Podcast: Jared Cooney-Horvath on Cognitive Neuroscience

We’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. Where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. We’re your host Jessica and Caroline. And today we’re talking with Jared Cooney Horvath, a cognitive neuroscientist from the University of Melbourne.

Jared specializes in human thought, learning and brain stimulation and has a new book titled Stop Talking Start Influencing, 12 Infsites from Brain Science to Make Your Message Stick that was published in March. Let’s listen in to a recent conversation between Tom and Jared. Jared Cooney Horvath, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast.

Ah, thanks for having me on. Where’d you go to high school? I went to high school in Eagle Crest High School in Denver, Colorado. Were you born and raised there? Yeah, so I’m born in Pittsburgh, but really quickly moved over to Denver, so pretty much

spent most of my childhood there. Gosh, I haven’t been back there in a long time. So when it came time for university, all the brothers kind of graduated at the same time and we all moved away from Denver and none of us ever looked back, unfortunately. Because it was a great city, loved it to death, just never went back for some reason.

Why did you study cinema at USC? Back in the day, film was all I cared about. All I wanted to do was be a director and make movies, but I kind of feel like it’s similar to a lot of careers. Once you see behind the curtain to how it actually works, then you really get to make

an informed decision as to whether or not you like it. And I decided I did not. Too much art by committee. I’m very much when I’m being creative, I want to do it myself. But I think the storytelling must be part of your thread, right?

Yeah, that’s how I went from film into teaching and it was using those concepts of influence, of understanding how people think and engage best with material that I was able to kind of carry over and use in the classroom. So you studied education at Harvard. When did you get that spark?

Was it in college you made that jump? Yeah, a couple of years after undergrad. I just started doing some test prep stuff and that’s when I probably my first class was when I’m like, yep, this is what I really love doing. So spent a couple of years in the classroom and then decided that was back when the brain

stuff just started to become really popular. And so I just remember people coming into the school all the time saying brain based this brain this, but no one had any true knowledge of what they were talking about. So I figured the only way to sort that out would be to go back to school, learn all that brain psych stuff myself so that I could bring it back to teachers to my practice and say,

cool, here’s here’s what it means. Here’s how we can use it. So why’d you decide to do your PhD in Melbourne? I met a lovely Australian Sheila and once you find love, you’ve got to chase it wherever it goes.

So she’s my wife is a Melbourne born and bred and she was originally going to move out to Boston, but she’s a psychologist and they didn’t recognize her credentials out there. So she would have had to go back to school retrain and that would have been a nightmare. So I just said, you know what, I’ll pack up, I’ll come your way and been here for about 10 years now.

Well, it’s a spectacular place, right? Oh, I love it to death. It took me a couple of years to get used to just the small changes like passing people on the sidewalk on the left instead of the right and escalators being flipped. But once I got used to it, yeah, there’s this is going to be a great place to raise a family.

So I’m in no hurry to get out of here. Congratulations on your new book. Thank you, sir. You had a book that came out just a couple of weeks ago. Stop talking, start influencing 12 insights from brain science to make your message stick.

Both great for a general audience, but a lot of important insights for educators. So would love to take a quick spin through the book. Yeah, yeah. What’s going to be the easiest way? Do you want to go through the 12 or there are a couple you want to hit specifically?

Yeah, well, let’s take a quick spin through the 12. The first one, it says don’t try reading and listening to the someone at the same time. Yep. So it turns out we’ve got this neurological bottleneck where we can only do one or the other.

We can either listen to somebody speaking and understand it or read and understand it. Because it turns out when we’re reading silently, we’re actually converting our internal speech into sound. So the brain is processing it as though we were speaking out loud. So we get this kind of bottleneck where we can do one or the other.

But when we try and do both, we lose information from both. And all of a sudden memory understanding comprehension drops wildly. So there are some, our friends at Microsoft, for example, have this really cool assistive technology where you can turn voice to text or text to voice. You can turn that stuff on and off and if you want.

Is that helpful for some kids? Is this a general? If you’re doing, yeah, absolutely. If you’re doing kind of, what’s the official word or term when it’s writing out what I’m speaking, not narration.

I don’t forget what the, dictation. That seems to be solid in small chunks, which is why kind of captions on films, so long as they’re one sentence each or so seem to work fine. It’s once you get into longer text. So I’m thinking more along the lines of if you’ve got a chapter open in front of you

and I’m kind of asking you to read through it while I’m teaching or if I’ve got slides with a bunch of bullet points, that’s when things get tricky. But you can especially, that assistive text works even better if you’ve got slight hearing disabilities. So if the speech you’re trying to listen to is somewhat jarbled or hard to hear, all

of a sudden having that text in front of you becomes a huge boon. So for any student who’s got some sort of hearing difficulty, that could be an incredible tool as well. The second one is that it seems to help if there’s images, if you’re listening to speech, having images that go with it, that feels like a shortcut to long term memory, right?

Bingo, yeah. You’ve got no bottleneck when it comes to simple images and speech and more to the point, once you’ve got an image and speech together, you actually see a boost in memory and comprehension that’s better than any individually. So speech alone, pictures alone, fine, but bring them together and all of a sudden the

whole is more than the sum of its parts. So why TED Talks are so popular? There you go. It’s just someone speaking with one image. They won’t let you do words, they won’t let you do big bullet points.

And you also notice they won’t really let you do charts and graphs because it turns out things like a graph, they’re not processed like regular images, they’re really complex to process. So if I throw up a chart, it’s going to take you explicit attention to figure out what it all means and during that time you can’t pay attention to me.

So we always say, yep, it’s your spoken word with simple images that are easy to discern. That’s how you get people engaged in forming deep memories. We’re talking online, I’m curious, is it better to read or to listen or is that very by the learner? Who depends on the text?

The way we always kind of say it is if somebody is teaching, always choose to follow the speaker because you’re going to be getting asides and insights that didn’t make the final cut of their slides or their handouts. But when it comes to long form material, if you do have written word, take it home, sit down and focus solely on that.

You’re going to… So it’s longer stuff, reading seems to work a little bit better because you can kind of take it in and out. But when pressed to the choice, if somebody is there live, always go with the speaker, best choice.

Number three is about spatial layouts. What did you learn about that? Yeah, so this started with slides as well, this idea that once the spatial world becomes predictable, people can free up energy. They’re able to easily figure out where information is going to be, they can find it easier, and

that frees up potential resources for them to focus on the meaning, the understanding of the material they’re looking for. So we actually started with slides saying, cool, as long as all of your slides or handouts are formatted similarly, you can free up attention. But that’s kind of now moved beyond that to further contextual environmental kind of issues

as well. So we’ve got similar layouts to your offices, to your classroom. Once people learn a layout, they can predict it a lot easier, free up attentional resources, learn a little bit easier. And you kind of get a second bonus that if you ever break that predictable layout, you

force people to pay attention. They don’t have a choice. As soon as that prediction is broken, their attention fires up and they’ll focus right where you want them to focus. So you can kind of use that prediction to also, if you’ve got a very specific point or something

you need to get across, break that prediction to force people to focus in. Number four and number 12 are about practice. Number four is about where you practice. And number 12 is about spacing practice. So maybe you could talk a little bit about the subject of deliberate practice and what

we’ve learned. Yeah. So I think with the key thing, key couple of principles with practice is one, context matters. Regardless of whether or not you’re paying attention to it, right now your memory for

my words aren’t just these words. They’re also going to be whatever smells are in the air, whatever clothing you’ve got against your skin, whatever other noises are coming in your ears. So context becomes embedded with every memory we form. So if we know that, then we can use context to our advantage during practice.

If we’re practicing for a very specific thing, embed as much context into your practice as you can. So that once you get to that performance moment, you can use all those cues to activate that information. Or if you’re practicing more generally, like I want to be good at basketball everywhere.

In that case, I want to practice in as many contexts as I can. Do it outside, do it inside at night during the morning, strip as much context away as possible so the skill becomes kind of standalone. So we’ve got this and it’s not just external context, it’s internal to how are you feeling, how chemicals are going through your body.

So we’ve got this issue of just locking in context. And then when it comes to spacing, it’s this idea that at the end of every day you go to sleep and when you’re asleep, you’re dreaming. And what’s happening, we think when you’re dreaming is you’re consolidating your memories. So essentially you’re locking down the information or skills you learned that day into your brain.

And that’s a really good necessary process. So we always say rather than cramming or doing too much study in one day, if you can break your study up with sleep in between, you allow yourself these consolidation moments and all of a sudden the learning, the memories move faster, go deeper. So an hour a day across three days will always lead to better longer term memories than three

hours in one day simply because you’ve got those sleep jolts in between. Cramming doesn’t work. You know what it sucks? It works in the very short term, which is why I think a lot of people get stuck with it.

But yeah, 72 hours after you cram, you can kiss 70% of that information goodbye. It’s cool. And another, we used to think we could multitask and I think a lot of us have learned that doesn’t work very well. This is lesson number five.

And if you still think you can multitask, we’re now learning that you’re probably one of the worst multitaskers. People who think they’re good at it have real difficulty figuring out just how poorly they’re doing when they do it. Yeah, it’s same thing as before when we’re talking about that bottleneck between voices.

It’s similar here where whenever you’re doing a task, you have to activate the rule set for that task. And this determines, you know, your attentional filter, what information is allowed in, what’s blocked out, what you can do, what you can’t do. And unfortunately, that rule set, there’s only one rule set slot in the brain, which

means you can only have one rule set active at any one time. So if you try and do multiple things simultaneously, you’re really just quickly jumping back and forth between them. And unfortunately, it takes time to switch that rule set out. And after a while, those rule sets start to get confused.

So if you’ve ever been talking on the phone while typing an email, you recognize you start to kind of bleed one into the other and start making mistakes on each. So anytime you multitask, you work slower, you remember less, and your accuracy drops precipitously. So we just say, look, if you’re going to, if you’re going to take the time to learn

something, short focused periods are always going to be better than long periods while multitasking. If you can just focus in for 25 minutes, that’s going to trump hours while trying to do other stuff. Number six is about interleaving skills.

What’s that? So this is a practice thing rather than a learning thing. And if when you’re practicing a set of skills, if you jump back and forth between multiple skills, you run a better chance of keeping each skill kind of what we call active, malleable, transferable, and usable.

So just as a simple example, if you’re practicing, say your golf swing, my natural inclination is to go out to the practice range and say, do 10 shots with my driver, then go to my three iron, then just kind of work my way down the clubs. And what happens is the more I practice in that kind of what we call chunked or masked fashion where it’s all driver, then all three iron, then all nine iron, I really start to

isolate skills and I, it becomes really difficult when I’m out on the actual golf course to jump quickly between clubs because I’d never practiced that way. But if instead on the driving range, I just jump, I do two with the driver, two with the putter, one with the nine iron, jump to a three back to the driver and I just keep interleaving, mixing and matching.

Now when I step out on the course where it’s a lot more chaotic and unpredictable, I’ve kind of practiced for that. I’m used to jumping between clubs now. So we say during practice, unless you’re trying to just build one long automatic program for something, jump between different skills, keep mixing and matching.

It’ll feel weirder. You won’t get as much into the zone while practicing, but come performance time, you’ll be able to jump a lot faster between skills. Is, would this suggest, would it be suggestive of benefits of integrated project-based learning in school that we combine challenges?

Bingo. So that’s what I, yeah, once you’ve got past kind of the learning stage, so you’ve got some information deeply embedded within you, then yet once you now bring on a long-term or broad project, which forces me to now jump between math and English and all these skills to see how they fit together, that, that’s incredible.

It’s exactly what this is talking about. Once you’re at the practice stage, the more you can jump between, the more you can keep all those skills active, keep them malleable, keep them fresh, and you might actually start to see some creative insights by jumping back and forth as well. That’s how we think creativity happens now, just linking two disparate ideas.

Why should we embrace errors? Oh, this, this one is my all-time favorite. So the brain, unfortunately, it doesn’t like to do a lot of work. So go back to what we were talking about with spatial predictability. It turns out the brain tries to form predictions for everything.

The idea being that so long as the brain can predict, it doesn’t have to actively engage with anything. It can just kind of coast. So right now, your listeners aren’t actually listening to us. They’re simply predicting the words that are about to come out of our mouths.

And so long as they’re even remotely close, they’ll experience the prediction rather than the reality. What an error is, is it’s when your prediction fails. And so an error is a very specific thing. It’s not, when you don’t know something, that’s not an error.

When you fail a test because you never studied, that’s not an error. When you have a really strong prediction that proves to be wrong, that’s an error. And in that moment, what happens is the brain flips into the present, what we call your coder, essentially your frontal lobe kicks on, and the whole machine goes into learning mode.

Essentially, the brain goes, uh-oh, there’s a mistake here. We need to update our prediction. So whatever information is about to come in, we can learn really easily and drop down. So it’s like the whole system becomes primed to learn when you make an error. Unfortunately, most people don’t really like that feeling, so they shut that system down.

But if we can learn to love that feeling of an error, everything conspires for us in that moment to learn. So they become the easiest access to forming new memories and learning new information. Yeah, that’s fascinating. I can think of a couple of books from 2018 that were uniquely provocative.

They’re ones that really challenged my mental model, and they did provoke that feeling of discomfort. Yeah. Yeah, I guess it’s, as you said, it’s leaning into that feeling and processing it is where real learning comes from.

And the more you can kind of yet learn to seek out that feeling, because it’s, believe it or not, that is the feeling of learning. That’s the physical updating of the brain. And I think most people try and, because it’s uncomfortable, avoid it, but the more you allow yourself to live in it, the more you learn to seek it out, and the more you can start

to go, you know what, I’m okay with this feeling. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just different than the comfort I’m used to to that prediction mode. Number eight, it’s about recall. Why is recall important?

Yeah, so we used to think that memories had to do with input. So how information comes into your brain. If it’s emotional, you’ll remember it better. If it’s repetitive, you’ll remember it better. But it turns out that’s not actually true.

If you want a deep, lasting, strong memory, it’s not about how the information goes in. It’s about how it comes back out. Every time you access a memory, that’s what makes it deeper. So the reason why we remember emotional events so well isn’t largely because it came in differently. It’s because we tend to think about those events more later.

The reason we remember some TV shows isn’t because we watch them a dozen times. It’s because we think about them the next day. We talk about them. We debate about them. So when it comes to forming deep memories, we always say recall becomes key.

It’s about how are you taking it out? So if you’re studying by rereading a chapter or rereading your notes or just rewatching a lecture, putting the information back in, that’s not doing you a lot of good. But if you’re quizzing yourself, if you’re trying to teach somebody else, if you’re having a debate with somebody, pulling that information out, that’s when you’re going to start to get

deep, lasting memories. So the question is, what does this mean? So this kind of goes down that route of priming, this idea that the brain will hold onto any pattern for an extended period of time. So if I can prime a certain pattern in your brain, I can guide how you approach learning

beyond that. So for the first five minutes of any class, of any meeting, of any conference, lessened presentation, I always say whatever information and skills you’re activating there, that’s going to be how they understand the rest of your presentation. So those become wildly important.

Are you activating very specific fact-based skills where the importance is each word? Are you activating debate skills where the importance is in relationships? Are you activating search skills? What strategies are you activating? Ask your questions.

What strategies are you activating, asking your audience to use in that first five minutes? And make sure that aligns with how you want them to understand and interact with the information for the next 40 minutes. Prime the right facts, prime the right skills, and it’s going to make learning a lot easier beyond that moment.

And back to storytelling, as we talked about earlier, number 10 is about using stories. Yeah. Why and how? This one’s probably my favorite. So if you think about dreaming, so now that I’m awake, thinking back to my dreams last

night, they’re chaotic. There’s just, there’s no real rhyme or reason. I’m playing soccer in one moment, and then I’m a different person in a shopping mall the next moment. It’s just, it’s nonsense.

But when I was asleep last night dreaming, it made perfect sense. The brain was tying each moment together. So what we learned from this is that the brain thinks in cause and effect is whatever happens in this moment, the brain is going to try and link to the next moment and say that caused that, that made this happen.

In addition, it’s going to send a lot of emotional valence to those moments. So it’s not just going to be events causing other events. There’s also going to be emotional moments that drive with that flow. So if that sounds familiar, that’s essentially the elements of a story. Stories aren’t just events happening, they’re cause and effect.

They’re events happening because something precipitated it with emotions flowing along with that momentum. So it’s not a mistake when people say, and we’re not being metaphorical, when we say the brain thinks in stories, the brain thinks in narratives. So if that’s the natural patterns of the brain, the more I can embed stories and narratives

into the information I’m trying to teach, the easier it is for the brain to process and make sense of that. I’m essentially just writing the rails already laid down in your brain. So anytime you’re teaching anything, if you can find an exemplar story that highlights all the concepts, if you can find a through line that links all the concepts together,

those stories are going to be what help people really comprehend and make sense of the information you’re trying to get across. For 11th set, moderate stress can actually be helpful, can boost the link to memory. Absolutely. It turns to stress.

If you think about it, stress isn’t a bad thing. It’s an evolutionary or universal, some sort of mechanism that we adopted to help our brain stay fresh. Stress is that sensation of, oh, there’s a difference between prediction and reality. And when I said earlier that in that moment, your brain becomes primed for learning.

Your body becomes primed for learning. This is what I mean. Stress kicks that cascade off. It essentially opens up the memory networks. It opens up your old predictions and allows you to move forward.

So moderate stress, which triggers that kind of cascade, is wonderful. And if you have moderate stress every day through challenge, through learning something new, through pushing yourself past your limits, those are what’s going to keep your brain sharp and healthy till the day you keel. So we now know that’s the secret.

If you’re an older adult, that’s the secret to a healthy brain. It’s not about doing a crossword every day. It’s about doing something new every day, forcing yourself into that zone of discomfort every day. And that’s what keeps the brain healthy.

The only danger is when stress becomes prolonged. So if I’m talking days of continuous stress, so something that might spring from trauma or if I’m having troubles at home, once stress becomes too long, that really beneficial mechanism becomes really detrimental. So what once was priming me for learning now essentially shuts down my ability to learn.

Same exact process. It’s just once it goes on too long, the brain starts to overreact, starts to die away. So we say short, pointed stress, good, long term stress, bad. Anytime you reach that zone, stop trying to learn. Your only goal should be to shut down the stress response.

Anything before that is going to be useless. All right, let’s do a quick lightning round. What’s better for learning a lecture or a challenging activity? Oh, honestly, it depends on what level of learning you’re at. When you’re at the beginning of learning, so taking in a brand new, brand new information

you’ve never encountered before, a lecture trumps an activity. But once you have the basic facts locked down, then an activity trumps lecture every day of the week. What’s better online or face to face? Oh, that one is zero question, face to face. We’ve found nothing that a computer can do that a human can’t do better live,

with the exception of access to information. Why is it better? No one knows exactly why, but we’re thinking it has to do with with the adaptability inherent in human interaction. Most of our meaning and communication isn’t done verbally and it’s not done through actions.

It’s done through feelings. We empathize with one another. Unfortunately, most technology is stuck with trying to base predictions on actions. So the one tool we have that it doesn’t have is the ability of I can just feel what a kid is feeling and know how to push based on that.

I’m not required to only have behavioral input. What’s better to listen or to read? So long as you’re doing either an isolation, I think they both serve different purposes, just so long as you don’t do them together. Speaking of listening, what’s your favorite podcast?

Favorite, you know what? This is going to sound crazy because it’s so left wing of what I normally would listen to. But right now I’ve been listening to that Malcolm Gladwell podcast, The Revision of History. And I’m actually enjoying the heck out of it. He’s got some really good episodes on, I just listened to a few on higher education and funding.

And I just was actually quite taken aback by some of the information that I’d never heard before. So right now, today, that’s the one I’m listening to. Well, I think it goes back to item number 10, storytelling. Malcolm’s just a great storyteller. Yeah. And you know what else I’ve been listening to is The Moth.

Have you heard of that? Sure. That is, I can’t… Anytime there’s, I have a free time, I’ll pop that on and I’m always enthralled. Story is how we think.

What’s a healthier brain activity, sleeping or running? Again, both, depending on, I hope you can do both. If you, oh God, if you had to select one, sleep. If you don’t sleep, you die. So you got to, I got to say sleep.

What other neuroscientists and or researchers are you learning from most recently? I’ve been doing a lot of work the last couple of years with a guy named Jason Lodge down at University of Queensland. And so he works really in the higher ed education sector. So his argument or goal is to see how can we best use technology and AI to boost learning in tertiary education. So for the last about two years, he’s been the guy I’ve been working with.

And although we don’t always see eye to eye, I am learning a ton about technology from him. What is next for you and your research? I guess just mentioning Jason and AI and tertiary learning maybe. It may be the answer, but curious about what’s next in your work? I’m the more I play with kind of the technology side, the more I’m getting, I’m pushing myself out of it.

It’s, I just, I, technology is kicking my butt right now in that everything that we think should be effective about it isn’t. And so I think I’m a lot of my research and I was moving back into the on the ground to try and suss out almost what we were just talking about. What it is about live that seems to trump digital, the exact same information. Even if you film a lecture and have people watch it, the people who were at the filming learn more than the people who watch it. It’s, it’s the strangest thing.

Once you put a screen in front of people, things drop. So I’m, I’m, I’m going back to kind of on the ground to try and suss that out and solve if I can, what that difference is. I guess I’ve, um, some might consider me a leading voice in online learning for the last 30 years. And I keep coming back to the power of relationships that most of us are, most of us are activated by relationship and learn and community. And while it’s possible to do that online, um, it, for most people, relationship and community are formed face to face.

And it’s interesting that many of us keep coming back to that. It’s, we keep trying. I’ve, I’ve got my nephews who are really into that, um, that Fortnite online game and they have their online communities and their friends, but there’s still something I don’t, I don’t know if it’s quantitative or qualitative, but there’s something different about online friends versus when they actually have their real friends come over to play. It’s their faces are different though, their words are different sensations are different.

So yeah, there’s a, and again, I don’t know if it’s a solvable thing, but there is something about being with somebody that we can resonate. We can feel each other and that seems to be really important. Where can people learn more online? So I’ve, if you go to scienceoflearning.com.au, um, if you go to the resources tab, I’ve got videos that I’ve made. So each of the 12 things we’ve talked about, I’ve made little five minute videos.

I kind of outlined the science behind each of those as well. So a bunch of good little videos you can use there. Um, and also if you just look up the science of learning online, you’ll get a lot of good research coming out of labs. Now some of it’s dense, but some of it’s really useful. Um, that just kind of start to try and draw this bridge between what we’re learning in the lab and how we can apply that in the classroom.

I’d encourage everybody to go online to your favorite online bookstore and find, stop learning, start influencing 12 insights from brain science to make your message stick. By Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath. Jared, thanks so much for being on the Getting Sport podcast. Hey, thank you. You guys have a good one.

A big thanks to Jared for taking time to chat with us for today’s episode. If you’re interested in learning more about cognitive neuroscience, we recommend grabbing a copy of his new book, Stop Talking, Start Influencing, 12 Insights from Brain Science to Make Your Message Stick. We’ve got it linked in the show notes and on today’s blog. If you’re ready to keep learning and want to explore all things innovation and learning, be sure to check out our blog at GettingSmart.com. And don’t forget to hit subscribe on the podcast so you don’t miss out on any future episodes.

While you’re there, leave us a rating and tell us what you think about the podcast. It helps us get better and helps more of your friends find us. All right. That’s it for this week’s episode. Thanks for tuning in for the Getting Smart podcast.

This is Jessica and Caroline signing off.