“Our brain wants to find a simple frame and stick with it, the same way it wants to make a binary decision,” Eric Johnson, the Columbia psychologist, told me. “That’s why teenagers get stuck thinking about breaking up with a boyfriend as, ‘Do I love him or not?’ rather than ‘Do I want to be in a relationship, or do I want to be able to leave for college?’ Or why, when you’re buying a car, you start thinking, ‘Do I want the power windows or the GPS?’ rather than ‘Am I sure I can afford this car?’
“But when we teach people a process for reframing choices, when we give them a series of steps that causes a decision to seem a little bit different than before,” said Johnson, “it helps them take more control of what’s going on inside their heads.”
One of the best ways to help people cast experiences in a new light is to provide a formal decision-making system—such as a flowchart, a prescribed series of questions, or the engineering design process—that denies our brains the easy options we crave. “Systems teach us how to force ourselves to make questions look unfamiliar,” said Johnson. “It’s a way to see alternatives.”
As Delia moved into her senior year at Western Hills High, her home life became increasingly chaotic. Her sister was there, raising the baby. Another sister had dropped out of school. The family would find a place to live and then something would happen—another lost job or a neighbor who complained about too many people in a one-bedroom apartment—and they would have to move again. In her senior year, Delia’s family finally found a long-term rental, but it didn’t have heat and, sometimes, when there wasn’t money to pay the bill, the electricity went off.
Her teachers, by then, had figured out what was going on, and had seen how hard Delia was working. She was getting straight As. They committed themselves to helping her however they could. When Delia needed to do laundry, her English teacher, Ms. Thole, would invite her over for the afternoon. When Delia seemed exhausted, Mr. Edwards would let her stay late in his classroom and nap, her head on the desk, as he graded exams. They saw her potential. They hoped, with a little help, she could make it to college.
Mr. Edwards, in particular, was a constant in Delia’s life. He introduced her to the school’s guidance counselor and helped her apply for scholarships. He edited her college applications and made sure they were sent in on time. When Delia had a problem with her friends, when she was fighting with a boyfriend or sparring with her dad, when it seemed like she had too much homework and too little time—whenever it seemed like life was overwhelming—she pulled out Mr. Edwards’s flowchart and put her troubles through the engineering design process. It was calming. It helped her think of solutions.
In the spring of Delia’s senior year, letters began arriving from scholarship committees. She won the $10,000 Nordstrom Scholarship, then a Rotary prize, then the University of Cincinnati’s minority scholar’s grant. The envelopes kept coming. Seventeen scholarships in all. She was the class valedictorian and was voted most likely to succeed. The night before graduation, she slept at Ms. Thole’s house so she could take a hot shower and curl her hair before the ceremony. In the fall, she enrolled at the University of Cincinnati.
“College is a lot harder than I expected,” Delia told me. She’s a sophomore now, majoring in information technology. She’s often the only girl in her classes and the only black student. The university has tried to help students like Delia, first-generation college attendees, by creating a program named “Gen-1” that provides mentors, tutors, mandatory study sessions, and guidance counseling. Gen-1 participants all live in the same dorm freshman year and sign a seven-page contract in which they promise to abide by a curfew, respect evening quiet hours, and participate in study halls. The idea is to help them get some distance from where they grew up, to see themselves in a new context.
“There’s still drama at home,” Delia said. But when things feel overwhelming, Delia thinks about Mr. Edwards’s class. Any problem can be worked through, step-by-step. “If I take something that’s bothering me and make it into smaller pieces, it feels like something I can think about without getting upset,” she said.
“I’ve been through a lot. But I feel like, as long as I’ve got a system for getting outside my head, I can learn from it. Anything that’s happened to me can be a lesson, if I think about it right.”
The people who are most successful at learning—those who are able to digest the data surrounding them, who absorb insights embedded in their experiences and take advantage of information flowing past—are the ones who know how to use disfluency to their advantage. They transform what life throws at them, rather than just taking it as it comes. They know the best lessons are those that force us to do something and to manipulate information. They take data and transform it into experiments whenever they can. Whether we use the engineering design process or test an idea at work or simply talk through a concept with a friend, by making information more disfluent, we paradoxically make it easier to understand.
In one study published in 2014, researchers from Princeton and UCLA examined the relationship between learning and disfluency by looking at the difference between students who took notes by hand while watching a lecture and those who used laptops. Recording a speaker’s comments via longhand is both harder and less efficient than typing on a keyboard. Fingers cramp. Writing is slower than typing, and so you can’t record as many words. Students who use laptops, in contrast, spend less time actively working during a lecture, and yet they still collect about twice as many notes as their handwriting peers. Put differently, writing is more disfluent than typing, because it requires more labor and captures fewer verbatim phrases.
When the researchers looked at the test scores of those two groups, however, they found that the hand writers scored twice as well as the typists in remembering what a lecturer said. The scientists, at first, were skeptical. Maybe the hand writers were spending more time studying after class? They conducted a second experiment, but this time they put the laptop users and the hand writers in the same lecture and then took away their notes as soon as it was over, so students couldn’t study on their own. A week later, they brought everyone back. Once again, those who took notes by hand scored better on a test of the lecture’s content. No matter what constraints were placed on the groups, the students who forced themselves to use a more cumbersome note-taking method—who forced disfluency into how they processed information—learned more.
In our own lives, the same lesson applies: When we encounter new information and want to learn from it, we should force ourselves to do something with the data. It’s not enough for your bathroom scale to send daily updates to an app on your phone. If you want to lose weight, force yourself to plot those measurements on graph paper and you’ll be more likely to choose a salad over a hamburger at lunch. If you read a book filled with new ideas, force yourself to put it down and explain the concepts to someone sitting next to you and you’ll be more likely to apply them in your life. When you find a new piece of information, force yourself to engage with it, to use it in an experiment or describe it to a friend—and then you will start building the mental folders that are at the core of learning.
Every choice we make in life is an experiment. Every day offers fresh opportunities to find better decision-making frames. We live in a time when data is more plentiful, cheaper to analyze, and easier to translate into action than ever before. Smartphones, websites, digital databases, and apps put information at our fingertips. But it only becomes useful if we know how to make sense of it.