So I want you to picture a specific moment. Maybe
it's from college or maybe it was just last week
at work. You have this massive test or a presentation,
right? Or some certification exam. Oh, yeah.
The high stakes moment. Right. And you go into
full blown crisis mode. I mean, you lock yourself
in a room. You make the flashcards. You're highlighting
the textbook until the entire page is just you
know, neon yellow. The whole page. The whole
page. You memorize all the definitions, you walk
in, take the test, and boom, you crush it. You
get the A, you get the certification, and you
just feel like the smartest person in the room.
And it is a really great feeling for about 24
hours. Exactly. Because you fast forward two
weeks, and someone asks you a basic question
about that topic at a dinner party, or a problem
pops up at work that requires that exact knowledge
you just tested on. And what happens? It's just
gone. It's gone. Blank slate. Or maybe you remember
the specific definition, but you have absolutely
no idea how to actually use it to solve the problem
in front of you. Wow. Yeah, that's the exam amnesia
phenomenon. I mean, we've all been there. It's
that really frustrating realization that you
didn't actually learn the material. You just
sort of rented it for the afternoon. Rented it.
I love that. Well, today we're doing a deep dive
into why that happens. We aren't just complaining
about bad memory here. We're looking at the actual
mechanics of why some learning sticks and really
transforms us and why other learning just completely
evaporates. We're unpacking this concept called
inert learning or inert knowledge. And inert
is just such a perfect word for it, really. It
implies something that's just sitting there.
Dead weight. It's taking up space but doing absolutely
nothing. It really is. And to help us navigate
this today, we're looking at a really compelling
piece from a blog called HackScience .Education.
It's a post titled When Learning is Inert, written
by Gary Ackerman, published on July 4th, 2024.
Yeah, and it's a great post. But what's really
interesting is that we're also time traveling
a bit with this one. Yeah, we are. Because Ackerman
built his entire argument on the work of Alfred
North Whitehead. And Whitehead was this British
mathematician and philosopher who was writing
about this exact problem way back in the 1950s.
Right. Specifically, his 1957 work, The Aims
of Education, and other essays. And what's really
striking to me is that even though Whitehead
was writing nearly 70 years ago, his critique
of how we learn or how we fail to learn feels
like it could have been written this morning.
It really does. So the mission for today's deep
dive is simple, but it's kind of heavy. We want
to figure out if the way we've been taught to
learn is actually broken. We're going to look
at the difference between just transferring information
and actually sharpening the mind. Which is a
huge distinction. Huge. And hopefully we can
figure out how to stop renting knowledge and
actually buy it for good. To do that, though,
I think we have to start with a baseline definition.
I know definitions can be a little dry, but this
one is really crucial for the whole topic. If
I asked you to just define learning right now,
what would you say? I mean, intuitively, I'd
probably say learning is acquiring new information.
Like, I didn't know the capital of Nebraska.
I read it in a book, and now I know it, so I've
learned. Right. And see, that is exactly where
most of us start. But Ackerman and Whitehead
both argue that that definition is way too shallow.
Ackerman actually defines learning biologically
first. Biologically. Yeah, as a physical change
in the brain. He labels it cognition. So it's
not just filing a report away in some mental
cabinet. It's literally remodeling the office.
Remodeling the office. OK, I like that. So it's
about building capability, not just increasing
storage space. Exactly. It's capability. And
Ackerman gives us this very specific detailed
checklist of capabilities in the piece. And the
argument is that if you can't do these things
you haven't actually learned. OK, let's walk
through that list. What's the first one? Well,
the first one is the one you just mentioned,
remembering information. OK, so memory is part
of the equation. Oh, absolutely. It's the basement
level, though. It's the foundation. You obviously
have to remember the facts. But if you stop there,
you haven't truly learned. The next step up on
his list is performing actions. Performing actions.
So. If I know the vocabulary words for saw and
hammer, that doesn't mean I've learned carpentry.
I have to actually be able to drive the nail.
Precisely. Yeah. You have to do something with
it. But then the list gets a little more abstract,
which is where it gets interesting. The next
sign of cognition, of real learning, is recognizing
patterns. Recognizing patterns. Can you give
me an example of that? What does pattern recognition
look like in the real world? Sure. Think about
a seasoned mechanic. listening to a car engine.
To you or me, an engine running just sounds like
noise, a bunch of rattling. But to the mechanic,
they hear a subtle clicking sound and they immediately
map it to a specific piston issue. They can do
that because they recognize the auditory pattern.
They aren't in there reciting a textbook definition
of an internal combustion engine in their head.
They're matching live, real -world data to a
pattern that they deeply understand. That is
what real learning looks like. That makes total
sense. It's almost like seeing the Matrix code.
In a way, yeah. you're seeing the underlying
structure. And that actually leads perfectly
into Ackerman's next capability, which is appreciating
observations. Appreciating observations. That
feels like a weird one to include in a scientific
definition of learning. It is often overlooked,
but it's vital. When you've truly learned a subject,
you start to notice things that other people
just ignore. You appreciate the nuance of the
thing. Oh, I see. Like how a graphic designer
can walk down the street and get visibly annoyed
by the kerning on a random restaurant sign while
I just look at it and see a sign that says pizza.
That is the perfect example. Their brain has
physically changed, remember, cognition to process
visual information differently than yours does.
They literally cannot unsee the bad spacing between
the letters. Wow, okay. That's how you know they've
learned design. They appreciate the observation.
And then Ackerman lists asking questions. Wait,
asking questions? Isn't asking questions what
you do when you haven't learned something yet?
It's actually quite the opposite. Complete ignorance
is usually silent because you don't even know
what you don't know. Oh, right. You don't even
know where to begin. Exactly. True learning gives
you the framework to ask intelligent, probing
questions. You have to know at least a little
bit about astrophysics to ask a meaningful question
about how a black hole works. If you know absolutely
nothing, you just sort of stare up at the stars.
That is a really good point. The better I get
at any hobby or skill, the more hyper -specific
my questions become. Right. And finally, the
list culminates with interacting with ideas,
tools, and people, meaning you can actually engage
with the concept dynamically. You can manipulate
it, talk about it, use it with others. OK. Plus,
there's this overarching wrapper around all of
these capabilities that Ackerman mentions. It's
called metacognition. Metacognition, that's thinking
about thinking, right? Yes. It's becoming aware
of and evaluating your own capabilities. So saying
to yourself, I know that I'm weak in this specific
area, or I know I have the skills to handle this
new problem, that self -evaluation is also a
core component of learning. So just to recap
this, learning is this massive multi -step process.
It's memory, yes, but it's also action, patterns,
noticing nuance, asking questions, interaction,
and self -awareness. It is a very tall order.
It's a full transformation of the brain. But,
and I think here is the giant pivot for our deep
dive today, that is not how most of our schooling
was set up. No, it is not. Enter what the source
material describes as the standard model of education.
Which kind of sounds like the villain of our
story today. Villain might be a harsh word, but
it's certainly the antagonist to the kind of
deep learning we're talking about. The standard
model prioritizes one thing above almost everything
else, efficiency. But efficiency makes sense
in context, doesn't it? I mean, schools have
a lot of kids, a lot of subjects to cover, and
very limited time. We do need to get the information
into their heads fast. And that is exactly the
logic behind it. The goal of the standard model
is the efficient presentation of information.
The teacher stands up and presents. The students
sit there and receive. And then how do we measure
if it actually worked? The test. Can the student
reliably recall the information that was presented?
Can I repeat what you just told me? Right. And
if you can repeat it reliably, you get a good
score. And then the teacher feels successful
because the class average is high. The parents
are thrilled because their kid got an A. The
school board is happy. It creates this very tight
closed loop of validation. But according to the
piece, this is a trap. Yeah, Ackerman points
out that everyone feels successful within this
model. That's exactly why it persists. But there's
a major catch. This feeling of success is often
contained entirely within the school environment.
Ah. You're winning the game of school, essentially.
But you aren't actually acquiring those cognitive
capabilities we just listed out. You aren't learning
how to perform actions or recognize patterns
in the wild. So we're essentially mass producing
students who are incredibly good at being students,
but maybe not so good at being thinkers out in
the world. We are producing students who are
filled to the brim with inert ideas. Let's talk
about that term because Alfred North Whitehead
coined this back in the 50s inert ideas It sounds
like a chemistry term like a noble gas that just
doesn't react with anything else in the universe
That is exactly the metaphor he was going for
Whitehead defined inert ideas as and I want to
make sure I get this quote right because it's
really the corrects of the whole thing He said
they are ideas that are merely received into
the mind without being utilized or tested, or
thrown into fresh combinations. Thrown into fresh
combinations? Yeah. I really love that phrasing.
It sounds dynamic, almost violent. You have to
really wrestle with the idea. It's the difference
between collecting a static book of stamps and
having a giant box of Legos. OK. Unpack that.
Well, in the standard model, we hand students
facts like they're rare stamps. You say, here
is a fact. Put it carefully in your mental album.
Keep it pristine. Don't crinkle it. Right, and
don't mix it with the other stamps. Keep the
history stamps in the history binder and the
math stamps in the math binder. Exactly. But
Whitehead is saying that real learning, non -inert
learning, is like playing with Legos. You get
a brick, but the whole point of getting that
brick is to click it onto another brick. And
maybe that second brick is from a completely
different set. To build something entirely new.
Right. That is what he means by throwing it into
fresh combinations. So if I just memorize the
phrase, the mitochondria is the powerhouse of
the cell, and I just hold onto it, that's a stamp.
It's completely inert. Yes. It remains inert
unless you use that concept to, say, understand
why you feel physically tired after a long run,
or unless you use it to ask a new question about
metabolic diseases. If it just sits in your head
waiting for a biology quiz on Tuesday, It's inert
knowledge. That brings up this concept from the
Ackerman piece of The Classroom Trap, this idea
that inert knowledge is strictly context dependent.
Right. And this explains so much about our daily
lives. This is exactly why you can ace a French
vocabulary quiz in 10th grade, but then totally
freeze up when a waiter in Paris asks you what
you want to drink 10 years later. Because my
brain has indexed that vocabulary under classroom
French quiz. Yep. It hasn't indexed it under
real life communication survival. It's like having
a key that only opens one very specific glowing
door in a video game and then you try to use
that same key on your actual front door at your
house and it just doesn't work. The context is
wrong. That is a perfect analogy. the knowledge
is entirely bound by the context where it was
acquired. If you never take it out of that context,
if you never test it in the real world or combine
it with other things, it remains completely inert.
Okay, I do want to push back for a second here
because I can hear the teachers listening and
honestly even my own internal logic arguing against
this a bit. You have to walk before you can run,
right? The Ackerman piece calls this the teacher's
defense. The logic is we must teach information
first. How can students use the information until
they know it? And it is a very logical, reasonable
defense. You can't write a beautiful sonnet if
you don't even know the alphabet. Yeah. You can't
do advanced calculus if you don't know that 2
plus 2 equals 4. Right. So the standard model
logic is let's spend the first 12 or 16 years
of a person's life just gathering all the bricks.
Let's build the inventory. And then later, maybe
when they get to a career, they can start building
the house. It seems like the responsible, orderly
way to do it. You build the inventory first.
It does seem that way. But Whitehead absolutely
dismantles this idea. He argues that this inventory
approach fundamentally misunderstands how the
human mind actually works. How so? He says in
the text, and this is a powerful philosophical
counter argument, he says, the mind is never
passive. You cannot postpone its life until you
have sharpened it. You cannot postpone its life
until you have sharpened it. Wow, that is quite
a quote. Think about what the inventory approach
actually assumes about a student. It assumes
your mind is just a bucket. It assumes it just
sits there, completely passive and empty, waiting
for the teacher to pour the knowledge in. And
only once the bucket is completely full, then
you're allowed to go do stuff. But kids aren't
buckets. I mean, if you ever met a six -year
-old, their minds are just buzzing constantly.
They never stop. Exactly. The human mind is an
active, living, breathing process. It is constantly
seeking out patterns, it's making weird connections,
it's trying to solve puzzles. If you force that
active mind to be passive, if you tell a student,
stop thinking about how this connects to your
life, just memorize this list of dates, you aren't
preparing the mind for the future. You're actually
dulling it. So Whitehead is saying that you don't
learn the alphabet and then years later write
a story. You learn the alphabet by trying to
write the story. Or at the very least, the two
processes have to be deeply intertwined from
day one. Ackerman puts it very bluntly in his
post. He says, passive minds do not learn. Passive
minds do not learn. Right. If the student's just
acting as a receiver, no actual cognition is
happening. There is no physical change in the
brain. They are merely recording data on a surface
level. which is why it vanishes a week after
the test. This explains so much about why I forget
things as an adult, too. It's not just about
school kids. It applies to everything. If I'm
reading a heavy business book and I'm nodding
along thinking, wow, this is super smart stuff,
but I'm not actually wrestling with the concepts
or applying them to my own work. then you're
being passive or just receiving. So how do we
actually fix this? Because obviously, we can't
all go back to kindergarten and redo our entire
education. Most of the people listening to this
deep dive right now are adults. We're trying
to learn a new software program for work, or
we're trying to pick up a second language, or
we're just reading nonfiction for fun. How do
we, practically speaking, stop hoarding these
inert ideas? Well, the short answer is that you
have to become the architect of your own fresh
combinations. You have to artificially create
the friction that the standard model tries to
remove. Give me a concrete example of that. Let's
say I'm reading a book about, I don't know, negotiation
tactics. OK, negotiation tactics. The standard
model approach to that book is to read the chapter,
highlight all the key terms in yellow, and maybe
tell a friend at lunch, hey, I read a really
good book on negotiation. And the result is?
You'll forget 90 % of it in a week. Guilty. I
have a whole shelf of those books. We all do.
But the active mind approach, the whitehead approach,
is to stop reading immediately after a new concept
is introduced and test it. Test it how? Well,
maybe you don't have a high -stakes hostage situation
handy to test it on. But you probably have a
toddler or a spouse or a barista at the coffee
shop. Negotiating with a toddler is honestly
probably harder than a hostage situation. It
probably is. But the point is, you have to try
to apply the framework immediately, today. Or,
if you literally can't act on it right then,
you do a rigorous thought experiment. You ask
yourself, how would this specific tactic have
changed the outcome of that client meeting I
completely blew last month? I see. You force
the new idea to collide with your existing reality.
Yes, you're remixing it. You're taking the negotiation
stamp out of the album and you're actively trying
to stick it onto the poddler Lego brick to see
what happens. And here is the kicker with that,
though. You have to do this before you actually
feel ready. That is the scary part. We all love
feeling ready. We love the comfort of saying.
I have studied enough. I've read all the books.
Now I am prepared to act. But according to this,
that feeling of readiness is kind of a lie. That's
just the standard model whispering in your ear.
It tells you that competence has to precede action.
Exactly. But Whitehead argues that action precedes
competence, or rather that the struggle of taking
action is the very thing that creates the competence
in the first place. That really flips the script
on imposter syndrome a bit, doesn't it? It really
does. If you feel like you don't entirely know
what you're doing and you're just struggling
to make these new pieces fit together in real
time, that's not a sign of failure. That's literally
the sound of learning happening. Precisely. Confusion
is not the enemy here. Confusion is the sweat
of the mind. Ooh, confusion is the sweat of the
mind. I like that. If you aren't feeling confused
occasionally, you are probably just reviewing
things you already know. Passive minds are very
comfortable. Active minds are usually a little
bit messy. So... If we look back at that checklist
from the beginning of the discussion, recognizing
patterns, asking questions, interacting with
tools, those are all highly active verbs. They
are. You can't passively recognize a pattern.
You have to be actively hunting for it. You have
to be deeply engaged. Yeah. And I think this
is probably the most important takeaway for anyone
listening today who feels stuck in their own
progress. If you feel like you are studying really
hard, but you're just not getting anywhere, You
need to stop studying. Stop receiving. Stop highlighting
the textbook. Please stop highlighting. Highlighting
is the ultimate inert activity. It feels like
you're doing work, but usually you're just painting
a page yellow. Instead, close the book and try
to explain the concept out loud to an imaginary
12 -year -old. Or write out an argument against
the chapter you just read. Exactly. Throw the
information into a fresh combination. Make the
idea fight for its life in your brain. Because
if it survives that fight, it's yours forever.
If it was really received? it's just gonna fade
away by next week. It's fascinating because this
whole discussion really makes me look at the
concept of being smart entirely differently.
We usually think the smart people are just the
ones with the biggest library of facts stored
in their heads. Right, the jeopardy version of
intelligence. Exactly. And, you know, that has
its place. But in a world where Google exists
in everyone's pocket, just holding on to inert
facts is less valuable than it has ever been
in human history. The truly valuable skill now
is the processing. The processing? It's the ability
to take a random fact, a new tool, and a complex
problem and weave all three of them together
to build a novel solution. It really is the difference
between a high drive and a processor. The hard
drive just sits there holding data, but the processor
is the thing actually doing the work. And Whitehead
basically wants us all to be high -speed processors,
not just dusty storage closets. Okay, so bring
this all in for a landing. We've established
that learning isn't just storage. It is a physical
change in the brain involving a whole suite of
active capabilities. Correct. We know the standard
model of education focuses on efficiency, which
traps us in this loop of just hoarding inert
knowledge that works on a test but fails in reality.
Yes. And we know the solution is to get active,
to utilize, to test, and to combine our ideas.
Passive minds do not learn. If you remember absolutely
nothing else from our deep dive today, remember
that. So here is my challenge to everyone listening.
And frankly, I'm going to try to do this myself
this week, too. Think about that one project
you've been procrastinating on. We all have at
least one. Right. The one where you keep telling
yourself, oh, I just need to do a little more
research first, or I need to take just one more
online tutorial before I actually start building
the thing. I want you to ask yourself, are you
actually preparing? Or are you just hoarding
inert ideas because staying in the receiving
mode feels safe? That is the big question. And
based on Whitehead's assertion that you cannot
postpone the mind's life until you have sharpened
it, I'll leave you with this final thought to
mull over. Let's hear it. If you stopped waiting
until you felt like you knew enough to start,
If you just started utilizing the little bit
of knowledge you actually do have today, how
much faster would you actually learn the skill?
Start before you're ready. Break some things
along the way. Throw those ideas into fresh combinations.
And just see what happens. Thank you for taking
this deep dive with us today. Go out there and
sharpen those minds. Thanks, everyone.