Learning new skills as an adult is basically like teaching a cat to fetch, technically possible, but mostly you just end up questioning your life choices. I should know,  I’m teaching myself creative writing (hence this barrage of posts 🙃). And even though writing may seem easy, trust me it is not.

Neuroscientist Dr. Lila Landowski says our brains peak at age 5. After 20, learning falls off a cliff — but it’s not all bad news. With the right “cheat codes,” adults can still learn fast, and even enjoy it.

The six keys according to her? Attention, alertness, breaks, repetition, sleep, and mistakes.

So here are 10 hacks to learn better, compiled from Dr Lila’s TED talk from 2023 and some related research(linked).

1. Exercise: it increases the part of your brain involved in memory and learning.  A moderate 20-minute exercise session can boost attention for up to two hours afterwards. So the next time you sit down for a focussed activity – do a few jumping jacks, climb the stairs or go for a run.
2. Reduce phone and social media time – now before you accuse me of sounding like your mother, hear me out. According to prior research, our brain is set up to focus on only one thing at a time. Constant context switching and multi-tasking causes attention deficit. Social media notifications draw your attention away and forces you to switch context. So the next time you sit down to study, switch on the do not disturb mode.
3. Add some stressors  – When our body’s fight or flight response is activated, it releases adrenaline which helps improve our alertness in the short term. Exercise is again a good way to add a small stressor. So is a cold shower.
4. But not too much – prolonged stress or chronic stress is bad. It can physically change your brain and cause memory issues in the long term.
5. Repetition – practice makes perfect and all that jazz aside, there is a scientific reason for why repetition helps with learning. Neuroplasticity is how our brain forms new neural pathways based on experiences and learning. This process requires a lot of energy and resources – much like building muscles. To maximize ROI, our brain won’t form new neural pathways unless a thing keeps coming back again and again. That’s how our brain knows this is important information worth new neural connections. Repetition is that signal to your brain. 
6. Break up learning into short sessions spread out over multiple days – To facilitate the conversion of short-term memories into long-term memories, it’s beneficial to break down learning into short, spread-out sessions over several days. Repetition is key, but distributing it over time allows the brain to process and consolidate information effectively. Studies have shown that shorter sessions over two days are more effective than a single long session. While one-shot learning can occur, it typically happens under conditions of fear or anxiety, which triggers the brain to retain crucial information. However, this intense emotional response, when it goes wrong, can lead to negative outcomes like PTSD.
7. Take 10-20min breaks between study sessions –  Breaks give your brain a chance to replay stuff you just learned, thereby helping solidify the knowledge. Another lesser known fact why breaks are important is that newly encoded information is unstable, and if we switch context to learn something else right after, that new knowledge can get destroyed. This process is called retrograde interference. So next time keep your learning sessions short, take breaks and during those breaks do something quiet and mundane. Let that new knowledge bake in.
8. Get enough sleep before and after – You have certainly heard this before, sleep is important, for stress, for body functions, for alertness. But did you know it also plays a role in consolidating short term memories into long term memories. When you do stuff during the day, your hippocampus keeps track of things – like the RAM of a computer. When you sleep, the hippocampus carts everything in your RAM to other parts of the brain – the cortex etc and turns it into long term memory. Almost like ahem committing to a physical disk.
9. Coffee – being a hardcore coffee drinker, I did a big, loud yay when I heard this. Coffee helps with alertness, but there is also a growing body of work that suggests drinking coffee before a learning task can help with memory functions. 
10. Make mistakes – have you ever felt a twinge of anxiety when you made a mistake. I know I have. My ears turn hot, a sense of dread seeps in. Apparently, this is a natural reaction to trigger your brain to remember something important. So next time you make mistakes, observe the anxious feeling and know that it’s your body’s signal to your brain. And once you do that, you won’t be afraid of mistakes, in fact you will embrace it, challenge yourself, push the envelope and that is how you will learn new things.

References:

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6945516/
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3197943/
3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5579396/
4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3351401/
5. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2644330/
6. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627323002015
7. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8202818/