might happen if we do this or that. And so this opened the door for us to become an incredibly creative species because we don't have to try everything out, but instead we can simulate possible futures and see what the consequences are, and so we can try lots and lots of ideas that way. And what that has led to over millions of years and specifically over the last few thousand and few hundred in particular is this incredible explosion of creative things that we can do. So unlike a hippopotamus or an alligator or something that essentially lives the same life every generation, humans keep bootstrapping their civilisations, so we are resting on the shoulders of our parents and their parents and so on, each generation.

Lynne Malcolm: For an insight into the breadth of human creativity, David Eagleman makes an unlikely comparison between the work of the NASA space program and the work of artist Pablo Picasso.

David Eagleman: Yeah, Apollo 13 was a ship that was going to the Moon and it had astronauts on it, and the mission went wrong, and what happened is part of the spaceship got destroyed in an explosion, and the astronauts and the mission control centre in Houston had to figure out what they were going to do to get these astronauts back to Earth. And it was an incredibly tense and amazing time because what happened is the mission control centre in Houston put together all of these plans on the fly. They had never expected something like this to happen, so what they did is they got out replicas of everything that the guys had on the ship and figured out how they could make repairs. They said, okay look, take your underwear and do this and take the front of the folder that the instructions are in and put that here to block the air filter, and so on. And they figured out in this incredibly creative way how to rescue these guys and bring them back home.

We compare that with the story of Picasso who actually revolutionised the art world with his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which he did in a completely separate way. He was working by himself, not in a group, he didn't have time pressure on him, but he took in all kinds of influences from things that he had seen before, and he invented this incredibly new creative form of art.

And what we compare there is these are both stories of creativity, and the question is what do they have in common? And the answer has to do with the way that human brains take in information and bend it and break it and blend it to spit out something new. And in both the case of NASA and Picasso, what they were doing was taking in things they had seen before and then manipulating it in their heads to generate something that was very new.

Lynne Malcolm: David Eagleman says that human creativity comes about as a result of three processes. He describes them as bending, breaking and blending.

David Eagleman: One of the things that's really interesting when you look at what is happening in human brains is that when they take in information, they are not storing it exactly as zeros and ones the way that your computer does. So when you put a file on your computer, the thing we like about our computers is they spit out exactly the same file years later. But of course memory is not like that, and all of the information we take in is not like that. Instead what is special and important about human brains is that they take in information and they mash it up in various ways and spit out new versions of it all the time. The ways in which the brain does this, we have summarised as bending, breaking and blending.

So breaking involves taking in something, let's say something you are seeing for the first time, and your brain thinks about it, okay, what if this were snapped in half, or what if this piece were not part of it and broken off or something? And this is something we see throughout the world of art and science, is this issue about breaking things into component parts to get something else out of it. So you see this in the art world when somebody takes...just as an example, a piece of artwork that I saw which was an obelisk and it was snapped in half and turned upside down, so the pointy bit was now the part holding it up. So that's an example of breaking. But we see this all the time in the sciences, for example, with DNA sequencing, it turns out that the way that you sequence is by breaking these long strands of DNA into small parts, and that makes it easier to analyse and collate, and the point being that it's the same process that is happening in the artist's mind and in the scientists mind, in both cases it yields something.

Then there's the issue of bending, so bending something in terms of the size or the shape or anything like that. So this is something you see all the time in artwork where somebody will, let's say, make a human figure that is giant or very miniaturised, that's just bending the size of it. And in the sciences you see all kinds of bends also. Just one example of a bend is the artificial heart, in 1982 this was invented and it was essentially a big mechanical pump which worked but it was heavy and would wear down. So the newer version of the artificial heart doesn't have a pulse, it doesn't have a pump, instead it just continuously pushes blood through and oxygenates it as it's going through. And what that means is you don't have a pulse anymore when you get one of these things, and it's just a bend on the original idea, it is taking something and moving it over to a slightly different version of it.

And then finally there's blending, this is sort of the third cognitive piece of software that your brain is always using, it is taking multiple ideas and smooshing them together. So this happens all the time in the arts were different styles are mashed up. For example, in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon he took various styles and pushed them together in a new way. And this happens all the time in the lab. Just as an example, some scientists wanted to make spider silk in large quantities but it turns out it's very difficult to get spiders to live together without fighting and eating each other. And so what the scientists did is they took the DNA for spider silk and put it into a goat and they made this chimera, a real life chimera called Freckles the Spider Goat, which she secretes spider silk in her milk, and this is a way to generate lots of it.

But all of these things when you look across the arts and the sciences you see it's the same cognitive software that is running, that is taking in the world and bending, breaking or blending it and spitting out new versions.

Lynne Malcolm: David Eagleman.

And here's co-author of their book The Runaway Species, composer Anthony Brandt. In a TED Talk in Houston, he's demonstrating these processes of creativity with some music by Beethoven. First, blending.

Anthony Brandt: Counterpoint, playing two or more themes that same time, is blending. We are going to demonstrate that for you now with some excerpts from Beethoven's Grosse Fuge. First we are going to play the main theme in the viola, accompanied by a marshal rhythm in the first violin.

[Music]

Now, later in the piece Beethoven is going to bend the viola's theme. He's going to make it gentler and more continuous and accompany it with a flowing line in the second violin. It sounds like this:

[Music]

Now, later in that same passage, Beethoven is going to break the viola's theme. He's going to take a four-note fragment and pass it from the viola to the second violin and back to the viola. It sounds like this:

[Music]

And now, the two passages we've been sampling, the first one with the marshal rhythm, the second one that is more flowing, are expressively worlds apart, and it seems impossible that they could ever come together. But at a climactic moment that's exactly what happens, Beethoven blends the two sections. Here's how it works. The marshal rhythm that was in the first violin [music] is given to the cello and sounds like this [music]. Meanwhile, the second violin plays that flowing accompaniment [music], and the first violin and the viola play the main theme. Here's what the blend sounds like:

[Music]

Works like the Grosse Fuge show us a human mind in action, bending, breaking and blending happen right in front of us. The arts make visible, make imminent internal brain processes, processes that we all share. It is the job of the arts to bend, break and blend, that's why there will always be new art.

Lynne Malcolm: Composer Anthony Brandt is co-author with David Eagleman of their book The Runaway Species.

You're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm. Today we're exploring human beings' unique capacity to be creative.

One of the drivers of creativity, is the exquisite tension we experience between constantly seeking novelty, and at the same time being attracted to the familiar.

David Eagleman: At first one might think, oh well, only a Mozart or a Picasso is really creative and I'm not, but it turns out that the cognitive software that I just talked about is running in everybody, this is how human brains work generally, but the other interesting part is how things are received by the community that you live in. And it turns out when you really examine this stuff across the board, especially in terms of the arts, the human brain always wants things that are novel, it's always leaning into the future. But at the same time it wants things that are somehow familiar, somehow tie into what it already understands. And as you said, all these creative acts that stick, that work, are somewhere in the middle. So in other words, if you are putting out a piece of art or music or even a new product that looks exactly like everything that has come before, that's not really going to get anybody's attention, but if you do something that is too wacky and too far out then it just doesn't land with the society, it's disorienting. And it's just because whatever you inherit as your culture, that's what makes sense to tweak that and to make changes to that so that you are making novelty on top of what is already familiar.

Lynne Malcolm: So you use then an example of the iPhone, the development of the iPhone, and you mention a thing called repetition suppression in relation to the design of the iPhone. Tell me about that.

David Eagleman: Generally the story with repetition and suppression is that the brain likes things that are novel. And so when you show the brain something new it has a big burst of activity and you can measure that, you see the brain becoming active. And then when you show the same thing again, there's a little bit less activity. When you show the same thing again there is a little less, and so on. And so what you are getting is as you repeat things you have the suppression of activity. This is actually what causes us to lean into the future is because we are always looking for the next novel thing, that's the thing that is of interest to the brain. Because essentially what the brain is trying to do is build an internal model of the world. So when it sees something new that is very important to it, to incorporate that into its model, when it sees something that it already gets then it just doesn't have to burn much energy on that because it already gets that thing.

So what's interesting with something like the iPhone is that when the iPhone was first announced, I think it was 2006, one reporter who was there described it as the Jesus phone because it seemed so incredibly novel, it seemed to have a virgin birth. So this inspires the brain of the audience to find this really cool.

What was interesting for us is we really explored this and it turns out that the iPhone, just like every invention, actually has a long history to it, and the first touchscreen mobile phone was in 1993, it was the IBM Simon, and of course at the time mobile phones were these big brick-like things that you had to hold on to, but it was a mobile phone and it had a touchscreen. Of course the touchscreen was very lousy at that time and it was only a single colour and so on, but the point is there were all of these things that led up to the invention of the iPhone. We tend to ignore those histories, but this is a really important theme in the book, about the fact that nothing comes from nowhere. Everybody loves this idea about the inventor who gets the bolt of lightning out of the blue, but that's not actually how creativity works, it's all about absorbing what is around you and mashing it up into a slightly new version.

Lynne Malcolm: And the timing is so important too, that it falls on open ears, if you like.

David Eagleman: Yes, that's right, and this has to do with this issue about what society is prepared to accept. And so this is one of the reasons why innovative companies for example are always putting out a whole range of products from the just barely new and improved, to completely wild and wacky, like the way that car companies put out concept cars on the wild and wacky end and just slight revisions of the car they did the year before on the closer end. It's because you have to try to cover that whole spectrum from the new to the familiar to understand where the border of the possible is. So if you look at interesting inventors and designers, they make things that are the next radio and the next car and the next home, things that are close to the hive, and then they make things that are really far away that are super wacky that may never get made, but that's the only way you can figure out what is possible, is by feeling out for that border.

Lynne Malcolm: Everyone has the capacity to be creative, it's part of the human condition. However, not all individuals have the opportunity to realise their full potential.

David Eagleman: Unfortunately there's a lot of study now that shows the way that that correlates with your socio-economic status, which is to say all kids are equally creative, I mean, this is just how the human brain works, this is what brains do. But it turns out that if you are in a great schooling system or you have great parents that teach you how to creative and encourage that and cultivate that, then that really sticks. And so if you are in a certain high socio-economic class or good neighbourhood you've got something like 10 times more chance to get a patent in your lifetime. And this is a real tragedy because this is wasting what is so special about human brains.

What happens always in impoverished neighbourhoods is that schools will get rid of the arts first because it seems like, well, that's the part that can go. But in fact what is special about the arts is it is the way to teach brains how to bend, break and blend explicitly. You take these colours, you take this sculpture, you take whatever it is, a piece of music, and you smash it up and you do things with it, you compose in different ways. This is the really important part that ends up in STEM education-science, technology, engineering and maths-it ends up being the same stuff that you do there but if you don't have any arts background you are not used to doing that. And unfortunately the way that schools are taught in general, and this is true even more so for schools that tend to be impoverished, is they are just teaching to the test. And the idea is you learn everything, you learn how to get to the answer in the back of the book, and then the semester ends and that's the end of it.

The good news is that changing schools into being more creative places is very easy and actually has really no influence on the school budget or anything like that, which is to say a teacher's job really is to teach what is known, and then by the time you get near the end of the semester, to use that as a springboard for students to mash things up and make their own versions of things.

Just as an example, if you're teaching an electrical engineering class, it's not enough to say 'follow these instructions to make the flashlight' but instead it is to 'now make your own thing', or in a painting class it's not enough to just say here are the styles of the masters that have come before you, but now go mash it up and make your own thing. It's just that extra little bit on the end of each semester that's the most important part, it's using knowledge not as a landing pad but as a springboard.

Lynne Malcolm: Creativity is the cornerstone for our next steps into the future, says David Eagleman. Why does David think that creativity is so crucial at this point in time?

David Eagleman: It's because as we are getting better and better at AI, artificial intelligence, a lot of the jobs that exist right now just are not going to exist in 10 or 20 years. And by the way, that's true even if people our age...you know, the things that we learned in school, some of those jobs don't exist, and more importantly there are so many new jobs that we didn't even know of when we were in school, I mean, they just didn't exist. Just the idea that you can be a multimedia designer, a blogger or whatever, or an AI designer, a self-driving car engineer or whatever it is that didn't exist when we were at school, so what will exist in 20 years we can hardly even imagine.

And so the question is do we want to train our kids in the way that we have done since the Industrial Revolution where we sit them down in class and have them do rote memorisation of various things, or do we want to really emphasise the creativity. The reason it's so important is because the world is changing so rapidly now that it's just not clear if the particular skills we are teaching them are going to be important and relevant, or instead whether the act of taking in new data and being creative with it is the real important thing.

Lynne Malcolm: In what ways are computers and artificial intelligence equipped to be creative? Can they be as creative as human beings?

David Eagleman: I think they can be. There's no reason they can't be because what's happening in the human brain is, as I said, this mashing up of information, and there's no reason computers can't do that, and already we have computers that compose music and do artwork and stuff that is pretty extraordinary.

I think the part where humans are a little bit ahead, I don't know for how long, but they are ahead of the moment, is that creativity...when you do a creative act there is actually two components to it. One is the act itself, and the other is how it is received by the society that you live in. So a computer, like any of these Google projects or something, can create incredibly interesting artwork and music, but it doesn't have a very good way of knowing which of these things is going to stick with its human listeners, or which things for whatever reason just aren't useful for humans to look at or listen to. And so there's a sense in which you kind of need to be a human, you kind of need to understand what it is to be a human in order to say, well, I created this but this is probably junk and over here this is great, this is going to really work. And so what these programs do is they generate thousands and thousands of mash-ups, but they don't know which ones are going to stick.

Lynne Malcolm: And also there's a social dimension to creativity, isn't there, because creative people are attracted to each other, they work together and they develop their creative ideas together.

David Eagleman: Yes, that's right. This idea of the creative genius working in isolation is actually a myth. These ideas that, okay, Picasso or van Gogh, maybe they worked by themselves and didn't have much of a social life, but in fact it's not true at all, these guys, just like every creator that we could find, is embedded in the social world. And again, this has to do with what is going to stick. So surely there are some very creative people who are hermits and out there up in the mountains somewhere but their stuff tends not to stick, in part because they are not getting a rapid enough feedback loop from their society telling them what works for other people.

Lynne Malcolm: So what does the future look like? How do we know that we are ready for such fast change and constant innovation that we are already seeing?

David Eagleman: The amazing thing is that we are on this exponential growth curve in terms of human invention. So what this means is it gets faster and faster every year. And if you look at a curve of history you have the invention of farming and then the invention of some alloys and the things that are moving slowly along, and then the invention of the printing press in the 1450s, and then a few things happen here and there. But then you get to the 19th century and the 20th century, things are really on this upslope, and where we are now, the 21st century, things are just moving at this unbelievable pace; gene editing, landing on asteroids, very soon we will be on the Moon again and Mars.

We are moving faster and faster for two reasons. The first is that we have this terrific capacity as a human to rest on the shoulders of everything that has come before us. So unlike a horse that is born and learns to be a horse all over again, we get to immediately say, all right, what is everything that has come before, we are going to launch off of that. And then the internet, by the way, helps enormously with that in ways that previous generations just didn't have that opportunity. But the the other thing is there's just many more humans now, so we've got almost 8 billion humans running around the planet, all resting on what has come before and all mashing and bending and breaking and blending everything that they take in, and so we just have this incredible opportunity for new creative acts. And as soon as someone does something creative it spreads essentially instantly because of the internet and global communication. And so things are just taking off in an enormously rapid way.

Lynne Malcolm: What are some of the ways that you suggest we can each nurture our creativity within ourselves?

David Eagleman: Part of the good news is recognising that everything that we are doing in a day, whether it's figuring out what you are going to say next to your friend or making a new recipe based on what you have in the cabinets or writing a little jot of music down or whatever the thing is, everything is creativity. And so forcing ourselves into making sure that we don't do any ready-mades...so what I mean by that is...you know, just as an example, sending a card to somebody, you can go and buy a card in the store and send that or you can make your own card, things like that. But this principle applies to lots of different things.

Just as an example, if you have kids, there are lots of toys that are just dumb toys where you press a button and something happens or whatever the thing is. But then there are lots of other toys that induce creativity, like just Lego, for example, because there is no prescriptive thing, but instead the child is constantly trying out new sorts of things.

On top of that, one thing I try to do every day is kick my brain out of its automated routines. So, just as an example, switching your watch to your other hand or brushing your teeth with your other hand. Or what I try to do most days is drive a different route home from work because otherwise you become an automated zombie and you do exactly the same thing and it stops taking up much time. You've probably noticed if you drive the same route home from work every day, the first day you do it, it seems to take a long time, and after a while it seems to take less and less time, and this is because you're not really that conscious of it after a while. But if you are doing new things all the time and forcing novelty into your life, things seem to take longer in a useful way.

Lynne Malcolm: You end your book with a very powerful line: 'Now close this book and remake the world.' You are really laying down a challenge there. How optimistic are you that the runaway species is capable to do that well?

David Eagleman: My hope is that the book will have a big influence and so on, but whether or not we had ever written this book, the human species is just screaming along doing this in a beautiful way. I mean, we are making so much progress every year. I am talking to you from Stanford University and I live here in Silicon Valley, and the things that you see every day in terms of what is changing rapidly and of course is happening worldwide and it's just such a pleasure to see our species doing this. To my mind the main thing that needs to change to make it even faster is just to improve our schooling system. In the book we also give a lot of advice to companies about how to be more innovative and of course to individuals an understanding of what that's about. But happily I'm quite optimistic about where our species is going with this. I don't even think there's a way to stop this.

Lynne Malcolm: Professor David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author from Stanford University. His latest book, co-written with composer Anthony Brandt, is The Runaway Species and it's published by Canongate.

Head to the All in the Mind website for more information and there's a link there to a previous All in the Mind episode in which I speak with David Eagleman about how the brain creates our own reality and identity.

Our producer is Diane Dean and sound engineer is Andrei Shabunov.

I'm Lynne Malcolm. Thanks for your company, see you next time.

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Creativity and your brain - ABC Radio National

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Lynne Malcolm: Our brains are attracted to the known and familiar. At the same time, we're hungry for the new and different. Our uniquely human creativity lives in this tension. David Eagleman: One of the things that has always intrigued me is that there is a difference between humans and the rest of the animal species.

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Creativity and the Brain - Note taking and Summary

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Creativity and the Brain - Note taking and Summary

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Creativity and Your Brain Notetaking and Summary

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Creativity and the Brain - Listening Gap Fill

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Creativity and the Brain - Listening Gap Fill

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Creativity and the Brain Paraphrase Summary

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Exercise is contagious because of social media

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Murray Cohen - www.BreakingNewsEnglish.com - Level 6

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Exercise is contagious because of social media

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Practice Speaking Test 4 Factors in Choosing a Career

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Practice Speaking Test 3 Preparing for Careers

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Ted Talk Wendy Sasuki The brain changing benefits of exercise

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Sana Qadar: Tom Vanderbilt didn't know how to play chess. That fact never bothered him until one day at the library with his four-year-old daughter.

Tom Vanderbilt: We were playing a game of checkers, which is something I know how to play, and right next to the checkers board there was a chessboard and she asked this simple question; can we play that game, it looks really interesting. And I said, I would love to but I actually don't really know how to play, I don't think I ever fully learned. So this was kind of a shameful thing to have to admit to my then four-year-old daughter that I didn't know how to do something. But I wanted to encourage her and I had this sense of chess as a very dignified game that was somehow good for you mentally. So I did what a lot of modern parents do and I hired a coach.

Sana Qadar: Tom decided he wanted to learn as well. He had been trying to teach himself online but wasn't really getting anywhere.

Tom Vanderbilt: And so this coach came by and I said, 'Is it okay if I jump in on these lessons as well?' And I thought it would be a funny, nonscientific experiment with a sample size of two in which we had these two different beginners at the same task, separated by all of these years of age. I was approaching 50 at the time. And it also raised the idea that I myself had not really learnt that many new skills, like the game of chess, in quite some time. It just struck a chord that I thought, here I am telling my daughter how important it is to learn new things, why aren't I doing the same thing?

Sana Qadar: You're listening to All in the Mind, I'm Sana Qadar. Lifelong learning can have a multitude of benefits, but there are also many reasons more of us don't do it. Does that come at a cost though?

Rachel Wu: There will be times in everyone's life when they have to be learning new things, because the world is changing rapidly. There will be a time when if you have to do learn something new, are you going to say, yes, I'll do that, or no, I won't do that.

Sana Qadar: Today, the challenges and benefits of being an adult beginner.

Tom Vanderbilt: I was basically sliding into middle age, in my own comfort zone of the things I already knew how to do, and I wasn't really that adventurous.

Sana Qadar: And so as you start to learn chess, who was doing better, you or your daughter?

Tom Vanderbilt: Well, that's a funny question because the human brain at those points in time is such a different entity. My daughter had this brain that was just...all of these synapses were yet to be connected, her brain is just open to the world and receiving such information, and she had very little in the way of memory or experience of playing other games, and this is in some ways why children are such effective learners because...it has been called the less is more hypothesis. There is less already in there clogging up their brain that gets in the way of learning these new things, whereas me, approaching 50, I use the metaphor of an old desktop computer with a lumbering hard drive. I had a lot of...all the things I knew, the people I had met, the things I had tried to do, the muscle memory lurking in me. To try to do something new, I sort of have to cut through all of that and add something else to the hard drive, and almost by necessity that's going to be a bit slower and messier. To cut to the chase here, she was doing better.

Sana Qadar: Who was better wasn't really the point though. Tom found the experience of being an adult beginner so challenging and interesting, he thought why not give this a proper go and learn a whole bunch of new skills. In his day job he's a journalist, and the experience would lead him to write a book called Beginners: The Curious Power of Lifelong Learning. But first, he had to choose which new skills to learn.

Tom Vanderbilt: I sent out this email at first to my friends and said what new tricks should this old dog learn? And people sent back all sorts of interesting things, everything from rock climbing to rock carving to attending gelato university in Italy, and all of these things sounded great in some ideal world but I really wanted to stick to things that I actually felt that I had a pang of desire for at some point in my life. So that was one criteria, something I genuinely wanted to do, not something I felt would be good for me in some sense or good for my career.

Sana Qadar: That means things like coding were out.

Tom Vanderbilt: Another thing was just it should be something that I should be able to do in New York, I didn't want to make it too exotic and be doing things that the average person might not be able to do. And I tried to, almost like a college curriculum, have some diversity in terms of the offerings, like a bit of an outdoor thing, and then I wanted to do something with my hands.

Sana Qadar: Tom settled on surfing, singing, juggling, drawing and jewellery making. And in choosing a variety of things to tackle more or less at the same time, he was onto something.

Rachel Wu: What happens is if you are just doing one thing at a time, if you don't happen to be great at that or if something doesn't go quite right with that one skill, then you might generalise and say I'm not good at learning anything. But if you've got three skills going on at the same time and you happen to be not so bad at one and not great at another one or whatever, or alternating, some days you are better at one or the other, then it might give you more confidence in learning in general.

Sana Qadar: Dr Rachel Wu is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California Riverside, and she researches how infants and children learn and whether any of that can be applied to how adults learn. So what's the biggest difference between learning skills as an adult versus as a child?

Rachel Wu: The number one difference is the amount of stuff that gets in our way. So as adults you have a lot of responsibilities that take up a lot of time, and so with infants and kids, they can spend the vast majority of their time learning the thing that they are supposed to be learning, but as adults you have full-time jobs or if you are retired, still you have other responsibilities. So you might have to pay tutors, you might have to try to scrounge around and find people to teach you things or try to teach yourself.

And then with stereotypes that people hold about how it's harder to learn as an adult, especially as an older adult, those stereotypes are much more frequently presented to you as adults as well and that might deter you from learning. So there are a lot of things working against us, I think, as adults, that have nothing to do with our actual ability to learn.

Sana Qadar: That was a problem for Tom when it came to learning chess and why his daughter was doing better than him.

Tom Vanderbilt: After a while she was really doing much more of the lessons with the coach because I got busy with life. And having this coach was a really important thing because she was doing what's called deliberate practise where, you know, she would play a game in, let's say, a tournament, and then the coach would analyse that game. And you really understand what went wrong. Whereas I was just playing to try to win every time without really doing that painstaking analysis, and that is really not the best way to improve. I was sort of going for this undeliberate practice, which was fun but, again, not the best way to improve.

Sana Qadar: There is no doubt learning as an adult is hard. If it's not life getting in the way, it's your own brain.

Tom Vanderbilt: Kids, again, have this fluid intelligence, as it's been called, they are really good at rapid-fire cognition at things like puzzle solving, and they are not afraid to ask questions that other people are afraid to ask. So, the tale of the emperor's new clothes, they will literally see things that other people don't see. There is this phenomenon called change blindness where something changes in a scene, often adults miss this entirely but kids pay attention to everything, they have no filter. Psychologists like Alison Gopnik have done this experiment, they will see things that adults just miss because adults are moving a little bit more on autopilot. If we think about the brain as sort of a prediction engine, as some people have postulated, we sort of already know what to expect in many situations, but kids don't have that filter.

Sana Qadar: But that's not to say adults are incapable of learning new things. More on that later. But first back to Tom's skills acquisition drive, and first up, surfing.

Tom Vanderbilt: Surfing, it's very easy to measure whether you've actually succeeded, which is because you've gotten on a board and rode a wave. But I will say that this did not happen on the first day, I'm not ashamed to admit, and it just felt...it was humbling, let's say, but also energising because it gave me something to look forward to.

And then the minute I actually did ride the board on day two was just an incredible experience because that's the thing about being a beginner that is so rewarding, that the learning curve is very steep. And when people hear that they often think you're talking about something that's very difficult, and I have to get pedantic here and say, no, it's an XY axis and you're talking about time versus progress. So a steep learning curve means you are actually learning a lot more quickly, you're going up. So from going not surfing to surfing, that's an amazing leap in skill acquisition. The problem is that it then gets infinitely harder and that learning curve begins to drop off and you get these plateaus. So that is one of the most satisfying things about being a beginner, is that sense that you are really moving quickly.

Sana Qadar: Tom was learning to surf at Rockaway Beach in Long Island, New York, but a few months later he was in Portugal and thought he'd hit the waves there. He quickly realised he was still very much a beginner.

Tom Vanderbilt: And I thought I already sort of know how to do this, so I'm just going to try it here. But the whole contour of the waves of that surf break were different, and I was on a different sort of board and I was just completely thrown for a loop. And to be honest I think I caught one wave in something like an hour and a half. Because this whole set of rules and things just didn't serve me that well in this new context, I wasn't able to adapt that well. And so this is part of the maturation process as we start to move up the chain and you begin to know how to act in different contexts or freeing yourself from those rules a little bit.

And this goes all the way up to mastery where it's basically an unconscious process. You know, what an expert chess player or surfer is doing is so often beneath consciousness. And this is why I should say that it can be very challenging for a master performer to be a coach because the master may have forgotten how they are doing what they are doing because they are just doing it. And they wouldn't be able to go back and break down that whole process that got them to where they are. So without really having that explicit sense, it's very hard for them to explain it to you, and this is why one of the most effective ways to learn as a beginner is to surround yourselves with people who are both slightly better than you and also slightly worse than you.

Sana Qadar: This strategy, of surrounding yourself with people slightly better and slightly worse than you, was clearer as Tom started taking singing lessons and joined a choir.

Tom Vanderbilt: When I first started, I was completely clueless. After a few months I started to get better and then I noticed a new choir member would join and had that same deer-in-the-headlights look that I had when I got there. But I was able to give them some pointers and that teaching is such an effective method of learning, something that we often forget, but it just cements what you already know in your mind and perhaps deepens that. It's also just very satisfying.

Sana Qadar: Yes, I was going to ask, why was singing one of the skills you wanted to learn?

Tom Vanderbilt: Like a lot of people I suppose I was sort of a lifelong, very private, accidental singer, singing in the shower, in the car, in privacy somewhere. So it does seem a bit of a fool's errand. But I felt it was something that I wanted to do and I felt that it brought a certain pleasure when I did it, although I sort of sensed that I wasn't particularly good and I really didn't know the mechanics of it, and this was definitely demonstrated on day one when I went to my first vocal lesson and the instructor asked me to sing something. And this is probably one of the hardest things I've done in my adult life because to just open yourself up without musical accompaniment and just sing something to a virtual stranger is completely challenging, and singing, unlike speech, really tapped into some emotionally resonant registers in the human psyche. So this was very hard. And I kind of botched it and the instructor was encouraging but I could sense she also saw the work that lay ahead.

I felt after a while I was doing these lessons though, and it was good but I felt like, well, I'm just kind of singing in private to this person, I wonder if there's a way to take this out? I chanced upon this choir and thought it was a great way to do it because I was shielded by the voices of others, yet I was singing in public, which was going to be a very new thing for me. But I was really struck by the choir as a sort of an institution. There is sort of a social harmony, I mean a literal and metaphorical harmony that is created, and it was just an absolute high that I felt from this experience. I never had a bad Monday night which is when our practice was.

Sana Qadar: There has been a lot of research over the years looking into the emotional benefits of choirs. Among them is a study Dr Ellie Pearce co-authored. She is a research fellow in the Division of Psychiatry at University College London.

Ellie Pearce: We were interested in singing because we think that it was one of a suite of behaviours which might have created social bonds for our ancestors. So for our ancestors to survive it was incredibly important that they were part of a group who for things like sharing resources, defending themselves, and singing, as well as behaviours like dancing and laughter we thought might have involved to create these cohesive groups through the release of chemicals in the brain called endorphins which are kind of like natural morphine, so they give you a bit of a high, they make you feel all warm and friendly and we think they are involved in social bonds.

Sana Qadar: As part of their research, Dr Pearce and her colleagues followed about 130 adults as they took classes in a variety of activities over seven months.

Ellie Pearce: We set up new classes of people who were learning to sing together, and then some comparison classes who were doing arts and crafts or creative writing, and we looked at what happened to the social relationships within those groups. We asked people to fill in questionnaires and rate how close they felt to the class as a whole right at the start, midway through, so about month three, and then right at the end, month seven.

Sana Qadar: Participants were also asked to comment on how they felt about each person in their class, plus they were asked if they could name their peers.

Ellie Pearce: The singers, the crafters and the creative writers all felt equally close to their respective classes. But what we did find was right at the start, so when the classmates were strangers and didn't know each other, we found that singing created a much bigger increase in how close they felt to their class compared to the non-singing groups. So it seemed like singing had an icebreaker effect where it created a very strong group cohesion very quickly compared to the creative writers and people doing arts and crafts.

Sana Qadar: Dr Pearce says many people in the singing class also gained confidence as they progressed because they started out thinking they couldn't sing at all. Hers is just one smaller study, but it helps explain why Tom was feeling the way he was.

Tom Vanderbilt: I can't say enough...and this is where if you feel like you can't sing all that well, a choir is a great environment because the blend that is created can generally absorb your imperfections. And in fact scientifically this is kind of interesting. That imperfection, the fact that some people are off just a little bit or different from one another, that's where the magic of the choral blend comes from and why it sounds so good. If everyone were just perfect and sounded too close to one another it would be this monotonous sound.

Sana Qadar: You're listening to All in the Mind, I'm Sana Qadar. Today, the benefits of lifelong learning and why more of us don't keep at it.

One survey of adults in 2017 by the American Association of Retired Persons found 50% of people over the age of 40 didn't learn any new information on a weekly basis.

Rachel Wu: At first when I saw that I was, like, that can't be right, maybe they are just thinking that what they are doing is not learning new information. But then the second item on the survey was do you Google for information and stuff like that. So these are people that don't even Google for new information on a weekly basis. To me that's very alarming because it's very hard to adapt in a changing world when you are not learning at least new information on a weekly basis.

Sana Qadar: This is Dr Rachel Wu again, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California Riverside.

Rachel Wu: There will be times in everyone's life when they have to be learning new things, because the world is changing rapidly. There will be a time when if you have to learn something new, are you going to say yes, I'll do that, or no, I won't do that. If you say no, I won't do that, then you might depend on somebody to do something for you. So if you, say, have medical records online now or something and you have to learn a new platform, are you going to rely on somebody to access those medical records for you or will you learn those things yourself.

Sana Qadar: But for a long time there has been an idea, a stereotype that older people can't really learn new things. Dr Wu says that's partly a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rachel Wu: If you haven't learned for 30 or 40 years, then if you try to learn something you're going to feel like you can't learn very well. So you are just part of this negative cycle where you don't learn as much and then you don't learn as well when you try to learn and then it makes you not want to learn as much.

And some studies have shown that maybe there is a biological reason because we don't grow as many new neurons, but it turns out we still do actually grow new neurons, there is room for neuroplasticity and all of these things that we are finding out now in adulthood that we didn't think was even possible before. So I guess new research is coming out showing it is possible to learn as you get older.

Sana Qadar: In one of her own studies, published in the Journal of Gerontology, Dr Wu and her co-authors had about 40 people aged 60 to 80 years old take a bunch of classes at a college campus.

Rachel Wu: They took three, sometimes five classes that we assigned to them and they had to do this for one quarter, so for three months. We also had discussion sessions with them to talk about motivation and barriers to learning, resilience, what does it mean to be a successful ager, things like that.

So after three months, they increased in their cognitive abilities to middle-aged levels. If you took an older adult off the street of Riverside, there would be a particular level that they would score on average, and that's where most of them started and so by the end of the intervention they were similar to middle-aged adults if you just took a random sample of middle-aged adults.

And so far we are working on the latest dataset now with one-year follow-up where they are actually more similar to younger adults. And so this is really exciting because it's showing the kind of possibilities we could provide ourselves and to each other if we allow ourselves to be in an environment that encourages this kind of intense learning.

Sana Qadar: Author Tom Vanderbilt's own quest to acquire new skills was slightly more free-flowing, and one of the things he wanted to learn to do was juggle.

Tom Vanderbilt: Yes, juggling is great because, as was explained to me by several researchers, it's a skill that you have to learn, and for people studying motor skills research, they need an experimental protocol to give subjects, a lot of what people use are these really boring artificial repetitive tasks like tapping fingers or pressing these weird buttons, completely boring things that make you fall asleep, but to try to teach someone to juggle three balls, and this is, number one, just fun and exciting for the person doing it, but number two, it's also something that most people can learn with a week or two of pretty consistent practice.

And what's really interesting is doing fMRI studies of the before and after, in as little as a week of this juggling practice they had seen significant changes in the brain's plasticity. The brain was adapting to the person doing this juggling and essentially becoming a different person. And there's nothing special about juggling, any new skill you learn that involves motion, vision, hearing, will bring about these changes in plasticity, and this is something that they found was not limited to only younger subjects, older subjects also had these changes.

Sana Qadar: Unlike some of the other skills he was picking up, like surfing or singing, learning to juggle wasn't some sort of hidden lifelong dream for Tom. He wanted to learn juggling as a way to learn about learning.

Tom Vanderbilt: One thing that also I found fascinating about juggling which really speaks to all skills is that there was a great study done at MIT in which they studied people learning how to juggle, and something interesting that goes on where one day you're sort of doing okay and you juggle 30 times in a row, 40, and you feel like you're really making progress, then the next day comes and you're suddenly struggling to do five or six of these runs, as they're called, in a row, and you think, wait, didn't I already know how to do this, why can't I do it now? And those researchers call these bugs, as in like computer errors. I think there's different things going on there which have to do with the brain consolidating all of this new information and forming even memories of how to do the skill. And sometimes the person just needs to basically take a break and step away from the juggling and let it all settle down cognitively.

But there's other things you can do to push through this plateau. And my teachers gave me all sorts of advice, which was, well, don't just struggle in that room, go to the other room, walk while you juggle, listen to music. You keep starting with your dominant hand, do your other hand, change the objects that you're juggling. All these little things would slightly disrupt my well-practised routine I had and I would struggle in the beginning, but after a few days or a week or so, it led to this process of actually getting much better because you were just, again, having this adaptability, flexibility, varying my practice.

Because one thing that expert jugglers are great at doing is if a mistake does happen in midair, they have practised for this, they can correct it. And if you kept trying to do the same thing every time, the moment something is a little bit different, you're going to fall apart, it's too rigid, your whole practice.

Sana Qadar: And so how are you as a juggler now?

Tom Vanderbilt: I'm pretty decent, but there is this huge threshold that both Richard Feynman and myself faced and neither of us have crossed, which is to juggle five balls. Three balls is your basic juggling, four balls gets little bit trickier, five is something that could take you just a year of solid practice to get. In the meantime, I just expand the repertoire of three- and four-ball tricks, of which there are endless numbers of these, and it's still quite a valuable thing to break out at parties.

Sana Qadar: How do you feel at the end of this journey? Do you feel younger, more clever, revitalised, how do you feel?

Tom Vanderbilt: I just feel that I've sort of tapped into reservoirs of...I don't really want to say talent, but just reservoirs of myself that I didn't know where there and it just has made life more interesting.

When The Queen's Gambit film that was immensely popular in the US, and I imagine in Australia as well, came out, this was something that I might have watched before and just thought, oh, that looks kind of interesting, and just skated over the chess that is mentioned, but now I was really able to engage with that on a whole other level because I had actually learned the game. And when they talked about the Sicilian Defence, I can really understand what that actually is.

And I find this with all of these skills, just new levels of appreciation, new levels of engagement with the world. If you want to learn to surf you suddenly become really interested in hydrology and the dynamics of the oceans, and it just, again, makes you attuned to more things in the world.

So I wouldn't say it's made me more interesting or anything, I'm probably actually more boring because now I'll want to talk to people about these skills all the time at parties. But I will say that it is a bit addictive, this process. I've just been doing some indoor rock climbing with my daughter actually, and I'm noticing all the same patterns again.

Sana Qadar: And you talk in the book about wanting to be a role model of sorts for your daughter and it's really lovely to read about your relationship with your daughter in the book. What did you want to show her through your journey?

Tom Vanderbilt: It was less about wanting to be better or good at all these things. What I really wanted her to see was that adults don't just know everything. You know, there was this sense that I was teaching her how to ride a bike, how to tie her shoes, how to do certain maths problems, she just had the notion that I already knew this stuff. But that the learning process itself had a struggle often involved. I didn't just arrive knowing all this stuff, there was some period when I was a beginner in those things and I struggled.

So I felt that especially when we were doing things together, to have her see me being out of my comfort zone, making the same mistakes she was making, sometimes making worse mistakes than she was making, it was just sending this message that it doesn't necessarily come easily, and I thought that might help her see this process unfold a little bit more clearly.

Sana Qadar: Finally I guess for anyone listening who would potentially like to start learning something new and is a little bit afraid, what words of encouragement would you have for them?

Tom Vanderbilt: I would say, number one, just go with your gut. If there is something that just calls out to you, whether it even seems trivial or strange, just go with that because enthusiasm is going to go a long way in terms of showing up for practice or putting in the practice or benefiting from it. I would say either get rid of goals entirely or keep them very small and achievable, don't go in with this massive goal because that might backfire on you.

The researcher Carol Dweck talks about this, a lot of people go into these things saying 'this is going to be my passion project', and by calling it that they almost short-circuit themselves, they think that it should come easily because it's something that they are going to love, and thus I don't have to do struggle, do all this hard work, but it turns out you actually do have to do that work and you might begin to resent this thing that was, hey, this was supposed to be my passion, why does it feel so bad?

I was in a drawing course, it was a week-long drawing course and someone showed up and...they quit the course and he said the reason was 'this was my vacation, I didn't want to work this hard'. So there could be some struggle there. So just keep the goals smaller, and if it's not really clicking, just move on to something else, life is too short to be saddled with an unsatisfying hobby.

Sana Qadar: That's Tom Vanderbilt, journalist and author of the book Beginners: The Curious Power of Lifelong Learning. We also heard from Dr Rachel Wu from the University of California Riverside, and Dr Ellie Pearce, research fellow in the Division of Psychiatry at University College London.

That's it for All in the Mind this week. Our producer is James Bullen, sound engineer is Andrei Shabunov.

I'm Sana Qadar, thanks for listening, catch you next time.

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Why being a beginner is good for you - ABC listen

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Learning chess with his young daughter kickstarted a life-long journey of learning for Tom Vanderbilt. Here's what he discovered about being an adult beginner, its benefits, and how kids and adults learn differently.

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1. Introduction to BE10 Online Speaking Test

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Food shortages - Paraphrasing possible answers

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Food shortages - Paraphrasing possible answers

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Food Conservation answers and paraphrasing exercise

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There's a common warning about our planet's future: the risk of food shortages.

"We've got a growing world and a hungry world. We need to make sure we do our part in helping feed that hungry world," said Kip Tom, a farmer from Indiana who's currently the U.S. ambassador to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, as he closed a panel discussion in 2018.

"That is totally the mantra," says Catherine Kling, an economist at Cornell University. "I'll bet I've been to 50 talks in the last five, 10 years where the beginning is, 'We have to feed 9 billion people by 2050. This is a crisis situation.' The word 'crisis' gets used regularly."

But, in fact, the long-term trend, for more than a century, has been toward ever more abundant food, and declining prices.

To be sure, every once in a while, it really does seem like a crisis. It certainly did in 2008. Tom Hertel, a economist at Purdue University, remembers it well. "This was right in the thick of the biofuel-driven madness," Hertel says, when government policies drove a surge in demand for corn to make ethanol. Rice and wheat prices were spiking for other reasons.

"People were really panicking," he says. Some economists thought that consumers would always experience chronic food shortages and high prices.

Hertel didn't believe it, though. He and his colleagues have a computer model of long-term trends that drive supply and demand for global food, and their model predicted plenty of food, with lower prices.

"So we wrote this paper, 'Debunking the New Normal,' and it was very unpopular," he recalls. "In fact, we weren't able to publish it!"

Eventually, he did find a journal to publish it. And he turned out to be right. Prices soon came back down.

And in fact, the long-term trend, for more than a century, has been toward ever more abundant food, and declining prices. From 1900 to 2000, Hertel says, the number of people in the world quadrupled, yet food prices at the end of the century were only one-third of their starting level.

It's true, of course, that millions of people in the world are hungry or malnourished. But Hertel and Kling say the main reason is that people lack the money to buy food, or because of war and political oppression. Reducing hunger requires addressing poverty and conflict, not just growing more food.

Kling, in fact, is mystified by all the talk about potential food shortages. "Part of the reason may be it's an effective communication device," she says. Farmers and their lobbyists, she says, use the idea that the world needs more food to argue that governments shouldn't impose environmental regulations that might force farmers to pay for all the water pollution they cause, and the wetlands that they destroy. They say, "Oh, we can't possibly impose those costs. Farmers will go out of business and we'll starve," she says.

Even scientists may sometimes have reason to overstate the risks of future food shortages. In 2008, Hertel says, "if you were in the market to raise money for agricultural research, it was a beneficial message."

Also, it's human to worry, and it's easy to think of things that could disrupt the supply of food. For instance, right now, there's climate change.

Tom Hertel has been looking at this. He says there is tremendous uncertainty, but a good chance that food production could get hammered by a warming planet after about 2050.

For the next few decades, though, the trends point toward continuing abundance. Farmers keep finding ways to grow more food on the same amount of land. Population growth, which is the major factor driving the increase in demand for food, is now slowing down.

In fact, U.S. farmers have been so unhappy about low prices for their corn and soybeans and milk in recent years that they've demanded, and received, billions of dollars in government aid. Much of that aid has been justified as compensation for falling prices that followed the Trump administration's trade fight with China, but economists say those prices were declining anyway.

Hertel says this situation gives governments an opportunity to address something more pressing. "The issue is not, can we produce enough food," he says. "It is, can we produce enough food in a way that doesn't destroy the environment."

Farming consumes vast amounts of the planet's land and water. But as farming becomes more productive, perhaps some of that land could be spared. Farmers could turn some cropland back into grasslands, or forest, or wetlands. "If farmers were paid to do this, this could be a very profitable activity, and it could become an important part of their revenue stream," Hertel says. This is already happening in Europe.

This reduces greenhouse emissions. It could help farmers cope with the warming climate, years from now.

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Food Is Growing More Plentiful, So Why Do People Keep Warning Of Shortages?

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For more than a century, food has been getting more abundant, and cheaper. Yet people keep worrying about food shortages. Some economists say the fears actually create their own problems.

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Tom Wujec presents some surprisingly deep research into the “marshmallow problem” -- a simple team-building exercise that involves dry spaghetti, one yard of tape and a marshmallow. Who can build the tallest tower with these ingredients? And why does a surprising group always beat the average?

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Philip Tirpak, Tanja Dreher, Anthony DiMeo, Matt Kulesza, Antony Funnell, Karin Zsivanovits

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Listening and responding - ABC Radio National

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Future Tense looks at the seemingly lost art of listening - listening, not just hearing! And what being responsive can mean in the modern world.

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Collaboration Quotes with possible answers

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Collaboration Quotes with possible answers

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Collaboration Quotes with possible answers

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Why having fun is the secret to a healthier life - TED Talk

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Why having fun is the secret to a healthier life - TED Talk

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Catherine Price: Why having fun is the secret to a healthier life

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Have you had your daily dose of fun? It’s not just enjoyable, it’s also essential for your health and happiness, says science journalist Catherine Price. She proposes a new definition of fun -- what she calls “true fun” -- and shares easy, evidence-backed ways to weave playfulness, flow and connection into your everyday life.