Category: walking and learning

Learning English: Walking versus Sitting

Seth Roberts5 Comments

A Chinese friend of mine learned about my discovery that it was much easier to study Chinese while walking on a treadmill than sitting. This led her to buy a treadmill. She began to study English (e.g., GRE vocabulary words) while walking on the treadmill. “It worked very well,” she told me. She found that if she studied words while walking, she could remember them four days later. If she studied them sitting down, she could remember them only a day later. With Anki, the default settings assume you can only remember what you’ve studied for a day — the first time you learn a word, you will be tested a day later.

This reminds me of Allen Neuringer’s finding of better memory for material learned while moving, but the size of the effect my friend observed is still shocking. If you can remember words four times longer before you need to review them, you can learn four times as fast. The effect that Jeremy Howard and I observed was of similar size. We could only study 10 minutes sitting down but could easily study for 40 minutes or more while walking.

Walking Meeting Update

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In a recent post, I described how much easier it was to meet with students while walking than while sitting. The content of the meetings stayed the same. I met with them after my Academic Writing class to help them with their writing.

I asked my students what they thought of these meetings. They had three complaints:

1. I walked too fast.

2. It wasn’t so easy to avoid bicycles and listen to me at the same time.

3. It was cold.

I told them that I found the meetings less tiring. They did not notice this.

I considered walking inside the teaching building but it turned out to be too dark. Instead, we walked outside the building in a nearly-deserted alley (solving Complaint #2). I walked more slowly (colving Complaint #1). I couldn’t do anything about Complaint #3.

The students could choose the length of the meetings. Last week all five of them chose 15 minutes. After 1 hour and 15 minutes of walking meetings, I felt entirely refreshed. As if I had done no work at all.

 

Walking Meetings Much Better than Seated Meetings

Seth Roberts7 Comments

In an interview about his new book The JFK Assassination Diary, Edward Jay Epstein was asked how he, a Cornell undergraduate, managed to talk to the people who did the research behind the Warren Commission Report. “It was a different age,” he said. “People actually communicated by sitting across a desk from one another and talking.” When I heard this, I was amused. I had just discovered that it was much better to meet with students walking than seated. What Epstein considered the good old-fashioned way (seated meetings) was to me the crazy new-fangled way.

As I’ve blogged, this semester I am teaching a class about academic writing. I am trying to apply my no grading/no lecturing method that worked well last year in a much different class (Frontiers of Psychology). In the writing class, my plan was/is to meet with students one-on-one right after class, in the same room. They choose the meeting length. During the meeting they show me what they’ve written and I make comments. During the next class they give a brief talk (e.g., 10 minutes) in which they tell the rest of the students what I told them. The course is much easier to teach than usual: no lecture, no grading, no written comments. Yet the students get as much one-on-one feedback as they want. I think spoken (face to face) comments are much better than written ones because they allow the recipient to ask questions.

Right now we covering how to write a personal statement for graduate school applications. The first set of after-class meetings was a week ago. The class has 12 students. Five signed up for meetings, 10-15 minutes each, an hour total. At the end of the hour I was tired. It was hard to concentrate that long. I went home and rested.

The class meets once/week. I thought of my discovery it was much easier to study Chinese while walking than while sitting (more here). While sitting I got exhausted after 10 minutes. While walking (on a treadmill), I could easily study 40 minutes. Jeremy Howard discovered the same thing. He put it like this:

[On a treadmill] I can [study Chinese] for an hour. Normally if I’m just sitting down I can just do it 20 minutes. . . . And at the end of that hour I was ready to do something else. Whereas at the end of 20 minutes, normally I’d be totally ready for a rest.

This gave me the idea of meeting with my students while walking. I’ve done walking interviews many times — for example, with job candidates and fellowship applicants. I didn’t like sitting for long periods of time and I hoped that walking would reduce their anxiety. It seemed to work.

During the next class, I announced the change: Bring a printed copy of your work (while walking I could not read a computer screen). I said they didn’t need a printed copy today, just in the future. After that class, I had four meetings. In three cases, the student did not have a printed copy so I started with the one student who did. I was pleasantly surprised that the other three students had made printed copies of their work by the time of their meeting so I did all four meetings walking.

What a difference! The meetings felt like no work at all. At the end of them, I felt refreshed. Yet their details (who, when, what, how long, etc.) were very close to what had left me tired a week earlier.

Maybe in the future offices and meeting rooms will have side by side treadmills and you project what you want to look at together on the wall. Another advocate of walking meetings is Nilofer Merchant. She says she listens better, mobile phones are less distracting, and the mood is better.

Humans evolved to specialize and trade. Specialized knowledge needed to be passed down, so we must, under the right circumstances, enjoy teaching, just as a healthy diet must taste good.

 

 

 

Walking and Learning: GRE Words

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Most of my earlier examples of the benefits of walking while studying involved treadmills and learning a foreign language. A Stanford student named Govind writes:

I found I was able to memorize GRE words very effectively while walking [compared to sitting]. It not only made the process much more enjoyable, but since I walked outside (around Oxford [England]), I also was able to associate words with physical cues. The difference between propitiate and propitious is now inextricably linked to Cowley. (I am now a memory palace convert.)

At Berkeley, I once assigned my intro psych students to do self-experiments. One of them measured how many French words she could study before falling asleep. She tried three body positions: sitting at a desk, lying on her side on her bed, lying on her stomach on her bed. She also tried three audio environments: silence, classical music, heavy metal. Best combination: lying on stomach, heavy metal. Worst combination: sitting at desk, silence. This amused me, but I now see that the real lesson of her experiment is that she didn’t try walking. It shows how little-known the walking-helps-memorize idea is, even though the effect is easy to notice, as Govind’s story shows.

More on the Synergy of Walking and Learning

Seth Roberts11 Comments

A few years ago, I discovered that walking made studying Chinese more pleasant and studying Chinese made walking more pleasant. It’s a big effect. While walking on a treadmill I could easily study Chinese for 40 minutes; while sitting or standing still, 5-10 minutes. The general idea seems to be that walking creates a thirst for novelty, for dry information. An evolutionary explanation is that this effect caused us to better explore our surroundings. Such exploration paid off too rarely and/or with too-long delays to be supported by the usual reward-action mechanism.

Jeremy Howard, the president of Kaggle, discovered the same effect independently while studying Chinese. A few days ago, I heard from Patrick Roach, a medical student in the Midwest, who also discovered the same effect independently — in his case, studying anatomy rather than Chinese. He blogged about the Anki/treadmill combination. I asked him if walking on a treadmill made it easier to study Anki? He replied:

Absolutely. I originally tried this with a 3100 card deck I created while studying anatomy in med school. The format (Image/Name) was perfect for reviewing while walking, as there wasn’t too much text to read. I imagine your experience with learning a new language was similar. Anyways, Treadmill + Anki (+Music) along with my Tablet / Wiimote combo was much more productive than either task alone. I could easily spend 1-2 hours and not notice the time passing in the same way it dragged on when trying to study endless flashcards sitting in a quiet room. Getting tired or losing focus was less of an issue as well – I noticed I had less distractions/extra attention to spare while walking.

Thanks for getting in touch, Patrick. As Lewis Carroll said, “What I tell you three times is true.”

 

 

Independent Discovery That Walking Catalyzes Learning

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Two years ago I discovered that if I walked while studying Chinese flashcards (using Anki), both activities — walking and studying — became easier. I could walk much longer on my treadmill and I could study much longer. Walking made studying more pleasant and vice-versa. Around the same time, Jeremy Howard, the president of Kaggle, made the same discovery independently. In an email to me, he writes:

I came up with the idea accidentally a couple of years ago – I needed to go to the gym every day, and that included 30 minutes on a cross-trainer (but I only managed to do 15 min most days). I needed something to do to keep me amused, so I brought along my PC and started doing my Anki whilst on the cross-trainer. I discovered I could do my cross-trainer for at least twice as long, and my Anki results were better too. Later I added treadmill walking to my Anki study too.

He says more about it, including how much it helped him, in a QS talk.

As Nabokov says in Pale Fire,

If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt
Sees a new animal and captures it,
And if, a little later, Captain Smith
Brings back a skin, that island is no myth.

Learning methods that use this effect are going to have a big advantage over learning methods that don’t.

New Walking-Catalyzes-Learning Results

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Two years ago, I discovered that if I walked on a treadmill while studying Chinese flash cards, it became much easier. Without walking, I could barely study 10 minutes without getting exhausted and stopping. If I walked at the same time, however, I could study much longer — say, 60 minutes. Huge difference. Walking on a treadmill made studying Chinese pleasant. This was stunning because walking on a treadmill by itself was boring and studying Chinese (or any other dry knowledge) is supposed to be boring. I concluded that walking created a thirst for dry knowledge, which studying Chinese satisfied. My evolutionary explanation was that this linkage evolved to push us to explore our surroundings. My posts about this.

In an April 2012 QS talk, Jeremy Howard reported the same thing.

I discovered that if I am walking on a treadmill at 1.2 miles per hour at a 1 degree incline I have an error rate of about 5%. Whereas if I don’t [walk on a treadmill] it’s about 8%. I also know that I can do that for an hour. Whereas normally if I’m just sitting down I can just do it 20 minutes. . . . And at the end of that hour I was ready to do something else. Whereas at the end of 20 minutes, normally I’d [audience member: “Take a nap”] Yeah, I’d be totally ready for a rest . . I also discovered I was 40% faster [at learning].

He added, “I love my Chinese every day.” More recently, someone named Adam posted on the QS forums that he’d had a similar experience:

As Jeremy Howard mentioned in his talk, SRSing (is that a word?) is exhausting. Like him, after a period of about 20 minutes, I often reach a level of fatigue that makes it difficult to continue studying. I first read about the “treadmill method” on Seth Roberts’s blog & found it highly effective. Like Mr. Howard, I could study for hours without become bored . . . The only problem here is that I don’t have easy access to a treadmill. My gym is quite far & it is impractical to go there every day, while I desire to SRS every day.

That two other people noticed such a big effect is good reason to think that it will be true for most people.

My Treadmill Desk

Seth Roberts5 Comments

In 1996 I put a treadmill in my office so that I could work standing up. My goal was better sleep (the more I stood, the better I slept), not weight loss (the usual reason for a treadmill desk). It was hard to walk a lot. Mostly I stood still. It was noisy, too — my neighbors complained. When the treadmill broke I didn’t replace it.

Now I walk on a treadmill for different reasons: to lower blood sugar and learn Chinese. Above is my current setup. I use the laptop to study Chinese (using Anki) or watch TV or movies. Studying Chinese while walking is much easier than studying Chinese while standing still or sitting. I have used flashcards but Anki (shown on the computer screen) helps space repetitions optimally. The headphones (Bose noise-reduction) are for TV and movies. I don’t need them for Anki.

Memory Palaces and the Walking/Learning Connection

Seth Roberts1 Comment

In this excellent article, Joshua Foer describes how he got really good at competitive memory tests, such as remembering the order of a deck of cards. He competed in the national championships.

Foer writes a lot about using “memory palaces” to remember stuff. You take a familiar building or neighborhood and vividly imagine what you want to remember at different places within it. To retrieve the memories, you mentally visit each place.

This is an ancient and famous method. I knew about it but had not realized until I read the article that it sheds light on my discovery that treadmill walking makes learning Chinese pleasant. (A commenter named Tom also noticed the connection.) Foer gives the obvious evolutionary explanation for why the memory palace method works so well: long ago, we needed to remember where to find important stuff (water, food, special plants, useful materials). So we evolved a memory system well-suited for doing so.

Less obvious is another evolutionary idea: why stop there? It’s a system. When you design a car for a certain sort of driving, you don’t stop with the engine. You adjust the drive train, the tires, and so on. If evolution shaped our brains for a certain sort of data (things in places), surely it also shaped our brains to collect that data. Pointless to design a car no one drives.

Two more changes would help make use of the system:

1. Hedonic. Make it pleasant to fill the system with data. This is what I noticed — dry knowledge (such as the order of cards in a deck) became pleasant to learn. Long ago, the hedonic change I noticed would have pushed people to walk in new places rather than old ones.

2. Efficiency. Make learning more efficient (= more learning per unit time). Several confounded comparisons point in this direction. For example, I found that 15 minutes studying flashcards while riding the subway was a lot less help than spending 15 minutes while walking on my treadmill. Of course there are many differences between the two situations. Likewise, using Anki is working much better now than in the past, when I used it sitting down. I will try to study this more carefully.

Years ago, evolutionary explanations such as these were mocked as “just so stories” by prominent scientists, such as Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, and Richard Lewontin. It’s now clear they were wrong.

Walking and Learning Update

Seth Roberts16 Comments

I discovered a year ago that walking makes it pleasant to study boring stuff — as I put it then, boring + boring = pleasant. I am still a little amazed.

Like any scientific discovery, I suppose, I had to do serious engineering to make good use of it. In particular:

1. Make walking easier. I use a treadmill in my apartment, which eliminates travel time (to where I do it), eliminates distractions, provides climate control, and allows me to walk barefoot.

2. Steady stream of study materials. Now I am using an Anki deck of Chinese characters put together by someone else. This saves a lot of time. (Anki is an open-source version of SuperMemo, a flashcard program that tries to optimize repetition.)

3. Figure out how much new stuff to study each day. Without plenty of repetition, you are wasting your time — you will forget what you’ve learned. Most of a study session is repetition. This means it’s not obvious how much new material to introduce each day. I found that 10 new Chinese characters is about right.

4. Put laptop on treadmill. To use Anki while on my treadmill, I need to use my laptop on my treadmill. At the Beijing Wal-mart, I found a piece of Sunor metal shelving that works perfectly. I put the shelf (about 90 cm long) across the arms of the treadmill, put the laptop on the shelf.

5. Minimize complications. I first noticed the effect using Anki. But Anki had several features I disliked, so I switched to ordinary flashcards. But they were too complicated — hard to schedule appropriately (you need to slowly expand the time between tests), time-consuming to keep track of progress. I had to keep stopping to make marks on the cards. So I am back to using Anki. Anki lacks a graph of progress — a graph that shows amount of learning versus date. But it is better than flashcards.

Each improvement made things better. With all of them, I lose track of time. Study, study, study, walk, walk, walk. Then it’s over. Not just painless, pleasant — different than any pleasure I have felt before. It feels a little like a new energy source (I imagine it can be used to learn many things), a little like teleportation.

The science aspect of it also interests me. Learning is the core topic of experimental psychology. Thousands of experiments have been done about human learning, thousands more about animal learning. Experimental psychologists are good methodologists; the average experimental psychology experiment makes the average medical-school experiment look retarded. But the walking/learning effect (walking makes learning pleasant) is outside anything anyone has ever reported. Only Michel Cabanac (not an experimental psychologist) has studied how variation in pleasantness regulates action (e.g., eating). Experimental psychologists lack good ways to find new effects. By missing this effect, they are missing a bigger idea:Â learning is regulated, just as a thousand other things inside our bodies are regulated.