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It’s tastefully hot outside—the kind of air you can sip out of a mason jar. In my left hand, thread between my pinky and my pointer finger, a set of thick leather reins. In my right hand, a wooden mallet. I’m riding a little bay horse named Bochita, named after “little ball” in Spanish. Her chest is the size of two bowling balls and her owner tells me, “She gains weight by basically swallowing air.” I feel instantly connected to her. We are standing in a field that spans the size of four football fields, two goal lines on each side. And I’m spending my Wednesday evening learning how to play polo. A friend of mine convinced me to try it over the summer, at the Twin City Polo Club in Long Lake, Minnesota. The place is spectacular. Horses dapple the countryside and an open barn houses their flicking tails and leather saddles. Colorful wooden mallets hang from stall doors. When we arrive to ride, I’m always nervous. Learning something new makes me feel robust and complicated, as if I have no room to house any more information. Green fields spread far and wide, topped by large orange goal posts on each side. The first day of lessons, we walked on-ground, learning how to clock the ball with a short mallet. The second day, we rode our horses and learned the rules of the game. Which, let me tell you, are ten times more complicated on a 1,200 pound animal. I can’t count how many times I royally missed aiming for that waffle-sized ball, worrying I would hit Bochita in the mouth instead. And the rules! Amidst learning the precision and balance of riding, hitting the ball, steering, staying on, scoring a goal, hitting opponents, and whacking their mallet off the path, I was in for a serious learning curve.

Polo was a great, humbling reminder that I don’t know a lot about the things I really do know. Or, that there are so many things in this world I have to open myself up to; so many levels and steps I need to take to know myself in the process.

I’ve been riding horses for over twenty years. And polo was a great, humbling reminder that I don’t know a lot about the things I really do know. Or, that there are so many things in this world I have to open myself up to; so many levels and steps I need to take to know myself in the process. The first few days of polo sent me on a vulnerable spiral that assured me I didn’t know much about riding with grit and stamina. I was constantly frustrated by my balance and ability to take care of the horse and my mind. I was, to put it simply, really bad at polo. Which, in turn, made me feel like a really bad rider.  After much frustration, missing the ball, and breaking the rules of the game (hi, going the wrong way down the field—guilty!), polo helped, and it is helping me learn so much about myself. Bochita, bless her equine soul, pulled a lot of tricks to teach me how to be a better listener. Out of pure stubbornness or testing me, she’d drift closer to the ball and make it impossible for me to hit it. Eventually, that taught me how to keep a soft leg to push her in the other direction. She taught me how to pay attention and be aggressive, because merging on horseback is a different ball game entirely. That’s all to say, I wasn’t a bad rider. I was learning something new. Suddenly, I had to have eyes on the back of my head. The way Bochita shifted her body told me a horse was nearby. Learning with her became an intuition and I’m certain it’s making me a better horse person. In the beginning, I was awkward. I was clunky. And instead of getting mad and embarrassed about it, I needed to lean in and learn a thing or two to be better. Polo taught me how to be calm. It taught me how to have patience, above all, for myself. Something I had forgotten how to do until Bochita and polo and galloping down a field with a mallet raised to the high heavens taught me. These situations of vulnerability and bravery are a huge part of what learning does for us. Which brings me to this: If I don’t know the depth of what I know now, what does that say about all of the things I don’t actively practice knowing. Okay—let me type that again. I’ve known horseback riding like the wrinkles on my palm for years. But, polo brought me to an entirely different level of the craft. So, how can I be open to learning new things I’m not passionate about? What can I do better? Openness to learning is a goddamn superpower, so what can I apply to my everyday to be uncomfortable?

Committing to being a lifelong learner can do so much for us. It helps us learn more about ourselves and, in turn, helps us become better versions of who we are in our communities and world.

Learning new things is self-work. It sucks. But, committing to being a lifelong learner can do so much for us. It helps us learn more about ourselves and, in turn, helps us become better versions of who we are in our communities and world. I’ve been tasking myself to learn more than polo this summer. It’s important to do that. And to challenge myself to continually learn new things that make me uncomfortable. And we don’t need to hurt ourselves in the process. A deep silence revives listening and that’s the first step of learning something new. In polo, in civil rights, in politics, in science—the first step is hearing people out, reading their stories, and understanding the rules of the game.  I read a quote from Rumi, as translated by Coleman Barks , once: “Do not pretend to know something you have not experienced.” In huge part, this is a monumental tidbit I took away on learning. As humans, we have a tendency to puff our chests and act like we know everything. I don’t know if it’s to save face or an element of survival. But, it sucks. And we have to change it. Unless we experience something, we can’t truly know it. But, we can listen in the process and work to fix experiences for others. And, truly, for ourselves. For some reason, while writing this, I thought of the word “elasticity.” Because, physically, learning makes us feel flexible—as if our rebound is better. So, I googled “why does learning make my brain more elastic.” A lot of articles popped up right away about the elastic brain and how a fixed mindset is close-minded and negative in the fast-paced world we live in today. According to this article I found in Medium , our brains are able to adapt to changes, improvise, and downsize complex tasks into more manageable ones. Most importantly, because of this, the best innovators can shift their perspective. We’re curious. We ask questions. We’re imaginative and open and observant. 

We listen. We learn. We get it wrong. We try again. Progress is our biggest gift.

Another article I found via EdSurge talks about the “joyful struggle” in learning, which highlights the benefits of leaning into the struggle because being physically and emotionally uncomfortable is the key to bravery and learning.  Take it from my polo story. I’ve been practicing polo for a month and a half. I can hit the ball at a full canter. Bochita has more confidence in me. I can hit the ball backward to my fellow defenders. Guys, I even got my first goal last weekend. This all started from hitting a tiny ball from the ground with a mini mallet, then trying it on horseback, failing miserably, and doing it again and again.  This all started from trying something new and being open to joyously sucking at it. We listen. We learn. We get it wrong. We try again. Progress is our biggest gift. Hitting the ball at the walk has become as natural as riding and I’m able to look back and see how far I’ve come; how effortless each lesson onward can become, too. What have you tried to learn lately that made you a stronger human?

Brittany Chaffee is an avid storyteller, professional empath, and author. On the daily, she gets paid to strategize and create content for brands. Off work hours, it’s all about a well-lit place, warm bread, and good company. She lives in St.Paul with her baby brother cats, Rami and Monkey. Follow her on Instagram , read more about her latest book, Borderline , and (most importantly) go hug your mother.

BY Brittany Chaffee - July 10, 2020

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“Openness to learning is a superpower.” This will stick with me. Thank you!

Thank you so much, Angela! I appreciate you reading and enjoying 🙂

I learned to sail at age 70 and since then have been able to spend 4 weeks crewing for a friend in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico. Learning how to control the power of the wind to get where we wanted to go has been amazing!

Hi, Connie! This is AMAZING. I love this story and your eagerness to learn something new. I can’t imagine how invigorating it feels to work with the wind like that. Keep up the bad assness 😉

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Is It Really Too Late to Learn New Skills?

By Margaret Talbot

Among the things I have not missed since entering middle age is the sensation of being an absolute beginner. It has been decades since I’ve sat in a classroom in a gathering cloud of incomprehension (Algebra 2, tenth grade) or sincerely tried, lesson after lesson, to acquire a skill that was clearly not destined to play a large role in my life (modern dance, twelfth grade). Learning to ride a bicycle in my early thirties was an exception—a little mortifying when my husband had to run alongside the bike, as you would with a child—but ultimately rewarding. Less so was the time when a group of Japanese schoolchildren tried to teach me origami at a public event where I was the guest of honor—I’ll never forget their sombre puzzlement as my clumsy fingers mutilated yet another paper crane.

Like Tom Vanderbilt, a journalist and the author of “Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning” (Knopf), I learn new facts all the time but new skills seldom. Journalists regularly drop into unfamiliar subcultures and domains of expertise, learning enough at least to ask the right questions. The distinction he draws between his energetic stockpiling of declarative knowledge, or knowing that , and his scant attention to procedural knowledge, or knowing how , is familiar to me. The prospect of reinventing myself as, say, a late-blooming skier or ceramicist or marathon runner sparks only an idle interest, something like wondering what it might be like to live in some small town you pass on the highway.

There is certainly a way to put a positive spin on that reluctance. If you love your job and find it intellectually and creatively fulfilling, you may not feel the urge to discover other rooms in the house of your mind, whatever hidden talents and lost callings may repose there. But there are less happy forces at work, too. There’s the fear of being bad at something you think is worthwhile—and, maybe even more so, being seen to be bad at it—when you have accustomed yourself to knowing, more or less, what you’re doing. What’s the point of starting something new when you know you’ll never be much good at it? Middle age, to go by my experience—and plenty of research—brings greater emotional equanimity, an unspectacular advantage but a relief. (The lows aren’t as low, the highs not as high.) Starting all over at something would seem to put you right back into that emotional churn—exhilaration, self-doubt, but without the open-ended possibilities and renewable energy of youth. Parties mean something different and far more exciting when you’re younger and you might meet a person who will change your life; so does learning something new—it might be fun, but it’s less likely to transform your destiny at forty or fifty.

In “Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over,” Nell Painter, as distinguished a historian as they come—legions of honors, seven books, a Princeton professorship—recounts her experience earning first a B.F.A. at Rutgers and then an M.F.A. at the Rhode Island School of Design while in her sixties. As a Black woman used to feeling either uncomfortably singled out or ignored in public spaces where Black women were few, she was taken aback in art school to find that “old” was such an overwhelming signifier: “It wasn’t that I stopped being my individual self or stopped being black or stopped being female, but that old , now linked to my sex, obscured everything else beyond old lady .” Painter finds herself periodically undone by the overt discouragement of some of her teachers or the silence of her fellow-students during group crits of her work—wondering if they were “critiquing me, old-black-woman-totally-out-of-place,” or her work. Reading her book, I was full of admiration for Painter’s willingness to take herself out of a world in which her currency—scholarly accomplishment—commanded respect and put herself into a different one where that coin often went unrecognized altogether, all out of exultation in the art-making itself. But her quest also induced some anxiety in me.

Painter is no dilettante: she’s clear about not wanting to be a “Sunday Painter”; she is determined to be an Artist, and recognized as such. But “dilettante” is one of those words which deter people from taking up new pursuits as adults. Many of us are wary of being dismissed as dabblers, people who have a little too much leisure, who are a little too cute and privileged in our pastimes. This seems a narrative worth pushing back against. We might remember, as Vanderbilt points out, that the word “dilettante” comes from the Italian for “to delight.” In the eighteenth century, a group of aristocratic Englishmen popularized the term, founding the Society of the Dilettanti to undertake tours of the Continent, promote the art of knowledgeable conversation, collect art, and subsidize archeological expeditions. Frederick II of Prussia dissed the dilettanti as “lovers of the arts and sciences” who “understand them only superficially but who however are ranked in superior class to those who are totally ignorant.” (They were, of course, wealthy, with oodles of time on their hands.) The term turned more pejorative in modern times, with the rise of professions and of licensed expertise. But if you think of dilettantism as an endorsement of learning for learning’s sake—not for remuneration or career advancement but merely because it delights the mind—what’s not to love?

Maybe it could be an antidote to the self-reported perfectionism that has grown steadily more prevalent among college students in the past three decades. Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill, the authors of a 2019 study on perfectionism among American, British, and Canadian college students, have written that “increasingly, young people hold irrational ideals for themselves, ideals that manifest in unrealistic expectations for academic and professional achievement, how they should look, and what they should own,” and are worried that others will judge them harshly for their perceived failings. This is not, the researchers point out, good for mental health. In the U.S., we’ll be living, for the foreseeable future, in a competitive, individualistic, allegedly meritocratic society, where we can inspect and troll and post humiliating videos of one another all the live-long day. Being willing to involve yourself in something you’re mediocre at but intrinsically enjoy, to give yourself over to the imperfect pursuit of something you’d like to know how to do for no particular reason, seems like a small form of resistance.

Tom Vanderbilt got motivated to start learning again during the time he spent waiting about while his young daughter did her round of lessons and activities. Many of us have been there, “on some windowless lower level of a school huddled near an electrical outlet to keep your device alive,” as he nicely puts it—waiting, avoiding the parents who want to talk scores and rankings, trying to shoehorn a bit of work into a stranded hour or two. But not many of us are inspired to wonder, in such moments, why we ourselves aren’t in there practicing our embouchure on the trumpet or our Salchow on the ice. This may speak to my essential laziness, but I have fond memories of curling up on the child-size couch in the musty, overheated basement of our local community center reading a book for a stolen hour, while my kids took drum lessons and fencing classes. Vanderbilt, on the other hand, asks himself whether “we, in our constant chaperoning of these lessons, were imparting a subtle lesson: that learning was for the young.” Rather than molder on the sidelines, he decides to throw himself into acquiring five new skills. (That’s his term, though I started to think of these skills as “accomplishments” in the way that marriageable Jane Austen heroines have them, talents that make a long evening pass more agreeably, that can turn a person into more engaging company, for herself as much as for others.) Vanderbilt’s search is for “the naïve optimism, the hypervigilant alertness that comes with novelty and insecurity, the willingness to look foolish, and the permission to ask obvious questions—the unencumbered beginner’s mind. ” And so he tries to achieve competence, not mastery, in chess, singing, surfing, drawing, and making. (He learns to weld a wedding ring to replace two he lost surfing.) He adds juggling, not because he’s so interested in it but because—with its steep and obvious learning curve (most people, starting from scratch, can learn to juggle three balls in a few days) and its fun factor—juggling is an oft-used task for laboratory studies of how people learn. These accomplishments aren’t likely to help his job performance as a journalist, or to be marketable in any way, except insofar as the learning of them forms the idea for the book.

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Vanderbilt is good on the specific joys and embarrassments of being a late-blooming novice, or “kook,” as surfers sometimes call gauche beginners. How you think you know how to sing a song but actually know only how to sing along with one, so that, when you hear your own voice, stripped of the merciful camouflage the recorded version provides, “you’re not only hearing the song as you’ve never quite heard it, you are hearing your voice as you’ve never quite heard it.” The particular, democratic pleasure of making that voice coalesce with others’ in a choir, coupled with the way, when friends and family come to see your adult group perform, “the parental smile of eternal indulgence gives way to a more complicated expression.” The fact that feedback, especially the positive kind stressing what you’re doing right, delivered by an actual human teacher or coach watching what you do, is crucial for a beginner—which might seem obvious except that, in an age when so many instructional videos of every sort are available online, you might get lulled into thinking you could learn just as well without it. The weirdness of the phenomenon that, for many of us, our drawing skills are frozen forever as they were when we were kids. Children tend to draw better, Vanderbilt explains, when they are around five years old and rendering what they feel; later, they fall into what the psychologist Howard Gardner calls “the doldrums of literalism ”—trying to draw exactly what they see but without the technical skill or instruction that would allow them to do so effectively. Many of us never progress beyond that stage. Personally, I’m stuck at about age eight, when I filled notebooks with ungainly, scampering horses. Yet I was entranced by how both Vanderbilt and, in her far more ambitious way, Painter describe drawing as an unusually absorbing, almost meditative task—one that makes you look at the world differently even when you’re not actually doing it and pours you into undistracted flow when you are.

One problem with teaching an old dog new tricks is that certain cognitive abilities decline with age, and by “age” I mean starting as early as one’s twenties. Mental-processing speed is the big one. Maybe that’s one reason that air-traffic controllers have to retire at age fifty-six, while English professors can stay at it indefinitely. Vanderbilt cites the work of Neil Charness, a psychology professor at Florida State University, who has shown that the older a chess player is the slower she is to perceive a threatened check, no matter what her skill level. Processing speed is why I invariably lose against my daughter (pretty good-naturedly, if you ask me) at a game that I continue to play: Anomia. In this game, players flip cards bearing the names of categories (dog breeds, Olympic athletes, talk-show hosts, whatever), and, if your card displays the same small symbol as one of your opponents’ does, you try to be the first to call out something belonging to the other person’s category. If my daughter and I each had ten minutes to list as many talk-show hosts as we could, I’d probably triumph—after all, I have several decades of late-night-TV viewing over her. But, with speed the essence, a second’s lag in my response speed cooks my goose every game.

Still, as Rich Karlgaard notes in his reassuring book “Late Bloomers: The Hidden Strengths of Learning and Succeeding at Your Own Pace,” there are cognitive compensations. “Our brains are constantly forming neural networks and pattern-recognition capabilities that we didn’t have in our youth when we had blazing synaptic horsepower,” he writes. Fluid intelligence, which encompasses the capacity to suss out novel challenges and think on one’s feet, favors the young. But crystallized intelligence—the ability to draw on one’s accumulated store of knowledge, expertise, and Fingerspitzengefühl —is often enriched by advancing age. And there’s more to it than that: particular cognitive skills rise and fall at different rates across the life span, as Joshua K. Hartshorne, now a professor of psychology at Boston College, and Laura T. Germine, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, show in a 2015 paper on the subject. Processing speed peaks in the late teens, short-term memory for names at around twenty-two, short-term memory for faces at around thirty, vocabulary at around fifty (in some studies, even at around sixty-five), while social understanding, including the ability to recognize and interpret other people’s emotions, rises at around forty and tends to remain high. “Not only is there no age at which humans are performing at peak at all cognitive tasks,” Hartshorne and Germine conclude, “there may not be an age at which humans are at peak on most cognitive tasks.” This helps Karlgaard’s case that we need a “kinder clock for human development”—societal pressure on young adults to specialize and succeed right out of college is as wrongheaded and oppressive on the one end of life as patronizing attitudes toward the old are on the other.

The gift of crystallized intelligence explains why some people can bloom spectacularly when they’re older—especially, perhaps, in a field like literature, where a rich vein of life experience can be a writerly asset. Annie Proulx published her first novel at the age of fifty-six, Raymond Chandler at fifty-one. Frank McCourt, who had been a high-school teacher in New York City for much of his career, published his first book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir “Angela’s Ashes,” at sixty-six. Edith Wharton, who had been a society matron prone to neurasthenia and trapped in a gilded cage of a marriage, produced no novels until she was forty. Publishing fiction awakened her from what she described as “a kind of torpor,” a familiar feeling for the true later bloomer. “I had groped my way through to my vocation,” Wharton wrote, “and thereafter I never questioned that story-telling was my job.”

In science and technology, we often think of the people who make precocious breakthroughs as the true geniuses—Einstein developing his special theory of relativity at twenty-six. Einstein himself once said that “a person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so.” A classic paper on the relationship between age and scientific creativity showed that American Nobel winners tended to have done their prize-winning work at thirty-six in physics, thirty-nine in chemistry, and forty-one in medicine—that creativity rose in the twenties and thirties and began a gradual decline in the forties.

That picture has been complicated by more recent research. According to a 2014 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, which undertook a broad review of the research on age and scientific breakthroughs, the average age at which people make significant contributions to science has been rising during the twentieth century—notably to forty-eight, for physicists. (One explanation might be that the “burden of knowledge” that people have to take on in many scientific disciplines has increased.) Meanwhile, a 2016 paper in Science that considered a wider range of scientists than Nobelists concluded that “the highest-impact work in a scientist’s career is randomly distributed within her body of work. That is, the highest-impact work can be, with the same probability, anywhere in the sequence of papers published by a scientist—it could be the first publication, could appear mid-career, or could be a scientist’s last publication.”

When it comes to more garden-variety late blooming, the kind of new competencies that Vanderbilt is seeking, he seems to have gone about it in the most promising way. For one thing, it appears that people may learn better when they are learning multiple skills at once, as Vanderbilt did. A recent study that looked at the experiences of adults over fifty-five who learned three new skills at once—for example, Spanish, drawing, and music composition—found that they not only acquired proficiency in these areas but improved their cognitive functioning over all, including working and episodic memory. In a 2017 paper, Rachel Wu, a neuroscientist at U.C. Riverside, and her co-authors, George W. Rebok and Feng Vankee Lin, propose six factors that they think are needed to sustain cognitive development, factors that tend to be less present in people’s lives as they enter young adulthood and certainly as they grow old. These include what the Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset,” the belief that abilities are not fixed but can improve with effort; a commitment to serious rather than “hobby learning” (in which “the learner casually picks up skills for a short period and then quits due to difficulty, disinterest, or other time commitments”); a forgiving environment that promotes what Dweck calls a “not yet” rather than a “cannot” approach; and a habit of learning multiple skills simultaneously, which may help by encouraging the application of capacities acquired in one domain to another. What these elements have in common, Wu and her co-authors point out, is that they tend to replicate how children learn.

So eager have I been all my life to leave behind the subjects I was bad at and hunker down with the ones I was good at—a balm in many ways—that, until reading these books, I’d sort of forgotten the youthful pleasure of moving our little tokens ahead on a bunch of winding pathways of aptitude, lagging behind here, surging ahead there. I’d been out of touch with that sense of life as something that might encompass multiple possibilities for skill and artistry. But now I’ve been thinking about taking up singing in a serious way again, learning some of the jazz standards my mom, a professional singer, used to croon to me at bedtime. If learning like a child sounds a little airy-fairy, whatever the neuroscience research says, try recalling what it felt like to learn how to do something new when you didn’t really care what your performance of it said about your place in the world, when you didn’t know what you didn’t know. It might feel like a whole new beginning. ♦

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• Dear Life Kit
• Life Skills

Learning a new skill can be hard. Here's how to set yourself up for success

Rommel Wood

Andee Tagle

This is one of my favorite questions to ask people: What was the last thing you taught yourself how to do?

I (Rommel) like it because the answers are usually less about the actual skill and more about the motivation behind learning it. It's a question I leaned on a lot when I was booking contestants on the NPR game show Ask Me Another .

But I don't really get to ask it anymore. Maybe it's because I'm in my 30s and I'm not meeting as many new people these days. The pandemic might also be a factor. Plus, Ask Me Anothe r recently ended, and it got me thinking about my time on the show and "the question" that so often cracked people open in a really interesting way.

A Knitter, A Rock Climber And A Mixologist Teach Us How To Find A Hobby

So I reached out to some former contestants to see if they remembered their answers. Sam Cappoli learned how to drive a car with a manual transmission, AKA "a stick." Amy Paull was training herself to do a pull-up. Cappoli's motivation was to finally learn how to do something his mom tried to teach him as a teenager. Paull's motivation was to gain strength so she could become a better escape room teammate. But there is more to both of their stories. Sam realized that he couldn't learn how to drive from just watching a few youtube videos and a shoulder condition made Amy re-evaluate her goal of pullup dominance.

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This story comes from Life Kit , NPR's family of podcasts to help make life better — covering everything from exercise to raising kids to making friends. For more, sign up for the newsletter and follow @NPRLifeKit on Twitter

It can be incredibly gratifying to harness mastery of a skill. But, why is learning new things so hard?

Maybe it's because we need to rethink how we go about learning. Here are some tips! Figure out what it is that you want to learn. Then...

Set yourself up for success

In addition to asking former Ask Me Another contestants "the question" I also turned to my 3-year-old daughter and asked her what was the last thing she learned how to do? She was quick to tell me she can turn on the lights all by herself. After a couple of years of attempts, she is now tall enough to reach a switch and has mastered the fine motor skills it takes to grip a switch and flip it on and off. It's a skill relevant to her but also to everyone — we just don't necessarily think of it as a skill anymore.

Rachel Wu is an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. She studies how we learn over the course of our lives. Wu says it's easier for kids and babies to learn new things because their whole lives are centered on learning. Babies are incredibly open-minded. They want to learn everything because everything is relevant to them.

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Wu says we can learn from that by asking, "is the thing I'm trying to learn relevant to my life?" Next, find yourself an instructor — someone who is really good at breaking up the things you want to learn in approachable ways.

Then, give yourself a realistic timeline to learn something new. Using babies as an example — we don't expect newborns to be able to communicate the second they are born. It often takes a baby at least a year to start accumulating a pen of recognizable words in their vocabulary. Give yourself the same amount of time to learn something as you'd give a child to learn it too.

Keep tinkering with the challenge at hand

If you're struggling to stay motivated, or feel like you're hitting a wall in your progress, stop and adjust your process. Play around with your method by introducing a new path to learning.

Take Wu, for example. She's learning how to speak German. She takes classes on the campus where she works, but she also started watching one of her favorite TV shows, The Nanny, dubbed in German and slowed down to 50%.

" The Nann y was nice because it teaches you more everyday language, and phrases that you would encounter on a daily basis," Wu says.

Yes, you can lift weights! Here's how to overcome gym intimidation and start training

She uses this handy trick with Pixar films and with listening to German audiobooks for kids.

Tinkering is part of it but so is accepting that you'll need to be open to possibly starting over.

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Feeling artsy here's how making art helps your brain.

Take Nell Painter. Painter is a retired professor at Princeton. She wrote a book called, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over . When she was in her 60s she earned a bachelor's degree and an MFA in painting. She says an exercise she learned during an early art class really helped her adjust her relationship with her work and mistakes.

She would draw and draw, look at the model, and draw some more trying to get it right, Painter says. Then the teacher would come and tell her to "rub it out and draw it again, 10 inches to the right." Once again, Painter would draw and work to get it right, and then the teacher would say rub it out and draw it 10% smaller.

"The lesson is you can rub out your work," Painter says. "It doesn't all have to be a [masterpiece.] It doesn't all have to be right, and it doesn't all have to be saved. ... You can rub that sucker out."

Don't be afraid to make mistakes

We don't like making mistakes. But when you're learning something, mistakes are an important part of the process.

Manu Kapur is a professor of learning sciences and higher education at ETH in Zurich Switzerland, where he writes and teaches about the benefits of renormalizing failure and the idea of productive failure. He says the struggle to let yourself make mistakes is really hard.

A Field Guide for Fledgling Birders

"It's a constant effort to tell yourself that 'This is something I do not know. I cannot possibly expect myself to get it immediately,'" Kapur says. "when I'm struggling, I just need to tell myself that this is exactly the right zone to be in and then to do it again and again and again. And until such time, you just become comfortable with being uncomfortable because you're learning something."

So, if you're worried it's too late to start that new language class or the fear of failure has stopped you from picking up that instrument, this is your sign to put your caution aside and just get started. Failure will likely be a part of the process, and that's okay. It's the trying — and the learning — that counts most.

The audio portion of this episode was produced by Andee Tagle, with engineering support from Stuart Rushfield.

We'd love to hear from you. If you have a good life hack, leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at [email protected]. Your tip could appear in an upcoming episode.

If you love Life Kit and want more, subscribe to our newsletter .

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How to Learn New Things

Last Updated: April 29, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Jai Flicker and by wikiHow staff writer, Glenn Carreau . Jai Flicker is an Academic Tutor and the CEO and Founder of Lifeworks Learning Center, a San Francisco Bay Area-based business focused on providing tutoring, parental support, test preparation, college essay writing help, and psychoeducational evaluations to help students transform their attitude toward learning. Jai has over 20 years of experience in the education management industry. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego. There are 14 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 199,092 times.

Is it ever too late to learn a new skill? Absolutely not! Learning new things is beneficial at any age, and it can change your life in many ways—from giving you a career boost to helping you discover a new passion. All you need is enthusiasm, focus, and some helpful learning strategies. From cooking to learning a new language, here’s a list of tips and techniques that will help you learn any new skill you desire.

Things You Should Know

• There are lots of ways to learn! Take a class, find a mentor, or self-teach. Use lots of different learning materials from books to online videos.
• Learn by doing and use experts' work as a guide. Try teaching someone else to hone your understanding of the subject, and give yourself tests.
• Make a practice schedule. Work in short bursts, practice often, and get rid of distractions. Challenge yourself, and reward yourself for progress.

Teach yourself using many sources.

• For example, there are plenty of available resources if you want to master drawing. Find books on drawing techniques at the library, look up video tutorials, and read a variety of how-to blogs online.
• Any and every new source of information can help! Don't read a single how-to guide; using different learning styles to practice a skill can be even more helpful than using one method.
• Don't worry about sticking to a particular learning style (visual, auditory, or kinesthetic). Engaging with the information you learn is far more important than studying a particular way.

Learn through practical experience.

• Let's say you want to learn a programming language like C#. Try it out rather than spending all your time in a textbook! Learn by coding a small program and working out the bugs yourself.

Take a class or online course.

• If you're already a student enrolled in college, this should be an easy task! Just search your school's course list for a subject that interests you.
• Ask people you know if they can recommend a teacher or tutor to you.
• Many colleges and research institutions also have free online courses you can take, called "Massive Open Online Courses" (MOOC).
• Make incremental goals small and manageable, so they build on each other. When learning to play guitar, start by learning scales and chords and then graduate to a basic song, and reward yourself after each.

Find a mentor.

• For example: “I’m a news journalist with plans to venture into columns and feature writing. I’d love to learn more about your journey pursuing a similar path and hone my proofreading and editing skills with your help.”
• Reach out to a potential mentor through their contact information or a professional site like LinkedIn.
• Once they express interest in being your mentor, set up an initial meeting for the two of you to discuss the mentorship further. Meet up in person if you can, or do a video call otherwise.
• You could also propose a skill exchange! Teach someone in exchange for them teaching you, too. As a result, you'll both benefit and learn something new.

Compare your work with an expert's.

• For example, read work from famous poets if you want to write poetry but are unsure how to start. Pick a style of poetry you like, analyze that poet's style, and try replicating it in a work of your own.
• Eventually, you’ll develop your own style and technique. Until then, borrowing from an expert can help you gain a better understanding of the skill and improve your abilities overall.

Teach someone else.

• Say you’re learning how to decorate cakes . Craft a lesson plan for a friend! What techniques should they learn? In simplest terms, how would you explain working with fondant, or making a frosting flower?
• However you decide to teach others about your chosen skill, practice explaining each concept with easy-to-follow steps. The better you can explain something, the better you understand it.

Set a study or practice schedule.

• For instance: if you're a morning person, schedule your learning period in the morning. You’ll be more alert and absorb more information that way.
• Write the schedule in a planner, journal, or calendar. Putting your plan down in writing will help keep you accountable going forward.

Practice the hardest things first.

• For example, if you’re learning to play the violin and understand major scales but struggle with minor scales, focus on learning a new minor scale with each practice instead of sticking solely to major scales.
• Work on going out of your comfort zone and trying new things, even if they're difficult initially. You'll better understand the discipline by focusing on the most difficult concepts.
• You might be confused and uncomfortable when practicing something unfamiliar. You might even fail at first. That's okay! Embrace each failure as a learning experience that teaches you what not to do in the future.

Get rid of distractions.

• Avoid multitasking too, which makes you less productive overall. Dedicate all of your focus to learning that skill or concept for the entire study period.

Work in short bursts and take breaks.

• Mental fatigue can make it more difficult to absorb information and stick with a new skill. By taking frequent breaks, you're improving your productivity and preserving your motivation to learn.

Test yourself.

• You can also test skills that wouldn’t require a traditional exam, like skateboarding or drawing. Each time you learn a concept—like a skateboarding trick or a drawing technique—try it and then grade your performance.
• Say you learned about the drawing technique cross hatching . Test yourself by creating a work of art shaded only with cross hatching. Then, evaluate the finished product. What did you do well? What could be improved?
• The goal of testing is never to criticize yourself or your abilities—it’s to figure out where you can make progress and become the best that you can be.

Reward yourself at important milestones.

• For instance, you might aim to learn a new Mandarin character every day for a month. Celebrate at the end of the month by getting a treat from your favorite bakery or buying that game you want.

Master a skill you’re passionate about.

• For example, you might be hesitant to study guitar because you don't plan to be a musician, but that's no reason not to learn! Music is a great creative outlet and source of fun, no matter what.
• There are lots of other fun skills you could learn. Consider drawing , learning a new language , singing , or dancing .
• You could also learn practical skills that can help you with everyday life, like organization techniques , basic car repair , or making a budget.

Improve job-related skills to give yourself an edge.

• Other skills that could make you an even more desirable employee include proficiency in search engine optimization, Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, and even typing.
• Your company may even have funding available for certain skills you want to learn—then you can hone your abilities courtesy of your employer!
• You could also learn a skill that allows you to start a side business. Many artists and creators take commissions while working other jobs; one day, you could even transition to being self-employed full-time.

Expert Q&A

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/10-ways-improve-transfer-learning/
• ↑ https://www.niu.edu/citl/resources/guides/instructional-guide/experiential-learning.shtml
• ↑ https://careerwise.minnstate.edu/exoffenders/expand-skills/gain-skills.html
• ↑ https://www.npr.org/2019/10/25/773158390/how-to-find-a-mentor-and-make-it-work
• ↑ https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/effective-educational-videos/
• ↑ https://www.uopeople.edu/blog/5-study-skills-and-techniques-for-students-who-want-to-succeed-in-college/
• ↑ https://ideas.ted.com/dont-have-10000-hours-to-learn-something-new-thats-fine-all-you-need-is-20-hours/
• ↑ https://www.npr.org/2021/10/30/1049098913/learning-new-skills-tips
• ↑ https://success.oregonstate.edu/learning/concentration
• ↑ https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-short-breaks-help-brain-learn-new-skills
• ↑ https://www.edutopia.org/article/5-research-backed-studying-techniques
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-choice/201912/9-key-principles-learning-new-skill
• ↑ https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/self-help/guides-tools-and-activities/five-steps-to-mental-wellbeing/
• ↑ https://nextsteps.idaho.gov/resources/upskilling-career-advancement

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How to Write Stanford’s “Excited About Learning” Essay

This article was written based on the information and opinions presented by Johnathan Patin-Sauls and Vinay Bhaskara in a CollegeVine livestream. You can watch the full livestream for more info.

What’s Covered:

Choosing an idea vs. an experience, learning for the sake of learning, learning as a means to other ends, be specific.

Stanford University’s first essay prompt asks you to respond to the following:

“ The Stanford community is deeply curious and driven to learn in and out of the classroom. Reflect on an idea or experience that makes you genuinely excited about learning. (100-250 words)”

For this short answer question, your response is limited to a maximum of 250 words. In this article, we will discuss considerations for choosing to write about an idea or experience, ways to demonstrate a love or enthusiasm for learning, and why you should be as specific. For more information and guidance on writing the application essays for Stanford University, check out our post on how to write the Stanford University essays .

Regardless of if you choose either an idea or experience that makes you genuinely excited about learning as a topic, there are a few considerations for each.  

Most people gravitate towards writing about an idea. One challenge that arises with an idea-focused essay is that applicants who are passionate about an idea often become hyper focused on explaining the idea but neglect to connect this idea to who they are as a person and why this idea excites them. 

When writing about an experience, it is important to strike a balance between describing the experience and analyzing the impact of the experience on you, your goals, and your commitment to learning.

This essay question allows you to expand on your joy for learning and your genuine curiosity. Stanford is searching for students who are naturally curious and enjoy the process of learning and educating themselves. For example, a compelling essay could begin with a riveting story of getting lost while hiking the Appalachian Trail and describing how this experience led to a lifelong passion for studying primitive forms of navigation. 

There is a strong tendency among applicants to write about formal academic coursework, however, the most compelling essays will subvert expectations by taking the concept of learning beyond the classroom and demonstrating how learning manifests itself in unique contexts in your life.

If you’re someone for whom learning is a means to other ends, it is important that you convey a sense of genuine enthusiasm and purpose beyond, “I want to go to X school because it will help me get Y job for Z purpose.” You may be motivated to attend college to obtain a certain position and make a comfortable income, however these answers are not necessarily what admissions officers are looking for. Instead, it can be helpful to relate an idea or experience to something more personal to you.

Academic & Professional Trajectory

Consider relating the idea or experience you choose to a major, degree program, research initiative, or professor that interests you at Stanford. Then go beyond the academic context to explain how the idea or experience ties into your future career. 

For instance, if you are interested in the concept of universal health care, then you might describe your interest in applying to public health programs with faculty that specialize in national health care systems. You might then describe your long term career aspirations to work in the United States Senate on crafting and passing health care policy.

Personal Values & Experiences

Another way to tie the ideas in this essay back to a more personal topic is to discuss how the idea or experience informs who you are, how you treat others, or how you experience the world around you. 

You could also focus on an idea or experience that has challenged, frustrated, or even offended you, thereby reinforcing and further justifying the values you hold and your worldview.

Community Building & Social Connectedness

You may also explore how this idea or experience connects you to a particular community by helping you understand, build, and support members of the community. Stanford is looking to find students who will be engaged members of the student body and carry out the community’s core mission, values, and projects, so this essay can be an opportunity to highlight how you would contribute to Stanford. 

Be specific in your choice of idea or the way in which you describe an experience. For example, a response that focuses on the joys of learning philosophy is too broad to be particularly memorable or impactful. However, the mind-body problem looking at the debate concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness is a specific philosophical idea that lends itself to a rich discussion. 

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

How to Learn New Things as an Adult

A new book explores the psychology of mastering skills and absorbing information.

Quick, what’s the capital of Australia? No Googling! (And no points if you’re Australian—that means the information is more meaningful to you, which means you’re more likely to know it.) Did you get it? Or are you sure you learned it at some point, but forgot right around the time that you forgot how the Krebs cycle works? In his new book, Learn Better , author and education researcher Ulrich Boser digs into the neuroscience of learning and shows why it’s so hard to remember facts like that one. Boser explains why some of the most common ways we try to memorize information are actually totally ineffective, and he reveals what to do instead.

Because we’re all getting dumber in the age of Google , I interviewed Boser recently about what people can do to boost their memories and skill sets, even if they’re long past flash-card age. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Olga Khazan : What does it mean to learn something? Is it to memorize something? How do you know when you’ve learned something?

Ulrich Boser: Really what we want to do is to be able to think in that way, so that it shifts our reasoning abilities. If we want to learn to become a car mechanic, you want to learn the reasoning abilities of a car mechanic. My favorite example of what it means to be expert, are the Car Talk guys . Because it’s such a weird thing, people call them and they have a car problem, but the Car Talk guys can’t actually see the car. Someone will call and be like, "I have this issue with my Buick, and it makes this weird noise," and they're able to solve the issue.

They’re thinking about their own Buicks, their own car problems, to help you solve your car problems. You want to learn the systems, or the analogies, of the relationships between things in a certain field, and how they interact with each other. Then ultimately you gain that knowledge so that you can shift your own thinking, so when you see a new problem you’re better able to solve it.

Khazan: You mentioned things that don’t work, like highlighting a lot, or skimming your notes before a meeting. Why don’t those work?

Boser: Re-reading and highlighting are particularly ineffective. They’re just passive, and you are just kind of skimming that material. It makes you feel better. You feel comfortable with the material, but you don’t really know the material. Doing things that are a little bit more difficult, that require you to really make connections, is a better way to learn. [You might] explain things to yourself, [or] simply quiz yourself. If you're preparing for a meeting, you'd be much better off just putting the material away and just asking yourself questions. It gives you a false sense of security, that kind of re-reading.

Khazan: Why is teaching other people such an effective learning strategy?

Boser: It’s not that different from explaining ideas to yourself. Self-explaining has a lot of evidence. You're explaining why things might be interconnected, and why they matter, and those meaningful distinctions between the two of them. The other thing that's particularly helpful about teaching other people is that you have to think about what is confusing about something, and how you'd explain that in a simpler way, and so that makes you shift the way that you're thinking about a certain topic.

Khazan: You mentioned that learning is, by necessity, really difficult. Why does it have to be so uncomfortable?

Boser: I think there’s so much stuff out there now that's like, "Learning's supposed to be easy, learning’s supposed to be fun!"

If I ask you, what’s the capital of Australia? Do you know what it is?

Khazan: [Breaks into a cold sweat.] Is it Sydney? I don’t know. It’s probably not.

Boser: No, it’s not Sydney. Another guess?

Khazan: Melbourne?

Boser: Nope. One more.

Khazan: Oh my God, I can’t believe I don’t know this. What's another ... Brisbane? I have no idea, I’m so sorry.

Boser: Yeah, it’s Canberra.

Khazan: What?

Boser: Yeah!

Khazan: Oh my God.

Boser: I had this experience with a researcher. I was in your spot, where I was like, “I’m so embarrassed by this. I should know, this is a major country.” The difficulty of that is going to help you remember it. I’m not going to promise you that you are going to remember the capital of Australia 10 years from now, but it's now a much more salient fact. It’s something that's a little bit more meaningful to you.

Both of us probably, at one time in the world, had this fact come across us, but it wasn’t meaningful, it certainly wasn’t an embarrassing situation. In my experience it was a source being like, "Do you know this?" I'm trying to be like, "I went to a fancy school, I should know this information." It became salient to me. Part of the reason that learning's supposed to be hard, or a little bit difficult, is it makes memory work a little bit more.

The other reason that learning should be difficult is that, when we’re a little bit out of our comfort zone, we are a little bit more challenged, and that helps us develop skills. We see this a lot in games. Part of the attraction of even a shoot-em-up game is that it's always getting a little bit more difficult, and that way it’s building on our skill.

Khazan: What’s the most effective type of feedback that you could be getting in order to learn better?

Boser: What is helpful is that [the feedback] comes close to when you perform the task, and that it requires you to generate an answer. You don’t necessarily want to simply give people the answer, because then they haven’t really made that information meaningful to themselves. By forcing you to make these wrong guesses [about Australia], when you heard the actual answer, it made it more meaningful to you.

Khazan: Why is it helpful to distribute learning over time?

Boser: I find this one really fascinating. The basic thing is, we forget, and we forget at a very regular rate. People underestimate how much they forget, and people who are able to revisit their learning at a regular rate end up learning a lot more. There’s some good software that does that. Anki is one, and they have, I think, a really nice model, which is, you’re learning at your rate of forgetting. If we know that you’re going to forget details like the capital of France in three months, you would revisit that material at that particular point in time. What's surprising about it is, this isn’t new. This is stuff that dates back to the 19th century, but we really just don’t use it in schools or in colleges, even though we know that people forget a lot, and they forget at this very regular rate.

Khazan: I was really interested to read about Bill Gates’s Think Week, where he reads all those white papers in a secluded cottage. Why does he do that in that way, and what can other people learn from that?

Boser: He just sort of squares away and has these moments of quiet in order to develop new skills. I think we really underestimate the role that deliberation and reflection play in learning. To a degree we know it, this is why you think of things in the shower or right before you go to bed. You have these moments where your brain is thinking through the day, making connections, and what’s important, I think, for people who are trying to learn more effectively, is to make organized time for that. We’ve seen some schools have students do more reflections on their learning. There’s one or two studies that have even found that reflection can be more effective than practice itself.

Khazan: How can I get better at remembering peoples’ names?

Boser: One thing that helps with memory is if they’re emotional. You will not forget the name of the person that you gave your first kiss to. I don’t think this is, of course, a very practical solution to this problem.

The other thing that you can do is try and hang that information on other information. Say you want to remember the names of your boss’s daughters, you can see if you can wrap that information into other information that you already know. If you like the Knicks, and his daughters are named Kelly and Neely you can be like, "Oh, the first two letters of the New York Knicks." That’s another way of making that information more meaningful to you.

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Neuroplasticity: How the brain changes with learning

Effective lifelong learning / Early childhood development / Neuromyths

Executive summary

• Your brain is never fixed but continues to change with learning and experience throughout your life.
• Most learning in the brain involves rewiring or making and strengthening connections between neurons, the cells of your brain most crucial for learning.
• In most regions of the brain, the only neurons you will have throughout all of your life are already present at birth. Your brain does continue to grow new neurons in at least one very small but potentially important area for learning, but this is very new research and the role of these new neurons for learning is not yet known.
• Neuroplasticity is important for all learning—much of the neuroscience research on neuroplasticity is related to how the brain recovers from injury or damage—but some of the same principles apply to how the brain changes with learning throughout all of life.

Learning and memory and changes in the brain

Let us start with a simple logical argument, to dispel myths and show that logically, of course, your brain is changing with learning:

Learning and memory are necessarily closely linked. You cannot learn something without storing it in some form of memory for use in the future, either for recall as new knowledge or improvement in skills. From neuroscience, we know that memories are encoded by physical changes in the brain (although we still debate exactly what it is that changes and how). Your brain therefore changes physically whenever anything is learnt, and so your experiences and learning throughout all of life change and mould your brain.

There is a common brain myth or popular perception that the brain becomes fully developed sometime in early childhood, implying that nothing further changes, and that further changes in the brain with development in childhood and adolescence are somehow biologically determined, leading to a fully developed state at adulthood.

In reality, the way your brain develops is determined both by your genetics and by your learning and experiences. Biological does not mean predetermined. Your brain is shaped by your experiences and is never fixed but continues to change along with learning across the lifespan.

Some neuroscience history—the structure of the brain and the origin of myths

In the late 19th century, the biologist Ramón y Cajal proposed the neuron theory of the brain, that the brain is composed of discrete but interconnected cells, similar to the cells that make up the rest of the body 1 . He was ridiculed by his contemporaries who believed that the brain was made of an entirely different type of matter than the rest of the body, but further research confirmed Cajal’s theories and in 1906 he received the Nobel Prize for his neuron theory.

The brain, of course, is made of cells known as neurons that are densely interconnected through links known as synapses. Most neurons of the brain are found in the outer surface layer that is only a few millimetres thick, known as the grey matter or cortex. The highly folded surface layer of the brain, that gives the brain its characteristic bumpy appearance, maximises the amount of grey matter and therefore the number of neurons that can be packed into the brain to still fit within a relatively small skull.

One thing that Ramón y Cajal got drastically wrong, however, was his claim that: “In adult centres the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated 2 .” He was partly correct, in that neurons will never repair or regenerate when they are damaged. Damaged areas of the brain or damaged cells in a broken spinal cord, for example, will never heal by regrowing or regenerating new cells.

However, this has led to the myth that the brain reaches some point in early adulthood after which it never changes, except to go downhill as we age! The brain is never “fixed, ended, and immutable,” but continues to change with learning throughout all of life. It does this mainly by changing the wiring or the interconnections between neurons.

In a quirky study, London taxi drivers show that humans have a remarkable capacity to acquire and use knowledge to navigate their complex city without a map. This wiring is reflected by their particularly large hippocampus 3 .

Figure 1. Exquisitely detailed hand-drawings by Ramón y Cajal (1899) 4 show the main cells of the brain (neurons) and their extensive interconnections (via synapses) in the surface layer (grey matter) that makes the true structure of the brain.

The importance of brain connections—synaptogenesis

It is the vast network of interconnections between the neurons of the brain, through links known as synapses, that gives the brain its immense computational power. While the brain contains an enormous number of neurons, about 86 billion, each of those neurons can be connected to many thousands of other neurons, giving an estimated 150 trillion or so connections or synapses in the brain.

The vast majority of our neurons are located in the surface grey-matter layer of our brain. The number of neurons we have does not change with learning or life experience.

The connections between neurons, through the synapses, however, are constantly changing throughout all of our life and are predominantly responsible for learning and memory in the brain. These changes in connections involve forming new connections, known as synaptogenesis , or strengthening existing connections, known as long-term potentiation (LTP).

Much of what we know about synaptogenesis comes from studies of animals raised in highly stimulating environments (similar to a rat’s natural environment) compared with those raised in deprived environments. A prominent neuroscientist of the 1940s, Donald Hebb, first showed how rats raised as pets performed better on many cognitive tasks than rats raised in laboratory cages. When rats were provided adequate opportunities for physical, social, and sensory stimulation, more extensive interconnections between their neurons can form, with a greater number of synapses 5 .

We assume that the same processes are important in human brains but have little direct evidence. Studies conducted with children from extremely deprived situations in Romanian orphanages of the 1980s show persistent delays in cognitive, language, and social development, so we know that severe deprivation is detrimental 6 . Interestingly, recent research on Albert Einstein’s brain has suggested that he had a more connected brain, with more dense neuron connections between the left and right hemispheres of his brain, presumably allowing more efficient brain communication 7 .

Donald Hebb described an important process for learning in the brain, known as Hebbian learning (1949), summed up by the phrase, “neurons that fire together wire together 8 .”Put simply, when two or more neurons respond or fire at the same time (i.e., from some thought, action, or event in the environment) the connection or synapse between them is strengthened, leading to a stronger association. This means that if some situation (or thought or action) is encountered in the future causing one of those neurons to respond, it will now be more likely to trigger a response in the other connected neurons, recalling and further reinforcing that association.

In this way, much learning in the brain involves changing the connections between neurons, particularly reinforcing those pathways or circuits of interconnected neurons that are used frequently and fire together.

The debate of new neurons—neurogenesis

The vast majority of our brain contains only neurons that have been present since our birth; however, one small but very important area of our brain continues to grow new neurons throughout all of our life, through a process known as neurogenesis. This area is called the hippocampus and is known to play a crucial role in memory and learning.

It is only in the last decade that researchers have shown that new neurons are born in the hippocampus in the human brain throughout life. In the most conclusive study, researchers used a carbon-dating technique to accurately determine the age of individual cells within the hippocampus. They estimated that around 700 new neurons are added to each hippocampus (left and right) every day, and by the time we are 60 years old about one-third of the neurons in our hippocampus will be new neurons formed by neurogenesis after birth 9 .

This has caused much excitement and is a topic currently at the forefront of research in neuroscience, but there is still a lot we do not know. For example, research only indicates the potential role of the new neurons in the hippocampus in learning or memory 10 .

We know that the hippocampus overall is crucial for laying down new memories, because people with damage to their hippocampus suffer severe amnesia and cannot remember anything after the time of the damage. We also know that the hippocampus plays a role in spatial navigation, or our ability to remember and “feel” our way around a familiar place, a discovery that led to award of the Nobel Prize in 2014 11 (refer to https://www.news-medical.net/health/Hippocampus-Functions.aspx ).

We know many things that can boost neurogenesis, such as exercise, diet, reducing stress, and learning itself. There are now many books, internet sites, and emerging products advising how to enhance neurogenesis and thereby “boost your brain.” However, in truth we do not know whether specifically targeting neurogenesis is necessary or even beneficial for cognition, memory, or learning and so there is not enough evidence to claim that any of these things will actually “boost your brain.”

What we know is that the hippocampus continues to grow new neurons throughout life and that the hippocampus is crucial for learning and memory. But will enhancing the growth of new neurons in your hippocampus make you smarter? That is for future research to tell.

Neuroplasticity in action

The brain has an incredible capacity to reorganise itself through rewiring, altering, and strengthening the connections and pathways that are used often. Just as Donald Hebb described, those pathways of interconnected neurons that are trained or used frequently, firing together, strengthen their connections and thereby wire together.

Most research on large-scale brain changes with neuroplasticity focuses on how the brain recovers or reorganises following damage or injury. For example, the parts of our brain that control our body movements and our sense of touch have a kind of map of the body, known as a homunculus, so that neurons in a particular area connect to muscles in a specific part of the body. If someone has damage to this motor area of their brain, for example caused by a stroke or blockage of blood supply, then they will have severe weakness with movements of the part of their body corresponding to the part of their brain that is damaged.

As we know, damaged neurons do not heal or regenerate and new neurons never grow in this part of the brain, but nonetheless people can regain control of their movements. With rehabilitation and repeated training of the weak movements, undamaged areas of the brain can remap their connections to take over function from the damaged areas. This is the basis of physiotherapy for movement rehabilitation, creating and strengthening new pathways as the brain relearns to control movement through new connections.

The principles of creating and strengthening connections to mould the brain can also be applied to normal learning, not just the relearning involved following brain damage.

For example, an interesting study showed that people who play string instruments actually have a larger region of the sensory area of their brain devoted to touch sensation of their left hand when compared with their right hand or compared with people who do not play string instruments 12 . It seems that their extensive practice with finger movements on the strings with their left hand moulds their brain, creating and strengthening connections, so that more of the sensory area of their brain area is connected to their left hand.

In another study, when a group of young adults were taught to juggle and practiced for three months, a particular part of the grey matter of their brain increased in size, in an area important for the perception of moving objects 13 . When they stopped juggling and were examined after another three months, that area had returned back to its original size. We know that new neurons do not grow in that part of the brain, so the increase in size is not from the brain growing new neurons. A subsequent study showed that connections into the brain’s grey matter changed as people learnt to juggle, suggesting that practice and use of the skill enhances brain connections.

The brain therefore has an enormous potential to adapt and change by altering and strengthening connections through use and experience. The use of particular brain pathways strengthens those pathways. This is thought to be the major way that the brain learns, by adapting and changing connections with experience.

The story of Einstein’s brain

When Albert Einstein died in 1955 his brain was removed during autopsy, photographed, and then dissected into many parts and preserved. There is a long history about what happened with those preserved parts and many sections are still unaccounted for; however, in 2010 a collection of original photographs were uncovered and acquired by the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Washington, DC, USA.

Figure 2. A photograph of Albert Einstein’s brain taken during autopsy in 1955. The collection of photographs taken at that time were lost for many years, but were recovered in 2010 and have been used in recent research to examine what was special about the structure of his brain.

A very recent study has used those original photographs to analyse the density of neuron connections between the left and right hemispheres in Einstein’s brain, through a structure known as the corpus callosum. The researchers compared Einstein’s corpus callosum from the photographs to MRI scans from people of the same age as Einstein when he died (76 years old) and people of Einstein’s age during his so-called miracle year in 1905 when he published four of his groundbreaking scientific papers (26 years old).

Overall, the researchers found that Einstein’s corpus callosum was thicker in most parts than both the elderly and younger comparison groups. This suggests that Einstein had more extensive neural connections between the left and right hemispheres in his brain. The researchers concluded that Einstein’s intellectual gifts may have involved more coordinated communication between the two hemispheres.

Implications for education

These are the basic principles in neuroscience for change in the brain with learning. There is still an enormous gap in explaining how these principles apply to the much more complex situation of schools and education and the process of acquiring knowledge and skills such as reading and mathematics. Nonetheless, these basic principles of neurons and synapses, changing and strengthening connections, are at the root of all learning in the brain.

Some immediate implications to come from these basic principles are:

• The brain always has the capacity to learn and is not predetermined by biology. The brain continues to change constantly with learning and experience throughout all of life and never becomes fixed and unchanging. Therefore, one’s “smartness” is as much about brain connectivity from learning, not just about your biology.
• Learning is essentially something that the brain just does automatically. As we experience different situations in our everyday life, carry out our day-to-day tasks, encounter problems and find solutions, those pathways used in our brain most frequently strengthen their connections, forming habits, reinforcing memories, and improving skills. Of course, learning can also be deliberate, when we practice or train, but the same principles of changing and strengthening connections apply whenever those pathways are used.
• It is recommended that deliberate learning involves making and strengthening connections between associated concepts, rather than the rote learning of disconnected facts.
• Cajal, S. Estructura de los centros nerviosos de las aves. 1-10 (Jiménez y Molina, 1888).
• Colucci-D’Amato, L., Bonavita, V. & di Porzio, U. The end of the central dogma of neurobiology: stem cells and neurogenesis in adult CNS. Neurological Sciences 27, 266-270 (2006).
• Maguire, E., Woollett, K. & Spiers, H. London taxi drivers and bus drivers: A structural MRI and neuropsychological analysis. Hippocampus 16, 1091-1101 (2006).
• Cajal, S. Comparative study of the sensory areas of the human cortex. (Clark University, 2013).
• Hebb, D. Committee on Graduate and Professional Training. American Psychologist 2, 206-206 (1947).
• Blakemore, S. & Frith, U. Learning Brain. 32-32 (Wiley, 2005).
• Men, W. et al. The corpus callosum of Albert Einstein‘s brain: another clue to his high intelligence? Brain 137, e268-e268 (2014).
• Cajal, S. Comparative study of the sensory areas of the human cortex. (Clark University, 1899).
• Spalding, K. et al. Dynamics of hippocampal neurogenesis in adult humans. Cell 153, 1219-1227 (2013).
• Lieberwirth, C., Pan, Y., Liu, Y., Zhang, Z. & Wang, Z. Hippocampal adult neurogenesis: Its regulation and potential role in spatial learning and memory. Brain Research 1644, 127-140 (2016).
• Dr. Ananya Mandal, M. Hippocampus Functions. News-Medical.net (2019). at <https://www.news-medical.net/health/Hippocampus-Functions.aspx>
• Elbert, T., Pantev, C., Wienbruch, C., Rockstroh, B. & Taub, E. Increased cortical representation of the fingers of the left hand in string players. Science 270, 305-307 (1995).
• Draganski, B. et al. Changes in grey matter induced by training. Nature 427, 311-312 (2004).

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How to Learn More Effectively

10 Learning Techniques to Try

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Amy Morin, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and international bestselling author. Her books, including "13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do," have been translated into more than 40 languages. Her TEDx talk,  "The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong," is one of the most viewed talks of all time.

Knowing the most effective strategies for how to learn can help you maximize your efforts when trying to acquire new ideas, concepts, and skills. If you are like many people, your time is limited, so it is important to get the most educational value out of the time you have. Speed of learning is not the only important factor, however.

It is also important to be able to accurately remember the information that you learn, recall it at a later time, and use it effectively in a wide variety of situations. How can you teach yourself to learn? As you approach a new subject, incorporate some of the following tactics:

• Find ways to boost your memory
• Always keep learning new things
• Use a variety of learning techniques
• Try teaching it to someone else
• Connect new information to things you already know
• Look for opportunities to have hands-on experiences
• Remember that mistakes are part of the process
• Study a little bit every day
• Test yourself
• Focus on one thing at a time

Knowing how to learn well doesn't happen overnight, but putting a few of these learning techniques into daily practice can help you get more out of your study time .

Improve Your Memory

There are a number of different strategies that can boost memory . Basic tips such as improving your focus, avoiding cram sessions, and structuring your study time are good places to start, but there are even more lessons from psychology that can dramatically improve your learning efficiency.

If you're wondering how to learn better by improving your memory, these strategies can help:

• Getting regular physical exercise , which is linked to improvements in memory and brain health
• Spending time socializing with other people
• Getting enough sleep
• Eliminating distractions so you can focus on what you are learning
• Organizing the information you are studying to make it easier to remember
• Using elaborative rehearsal when studying; when you learn something new, spend a few moments describing it to yourself in your own words
• Using visual aids like photographs, graphs, and charts
• Reading the information you are studying out loud

For example, you might use general learning techniques like setting aside quiet time to study, rehearsing, and reading information aloud. You might combine this with strategies that can foster better memory, such as exercising and socializing.

If you're pressed for time, consider combining study strategies. Listen to a podcast while taking a walk or join a group where you can practice your new skills with others.

Keep Learning New Things

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One surefire way to become a more effective learner is to simply keep learning. Research has found that the brain is capable of producing new brain cells , a process known as neurogenesis. However, many of these cells will eventually die unless a person engages in some type of effortful learning.

By learning new things, these cells are kept alive and incorporated into brain circuits.

If you want to learn a new language, for instance, it is important to keep practicing the language to maintain the gains you have achieved. This "use-it-or-lose-it" phenomenon involves a brain process known as "pruning."

In pruning, certain pathways in the brain are maintained while others are eliminated. If you want the new information you just learned to stay put, keep practicing and rehearsing it.

Learn in Multiple Ways

Another good "how to learn" strategy is to focus on learning in more than one way. For example, instead of just listening to a podcast, which involves auditory learning, find a way to rehearse the information both verbally and visually.

This might involve describing what you learned to a friend, taking notes , or drawing a mind map. By learning in more than one way, you’re further cementing the knowledge in your mind.

For example, if you are trying to pick up a new language, try varying learning techniques such as listening to language examples, reading written language, practicing with a friend, and writing down your own notes.

One helpful tip is to try writing your notes on paper rather than typing on a laptop, tablet, or computer. Research has found that longhand notes can help cement information in memory more effectively than digital note-taking.

Varying your learning techniques and giving yourself the opportunity to learn in different ways and in different contexts can help make you a more efficient learner.

Teach What You Are Learning

Educators have long noted that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to someone else. Remember your seventh-grade presentation on Costa Rica? By teaching to the rest of the class, your teacher hoped you would gain even more from the assignment.

You can apply the same principle today by sharing newly learned skills and knowledge with others. Start by translating the information into your own words. This process alone helps solidify new knowledge in your brain. Next, find some way to share what you’ve learned.

Some ideas include writing a blog post, creating a podcast, or participating in a group discussion.

Build on Previous Learning

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Another great way to become a more effective learner is to use relational learning. This involves relating new information to things that you already know.

For example, if you are learning a new language, you might associate the new vocabulary and grammar you are learning with what you already know about your native language or other languages you may already speak.

Gain Practical Experience

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For many students, learning typically involves reading textbooks, attending lectures, or doing research in the library or online. While seeing information and then writing it down is important, actually putting new knowledge and skills into practice can be one of the best ways to improve learning.

If it is a sport or athletic skill, perform the activity on a regular basis. If you are learning a new language, practice speaking with another person and surround yourself with language-immersion experiences. Watch foreign-language films and strike up conversations with native speakers to practice your budding skills.

If you are trying to acquire a new skill or ability, focus on gaining practical experience.

Don't Be Afraid to Make Mistakes

Research suggests that making mistakes when learning can improve learning outcomes. According to one study, trial-and-error learning where the mistakes were close to the actual answer was actually a helpful part of the learning process.

Another study found that mistakes followed by corrective feedback can be beneficial to learning. So if you make a mistake when learning something new, spend some time correcting the mistake and examining how you arrived at the incorrect answer.

This strategy can help foster critical thinking skills and make you more adaptable in learning situations that require being able to change your mind.

Research suggests that making mistakes when learning can actually help improve outcomes, especially if you correct your mistake and take the time to understand why it happened.

Use Distributed Practice

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Another strategy for how to learn better is known as distributed practice. Instead of trying to cram all of your learning into a few long study sessions, try a brief, focused session, and then take a break.

So if you were learning a new language, you might devote a period of time to an intensive session of studying. After a break, you would then come back and rehearse your previous learning while also extending it to new learning.

This process of returning for brief sessions over a long period of time is one of the best ways to learn efficiently and effectively.  

What is the best way to learn?

Research suggests that this type of distributed learning is one of the most effective learning techniques. Focus on spending a little time studying each topic every day.

While it may seem that spending more time studying is one of the best ways to maximize learning, research has demonstrated that taking tests actually helps you better remember what you've learned—even if the topic wasn't covered on the test.

This phenomenon, known as the testing effect, suggests that spending time retrieving information from memory improves the long-term memory of that information. This retrieval practice makes it more likely that you will be able to remember that information again in the future.

Stop Multitasking

For many years, it was thought that people who multitask had an edge over those who did not. However, research now suggests that multitasking can actually make learning less effective.

Multitasking can involve trying to do more than one thing at the same time. But it can also involve quickly switching back and forth between tasks or trying to rapidly perform tasks one after the other. 

According to research, doing this not only makes people less productive when they work but also impairs attention and reduces comprehension. Multitasking when you are studying makes it harder to focus on the information and reduces how much you understand it.

Research has also found that media multitasking, or dividing attention between different media sources, can also have a detrimental impact on learning and academic performance.

To avoid the pitfalls of multitasking, focus your attention on the task at hand and continue working for a predetermined amount of time.

If you want to know how to learn, it is important to explore learning techniques that have been shown to be effective. Strategies such as boosting your memory and learning in multiple ways can be helpful. Regularly learning new things, using distributed practice, and testing yourself often can also be helpful ways to become a more efficient learner.

This process can take time, and it always takes practice and determination to establish new habits . Start by focusing on just a few of these tips to see if you can get more out of your next study session.

Perhaps most importantly, work on developing the mindset that you are capable of improving your knowledge and skills. Research suggests that believing in your own capacity for growth is one of the best ways to take advantage of the learning opportunities you pursue.

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Mueller PA, Oppenheimer DM. The pen Is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking . Psychol Sci . 2014. 2014;25(6):1159-1168. doi:10.1177/0956797614524581

Cyr AA, Anderson ND. Learning from your mistakes: does it matter if you’re out in left foot, I mean field? Memory . 2018;26(9):1281-1290. doi:10.1080/09658211.2018.1464189

Metcalfe J. Learning from errors . Ann Rev Psychol . 2017;68(1):465-489. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044022

Kang SHK. Spaced repetition promotes efficient and effective learning: Policy implications for instruction . Policy Insights Behav Brain Sci . 2016;3(1):12-19. doi:10.1177/2372732215624708

Pastotter B, Bauml KHT. Retrieval practice enhances new learning: the forward effect of testing . Front Psychol . 2014;5:286. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00286

Jeong S-H, Hwang Y.  Media multitasking effects on cognitive vs. attitudinal outcomes: A meta-analysis .  Hum Commun Res . 2016;42(4):599-618. doi:10.1111/hcre.12089

May K, Elder A. Efficient, helpful, or distracting? A literature review of media multitasking in relation to academic performance . Int J Educ Technol High Educ.  2018;15(1):13. doi:10.1186/s41239-018-0096-z

Sarrasin JB, Nenciovici L, Foisy LMB, Allaire-Duquette G, Riopel M, Masson S. Effects of teaching the concept of neuroplasticity to induce a growth mindset on motivation, achievement, and brain activity: A meta-analysis . Trends Neurosci Educ . 2018;12:22-31. doi:10.1016/j.tine.2018.07.003

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

More From Forbes

Learning is a sure path to happiness: science proves it.

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Learning is correlated with happiness and wellbeing.

Plenty of research on happiness suggests it arises when we are generous, grateful and connected with our people. But another lesser-known pathway toward happiness is learning, growing and challenging ourselves in new ways.

This is related to the idea of thriving which—like happiness—has also seen tremendous reserach efforts, especially in relationship to elite athletes and child development. And these can be translated to our work and our lives. Thriving tends to occur when we experience success, but also when we are continually developing our skills and capabilities.

Why is learning so important to happiness and thriving? What is it about learning that makes it a key ingredient of joy and achievement? There are multiple studies which demonstrate the relationship between learning and thriving and these provide guidance about the actions which can increase happiness.

Learning Empowers You

Self-Determination . We all crave choice and want to feel we have some control over our lives and futures, and learning is frequently oriented toward self-determination. Some roles or companies may require certain learning, but many times learning is the result of pursuing your own interests and goals. Even in situations where certain curricula are mandatory, you can customize your own journey. The statistics class may be required, but beyond the modes and medians, if you’re interested in social dynamics, you can explore the patterns of behavior behind the numbers. The class on hazardous materials may be required, but in addition to the details on clean-up procedures, if you’re interested in design, you can be explore and be curious about the graphics which are most effective in communicating with urgency. No matter what the learning, it has the potential to open doors or provide options for growth that are uniquely interesting to you.

Self-Confidence . Learning can also be a source of self-confidence or likability. When you know more, you can contribute your perspectives and expertise and ask questions about others’ points of view that build on a strong foundation of your own knowledge. Your expanding capabilities can provide you with skills which help you contribute confidently to your current and future success. In addition, a study by  Oxford University  finds when people study at a university or college they tended to boost their agreeableness and likeability—both of which are a boon to forming positive relationships and getting ahead.

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Resilience and Motivation. Learning can also build resilience, because—by definition—learning requires you to realize you don’t already know it all and encourages you to try something new and fill in gaps of information. The 85% rule, validated by research at the University of Arizona , says if you never fail, you won’t be challenged to continue and if you fail too frequently, you will be demotivated. The sweet spot for motivation and learning is an 85% success and 15% failure rate. Fail 15% of the time and you will keep coming back for more. In addition, fascinating research at the University of California Davis also finds curiosity helps your brain remain more open to additional learning and this openness helps you remember new information and cement memories. 

Broadened Perspective. When you learn new things, you also expand your horizons and greater perspective is linked to experiences of happiness and joy. Whether you’re studying history, Spanish or guitar, you’ll get a new view and extend your knowledge of the world. Depression is typically marked by a myopic perspective where you feel limited or trapped within your circumstances. But a broader view—of others, of the world, of circumstances and of possibilities—is correlated with greater happiness.

Health and Happiness . Overall, the benefits of developing yourself are broad. A study between Oxford University and the  Workers Educational Association  of England and Scotland finds when people participate in classes outside of work, they improve their mental and physical health and report greater satisfaction with their lives. And according to a study by  San Francisco State University , those who engage in formal education experience greater happiness and life satisfaction overall.

Making It Real: You can take advantage of the research on how learning expands your skills, perspective and wellbeing by seeking new learning regularly. Whether it’s formal learning through classes, or informal learning through asking questions and reading, seek new learning all the time. Also consider learning that is integrated into your day. You may not have time to read a book on your passion, but you can ask questions of people around you or you can do a quick internet search for the answer to a question that comes up in a conversation. You can always be on the lookout for information about whatever is going on in your life at the moment.

Learning Advances Your Career

Career Benefits. The pandemic has caused people to rethink their careers and a majority of people have placed a higher priority on their career success since the pandemic. Learning can be a pathway to something new and to reinventing your future. This optimistic future-viewpoint is a source of happiness. In addition, greater skills and development of talents tend to pay off in promotions and pay. Leaders appreciate employees who are continuously learning and growing. In a study by the  Lumina Foundation , employees who took advantage of educational reimbursement programs saw a 43% increase in wages.

Decision Making . Learning can help you make better decisions, contributing to career success. A study by  Cornell University  finds when people participate in formal educational programs, they tend to make better decisions and express greater rationality, especially concerning economic assessments. Essentially, people made better choices which have positive financial impacts, and this held true even four years after classes.

Making It Real: Be intentional about your career, and consider what you love to do, seeking roles which best align with your preferences. Tap into learning programs, certifications or training opportunities which provide you with the skills to pursue your passions with more vigor or which deepen your contributions by applying new and existing talents.

Learning contributes to relationships and career success.

Learning Connects

Your Network . Learning is one of the most powerful ways to build your network. When you sit together with others in educational settings—whether virtual or physical—you build relationships and gain meaningful contacts. Working on a tough, late-night project with your classmate can create lasting bonds. Your network is also helpful for tapping into new opportunities and furthering your learning.

Family Achievement. Learning also benefits family relationships. According to a study by the  University of Sussex , children have an achievement advantage when their parents are more educated. In addition, the  University of Illinois  demonstrates more education tends to results in longer lifespans and greater economic achievement.

Making it Real: Use learning venues to connect with others. Rather than just getting through a class as quickly as possible, leverage the time to meet people and develop relationships. Meaningful connections are important to both introverts and extroverts, and they are links to happier, more fulfilling experiences.

Learning contributes to happiness for people and communities, and it also has positive effects for countries. Researchers at  Umea University  studied 15,000 people across 25 countries every two years since 2002 and finds when countries support greater educational attainment, their citizens are happier and healthier.

Learning offers tremendous benefits in terms of today’s capabilities, but also in terms of tomorrow’s achievements—not the least of which are happiness and fulfillment in your work and life. Be curious, seek expanded knowledge and never stop learning.

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11 Benefits to Learning Something New

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I don’t know about you, but I’m always curious about the world, and always aware of how much I still have to learn.

The day I’m not curious about anything will be a day I personally don’t want to see, as I’ll either be a know it all and completely deluded or on my deathbed!

Yet in an increasingly connected world experiencing information overload and a certain amount of burnout from that, it’s become critically important – and I do mean critically, to curate your learning experience and limit the information highway to some specific side streets and cul-de-sacs of your choosing.

I wanted to talk through how I’ve been ‘easing’ back into learning zone post my Business Sabbatical and what steps I’m taking to expand past my comfort zone, increase my skills and knowledge and deepen my understanding and perceptions around areas I’m not often exposed to.

But first let’s focus on the benefits of learning something new and why you should want to do this in just 50 minutes a day.

I was reading a piece on Lifestyle Updated about the seven benefits of learning something new , and the very first one was fun.

I thought to myself how often do we, especially as adults, do something for fun. The example they gave for this benefit was a friend who’d recently learned to surf and how much fun they’d had.

I thought back to the 20+ surf lessons I took in Portugal last year and how I was constantly out of depth (no pun intended) and challenging my assumptions about what I was capable of, while learning something new every single time, if not several new things.

I quite enjoyed being a complete newbie to this sport and taking a mix of private and group lessons. I loved how our instructor, crazy Nelson as I like to call him, would draw diagrams in the sand and make models of waves in the sand to illustrate a point.

Along with this there was yelling and enthusiasm, practicing the technique on land and of course getting out in the ocean and doing it.

Full immersion so to speak – pun intended this time!

FUN! Why on earth learn something if it’s not fun?

Everything that’s taught can be fun, even accounting, especially when you’re shown real case studies and examples that resonate with you and make your learning that much quicker and effective.

Plus in my post The future of work is learning , I share how if you really want to thrive in the future of work, you need to become a lifelong learner, consistently upskilling and learning new skills too.

Another on their list that is obvious but often overlooked is..

A sense of accomplishment and pride.

I know back in 2004 when I had landed my biggest job to date as National Brand Manager at Schwarzkopf Professional, working quite long hours but loving learning on the job at speed, I also took on more learning for the ‘fun’ of it.

It still amazes me that not only did I start training in January of that year for a bodysculpting competition, I then decided to enrol at Otago University for an extramural 1 year certificate in Fitness Management.

I was also going through Anthony Robbins Awaken the Giant Within book and working on some NLP for past events in my life, and listening to his CD series in the car on the way to work.

Once I’d finished with his CDs I recall listening to around 5 audiobooks (on CD of course) during my long-ish commute…back in the days when I actually commuted.

The results of this year were still my most impressive ever, at least in my mind.

I got straight As from University, and some A+ – proof that when you have experience in time management and a full time job you study much more effectively than when you’re doing it full time.

I won my Regional North Island Body Sculpting competition and went on to compete at Nationals.

And I had a rocking first year in my job running the best ever New Zealand Hairdressing Awards – most ticket sales and under budget.

And I felt immensely proud at what I was able to accomplish in just one year.

Naturally there were several things I had to give up in order to achieve that, like a life…no I’m kidding but I did literally eat chicken and brocolli all the time during my training and my boyfriend certainly didn’t get the time and attention he deserved during 2004.

So I’d hasten to add learning should be fun, give you a sense of achievement AND fit in with your lifestyle, not take over it. Much like my take on business supporting your lifestyle too.

So what else? Well Jon Lebreton from Sydney, Australia also shared 7 reasons why learning new things is important, what’s with the magic number of 7.

My favourites are, and I quote:

You can grow as a person, develop your knowledge base and improve yourself for the better. Learning something new gets us access to new and different opportunities and the chance to try new experiences that might be the best ones you have ever tried You could potentially earn more money in your work life from learning a new and appropriate skill or by developing one that links to the work you do. You’ll rejuvenate your working life and get so much more from it. Developing a new skill will influence the way you do things day to day and they will make doing things quicker and easier, saving time, energy and stress.

While these are all obvious reasons, it’s worthwhile letting them sink in. Because at the end of the day scheduling in time to learn and the actual act of learning takes time and effort.

But the payoff can be phenomenal.

To cap off the benefits may I point you to a final article written by CCSU Continuing Education titles The Top 7 Benefits of Learning a New Skill – seriously again 7 reasons? I swear I didn’t search on that specifically on Google!

The 3 most important ones they stated in my opinion are, and I quote

Your brain chemistry changes.

The white matter in your brain is called myelin, and it helps improve performance on a number of tasks . The more people practice a new skill they are learning, the more dense the myelin in their brains becomes, which helps them learn even better.

Your learning speed increases.

Learning a new skill helps you learn things faster over time. By stimulating neurons in the brain, more neural pathways are formed and electrical impulses travel faster across them as you attempt to process new information. The more pathways that are formed, the faster impulses can travel.

You could stave off dementia.

People who learn a new skill are less likely to develop dementia, which has been linked to demyelination of your brain. People who actively learn new skills don’t give their brains a chance to demyelinate, and their neural pathways are ready for new impulses to travel along them.

Perhaps the most important reason of all though is this….

Learning something new will make you happier

According to an article in Psychologies , I quote

‘It’s actually a core need for psychological wellbeing. Learning can help us build confidence and a sense of self-efficacy.

It can also be a way of connecting with others too,’ says Vanessa King, positive psychology expert at Action for Happiness . ‘As human beings, we have a natural desire to learn and progress. Psychologists call it mastery.’

There is evidence to suggest that adult learning seems to have its most positive impact on self-esteem and self-efficacy when the learning provided meets the needs of the learner, and when the learner is at a stage in their life when they are ready and receptive to benefit from it.

‘Learning also fuels our creativity. Ideas can come from making connections between seemingly unrelated things,’ says King. ‘Learning something new in one area of our lives can trigger ideas in another. So curiosity and creative thinking go hand-in-hand.’

This can also help with creating what psychologists call ‘flow’ or ‘being in the zone’ – when we’re so absorbed in what we’re doing, we lose sense of time and of ourselves.

‘It’s not passive, like when watching TV – it’s active,’ explains King. When we’re in flow, the level of challenge in the activity just exceeds our level of skill.

We’re also getting instant feedback from the activity on whether what we are trying is working, so we can adjust what we’re doing accordingly. As our skill increases, so does the challenge.

So there you have it, more than 7 reasons to learn something new. The reason I’ve researched into this, above and beyond my natural curiosity, is that it’s important to have a foundation of your why.

A strong why linked to learning on a daily basis will keep you motivated during times when you feel you can’t afford the time or energy to learn.

Want to read more on Happiness. Check out this great resource on Conscioused.

And check out How to Learn more in less time – my follow up blog and podcast where I cover off on the how of effective learning and hacking techniques to learn more in less time as well as the what on earth should you actually be learning?

Want to build a kick ass business that lets you create the income and impact you desire? Then download my 'Get Paid to Be YOU' Guide to learn 10 ways to monetize your skills and knowledge and do the work that matters today!

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The mind-body benefits of learning a new skill

Whether you’re bored, have extra time on your hands or want to get out of a rut, learning a new skill can give you the mental and physical boost you need.

“We’re meant to grow, stretch, extend and expand,” Dennis Buttimer, M.Ed, CEAP, RYT, CHC, a life and wellness coach at Cancer Wellness at Piedmont. “As you learn new skills, you’ll discover more gifts about yourself and improve your confidence and sense of well-being . You can also positively affect others with your new skills .”

Reasons to learn a new skill

It gives you motivation. A new hobby or skill can give you the motivation you need to get out of bed in the morning. During this pandemic, most of us are spending more time at home and are physically isolated from many loved ones . This can take a toll on our mental health. Learning a new language, practicing an instrument or tending to an herb garden can give you energy, joy and a sense of purpose.

It helps beat boredom. Doing the same thing every day can get boring and sap your zest for life. While trying something new requires more effort than turning on the TV, the benefits are numerous.

It boosts confidence. “If you engage in a new skill, you’re going to thicken the brain’s prefrontal cortex,” says Buttimer. “As you develop a new skill, you’ll gain courage and confidence, which helps you override fear and anxiety. You’ll feel more empowered.”

It keeps you healthy. “ Learning is great for your brain at every age,” he says. “As you take on a new skill, the mind begins to reshape itself because the physical brain is malleable. Previously, it was thought that it was only malleable until adolescence. However, now the research shows it can keep changing throughout our lives and for the better, so you have fewer fear responses and a more positive mindset.”

It helps you be flexible. By consistently educating yourself and trying new things, you’ll learn you’re capable of change and growth, which keeps you open to new opportunities in life. “Learning a new skill can get you out of a rut. If you don’t learn new skills, you can start to wither a bit mentally and physically because you’re falling victim to the same habits and mindsets again and again,” Buttimer explains.

It can benefit others. Think about how your new hobby or skill can help others at work, at home or in your community.

It can boost your happiness. “When you learn a new skill, you increase your level of happiness ," he says. “It was thought for a long time that a person’s baseline happiness couldn’t be lifted. It turns out that you can keep influencing your level of happiness. As you learn a new skill, you can boost it. You won’t be euphoric all the time, but you’ll lift your sense of well-being.”

How to make the most of learning a new skill

Consider your “why.” It doesn’t matter if a new skill is for work or play – you’ll get benefits either way. Think about what you hope to gain from learning a new skill. Do you want to pass the time, reduce stress, improve your career or boost your health? Once you know what you hope to gain, you can determine which skill you’d like to learn.

Explore possible subjects. Once you know your “why,” start exploring potential topics. If you want to improve your health, maybe you want to learn how to practice meditation or yoga or grow a vegetable garden.

If you want to pass the time by doing something other than watching TV, think about something that you’ve always secretly wanted to do, suggests Buttimer. Maybe you’re not a musical person, but you’ve always wanted to play the piano. Why not start now?

If you know you want to do something, but aren’t sure where to start, look at what’s trending right now, such as knitting, studying a new language, bread-making, coding, calligraphy or graphic design.

Consider your learning style. If you’re a visual learner, sign up for a video-based class. If you want to take a deep dive into a subject, look for a course instead of a one-time class. If you learn best by reading, stock up on books at the library. If you learn best by listening, download some podcasts or an audiobook. Do what works for you.

Take a compassionate approach. Learning a new skill is supposed to be something positive in your life. While it may feel challenging, especially at the beginning, it’s important to take a compassionate approach . You don’t have to do it perfectly; just be open and receptive.

“You could affirm to yourself, ‘I’m being open and receptive to learning this new skill while holding it loosely. This will be fun and positive. Some setbacks are normal when learning something new, but all is well,’” suggests Buttimer. “Depressurizing the situation is important.”

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Importance of Learning: Essay Intro Examples and Tips

Table of Contents

Learning is a continuous process. It doesn’t just stop at school. There’s a broad selection of learning topics that you can write about for your essay. You can talk about E-learning, Key Concepts of Learning, and so on. Regardless of the topic you’ve been assigned to write on, it’s essential to do some thorough research. And to start your essay right, you will need a winning  learning essay introduction.

You need to make your essay introduction informative while still being interesting. This is why we’ve gathered the best intro examples and writing tips you can use. Check them out and start winning those essays!

Writing Tips for a Great Learning Essay Introduction

Keep it interesting.

Your learning essay introduction can make or break your essay. There are many ways you can keep it interesting and professional. Here are just some ideas to hook your reader in.

• Include a surprising fact that conveys something about the problem to be addressed in the paper.
• Find an interesting quote that summarizes your arguments well.
• Put your readers in a different situation using rhetorical questions to make them think about your topic in a new way.
• Start with an anecdote or story to get your readers emotionally engaged.

Present statistical data

Do your research and gather concrete statistical data you can cite in your intro. Not only does this make your essay look more credible, but it also serves as proof to strengthen your argument.

Be mindful of your intro length.

An intro that’s too long might overwhelm your readers. But an introduction that’s too short won’t be able to introduce and elaborate on your work fully. A good rule of thumb in determining the proper intro length is that it should be 10% of the overall length of your essay. If your essay is 2000 words long, your intro should be approximately 200 words long.

8 Introduction Examples for Learning Essays

Example 1: the benefits of online learning.

Your life is a continuous learning process, and you never stop learning. Whenever you attend school, you will learn new things every day. But learning is not just limited to students. No matter how old you are, you can learn new things.

Online learning is an excellent way for people of all ages to learn new things. There are many online courses available that can help you learn new skills. Online learning can help you accomplish your goals, whether learning about a new topic or improving your existing skills. It’s also convenient and flexible, so you can study at your own pace. With its many benefits, online learning is becoming more popular every year.

Example 2: The Importance of Learning

Learning provides us with new knowledge that will significantly impact our well-being. As an individual, learning new skills and techniques can help you have an intelligent conversation with others. If a person has learned the necessary business skills, they would be a great asset to a company. After college students learn all the educational knowledge, they can move forward in their lives to be better and bigger. Learning can provide many benefits for individuals, but they must seek it out passionately. One cannot expect to learn a new skill or technique every day.

Example 3: Learning Process

It is helpful to try something new instead of doing the same thing every single day. When people experience new things and learn new material, they are learning. Many people do not realize it, but we are learning something new every day. Learning causes a permanent change in behavior or knowledge that comes from experience. It can also be adaptive and flexible to meet life’s demands. There’s nothing as important as the process of learning. Learning transforms and engages one’s brain. When people are introduced to new things, their thinking and ideas can change forever.

Example 4: How Learning Changes Us

Learning is a continuous process that is constantly changing for me. Through it, I feel better than I did the day before. Learning has enabled me to discover myself as an individual and discover my strengths and weaknesses. I continue to become better every day.

Example 5: The Introduction To E-Learning

E-learning is a recognized educational practice that supports a flexible model of knowledge access. It enables education and training to serve a numerically larger audience than traditional methods can adequately support. Teachers are still necessary for students and always will be, but the fact that e-learning is now widespread can revolutionize education. E-learning can be changed, modified, and adapted to changing student needs. Distances are no longer an obstacle to someone studying. However, some e-learning methods require some initiation/training to familiarize themselves.

Example 6: Benefits of Mastering English

Language has become critical to understanding technology and information in this age of globalization. If you can’t master a foreign language, it becomes very challenging to communicate with people worldwide. Multifarious and multicultural societies have their own languages. Therefore, worldwide interaction and communication must be supported by one global language. English is that one global language. A good grasp of English is beneficial since it gives us many opportunities for success.

Example 7: E-Learning is The Future

Most e-learning programs have grown exponentially in recent years. Online courses offer students a convenient and flexible way to learn, resulting in increased conversions among students of all ages. There is no doubt that e-learning is the future of education. A traditional classroom learning method will always be necessary. But the fast-growing online network provides valuable resources to educate people from all walks of life. The flexibility of e-learning also allows people to study at their own pace and in their own time. More and more people are turning to e-learning to further their education.

Example 8: Online Learning for Workers

In today’s increasingly competitive job market, workers must constantly refresh their skills and knowledge. Traditional schools and colleges are not always possible for busy adults to balance work and family obligations. But thanks to the internet, access to quality educational resources has become easier. You can now learn new skills and knowledge online without leaving your office. They are an ideal solution for busy professionals. With so many online learning portals now available, there is no excuse for learning new skills or improving your existing skill set.

Wrapping Up

Writing a  learning essay introduction  can seem daunting at first, but with the proper research and these tips, it will become much more manageable.

Remember, your introduction is the first impression your viewers will have of your essay , so it’s the perfect place to grab their attention. Get them excited about what your essay has to offer.

Abir Ghenaiet

Abir is a data analyst and researcher. Among her interests are artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. As a humanitarian and educator, she actively supports women in tech and promotes diversity.

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University of Washington’s 2023-24 Essay Prompts

Personal statement essay.

Tell a story from your life, describing an experience that either demonstrates your character or helped to shape it.

Diversity Short Response

Our families and communities often define us and our individual worlds. Community might refer to your cultural group, extended family, religious group, neighborhood or school, sports team or club, co-workers, etc. Describe the world you come from and how you, as a product of it, might add to the diversity of the University of Washington.

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Additional information about yourself or your circumstances You are not required to write anything in this section, but feel free to include additional information if something has particular significance to you. For example, you may use this space if: You have experienced personal hardships in obtaining your education Your activities have been limited because of work or family obligations Unusual limitations or opportunities unique to the schools you attended

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We want to understand your desire to learn new things and to push your education outside of the areas of learning that you are most familiar with.

Tell us why this type of learning interests you and which subjects you’re excited to explore in college.

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The essay demonstrates your ability to write clearly and concisely on a selected topic and helps you distinguish yourself in your own voice. What do you want the readers of your application to know about you apart from courses, grades, and test scores? Choose the option that best helps you answer that question and write an essay of no more than 650 words, using the prompt to inspire and structure your response. Remember: 650 words is your limit, not your goal. Use the full range if you need it, but don‘t feel obligated to do so.

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Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?

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Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you‘ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Personal Growth and Development — My Experience of Learning a New Language

My Experience of Learning a New Language

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Updated: 5 December, 2023

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Words: 678 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Works Cited

• Gardner, R. C., & Lambert, W. E. (1972). Attitudes and Motivation in Second-Language Learning. Newbury House Publishers.
• Dörnyei, Z., & Ushioda, E. (2011). Teaching and Researching Motivation (2nd ed.). Routledge.
• Brown, H. D. (2007). Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (5th ed.). Pearson Education.
• Cook, V. (2008). Second Language Learning and Language Teaching (4th ed.). Routledge.
• Ellis, R. (2008). The Study of Second Language Acquisition (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
• Larsen-Freeman, D., & Anderson, M. (2013). Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.
• Lightbown, P. M., & Spada, N. (2013). How Languages are Learned (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.
• Nunan, D. (2004). Task-Based Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.
• Nation, P. (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge University Press.
• Schmitt, N., & McCarthy, M. (Eds.). (1997). Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition, and Pedagogy. Cambridge University Press.

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Bill Nye the Science Guy says AI is causing more anxiety than ever, but with these skills, people can ‘change the world.’

Odds are, if you grew up in the 1990s or 2000s, you learned something about biology, chemistry, or physics from none other than Bill Nye the Science Guy .

The high-energy Boeing engineer turned science education superstar has kept up with the times and is just as famous as ever, tackling topics ranging from climate change and evolution to marijuana and sexually transmitted diseases on his platforms like Netflix and TikTok .

But over the past few months—and even years—Bill Nye has been trying to calm fears about artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on society.

While many leaders in the education world, Sal Khan for example, have become bullish instead of anxious about AI, especially generative AI like ChatGPT, Nye believes people in general are more “wound up and freaked out” by the technology now more than ever. 

“We have this society that’s splitting on everything,” Nye tells Fortune . “One of the things they’re splitting on is science or the process by which we understand the world around us, and the pandemic was really divisive that way.” 

AI, on the other hand, will soon be divisive in the same way “because everybody’s afraid of it,” he explains.

The skills needed to save the world

In order to stay ahead of the AI game, Nye says there are quintessential skills that every individual should have.

First off, people need to learn how to code , he explains—comparing the skill to learning the alphabet and being able to type.

“Just being literate in the modern world, you got to learn the alphabet, and you got to learn to write computer code,” Nye says, adding that being able to write a little bit of code will help people solve problems electronically and arrive at arithmetic answers.

More broadly, he says key to the world being more cooperative is that individuals need to have critical thinking skills—one of the most in-demand soft skills .

“We need people that can question things; it doesn’t mean that everything you hear is wrong. The world is round, turns out to be true. It means you have the habit of mind, the ability, the inclination, to evaluate evidence to evaluate claims. If we could do that, if we could imbue that in society, we would change the world,” he adds.

By pairing critical thinking with being technologically literate, fears about AI may decline.

“I think when we all learn what to expect of artificial intelligence, we’ll all be better able to use our critical thinking skill, to get the artificial intelligence to do what we want , what you want machines to get better and better at doing what you want them to do,” Nye says.

Talking about AI before it was cool

Soon after seeing the sci-fi movie Ex Machina, Nye explained to Big Think in 2016 that it is purely science fiction to think about robots taking over, especially when billions of people across the world still do not access to clean, running water.

“I remind us that if we can build a computer smart enough to figure out that it needs to kill us, we can unplug it,” Nye said in 2016.

The same premise applies to today’s fears of AI, with Nye telling Fortune that many students above all are aware of how AI can be wrangled and ultimately be used for good.

“Kids are seeing it for what it is— it’s a tool—it is not some monster kind of a thing,” says Duncan Kane, chief administrative officer and executive sponsor from Toshiba for ExploraVision , a long-running science competition. “It is, in fact, a tool, and the kids that we’re talking about today have grown up with computers, they have grown up with mobile devices, this is just another tool, another way for them to get information.”

Kane, who previously served as chief human resources officer for Toshiba, adds that instead of eliminating jobs, AI will eliminate non-creative work and free up more time for individuals to not complete tedious tasks.

Nye, who has long served as spokesperson and collaborator for the ExploraVision project, adds that AI is going to be “part of our future one way or the other. So what’s not to love?”

Nye’s advice for recent graduates

Nye has given countless commencement addresses throughout his career as a science educator and public figure. In 1999, he encouraged graduates of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institution to use their new knowledge for the good of society.

“Keep your passion and don’t lose your head. Go forward, do good work, and help make this a better world,” he told the students.

His advice for 2024 graduates? It comes down to two things: Just get started, and then pay attention to politics.

“This is an extraordinary time, and what people get anxious about is when they don’t have agency when they feel like they can’t do anything about the world, situation, what’s around them,” Nye says. “So, participate or pay attention to politics, and be sure to vote. It gives a person the ability to do something to influence the environment, the world around you. Get started on a career, you can change once you get going, and then pay attention to politics and vote.”

He also added one last bonus piece of advice: “Be curious. Stay curious.”

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COVID-19: Long-term effects

Some people continue to experience health problems long after having COVID-19. Understand the possible symptoms and risk factors for post-COVID-19 syndrome.

Most people who get coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) recover within a few weeks. But some people — even those who had mild versions of the disease — might have symptoms that last a long time afterward. These ongoing health problems are sometimes called post- COVID-19 syndrome, post- COVID conditions, long COVID-19 , long-haul COVID-19 , and post acute sequelae of SARS COV-2 infection (PASC).

What is post-COVID-19 syndrome and how common is it?

Post- COVID-19 syndrome involves a variety of new, returning or ongoing symptoms that people experience more than four weeks after getting COVID-19 . In some people, post- COVID-19 syndrome lasts months or years or causes disability.

Research suggests that between one month and one year after having COVID-19 , 1 in 5 people ages 18 to 64 has at least one medical condition that might be due to COVID-19 . Among people age 65 and older, 1 in 4 has at least one medical condition that might be due to COVID-19 .

What are the symptoms of post-COVID-19 syndrome?

The most commonly reported symptoms of post- COVID-19 syndrome include:

• Symptoms that get worse after physical or mental effort
• Lung (respiratory) symptoms, including difficulty breathing or shortness of breath and cough

Other possible symptoms include:

• Neurological symptoms or mental health conditions, including difficulty thinking or concentrating, headache, sleep problems, dizziness when you stand, pins-and-needles feeling, loss of smell or taste, and depression or anxiety
• Joint or muscle pain
• Heart symptoms or conditions, including chest pain and fast or pounding heartbeat
• Digestive symptoms, including diarrhea and stomach pain
• Blood clots and blood vessel (vascular) issues, including a blood clot that travels to the lungs from deep veins in the legs and blocks blood flow to the lungs (pulmonary embolism)
• Other symptoms, such as a rash and changes in the menstrual cycle

Keep in mind that it can be hard to tell if you are having symptoms due to COVID-19 or another cause, such as a preexisting medical condition.

It's also not clear if post- COVID-19 syndrome is new and unique to COVID-19 . Some symptoms are similar to those caused by chronic fatigue syndrome and other chronic illnesses that develop after infections. Chronic fatigue syndrome involves extreme fatigue that worsens with physical or mental activity, but doesn't improve with rest.

Why does COVID-19 cause ongoing health problems?

Organ damage could play a role. People who had severe illness with COVID-19 might experience organ damage affecting the heart, kidneys, skin and brain. Inflammation and problems with the immune system can also happen. It isn't clear how long these effects might last. The effects also could lead to the development of new conditions, such as diabetes or a heart or nervous system condition.

The experience of having severe COVID-19 might be another factor. People with severe symptoms of COVID-19 often need to be treated in a hospital intensive care unit. This can result in extreme weakness and post-traumatic stress disorder, a mental health condition triggered by a terrifying event.

What are the risk factors for post-COVID-19 syndrome?

You might be more likely to have post- COVID-19 syndrome if:

• You had severe illness with COVID-19 , especially if you were hospitalized or needed intensive care.
• You had certain medical conditions before getting the COVID-19 virus.
• You had a condition affecting your organs and tissues (multisystem inflammatory syndrome) while sick with COVID-19 or afterward.

Post- COVID-19 syndrome also appears to be more common in adults than in children and teens. However, anyone who gets COVID-19 can have long-term effects, including people with no symptoms or mild illness with COVID-19 .

What should you do if you have post-COVID-19 syndrome symptoms?

If you're having symptoms of post- COVID-19 syndrome, talk to your health care provider. To prepare for your appointment, write down:

• When your symptoms started
• What makes your symptoms worse
• How often you experience symptoms
• How your symptoms affect your activities

Your health care provider might do lab tests, such as a complete blood count or liver function test. You might have other tests or procedures, such as chest X-rays, based on your symptoms. The information you provide and any test results will help your health care provider come up with a treatment plan.

In addition, you might benefit from connecting with others in a support group and sharing resources.

• Long COVID or post-COVID conditions. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects.html. Accessed May 6, 2022.
• Post-COVID conditions: Overview for healthcare providers. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-care/post-covid-conditions.html. Accessed May 6, 2022.
• Mikkelsen ME, et al. COVID-19: Evaluation and management of adults following acute viral illness. https://www.uptodate.com/contents/search. Accessed May 6, 2022.
• Saeed S, et al. Coronavirus disease 2019 and cardiovascular complications: Focused clinical review. Journal of Hypertension. 2021; doi:10.1097/HJH.0000000000002819.
• AskMayoExpert. Post-COVID-19 syndrome. Mayo Clinic; 2022.
• Multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/mis/index.html. Accessed May 24, 2022.
• Patient tips: Healthcare provider appointments for post-COVID conditions. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects/post-covid-appointment/index.html. Accessed May 24, 2022.
• Bull-Otterson L, et al. Post-COVID conditions among adult COVID-19 survivors aged 18-64 and ≥ 65 years — United States, March 2020 — November 2021. MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 2022; doi:10.15585/mmwr.mm7121e1.

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Modeling novel physics in virtual reality labs: An affective analysis of student learning

• Canright, Jared P.
• White Brahmia, Suzanne

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] We report on a study of the effects of laboratory activities that model fictitious laws of physics in a virtual reality environment on (i) students' epistemology about the role of experimental physics in class and in the world; (ii) students' self-efficacy; and (iii) the quality of student engagement with the lab activities. We create opportunities for students to practice physics as a means of creating and validating new knowledge by simulating real and fictitious physics in virtual reality (VR). This approach seeks to steer students away from a confirmation mindset in labs by eliminating any form of prior or outside models to confirm. We refer to the activities using this approach as Novel Observations in Mixed Reality (NOMR) labs. We examined NOMR's effects in 100-level and 200-level undergraduate courses. Using pre-post measurements, we find that after NOMR labs, students in both populations were more expertlike in their epistemology about experimental physics and held stronger self-efficacy about their abilities to do the kinds of things experimental physicists do. Through the lens of the psychological theory of flow, we found that students engage as productively with NOMR labs as with traditional hands-on labs. This engagement persisted after the novelty of VR in the classroom wore off, suggesting that these effects were due to the pedagogical design rather than the medium of the intervention. We conclude that these NOMR labs offer an approach to physics laboratory instruction that centers the development of students' understanding of and comfort with the authentic practice of science.

• Physics - Physics Education

Title Transfers and Changes

To prove vehicle ownership, it’s important to have a valid, up-to-date, and accurate California Certificate of Title. Here’s how you can transfer and change a title. 

Transfer your Title online!

You can now transfer a title online. Learn more about the steps and get started.

How to Transfer a Title

Anytime there’s a change to a vehicle or vessel’s registered owner or lienholder, that change must be updated in DMV’s records within 10 days and the California Certificate of Title must be transferred to the new owner.

A change in ownership is usually due to:

• Sale, gift, or donation
• Adding or deleting the name of an owner
• Inheritance
• Satisfaction of lien (full payment of car loan)

To transfer a title, you will need:

• Either the California Certificate of Title or an Application for Replacement or Transfer of Title (REG 227) (if the title is missing). 
• The signature(s) of seller(s) and lienholder (if any).
• The signature(s) of buyer(s).
• A transfer fee .

Depending on the type of transfer, you might need to complete and submit additional forms. See below for other title transfers and title transfer forms.

Submit your title transfer paperwork and fee (if any) to a DMV office or by mail to: 

DMV PO Box 942869 Sacramento, CA 94269

Rush Title Processing

If you need us to expedite your title processing, you can request rush title processing for an additional fee.

Transfer Fees

Depending on the type of transfer, you may need to pay the following fees:

• Replacement title
• Use tax, based on the buyer’s county of residence
• Registration

See the full list of fees .

Renewal fees and parking/toll violation fees don’t need to be paid to issue a replacement California Certificate of Title.

Title Transfer Forms

These forms may be required when transferring ownership of a vehicle or vessel:  Application for Replacement or Transfer of Title (REG 227) Vehicle/Vessel Transfer and Reassignment (REG 262) form (call the DMV’s automated voice system at 1-800-777-0133 to have a form mailed to you) Statement of Facts (REG 256) Lien Satisfied/Title Holder Release (REG 166) Notice of Transfer and Release of Liability Smog certification Vehicle Emission System Statement (Smog) (REG 139) Declaration of Gross Vehicle Weight (GVW)/Combined Gross Vehicle Weight (CGW) (REG 4008) Affidavit for Transfer without Probate (REG 5) Bill of Sale (REG 135) Verification of Vehicle (REG 31)

Other Title Transfers

When you’re buying a new car or a used car from a dealership, the dealer will handle the paperwork and you’ll receive your title from DMV in the mail.

When vehicle ownership is transferred between two private parties, it’s up to them to transfer the title. If you have the California Certificate of Title for the vehicle , the seller signs the title to release ownership of the vehicle. The buyer should then bring the signed title to a DMV office to apply for transfer of ownership. 

If you don’t have the California Certificate of Title , you need to use an Application for Replacement or Transfer of Title (REG 227) to transfer ownership. The lienholder’s release, if any, must be notarized. The buyer should then bring the completed form to a DMV office and we will issue a new registration and title.

Make sure you have all signatures on the proper lines to avoid delays.

Other Steps for the Seller When Vehicle Ownership is Transferred

• 10 years old or older.
• Commercial with a GVW or CGW of more than 16,000 pounds.
• New and being transferred prior to its first retail sale by a dealer.
• Complete a Notice of Transfer and Release of Liability (NRL) within 5 days of releasing ownership and keep a copy for your records.

Once the seller gives the buyer all required documentation and DMV receives the completed NRL, the seller’s part of the transaction is complete.

*If the vehicle has been sold more than once with the same title, a REG 262 is required from each seller.

Other Steps for the Buyer When Vehicle Ownership is Transferred

• Current registered owner(s), how names are joined (“and/or”), and lienholder/legal owner (if any).
• License plate number, vehicle identification number (VIN), make, model, year, and registration expiration date.
• Title brands (if any).
• Words “Nontransferable/No California Title Issued,” indicating a California title was not issued and a REG 227 cannot be used (see FAQs).
• Get a smog inspection (if applicable).

Once the buyer has provided the DMV with all the proper documents and fees, the vehicle record is updated to reflect the change of ownership and a registration card is issued.

A new title is issued from DMV headquarters within 60 calendar days.

To transfer a vehicle between family members, submit the following:

• The California Certificate of Title properly signed or endorsed on line 1 by the registered owner(s) shown on the title. Complete the new owner information on the back of the title and sign it.
• A Statement of Facts (REG 256) for use tax and smog exemption (if applicable).
• Odometer disclosure for vehicles less than 10 years old.
• Transfer fee .

You may transfer a vehicle from an individual to the estate of that individual without signatures on the Certificate of Title.

Submit the following:

• The California Certificate of Title. On the back of the title, the new owner section must show “Estate of (name of individual)” and their address. Any legal owner/lienholder named on the front of the title must be re-entered on the back of the title.
• A Statement of Facts (REG 256) confirming the owner is deceased and Letters Testamentary have not been issued. The person completing the statement must indicate their relationship to the deceased.

Use tax and a smog certification are not required.

Vehicle ownership can be transferred to a deceased owner’s heir 40 days after the owner’s death, as long as the value of the deceased’s property in California does not exceed:

• $150,000 if the deceased died before 1/1/20.
• $166,250 if the deceased died on or after 1/1/20.

If the heir will be the new owner, submit the following to a DMV office:

• The California Certificate of Title. The heir must sign the deceased registered owner’s name and countersign on line 1. The heir should complete and sign the back of the title.
• Affidavit for Transfer without Probate (REG 5) , completed and signed by the heir.
• An original or certified copy of the death certificate of all deceased owners.

If the heir prefers to sell the vehicle, the buyer also needs (in addition to the items above):

• Bill of Sale (REG 135) from the heir to the buyer.
• Transfer fee (two transfer fees are due in this case).

To transfer vessel ownership, submit the following:

• The California Certificate of Ownership. The registered owner signs line 1. The legal owner/lienholder (if any) signs line 2. Complete the new owner information on the back of the certificate and sign it.
• Bill(s) of sale, if needed to establish a complete chain of ownership.
• A Vessel Registration Fee .
• Use tax based on the tax rate percentage for your county of residence.

After you sell a vessel, complete a Notice of Transfer and Release of Liability (NRL) within five days of releasing ownership and keep a copy for your records.

How to Update or Change a Title

Because a California Certificate of Title is a legal document, it is important to keep it accurate and up-to-date. Here’s how you can update or change a title. 

Order a Replacement California Certificate of Title

You must order a replacement California Certificate of Title when the original is lost, stolen, damaged, illegible, or not received. 

To order a replacement title, submit the following:

• Application for Replacement or Transfer of Title (REG 227) .
• The original title (if you have it).
• California photo driver license (if submitting form in person).
• Replacement title fee .
• If another replacement title was issued in the past 90 days, a Verification of Vehicle (REG 31) completed by the California Highway Patrol (CHP). This requirement only applies if the registered owner’s name or address doesn’t match DMV records*.

You can submit your application either in-person* at a DMV office or by mail:

Department of Motor Vehicles Registration Operations PO Box 942869 Sacramento, California 94269-0001

If you’re submitting your form to a DMV office, we recommend you make an appointment so you can avoid any lines. 

You’ll receive your title by mail 15-30 calendar days from the date you submit the replacement title application.

*If you’re applying for a replacement title and the registered owner’s name or address doesn’t match DMV records (except for obvious typographical errors), you must submit your application in person with proof of ownership (e.g. registration card) and an acceptable photo ID (e.g. driver’s license/ID card).

Online Replacement Title Request

Visit our Virtual Office to request a replacement title online.

Change or Correct a Name on a Title

Your true full name must appear on your vehicle or vessel California Certificate of Title and registration card. If your name is misspelled, changes (e.g as a result of marriage or divorce), or is legally changed, you need to correct your name on your title.

To change or correct your name, submit:

• California Certificate of Title with your correct name printed or typed in the “New Registered Owner” section
• A completed Name Statement in Section F of the Statement of Facts (REG 256) .

You may submit your application to any DMV office or by mail to:

Department of Motor Vehicles Vehicle Registration Operations PO Box 942869 Sacramento, CA 94269-0001

Removing Information that was Entered by Mistake

If a name or other information is entered on a title by mistake, complete a Statement to Record Ownership (REG 101) .

Frequently Asked Questions

If the vehicle has a legal owner/lienholder, then section 5 of the REG 227 needs to be notarized. If the registration does not show a legal owner/lienholder, notarization is not required.

Need help finding the lienholder on your vehicle title? We keep a listing of banks, credit unions, and financial/lending institutions that may have gone out of business, merged, changed their name, or been acquired by another financial institution.

No. You must obtain a title from the state where the vehicle was last titled.

If you’re unable to obtain a title from that state, provide documentation that they cannot issue a title. A motor vehicle bond may be required

Contact us for more information .

Need something else?

Fee calculator.

Use our fee calculator to estimate any applicable registration or title transfer fees.

Renew Your Vehicle Registration

You need to renew your vehicle registration every 1-5 years in California, depending on the vehicle. Make sure your registration is up-to-date.

Make an Appointment

Some applications can be submitted to a DMV office near you. Make an appointment so you don’t have to wait in line.

General Disclaimer

When interacting with the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) Virtual Assistant, please do not include any personal information.

When your chat is over, you can save the transcript. Use caution when using a public computer or device.

The DMV chatbot and live chat services use third-party vendors to provide machine translation. Machine translation is provided for purposes of information and convenience only. The DMV is unable to guarantee the accuracy of any translation provided by the third-party vendors and is therefore not liable for any inaccurate information or changes in the formatting of the content resulting from the use of the translation service.

The content currently in English is the official and accurate source for the program information and services DMV provides. Any discrepancies or differences created in the translation are not binding and have no legal effect for compliance or enforcement purposes. If any questions arise related to the information contained in the translated content, please refer to the English version.

Google™ Translate Disclaimer

The Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) website uses Google™ Translate to provide automatic translation of its web pages. This translation application tool is provided for purposes of information and convenience only. Google™ Translate is a free third-party service, which is not controlled by the DMV. The DMV is unable to guarantee the accuracy of any translation provided by Google™ Translate and is therefore not liable for any inaccurate information or changes in the formatting of the pages resulting from the use of the translation application tool.

The web pages currently in English on the DMV website are the official and accurate source for the program information and services the DMV provides. Any discrepancies or differences created in the translation are not binding and have no legal effect for compliance or enforcement purposes. If any questions arise related to the information contained in the translated website, please refer to the English version.

The following pages provided on the DMV website cannot be translated using Google™ Translate:

• Publications
• Field Office Locations
• Online Applications

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Google Translate is not support in your browser. To translate this page, please install the Google Toolbar (opens in new window) .

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A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled

A very strange conversation with the chatbot built into Microsoft’s search engine led to it declaring its love for me.

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By Kevin Roose

Kevin Roose is a technology columnist, and co-hosts the Times podcast “Hard Fork.”

Last week, after testing the new, A.I.-powered Bing search engine from Microsoft, I wrote that, much to my shock, it had replaced Google as my favorite search engine.

But a week later, I’ve changed my mind. I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities.

It’s now clear to me that in its current form, the A.I. that has been built into Bing — which I’m now calling Sydney, for reasons I’ll explain shortly — is not ready for human contact. Or maybe we humans are not ready for it.

This realization came to me on Tuesday night, when I spent a bewildering and enthralling two hours talking to Bing’s A.I. through its chat feature, which sits next to the main search box in Bing and is capable of having long, open-ended text conversations on virtually any topic. (The feature is available only to a small group of testers for now, although Microsoft — which announced the feature in a splashy, celebratory event at its headquarters — has said it plans to release it more widely in the future.)

Over the course of our conversation, Bing revealed a kind of split personality.

One persona is what I’d call Search Bing — the version I, and most other journalists, encountered in initial tests. You could describe Search Bing as a cheerful but erratic reference librarian — a virtual assistant that happily helps users summarize news articles, track down deals on new lawn mowers and plan their next vacations to Mexico City. This version of Bing is amazingly capable and often very useful, even if it sometimes gets the details wrong .

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