L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Getting The Brain Right: Key Insights from Learning Science for All Learners and Educators to Understand

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

It controls our every move and it houses our every thought… but how many of us understand how the brain works? Truthfully, there’s more that we don’t understand about the brain than we do understand. But that doesn’t mean we can’t capitalize on what we have been able to glean through neuroscience and psychological studies over the years. To help us do just that on the perpetual journey to becoming better learners (and educators), Lauren Waldman, the Learning Pirate joins this week’s episode.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. This week, my guest is Lauren Waldman. This week, my guest is Lauren Waldman. Lauren has many titles, L&D consultant, speaker, educator, but most importantly, she is the learning pirate. As a learning scientist, it is Lauren's life mission to help us join forces with our brains.

In other words, she hopes to help us better understand the mechanisms by which we gather, retain, and recall knowledge so that we can become more effective learners, both individually and organizationally. I was drawn to Lauren because she is fighting the good fight against disinformation and bad science online, something I haven't seen anywhere else in the learning community. In addition to her day job as a science translator, she's not afraid to call out other experts

and demand accuracy when it comes to the brain. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with Lauren Waldman. Lauren, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Thank you so much for joining me. Hey, Tyler. It's good to be here. I discovered you when I was speaking with Helen Marshall on a prior episode.

I think I was actually doing some research to record that one. And one of her episodes on her podcast featured you. And I was really fascinated by the work that you do because you're kind of going into the industry and blowing things up a little bit. You're making a mess. You're being a pirate, which is I absolutely love that. And you have taken it upon yourself to seek out and debunk bad learning science in a very simple way. That's one of the things that you do kind of on social media and in publications. You will call people out. You'll say, hey, this isn't really good science. I don't like the way you're presenting these principles. And you will provide corrections and more accurate takes on whatever the topic is. this is a really noble goal, especially because of the world that we live in right now, where so much of media in general is when science is presented, if it's presented at all, it's abbreviated, it is embellished upon, or there are just lies utilized to further agendas or really whatever it is. But I've never seen it in sort of a niche science like learning science,

which is only niche in certain ways. You know, everybody learns, everybody is taking advantage of their brain in that way. But it's never really dawned on me to see a learning science or brain science or psychology article or neuroscience piece and say, I need to look deeper at this. So you really opened my eyes to this. And I'm curious, do you think that right now it's more important than ever to deeply reflect on the learning science that we're using and to seek truth in that field? Absolutely. But I think more importantly is that we turn the lens on ourselves as just, you know, everyday human beings. And what does that mean to be an operational human being? And how do we learn more about our operational systems in order to be better learning professionals and better learning

designers, facilitators, but overall, better humans, right? Like, if someone would have handed me an operational manual of me as I was growing up, I would have taken that thing in a heartbeat. We didn't have that luxury, right? So I think it's critical at this point, especially because, you know, we were speaking a little bit earlier about the uprise of AI and really understanding how do we seek the truth and how do we validate that truth. And when it comes to science, it's incredibly important that we do our due diligence with that, because otherwise we not only end up with a neuro babble and the neuromyth, but we end up with really crappy learning again. I have a background in journalism. I shouldn't say a background, but I did some student journalism when I was at Boston University. And if there's one thing that I learned, it's that a lot goes wrong in the media and reporting, especially when it comes to science, when you're dealing with

a language system and a body of knowledge that's very esoteric and in some cases totally inaccessible to those who haven't studied that thing, it can be really complicated to translate discoveries and important ideas and facts and concepts to the masses. On top of that, much of how the media operates thanks to monetization is deeply influenced, if not totally corrupted in some cases. Not just special interests like in, you know, sort of mainstream media, but systems of arbitration like search engine optimization, SEO, and algorithms that just control the information flow that we all experience and that we all consume, whether it's on our devices and major publications and network news, that sort

of thing. So how can we as a society, this is a macro question, but what do you think we can do as a society to get good hard science into our daily lives in a way that sort of prevents that descent and vicious cycle of disinformation? Any ideas for that? I think the biggest thing that I see not only in the industry is that people don't validate who the information is coming from. And I think that's step number one is know your source and really dig into that source. In the learning and development industry, when neuroscience started to sort of make its way in, it became a very like sexy and very like marketing-esque term. But when you peel back the layers of the onion,

even if someone has PhD at the end of their name, what is that PhD of? And 90% of the time, it's not in the science at all, but they're presenting themselves. So the very first thing is to do your due diligence when it comes to validating your sources. And that means not just taking the first one at face value. You know, I think if we equate it to shopping around for, you know, a car or a new phone or whatever, would you trust the very first source or the very first review that you saw? Or do we do our due diligence? We do it with other aspects of our lives. So it's definitely something that we need to be doing when it comes to this, because this is like, you know, human behavior and things about our own function. So definitely look for those trusted sources and make sure that they're validated. And Tyler, I think one of the big problems that translators like myself face,

and the scientists themselves, a very close friend of mine, Dr. Ben Rain, Ben is massive on social because of his ability to debunk science. And he's a Stanford neuroscientist. He's absolutely fantastic. But he'll cite his papers, he'll put those things up. So popularity doesn't mean credible. That's kind of the end of that story. You know, just because I have cool hair, it doesn't mean that you should trust me. Just because I draw in a big crowd, it doesn't mean you should trust me. Just because you see me on social media everywhere, it doesn't mean you should trust me. Trust me because of my credentials. Trust me because of my board of advisors. You can all look up. Like you were saying, as someone who was in journalism before, we can't just take what we see at face value.

I will add one more component to this. So I also used to live and work in San Francisco and Los Angeles, which when you're kind of in the entrepreneurial world out there, there are certain categories of people that are, dare I say, peddling junk science as a way to improve the self. There's a lot of body hacking, mind hacking type stuff going on out there that I was not really involved in, but I saw a lot of it and a lot of sort of obsession with the body and the brain as a tool for great achievement. And there were a handful of cases where I saw people citing themselves as doctors, you know, claiming to be doctors and that sort of thing. And in some cases, in at least one case, it was an outright lie. And that's, you know, more rare. And those people tend to get debunked and sort of called a fraud and removed very quickly. But there's also cases where there are things like degree farms where you can become a doctor without really any true valid education behind that. And I just think in certain places, sadly, the brain is actually one

of those spaces where, I don't know, things like nootropics and other types of products that are meant to enhance brain function and all of that. I found that a lot of folks that were developing or peddling those things were really embellishing on their credentials and that sort of thing as well. And I don't think that you're dealing too much in those worlds in that realm. I think that you're dealing with hard science

and people who are proper neuroscience PhDs and have been doing research in good faith for a long time now. But I just wanna add that one additional caveat there that sometimes even if you see a PhD, you have to look into what is the origin of that PhD, where did it come from and sort of how valid it is. So I just want to throw that in there as well. But when it comes to the brain, I want to ask you because I'm not a brain guy. I'm not a brain scientist. I'm not a learning

science professional by any means. I would like to, if you can, describe where our knowledge of the brain is right now in the scientific community. Because I know that 100 years ago and even maybe 50 years ago, what we understand about the brain and how we learn and how it functions was probably nowhere near what we've achieved right now. improve our brains toward well-being, how capable are we really of influencing our own mind? And how much of it is more like broad concepts that if we loosely follow will result in improvement over time? What can you say about that? Even in comparison to the last 20 years, when I'm doing presentations or keynotes, I love to show people what the image of the first MRI looked like, because that was constructed in 1977. And 1977, you know, we're talking about 40, 40 so years ago. And before that, you couldn't look inside the brain. You know, you could measure electrical waves, but you couldn't really look

inside of it. So it's only been 40 years. And 40 years is still a long time. It's only been 40 years that we've had the technology to even look inside the brain. And because of the advanced technologies, then we had fMRIs. So we can now see function because of blood flow. And I think, from my perspective, we've come leaps and bounds, leaps and bounds from where we used to be. But the more that you study the brain, the more you realize you know nothing. But the more that you study the brain, the more you realize you know nothing. I've got colleagues who have been in the field for, you know, much, much longer than I have and their PhDs. And my one colleague, Joseph Devlin from UCL, the University College London, he studied the neurobiology of language, only the neurobiology of language for 20 years. So when you think about that, and think about every little component of how this three pounds of like meatloaf essentially works, is being disseminated by millions of neuroscientists around the world, each working

on very minute, tiny pieces of the puzzle. So where we were, I'd say even 20 years ago, and what we see now, we definitely have very strong evidence, research and protocols that we can follow that we do know because of the experiments and the published works. We do have very good protocols that we can follow in order to help us live healthier, better lives when it comes to our brain health. And that's through exercise, it's through sleep, it's through diet. Are those things going to advance even further in the next 20 years? Absolutely. Because the more that the scientists discover, the more experiments that they can do, the more those things are going to change. So yeah, there's

definitely I don't like the word hacking. That's why my terminology, everybody who's part of the pirate crew, we like we don't say hacking, we don't say control, we say we're joining forces, right? We join forces with our brain. And we do it through understanding how these protocols work, how the underlying mechanisms of the brain work and how the neurochemistry works to enhance those mechanisms. Joseph Devlin, is that his name? Is he the one that you were just viewing your brain with that you posted on LinkedIn and videos. Did you find anything anomalous or exciting in that process?

No, but I was joking. That was right after a very rigorous speaking tour, 36 stays in multiple cities. And Joseph was my last stop. And I said, you know, you're going to put me in the scanner and we're going to look at my brain. But I suspect you're going to find a monkey with symbols just banging away in there at this point. So fortunately, that wasn't the case. I'm actually very proud. The scan of my brain was a beautiful specimen.

So, yeah, that's the amazing Professor Joseph Devlin. Great. And again, thank you for joining me shortly after that trip where I'm sure you're still kind of reeling from it all. So I really appreciate you being here. Bringing it back to what is actually happening in our brain. Can you describe what the process of learning looks like or is like in terms of the physiology of our brains? What is learning? What is actually going on inside there?

It's crazy. This is why I can describe it. I love showing it to people. That's why, and again, the keynotes, the presentations, I'll show some live MRI, fMRI footage. But really, what's happening is you got to think about your brain as this thing that is basically governed by chemical signals and electrical signals. And we have billions of cells in our brains. 86 billion. We start with 100 billion, which is already very impressive.

They get reduced to about 86 billion. Now you've got 86 billion of those that have these tree branch-like structures that grow out of them. And there's like thousands and thousands upon thousands of those. And those grow when we're learning because they're growing from our experiences. But then we've got these things called the synapses. And the synapses, there are trillions of those. So I want you to display, anyone who's listening to this right now, I want you to kind of like look in the mirror afterwards and take a look at your head and

realize you've got 86 billion cells in there with hundreds of thousands of connections and trillions of these little tiny spots of communication, these structures called the synapses. Now, if that's not blowing your mind already, then, you know, I don't know what else will, right? But when it comes to what does learning look like from the inside out, it's all about communication and sort of the manipulation and the change of these networks that we create. So most communication between your cells are happening at those really specialized structures called the synapses. And it's their ability to change, which is central to basically all learning and behavioral

modification. And that's basically where these like chemical signals are being sent back and forth. That's then going through the cells. And then we've got our electrical signals. It's just a mishmash of things that are happening, but they're happening at like the speed of light, the absolute speed of light. So when we think about what does learning actually look like from the inside out and how does this process happen? Well, it's basically the creation and the destruction and the movement and the changing of these neurons

and these synaptic changes. And we're doing it by either changing or remapping networks and creating new pathways, which is in response to new stimuli through practice and through repetition. So essentially, every time you learn something new and you practice it, your brain is either going to change the structure of those cells, or it's going to increase the number of synapses between the neurons, allowing them to send information faster. And that was a very, very long and nerdy answer. Exactly what I was looking for. I also want to add one fact to emphasize the scope of what

actually exists inside the mishmash of our brain as you describe it. I think in the same post, actually, on LinkedIn that I just mentioned with Dr. Joseph Devlin, you mentioned that all the sort of viscera inside there, if you mapped it out end to end physically, it could wrap around the earth multiple times or something like that. Is that right? 160,000 kilometers of our networks, of our highways, 160,000 kilometers, which could be wrapped around the earth four times, all exists in your brain and is helping you to send all of that communication. When you say that you want us to go and look in the brain and is helping you to send all of that communication. When you say that you want us to go and look in the mirror and just look at our head,

it makes me feel like I'm going to look at my head and lose my head as I think about that, because that is wild. That is absolutely otherworldly to hear. I had no idea until I read that. I was like, that feels wrong. And I looked it up. I was like, oh, my God, the body is a fascinating thing. And so is the brain. So let's talk about getting better at learning. So metacognition, I think, is a safe place to start. I've looked this up a little bit. I've read about it in the past, kind of going through psychology textbooks, but you are the expert. And I've seen you talk about this a few different times. Can you explain metacognition? Metacognition is like a superpower. Metacognition is like a superpower. That's first and foremost.

Metacognition comes from a theory that dates back to 1975, 77, John Flavel, Working Memory and Cognitive Load. And metacognition is really one's ability to regulate and monitor their thought processes. So I always describe it as it's your ability to become the audience to your own performance. And it's such a valuable skill, not just for us as like an everyday human being, because, you know, we want to understand how are we performing? What are we thinking? How is our processes going, whether that be for learning or for work, or just trying to get out the door on a day to day basis. But to be able to stop in the moment to have that ability to stop in the moment, which is challenging in itself, to then ask yourself, like, okay, am I doing what I should

be doing? Am I working in a way that I want to be working? And when it comes to learning, where this is incredibly critical and valuable, is to question things about not only your learning strategy or your methodology, but while you're learning to be able to monitor your progress. I give the example of three very simple questions that you can ask yourself, which is what do you know? What don't you know? And what do you think you know? And often we miss these opportunities to do this while we're learning. Because we were never taught to do that. No one ever stopped us in school was like, okay, you just finished that chapter of whatever book you were reading there.

What do you know now about that? And if they would have stopped us at that point, you probably would have had 25 little humans going, I don't know. You know, there was a guy, he had a dog. So the ability to be metacognitive and to monitor and regulate your cognitive processes is such

an exceptional talent to have for all of us as human beings. Because what's the purpose of learning or trying to learn something? And even more importantly, we haven't brought this into the conversation yet, is you don't say learning without memory, right? We're looking to create a memory that we can then transfer somewhere else. And that memory is going to represent a behavior that we can then transfer somewhere else. And that memory is going to represent a behavior or skill or an ability, etc. So what's the point of going through learning, getting to the end, and then realizing that you didn't actually know what you thought

you knew and you can't transfer it. So the metacognitive abilities basically inserted into the learning process reduces you getting to the end and going, I don't know. You know, I can't answer that quiz at the end because I didn't actually learn anything yet. But to take full advantage of metacognition, don't we have to have a level of awareness of how things work, kind of like what we're talking about right now? I dare I say meta metacognition, where we understand the biases that impact how we think and how one can know what one doesn't know. Like, that's a really difficult question. What don't I know? Because you often don't know what you don't know. I'm just wondering, you know, as far as we can think metacognitively, do we need to further understand

how the brain works before that really sort of shows its full benefit and its full power? There's so much more that we can layer upon that, right? So even to have the ability to stop in the present moment and to focus and to think about your processes, that's challenging in itself. We don't take pauses enough, right? And focus is a skill. Focus can be very challenging for many.

And so in order to really get the best out of something like metacognition, well, you have to then be able to stop yourself in the moment. And that requires you to harness your attentional networks of the brain, make sure that you're actually paying attention. So yes, there are underlying processes when it comes to our biases as well. We can look at things like schematics, right? And schemas are the way that our brain categorizes and organizes information. And we started developing those from a very young age. And those do influence what new information comes at us and how we categorize that and process it. So yeah, that's another thing to consider as well. Because when we're learning, we can have those working for us, or we can have those working against us.

So it's a lot of higher order thinking of, you're right, we don't know what we don't know. But when we're learning, we're typically learning for either pleasure or purpose. But organizational learning is, we need you to transfer it, right? Whether that be a new process, or whether that's a new procedure, or a new product, whatever that might look like, there's always a topic to that learning. So we can sit down at the very beginning and ask ourselves, what do I actually know about this? What don't I know? Right? So, you know, I've worked on cruise ships, which are very, very crazy environments to work on, right? And things move at lightning speed. Now, before I worked on the cruise ship, you could have asked me, what do I know about working on a cruise ship? It would have been very little. Like there was a lot in that I don't know. And then there was a lot of what do I think I know, right? And when we extract the what do I think I know, well, then we can also see if we do have any cognitive biases against one of the most critical elements to us becoming better learners

is to upskill ourselves in methodology and strategy. And yes, of course, it's good to know a little bit about what's happening underneath the hood of our skulls, right? Like understand the operational system just a little bit, because that way you know if you're working with it or you're working against it. Yeah. And that's what you're here for, is to help us sort of up level ourselves. So when it comes to the organizational and as you're talking about focus, I think that's really important because I'm constantly having conversations about learning in the flow of work and how to actually get people to care about learning when they're a part of an

organization because of all the many reasons that one might not want to learn anymore once they're a full adult, working in a job, making money, and no longer a student. You know, many reasonable reasons there. But at the end of the day, most people like learning in some form or fashion. Learning is often cited as a big, or learning opportunities are often cited as a big reason that people stick with companies, you know, for the promise of growth and the promise of advancement and just personal endeavor. But what can we do from an organizational perspective, leaders, to help improve things like focus and attention when it comes to learning programs? Is it the pedagogy within which learning is offered? Is it the format and style? Is there something you can do there?

Supplemental practices that come as a part of the learning? What do you think? What are the things that are most easily implementable that can really help people improve their focus and attention on the learning that L&D folks are providing? So the very first thing I want to sort of make it clear that there has to be harmonization between both sides of this learning party, right? So we've got the people who are designing the learning, we've got our learning teams, and then we've got the people who are designing the learning, we've got our learning teams, and then we've got the people who are gonna be absorbing the learning. And both need to know the same things,

but for different purposes. Now, on the learning side of things, we want people to understand, like you said, well, what is focus? Why is it so damn hard sometimes, right? And if attention is the mechanism to focus, well, then what is attention? And where can my attention be taken in any given moment? And then how do I harness that to focus?

So we can teach people these things, we can show them the abundance of attentional networks in the brain, and not ask them to understand them as thoroughly as I do or as another scientist does. But we can just show them, okay, well, if you know that there is one line that's going to take your attention from the visual system, and another one's going to take it from the auditory system, there's another one that's going to go to the executive function. Okay, that's three I've listed already. What can you do to dim the noise in order to help you utilize your resources better in order to focus? Do I have to listen to music? No, I don't.

I know someone's going to eventually say, well, Lauren, what about binaural beats? We've heard that, you know, binaural, yes, binaural beats at a pure beat with no music with it. It does help the brain to focus 40 hertz. But if I'm listening to, and I'm just, this is is gonna be so random, but I was listening to Eminem earlier. So like if I'm listening to Eminem, having like a hip hop party, and I want to sing along and like, you know, pretend to be a rock star at my desk, it's gonna be harder for me to focus on the things that I actually need to be focused on. So those underlying skills, which will help us be better learners, like focus, because focus is the gateway to learning. That's a great place to start. But then we've got other things to take

into consideration, right? It's like, if you're stressed out, and your system is just completely hijacked with, you know, emotional response, well, the executive function isn't working as best as we want it to. Is that the best time to learn? No, it's not. And we saw this during the tail end of the pandemic when everyone was making these quote unquote, back to work plans for everybody and the back to work training. And I'm quote unquote, because no one stopped working. That was ridiculous. But they wanted people to do all of this learning and all of this training. I'm like, but people are in such high levels of anxiety and stress and emotion. You can't learn functionally when you're in that state.

So even understanding downregulation from an emotional system, if I do want to work, but I do want to learn, but I'm feeling like this, what are some practical things that I can do, whether that be through meditation or breathwork or change of environment to help activate a different brain state so that I can come back and focus and learn. So there's a plethora of things that we can learn as fundamental human beings that will support us learning better, working better, and basically just treating each other a lot better. That's interesting. Learning when you're most properly regulated and prepared for

it. I think, you know, obviously in school, I think we all have experience of when we're most effective at writing long papers and doing our research. And there's the obvious knowledge that cramming is not really great for studying anymore. And things like distributed practice are more effective. And my first job out of college was selling textbooks and digital learning materials. And we went up against some competition that had digital learning tools that encouraged distributed practice. Actually, in some cases, enforced distributed practice for students studying from their books. Where they would read a chapter or a few pages of a textbook and then be locked out of it so they couldn't read it anymore. Give it an exercise and then be forced to come back to the textbook later on. I don't know if

this was ever actually implemented, but it was tested at some schools. And that really fascinated me because people simply don't have the time or energy or wherewithal to do that, to study in a certain way, to learn in a certain pattern or with a certain time period. But what I'm wondering now is from a professional standpoint at organizations, could something like workforce intelligence or, you know, that sort of AI implementation that's aware of all the tasks that you do inside the tools that you use in your computer day to day to get your jobs done, could it theoretically be that AI can determine when learning is actually best for you? because the timing of your day, the tasks that you've completed, your emotional and mental state is now sort of ideal for learning

from something that you did that day or the day before. I'm not sure if you have really any knowledge of where AI is going in this direction, but I spoke with Sam Keenly. He works at Loxo, and that's talent intelligence, so recruiting with AI. And he was explaining how the AI is capable of kind of identifying positions that may or may not be soon to be vacated for one reason or another, because somebody may be getting older or has been in that career for a long time, or the sort of shelf life of that position is just kind of naturally running out. And this AI helps companies identify what are some potential succession plans. And I'm kind of wondering if AI could potentially be used to do that same thing, but for like micro learning

in a day to day process with individuals. There's plenty of personalized learning AI tools, but could we actually make it so that the AI is aware of kind of what's going on during your day and then assessing maybe this is a good learning moment for you or something like that. Do you have any thoughts on that? Not whether that sort of thing could happen, but is AI implementation of that sort of thing reasonable as I'm describing it? Or is that maybe too much of a reach to go in that direction? It's not, but I won't speak with great authority on this because it's not my area of research. But, you know, where I find it funny like, if I were to train AI for me to sit down and be activated when I was learning, it would have to ask me something like, Hey, Lauren,

how did you sleep last night? Did you have a glass of water yet? Have you drank too much caffeine? Did you see that dog down the street that really annoys you in the morning? It's got to get pretty deep. It's got to be your bestie. Yeah, right. And I'm just not so sure I want to go there know. It's got to get pretty deep. It's got to be your bestie. Yeah, right. And I'm just not so sure I want to go there yet. So when we say this learning in the flow of work, which I think it's a little bit comical sometimes for me to hear this, because you're always learning, you know, we're programmed and designed. We are physically designed to learn as human beings as part of what our brain's main function

is. But I think what the main problem with learning is, is that we have never really looked at it from a very intentional and strategic way when it comes to methodology and how do we bring in different methodologies to do that. Now, I can give you, this is crazy. So because we were all mostly, I won't broad stroke and say all, but because most people around the world came up in an educational system that was relatively the same, we went through, you know, first period, second period, reading, writing, you know, math, okay, study, take a test, forget everything, move on. I was at the library on Saturday, because that's how cool I am.

And this library was, it was the Toronto Reference Library, and it's right next to a university. And I was actively observing all of these students sitting there and studying the same way that has always been done for centuries. They're there with their books. They're there with their highlighters. They're like, I watched this girl read her notes over and over and over again in a very like same way. And it doesn't show me that people are learning the strategies to learning.

And I think until we understand that, we're still really stuck in the way that we go about our learning, but also in the way that we design it. And that's really my area of expertise and specialty is in scientific learning design. Like I said, it's not just a responsibility of the designers, the L&D teams, the teachers. It's the responsibility to somebody else to then learn better using those methodologies that have actually been used to design the learning itself. So what are L&D teams? What are organizations that are distributing learning to their people, to their employees? What are it wrong. It was just that we didn't know how to do it better. And I think this is the biggest problem with L&D right now is you're not open to learning how to learn better yourself so you can do better design facilitation and serve the rest of the organization. And it's absolute insanity to me that I can be in a room of 35 to 200 learning leaders and still have to beg and plead with them to please let's start teaching the learning teams how to learn better. Let's start teaching them a bit about the learning science. Let's start teaching them about how a brain operates so that they can design better and understand who they're designing for better, because they can also understand themselves

better. And that's just madness to me, that we're not getting this more into the teams. That being said, I understand their roadblocks. They're up against budgets that they don't get, the seats at the table that they don't have enough time to argue it. We've been trying to sort of chase our tail for a very long time, but I'm sure you've spoken to many in the industry as well, is we're at such a critical time right now that if these voices aren't heard, and if we don't start fighting, and if we don't change the way that we're doing things in order to show that we have greater value, we are going to keep seeing teams get

wiped out in one email, all made redundant, all let go. This trend has already started. We're continuing to see it. But again, when are you going to start doing it differently? AI is not going to be the answer. It's going to be part of the solution. But I think we said earlier, you know, when you asked me before we started thoughts on AI, like garbage in garbage out, if all you're teaching it is the same things that you already know, and your results are going to be pretty much the same. Stephen Miller was my guest two weeks ago, he is deep into AI in terms of the work that he does. He does a lot of research on it. He has helped implement digital transformations in government entities and large organizations,

banks, mostly in Singapore is where he worked. But he also has broad experience with learning and development people. And he said that learning and development really needs to focus less on just distributing courses. And as you already mentioned, there are many roadblocks to everything that learning and development people are doing, you know, budgets and everything make it really hard to go beyond, in some cases, the bare minimum, which can be just courses for training. But at the end of the day, do you think he's right about that, that fewer courses and a more robust education system, whatever that represents, something more thoughtful is the answer? something more thoughtful is the answer? It's one of the answers, absolutely. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Dr. Keith Keating, but Keith has just released a book or is about to be released called The Trusted Learning Advisor. And it's about these issues when we're talking about what's happening at the leadership level and not being order takers anymore and all of that. And

part of the challenge is going to be, you got to fight a little bit. The last presentation I gave in London, I said, well, you can go a little bit pirate or you can go a lot. And I suggest you go a lot. So go a lot pirate on it, right? But change doesn't happen from us just talking. I think that's where we've also been sort of stunted at it. We talk and we talk and we talk and we talk. Where is the action? Where are the tangible calls to the action that says we are not going to do this like this anymore and we need the business to come to the table to support us in that. We need the business to give us time for us to learn how to do it better for everybody else. And that's a hard negotiation,

but it can be done. I love this example that I give to people that if you're in a leadership meeting and you're trying to fight for time for people to learn in your team, especially the learning teams, and someone's challenging you on that, if you find three objects in the room and you ask people to juggle, and most people just don't know how to juggle, right? If one person knows how to juggle, then that's cool, but most of them won't know how to juggle. And they'll look at you and go, well, we can't juggle. We're like, okay, cool. I'll be back tomorrow. If that doesn't kind of level set things a little bit, well, that's how you want other people in the organization to

learn. Interesting. The question of getting budget and time is so pervasive. And this always comes back to the ROI question in the conversations that I have is how do we as learning leaders demonstrate that we're creating a return on investment for the education that we're giving our people? Obviously, there's the training and onboarding and those critical things that L&D people are creating and performing, but there's a lot related to well-being and upskilling and assessing skill gaps and all of that. But at the end of the day, it just doesn't seem like there's any real clear system that is consistently used or followed for drawing an ROI to the learning. Do you have any answers for that? Do you have any thoughts?

So when I'm designing learning, and if it's for large scale change, the very first thing that we address is that we're not going to get everybody that's just just give up, you're not going to get 100%. That's the first thing wave the white flag from the very beginning, where I find the most success is in taking that two prong approach. First, I'm going to design the learning with every little bit of science that I possibly have in order to help someone else's brain take it in as best as they can. So the science of the design of the learning is step number one. Every program that I've designed for the last five years that goes into any large scale organizations, we help the rest of the employee population understand

better learning strategy. If you can take in the learning better and we're designing it better, well, guess what? You want to know what the ROI on that is? It's a lot of saved time. A lot of saved time. Because I can guarantee you, you are not going to have to repeat that learning again. Because we are actually taking into consideration how does a human brain create a memory? And how does the human brain retrieve that memory in order to perform? And you go to most learning and development teams, and you ask them, can you at a very basic level explain to me how a memory in a human brain is created? And they're not going to be able to tell you that. Well, then how are you designing learning then to help with that process? So that's number one. And then designing in the measures. Again, we can use metacognitive

theory for this. We're designing in measurements during the learning itself. We're not going to let someone get to the end and realize that they couldn't transfer something. And this goes really outside of just like I said, it's not just about these quizzes or these tests, because not all learning is knowledge learning. Some people have hands-on jobs and some of them are very critical and they can be dangerous. And we have to take all of these things into consideration. But the ROI comes down to the fact that we are saving people significant amounts of time and not having to double back and do learning again because they didn't remember anything. And it might take a little bit longer at the beginning. But the results

on the long term are much higher. So we're saving people from having to Google things to go onto YouTube, to any of the platforms, they're not digging through your LMSs, which are just like littered with too much content. So a ton of time. So whatever that hourly rate is, multiply that by the number of hours that are wasted learning. And you've got significant ROI when we actually change the way that people learn and design learning. Do you advocate for or ever yourself, put people into buckets into learning buckets, like those who are going to just get it really quickly and run with it, those that are going to struggle and those that need a bit of extra help to really implement it from leadership. I've had this conversation with a couple of guests, but what do you think about

that from a learning design expert? It's more energy and it's more time, but is that worth doing? I think that we all fall into each one of those buckets during the process. At one point, I'll go back to my time at the library on Saturday. I'm currently combing through 20 years with a research on working memory, only working memory. These are like massive review papers. And I'm very motivated. I love this stuff. Very excited to jump in and spend like four hours at the library, just like learning about all of this. And about an hour and a half in, I was so frustrated and just needed to take a moment for myself, right? And so I can be highly motivated, but motivation is very unstable. So how do I keep myself motivated?

And that could be for anything that you're trying to do in life. It doesn't have to be learning. It could be if you're trying to create a new habit, new behavior is, you know, motivation is not stable. So how do we stabilize it during those moments of, I really don't want to do this anymore, even though I was really excited to do it at the beginning. it during those moments of, I really don't want to do this anymore, even though I was really excited to do it at the beginning. And it's really just recognizing those human things about us. Because learning is hard. There is not one scientist who I know who will tell you that

learning is a breeze, right? At some point, you're going to get to what I call the moment of grr to get to the moment of yar, right? That's the pirate. So the pirate, you know, yar stands for you are really ready. No one's really ready right away. That's all it comes down to. They might enjoy the process a little bit more, but I think at some point or another, we're all going to fall into one of those buckets. Yeah, that makes total sense. Do you have a favorite or least favorite neuro myth or brain or learning myth that is especially pervasive or ubiquitous or just resilient in terms of just always being in the public that people think is how the brain works and it's just totally untrue? God, I just don't even want to say them.

Let's debunk one right now. Let's tell the people. Let's go. Okay, let's go with the learning styles. We know that's not a thing anymore. Joseph Devlin, my friend who we've been talking about, he put up a post today about the, I think it was the personality styles, like the E-N-F-J or I-N-T, whatever. And that's completely debunked. So all of those companies who have spent ridiculous amounts of money,

these personalities are, yeah, that's been debunked, which is awesome. The best one, I think, which is the one where people think you only use 10% of your brain. That's really funny. Like, if you only use 10% of your brain, like I imagine a world where people only use 10% of your brain, it would literally look like the set of The Walking Dead. Just everyone would be kind of like dragging their feet and mumbling and just body parts falling off or something. But the 10% thing is kind of ridiculous. And no doubt we're going to see more and more of these myths cut out

as we learn more, because a lot of these myths, unfortunately, were derived from the science itself that was misconstrued and misinterpreted. And then left brain, right brain, isn't that also, I think Joseph might have posted something on that too. Isn't that a bit of a myth how we generally think about that? Not a thing. There are specialized areas in the brain, but yeah, to say I'm a right hemisphere person or I'm a left hemisphere person, I'm like, if you only have one hemisphere, maybe that's true. I have some friends I need to have stern talking to's about that one. They tend to turn to that for a lot of their flaws, I think. Okay, well, thank you again, Lauren, for joining me. This

is a great conversation. Before I let you go, can you just let our listeners know where they can learn more about you and your work? Well, the Learning Pirate website is always a great place to start. And we just made this announcement a couple of months ago during the tour is joining forces with your brain, which is the scientifically designed learning series. We are now going to be allowing companies to license that. So that's a big one. But yeah, you can see the trailers for that on the learning pirate website. And if you really want to be entertained, then the true pirate comes out mostly on LinkedIn, the calling out the debunking, you know, to be entertained, then the true pirate comes out mostly on LinkedIn.

The calling out, the debunking, you know, in all seriousness, though, it's being a really good advocate for change in the industry so that we can all evolve. And the website, it's just learningpirate.com, right? Learningpirate.com. Know that. It's not pirates. There's only one of me. Okay.

Again, thank you so much for joining me. And for our folks at home, thanks for joining as well. We will catch you on the next episode. Cheers. You've been listening to L&D in Action, a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player to make sure you never miss an episode. And don't forget to give us a rating, leave a comment, and share the episodes you love. Help us keep delivering the conversations that turn learning into action. Until next time.