Intro. [Recording date: September 13, 2023.]
Russ Roberts: Today is September 13th, 2023, and my guest is psychologist Adam Mastroianni. His substack is Experimental History. I encourage you to read it. It is phenomenal. This is his third appearance on EconTalk. He was last here recently, in August of 2023, talking about how you can’t reach the brain through the ears. That is: how hard it is to tell someone something and then for them to remember it, absorb it, and apply it.
Today’s conversation is a sequel and maybe also a prequel. We’re going to continue to talk about learning and the acquisition of wisdom and understanding based on some other writing you’ve done, Adam, and if–whatever we get to we’ll link to–but we’re going to start with an essay you wrote called “You’ll Forget Most of What You Learn. What Should You Do About That?”
Adam, welcome back to EconTalk.
Adam Mastroianni: Hey, thanks for having me back. It’s good to see you again.
Russ Roberts: Good to see you.
Russ Roberts: Let’s talk about formal education, what we call the classroom. As you start in your essay, most of us spend years there. Do we really forget most of what we heard? Most? In fact, almost all, maybe all?
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah. I mean, you could answer this question a few different ways. Right? So, people have done some studies on this where they try to do the formal thing and track the things that people are supposed to learn in their classes and then follow up with them years later. I mean, you can get pretty much every number you want, depending on how long you wait, how you do the test, but it’s somewhere between a lot of what people learn they lose and pretty much everything.
I mean, you can run this test on yourself, right? I graduated from college in 2014 and as just a little test, I tried to list every class that I took. I knew that there were 32 because I took four every semester and I got to 19 out of the 32. And so, if I can’t even name a good chunk of the classes that I took less than 10 years ago–I mean maybe that knowledge is accessible in a different way, but clearly it’s not very accessible.
The other example I have of this was just, happening upon an episode of Are you Smarter Than a Fifth Grader, where a woman–to the dismay of all the fifth graders on stage–is screaming over and over, ‘There are 352 feet in a yard.’
So, it’s bleak: whatever the number is, it’s not a great one.
Russ Roberts: I want to answer to that, and the answer I used to give–it’s interesting; I think as an economist with a free market bent most of my life, I had trouble–I still have a little bit of trouble, but I certainly had trouble when I was younger–accepting that really horribly stupid, irrational things would persist. I figured people would usually figure things out, make them better. So, the idea that we would spend 12 to 16 years in a classroom and get, quote, “almost nothing out of it” seemed improbable to me. It still does a little bit. So, I’m going to defend it a little bit, but I’m very sympathetic to your point now that I’m older.
One argument would be: Well, okay, you don’t remember facts, right? I don’t remember atomic weight. I don’t remember exactly what the red shift is. I know it has something to do with speed of things and their frequencies changing. But, that’s not really what–those are just facts. They’re not important. I can Google those or look them up in a book. What’s important are modes of thinking; and that’s what I learned in school. I learned how to think, or I learned frameworks for thinking; and that’s what I learned. That’s more important than facts.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah. Well, I think two problems with that. One is it does really seem that what we’re doing a lot of the time in the classroom is trying to transmit the facts. That, if you went into a classroom and they were like, ‘Look, we know you’re not going to remember any of the facts here and you can look them up anyway. What we’re really going to do is teach how to think,’ I’d go, like, ‘Okay.’ But there doesn’t seem to be a point at which the teaching-to-think actually happens.
I know that this is the conceit behind higher education. The example I use in the piece is: If you want to learn how to learn, we do actually know something about how to learn. It is nothing like we get people to learn in undergrad.
So, for instance, all of the things that people naturally do to try to remember things better–highlight things in their textbooks, take bullet pointed notes, rereading things–we don’t have any–there’s pretty good evidence that doesn’t help you remember those things. Certainly, cramming doesn’t help you remember most of the incentives that we create for people: encourage them to cram for the test, take the test, and then don’t remember anything afterward. So, if that is what we’re doing–which I agree we’re doing some of–but it doesn’t seem to really be what we’re trying to do, and it doesn’t seem to be what we mainly do.
Russ Roberts: So, here at Shalem College, we do–for the first year or so of the students’ experience–read Great Books in small seminars and explore them. And I do think, besides finding out what happened in the Odyssey, I do think students acquire insights into themselves and learn how to read from that experience, which is much more important than knowing what happened to Odysseus when he encountered the Sirens.
So, I think there’s some of it; but I certainly agree with you that–let’s call it the lecturing format. I was a very interactive lecturer, but still I lectured. I think the lecturing format is pretty dismal in being transformative. And I think back to my college astronomy class: I don’t remember one thing from it. It doesn’t mean I got nothing out of it, but I don’t remember one thing. That’s really weird because I love the nighttime sky.
Now, one of the things I’ve learned since I took my astronomy class–unless I learned it and forgot it–is that when you look up at the nighttime sky in a decent place, meaning not too much light pollution, and you see thousands of stars, virtually every, and in most cases, every star that you see is in the Milky Way. That’s extraordinary. When I learned that fact–and I learned it about six years ago from a friend of my nephew who was staying with us for a night in a place with really good stars–he just mentioned that in an offhand way. I thought, ‘Well, that can’t be true. I know that.’ But, I didn’t know it. I think it is true. And the only exception is that maybe–I think it’s Andromeda, you can kind of see as a sort of smudge with the naked eye–but every single star you see is from the Milky Way, which means that you are seeing 1/300 billionth, at most, of the stars in the universe.
To me, that’s a mind-boggling thing. And I hope maybe for some of our listeners that would be the only thing they take away from our conversation, Adam. Probably not. But is that not extraordinary? And, why would I not want to know that in college unless I knew it, was told it, forgot it, and when I got older and heard it, I was in a better place. I was more interested. Very possible; but it is remarkable that I literally cannot name one thing I learned.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah. And I think the important part of that fact isn’t necessarily, like, that particular ratio, or even necessarily that every star you see is in the Milky Way. I think the important thing to take away from it is you are very, very, very small and the things that you can see are a very, very tiny sliver of all the things that exist. And putting the numbers and the facts to it help access that experience. But, I think it is that thing that is quite important.
And it probably helps if you receive that knowledge as you are looking at the stars. Right? There’s a reason why that feeling tends to arise when we are able to do that, and why–I feel like I can access a little bit of what you’re talking about, this feeling of being very small, when you just describe it to me. But right now I feel kind of big. I’m in a room where I own all the stuff in it; and I feel like I’m the center of the universe. I live in a city, and so I don’t feel all that small at all.
And so, it is not even really, like–the fact is a handle that’s bolted onto the thing that we really want to get, which is this knowledge of being very small. Maybe knowledge isn’t even the right word for it.
Russ Roberts: Or a feeling of awe, a feeling of wonder.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah.
Russ Roberts: I’m going to give one more example, though, and I want you to react to it because I think it’s sort of interesting. I think it was third grade–might have been fifth; somewhere in between third and fifth grade–we had to do an assignment on Greece, the country, mostly Ancient Greece. So, some people did the culture, one person did–I don’t know what–different history, different pieces of it.
And one of my classmates, whose name, of course, I’ve forgotten; but I do remember his report vividly. He was assigned Greek military history. And his entire report was one sentence: ‘Greece,’ well, maybe two, ‘Greece has been in many wars, too many to talk about right now.’ He sat down. It’s a great speech, it’s a great presentation, and remarkably memorable.
Now, I want you to respond to that because it’s the only thing I remember pretty much from that class or maybe the whole year. And, why do I remember that? It’s funny; I’ve told it dozens of times, I’ve repeated it. So, jokes and stories we do often remember–not deep understanding, wisdom, and so on. And I think that’s important.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and there’s probably so much to that story that I’m assuming that you know that I don’t know. That kid could have been the class clown. He could have been self-aware about this. So, it’s not clear to me from the story whether he was self-aware or whether he was sort of a savant, like a child beyond his years. Or, whether, also, I think you said–I was just assuming it was a boy, that–
Russ Roberts: It was, in my memory.
Adam Mastroianni: or whether he was just really just phoning it in and didn’t even realize that that was a very silly thing to say.
I have a similar story from Social Studies class in ninth grade or something. We were talking about the Treaty of Versailles and we were reading out of the textbook–I think we were going through the room and each of us was reading a paragraph. And this kid, Isaac, had to read the first time we encountered the word Versailles, and he said ‘Ver-sal’-lees.’ Which–I grew up in Ohio; there is a town where people, they don’t say ‘Ver-sal’-lees,’ but they do say ‘Ver-sales.’ And, like, we stopped and everybody laughed at him. And I remember years later people would talk about ‘Versallies.’ And so I can’t even–I’m embarrassed to say this, I can’t even tell you which war it was that the Treaty of Versailles ended–but I do know what it was like for this guy to be ridiculed in front of his classmates for mispronouncing it, which I don’t think was the thing that our teacher hoped that we kept with us 20 years later.
Russ Roberts: Let’s then go to the next part of your insight. So, we have a reality–I think it’s a reality–there have been a number of tests in economics of this. I used to be skeptical of them and I’m not anymore, how little people remember of microeconomic theory, say, after the course is over. I think Robert Frank on this program made the observation that months–if it’s far enough after the course is over, people who haven’t taken the class, do as well as people who took the class. Which should be a very good measure of how bad learning is. Let’s assume it’s true. Despite that, you have something positive to say about the learning that we experience. What is it?
Adam Mastroianni: So, it isn’t the case that we lose everything. And, I think what remains is really interesting; and it seems to remain for a long time even without really using it, doing all the things that we normally do to keep memories strong. I mean, we just told two stories from our childhoods that–you said you’ve told yours before. I don’t know if I’ve ever told that story before, but it was very accessible to me.
And so, what was it, in the stories, and what is it in the memories that remain? What are those? And what I call them in the piece is vibes, for lack of a better word–which is: somewhere between implicit and explicit memory, it is some mixture of feelings. It is also, I think, sort of propositional knowledge that can’t [?trust, remember?] easily.
So, what was the vibes of, like, seeing that kid mispronounce ‘Versailles’ and be ridiculed? Well, I learned things like you better be really careful in front of your peers and don’t do anything stupid because it will follow you for a long time. I learned that can happen at any time. I learned that something totally arbitrary could, like, lose you esteem among your peers. None of this had anything to do with what we were supposed to be learning at the time.
Another thing that comes to mind: When you mentioned remembering microeconomics, I took a macro class in my freshman year of college. I don’t really remember anything about the class except for there was a day at the end when she showed us slides from her trip to China and, like, students started walking out; and she said, she was, like, ‘Don’t. I’m going to test you on this.’
And so, I learned something important about what it takes to, like, retain people’s knowledge and, like, build a moment inside a classroom. I learned something about the arbitrariness of knowledge. Right? The thing that she had to resort to was sort of this cudgel of: you have to sit and listen to basically me telling you about my vacation because I can test you on it.
None of these things have anything to do with macroeconomics. I can’t tell you anything about it, but I think those things are best described as vibes.
Russ Roberts: Fortunately, as the host of the show, I don’t have to reveal what I remember about macroeconomics. I think it’s greater than your knowledge, but I don’t want to go any further than that.
This is awkward. I want to disagree with you a little bit. And it’s your essay, so you can–maybe I misunderstand it. I think the things that you’re talking about that remain, I think you’re trying to salvage the classroom by saying you did learn something. Maybe it’s enough to say you felt something. And I want to suggest the possibility that much of life–our experiences–of course, they have lessons. Many of our experiences produce lessons: Don’t mispronounce words, don’t say words that you’re not 100% sure of.
But I think it’s more than that, a lot more than that. It’s about that much of life isn’t the things we learn, but it’s the things we feel.
Now, as academics, that’s very disturbing. We don’t like it. You refer to that at times in your piece–in a different essay we might get to today. But, isn’t the lesson here that much of life is how we experience things rather than the content, and that that–maybe that’s okay, but it’s definitely not the alleged purpose of formal classroom learning?
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, no; I think we’re in agreement on this. I think because the word ‘feel’ does a lot of work: that, usually, I think we assume when we’re talking about, ‘I felt something,’ we assume that means an emotion. And obviously emotion is part of this, but it isn’t just that I felt sad at this time. When we say that word ‘feel,’ what we really mean is, ‘I had some kind of experience that is difficult to articulate.’ And so, emotions are part of that, but they’re not all of that.
Like, when I saw that professor losing the classroom, I did feel something like secondhand anxiety. I felt sympathy. But, I think though–what those feelings were, my brain’s way of telling me, like, ‘Pay attention to this moment. Something important is happening, and that’s why we’re going to encode it.’ And so, those emotions are almost like tags in a filing cabinet that allow you to find it again.
So, yeah, I agree: and, like, I don’t have any hope of salvaging the classroom in particular, but I do think these things can happen there and I think they can happen more if you appreciate that those are the things that are much more likely to make it beyond the few months after your class–that, like, I effortlessly remembered that experience years later without ever having being tested on it. Without ever–no one ever told me I was going to be tested on it. Something about it made it stick, and I do think it was a feeling.
Russ Roberts: So, you give an example of what you call bad vibes and good vibes from your psychology education, which is both amusing and, I thought, informative. So, give us the example of the bad vibe, the opening moments of one psychology class, and a different one–a good one.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah. The bad vibes were in a cognitive psychology class I took. I remember vividly in the first lecture, the professor said, ‘Cognitive psychology is pretty boring.’ The bottom fell out of my stomach, because I went, ‘Oh, no. I have to take this class.’ And, I mean, it turned out to be pretty boring because he felt that way about it. I do remember that.
But, as I point out the essay, there is something I really remember well from that class, which is the concept of greebels, which are like weird little alien formations that were used to settle or try to settle a debate in cognitive psychology and neuroscience about, like, what is this patch of brain that we call the fusiform face area that seems to light up in response to faces? Or is it specific to faces or is it actually for processing fine configural details? So, they made these little alien creatures they called greebels; they trained people to distinguish between them; and then found that the fusiform face area also responds to greebels as well as faces after you acquainted[?equated?] yourself with them. Obviously, the problem here being, like, well, the greebles kind of have faces.
Russ Roberts: And that’s worth at least some healthy fraction of $60,000 for the tuition you paid for that class.
The tragedy of that story is that you remember two things. One, a really inexcusable, unprofessional opening remark by a faculty member; and two, a phenomenon that is really not that interesting is not a transformative experience. But you have a good one.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, yeah. The good vibes were a different psychology class I took: It was Psych 101, and the professor–his name was Danny Oppenheimer–he stood up at the front of the class and he had this whole routine that was all based around a bag of M&Ms. And I don’t remember the whole routine, but I remember the fact of the routine, parts of which included getting somebody to stand up and he is, like, ‘Okay, I’m going to toss you the bag of M&Ms,’ and tosses it to the student; the student catches it. And he’s explaining that what the brain has to do in order to coordinate the body in order to capture the M&Ms, it’s pretty amazing. You have to be able to tell the difference between where the bag of the M&Ms is and the rest of the world around it. This is not a trivial computational problem to solve. You have to coordinate your limbs to put your hands in the right position to catch it. I was like, ‘Oh, this is all pretty cool. This guy’s throwing M&Ms at students. That’s kind of neat.’
He tells the student to toss the bag back to him. He catches it, he goes, ‘Obedience. That’s also something that we will catch in this class.’
Now, the student is a little embarrassed. Everybody’s laughing. I’m getting goosebumps even just thinking about it. I was like, ‘Oh, this is kind of fun.’
He tosses the M&Ms back to the student, and he says, ‘Okay, now toss it back to me.’ And the student doesn’t do anything. And he goes, ‘Learning, we’ll also talk about that.’ And I go, ‘Oh, he predicted what the student would do.’ And it did make me feel a little bit like, maybe there is something to this psychology thing, if you could do this with it.
And the rest of the semester felt that way. I remember weeping at the end of the semester just at the beauty and the amount of knowledge that I felt like I had encountered. Not that I could remember all of it afterward; but there’s a reason why I became a psychologist–that I kept chasing that feeling that I had: that there were interesting things to discover here and we could do cool things with them.
So, those were some good vibes.
Russ Roberts: And you mention in your essay that even though he had this delightful interaction–experiential moment with the student in the opening lecture–the rest of the class was just him, at 2X, telling you stuff.
Russ Roberts: And, it was sufficiently interesting that it was that powerful that it made you weep it when it was over. Do you really think that’s all you got out of it was that feeling, though?
Adam Mastroianni: I mean, I do think that because–I mean, it was my major and I kept, I stayed in the field–there’s probably more that I remember from that class because I kept using it. So, it’s not zero. It’s definitely not zero. I don’t know if it’s a very high percentage. And it’s not–sorry, go ahead.
Russ Roberts: No, but my point is the fact that you can’t remember it is not–
Russ Roberts: that decisive.
Russ Roberts: Maybe you used it in other ways and your brain retained certain patterns that matter. Maybe.
Adam Mastroianni: Yeah, but for the amount of time and attention that I paid to that class at the time, it doesn’t feel like a great ratio. And I mean, I do think this ultimately makes sense. There is something there, right? I’m glad that I took that class. It changed my life.
But, at the time when you’re in it, it feels like what you’re doing is assembling all this house-of-cards of facts and knowledge that then topples over afterward, rather than trying to optimize for the things that stick around much later. Or at least teaching in such a way where you realize that, like, the point of this cannot be that at the end of this we administer to you a multiple choice test and we hope you get like 95% of the questions right, and then we hope that 10 years later, you would still get most of the questions right. That: if you’re doing that, I think you’re wasting your time.
Russ Roberts: So, let me try a different take on this. I lived with my parents for 18 years and then some summers. The 18 years was full-time. There were some times where I was asleep. There were times when my dad was on a trip. There was times my mom was on a trip. But, we spent a lot of hours together. I don’t remember very many of them. I really don’t. I remember more than I can say: every once in a while a memory will arise that I had forgotten–whatever that means–that I couldn’t consciously bring to mind. But, when we think of the quantity of hours–let’s just talk about the four hours at night for 18 years. It’s thousands of hours where my brain has very little direct recall, and yet I’m pretty confident they shaped me. I want to say two things actually. One is most of what I do remember is vibe. I remember that they cared for me probably more than I remember the content of what they wanted me to absorb.
But, my dad was very much a teacher–he was an amateur teacher–but he loved teaching me things. And I don’t think I remember very many of them, but I do remember that vibe. And I wouldn’t want to say, I don’t think, that even though I can’t remember them, they probably didn’t–I don’t want to say they didn’t have much impact.
So, I’m torn. I find your argument profound–and there’s more to say: we’re going to get to it in a minute–but I wonder if it’s, if you protest too much. [More to come, 27:05]
