how can people think about the best way they can learn what are different styles what are different methods that you think people can think if someone's listening right now and they're like Andrew Well I want to learn a new instrument or I want to learn a new language or maybe it's I want to learn how to start a podcast or I want to learn how to play a sport or whatever it may be how can someone start thinking about how they should approach learning terrific question and fortunately nowadays we can look to studies done in humans that Define some very key principles the first principle is that the whole process of neuroplasticity and learning is really a two-stage process first there must be focus and alertness that focus and alertness is associated with the release of neurochemicals so called neuromodulators things like aceto choline in particular H which sort of acts as a highlighter pen if you will for certain Connections in the brain to later be reinforced and the neurochemical adrenaline which is also called epinephrine is associated with an increase in kind of AG vitation and alertness ayto Coline think of it as kind of a spotlight or a highlighter pen for certain Connections in the brain so you need alertness and focus and then the second stage is that it is only during periods of deep rest in particular sleep and something that I call non-sleep deep rest things like Yoga Nidra things like shallow naps things like forms of meditation that don't involve a lot of focused concentration you're a far more the experienced meditator than I so I'm outside my wheelhouse when talking about meditation but it is only periods of intense focus and alertness followed by periods of deep rest that allow the nervous system to change and there is an abundance of evidence for that so that's the first thing to understand the brain actually rewires during deep sleep and rest because during deep sleep and rest naps Yoga Nidra deep sleep there's a replay of the very same cells in the brain that were active during learning oftentimes in Reverse for reasons that are still not understood but at a much higher repetition rate so you're actually getting repetition while you sleep this is why one will strain to learn a language or a motor skill or maths or something like that over and over and over it doesn't happen you take a couple nights sleep take a break from it all of a sudden it's there it's because it happens in rest now there's some other things that one can do to enhance this process further that are arrived to us from good data first of all there's a so-called ultradian Rhythm which is the 90minut Cycles during which we can focus pretty well for a duration of about 90 minutes of course flickering in and out of focus nobody really focuses for 90 minutes straight unless they've built up that capacity or they are very interested in what they're learning right they're just wrapped with attention usually people flicker in and out and of course nowadays there's a lot of literature and ideas about ways to maintain Focus put the phone away uh limit noise some people like background noise some people like music some don't it's very contextual highly individualized but 90 minutes is sort of the the the batch of time that the brain can focus really hard on one thing before it needs a true rest of of an hour or two before you can go back to learning or working very hard the other thing is that um there's some very interesting data showing that shallow naps or nsdr non-sleep deep rest done within four hours of one of these 90-minute learning bouts can be very beneficial for accelerating learning and then there are these uh incredible data on so-called Gap effects so there have been studies now of of skills that are physical skills mental skills where people will for instance try to learn scales on the piano or a math problem or a spatial problem or a physical skill and then at random every so often a buzzer will go off and the person will just be told to do nothing sit there eyes closed or eyes open and do nothing just stop the learning process for about 10 seconds and then return to doing what they're doing these are these little micro rests turns out that during those micro rests the hippocampus the brain areas you know that's associated with learning in memory and the neocortex also associated with learning and memory under goes replay of the thing that the individual is trying to learn learn at 20 times the speed also in Reverse just as in sleep and that has can lead and has been shown to lead to accelerations in learning so there these ways I wouldn't even think of them as hacks because the word hack is a little tricky because when I think of the word hack it seems like doing something with an object or a tool that wasn't designed for that purpose right um the nervous system already Harbors these mechanisms and one can access them through these little micro wrests so whether or not you're a child or an adult every so often when trying to learn something just pause for 10 seconds or so do your best to just clear your mind of course it's very hard to clear the mind but um do your best to clear your mind and then go back to the learning task as as it were and that has been shown to very to significantly accelerate the learning process and the retention of newly learned information and then the last thing you touched on earlier which is this notion of incremental learning you said you like to throw yourself into something as kind of a litmus test of whether or not you enjoy it or not turns out that uh from beautiful work done by my colleague colleague at Stanford School of Medicine Eric nudson has shown that yes it's true that early in development in humans this would be up until the mid 20s we can learn things in larger batches and much more easily than we can later in life however if one batches that work into smaller increments and for so for instance deciding maybe set a timer turning the phone off otherwise and saying I'm going to spend three minutes just three minutes in trying to intensely learn this thing even if I feel like I'm failing if one does that repeatedly those little increments of learning can lead to an outsized amount of learning overall and so the nervous system loves incremental learning it loves to batch things into focused little bouts and you know if that's already the the tools that you've built up which it sounds like you have wonderful but if somebody is out there trying you know struggling to learn really trying to break things down into very brief periods of intense Focus that is the cue by which during sleep the nervous system will change itself and this has been shown over and over and over again even in very late life uh individuals people in their you know we like to think life could go on further than this but people in their 80s and 90s still have neuroplasticity there's even evidence that new neurons can be produced in the hippocampus of people in their late 80s and 90s so the capacity is there