The Secret of Your Learning

Seven Things You Probably Think You Know About Learning—And Almost None of Them Are True.

By Matthias Ehrhardt, Autoris Leadership Institute

“I can’t remember names.”

Ever heard that? Or maybe even thought it yourself?

“I can’t learn that at my age.” “I’m just not a numbers person.” “I’m more of a visual learner.” Many people know these phrases. They sound familiar. Sometimes even reassuring—a kind of peace with oneself. Except: they’re usually not true.

So why do we say them so often? One reason is their hidden purpose: they supposedly save us the trouble. If “that’s just how I am”—why should I even try to change a habit? Improve my memory? Try something new? “It won’t work anyway.” However, what sounds like self-awareness is often the opposite: self-deception. We can learn and change more than we give ourselves credit for.

And that is our opportunity. Alvin Toffler summed it up as early as 1970 in his book Future Shock: “The illiterates of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

His insight is more relevant today than ever. In an era where reskilling and lifelong learning are no longer just buzzwords but professional realities, the ability to learn is indeed becoming the central competency of the 21st century.

What exactly do we mean by learning? A broad definition understands learning as the “process of acquiring and transforming knowledge, skills, behavior, habits, and attitudes.” Five dimensions—and in each of them, we can regress, stagnate, or actively improve.

But what stands in the way of our growth? A lack of talent? Hardly. Researchers like Geoff Colvin have studied this in depth.¹ The biggest stumbling block on the path to success lies within ourselves. It is assumptions about our ability to learn—or, even worse, our supposed “inability to learn.” The scientific term for these: learning myths. They sound true, but rarely are. And they can be all the more dangerous for it. Someone compared them to poisonous mushrooms—tempting on the outside, barely distinguishable—and, at best, hard to stomach.

Learning myths. We should be aware of them.

“I’m a visual learner”

Sometime in the 1990s, an idea began to spread in schools, companies, and professional development seminars: that people have different learning styles—visual, auditory, kinesthetic—and learn best when instruction is tailored to their style. That sounded plausible, still sounds plausible today, and has been repeated millions of times.

The catch: There is hardly any scientific basis for this. The concept dates back to work from the early 1920s—studies on mental imagery and verbal memory that were generalized to all learners and all subjects without sufficient evidence.² What has been systematically investigated since then: People certainly have preferences; some like visualizations, others prefer to listen. But there is no reliable evidence that tailoring instruction to these preferences improves learning outcomes.³ The so-called matching hypothesis has not been confirmed in studies to date.

And yet, learning styles are among the most widespread neuromyths—even among people with scientific training.⁴

Mozart’s Babies

In 1993, a study from the University of California was published. Thirty-six students listened to ten minutes of Mozart and subsequently performed better for a short time on a spatial reasoning test. Ten minutes, 36 people, a single test. This became the Mozart effect. A billion-dollar industry. Baby Einstein CDs, sound pillows for pregnant bellies, classical music subscriptions for infants.

The original study showed no increase in IQ, no long-term effect, nothing about babies.⁵ Follow-up studies found no robust effect, and one of the original authors later called the hype a “scientific legend.”⁶ The real point: active music education—that is, playing, practicing, learning—actually has positive effects on cognitive development, according to current knowledge.⁷ But that’s hard work. Sound cushions are more convenient.

We only use ten percent of our brain

About half of all teachers still believe this.⁸ The 2014 film “Lucy” starring Scarlett Johansson revived this belief for a new audience: What if we suddenly used 100 percent?

What modern imaging techniques show: All areas of our brain are practically constantly active and functionally engaged—more or less so depending on the task, but according to current research, not reduced to ten percent, not even during sleep.⁹

“I can’t learn that at my age”

People sometimes say this at age 35.

The brain changes—throughout a person’s entire life. Imaging studies conducted over extended periods show that structural and functional changes continue well into one’s twenties and, in some cases, into one’s thirties—synapse formation, myelination, and the reorganization of neural networks.¹⁰ Neuroplasticity can be observed at any age, even though it changes over the years.¹¹

Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University and author of Mindset, distinguishes between two fundamental attitudes toward one’s own abilities. A growth mindset—the belief that abilities can grow through effort and experience—goes hand in hand with a willingness to take on challenges, view setbacks as learning opportunities, and persevere even when things get tough. “Why would you want to keep proving how good you are,” asks Dweck, “when you could instead get better?”¹² She calls the opposite a fixed mindset: the belief that abilities are innate and largely unchangeable. People with this tendency tend to avoid challenges—not because they couldn’t handle them, but because failure would confirm their belief. A self-perpetuating cycle.

Joshua Foer provides a concrete example of a growth mindset. The journalist and entrepreneur spent a year extensively studying peak memory performance—and in doing so, realized how much can actually be changed through targeted training. In the end, he won the U.S. Memory Championship—and described this experience in his book Moonwalking with Einstein.¹³

What may change with age is often not the ability to learn, but confidence in that ability. Older learners bring something to the table that younger people often underestimate: context, experience, and self-regulation. In Japan, there are waiting lists for public university lectures attended primarily by older adults.

Some windows do indeed narrow over time. According to current research, achieving a flawless accent in a newly learned language tends to become more difficult with age—though exceptions exist and the evidence is not uniform.¹⁴ However, these are narrow, specific areas that are often generalized in everyday life to apply to everything that can be learned.

Albert Mehrabian and the number he couldn’t shake

At some point, three numbers became firmly established in communication seminars, leadership training, and presentation guides worldwide: 7–38–55. Seven percent of a message is conveyed through words, 38 percent through the voice, and 55 percent through body language.

Albert Mehrabian, a psychologist at the University of California (UCLA), developed these figures in the 1960s. What is often left unmentioned: He studied exclusively incongruent messages—situations in which words and facial expressions contradicted one another. Specifically, he examined the emotional impact of a single word depending on facial expressions and tone of voice. One word, a very specific situation, students as test subjects—and from this, “7-38-55” became a universal rule for seemingly every form of communication.¹⁵

Mehrabian objected to this in interviews, letters, and public statements. “This equation does not apply to normal conversational situations,” he repeatedly clarified—without making an impact. The seminars continue, the figure appears in thousands of books, and many people have invested their energy in body language training based on this misinterpretation—instead of preparing their content. The latter would likely have been the far more effective lever for many...

Maxwell Maltz’s Most Costly Note

“Start today, and in three weeks you’ll be a new person.” This message runs remarkably consistently through self-help books, coaching programs, and social media challenges.

Where does it come from? In the 1960s, American plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz observed that his patients needed about 21 days to get used to their changed appearance—a new nose, a corrected chin. He wrote about it, the book became a bestseller, and the 21 days stuck—for everything and everyone.

What research shows: Depending on behavior, context, and motivation, habits form between 18 and 254 days, on average after about 66 days.¹⁶ That’s no reason to be discouraged. It’s an indication that people who give up after three weeks because “it’s not working” may have trusted a number that a plastic surgeon jotted down while observing nose surgeries.

The Misconception About Discipline

Closely related to the 21-day rule is the belief that behavioral change is primarily a matter of character. Those who don’t succeed don’t want it enough. Those who fail are weak.

James Clear, author of the international bestseller Atomic Habits, describes a different perspective: People with good self-discipline are often those who need it the least—because they have designed their environment so that the desired behavior is easy and the undesired behavior is difficult.¹⁷ Not discipline, but design. If you don’t want to eat chips in the evening, don’t buy them in the first place. If you want to go for a run in the morning, put your shoes by the door the night before.

Clear calls this “environment design”—and arrives at a finding that runs through current behavioral research: context, triggers, and routines often explain sustainable behavior better than self-control alone.¹⁸ Discipline plays a role. As a standalone strategy, it has rarely proven sufficient.

What to do?

What can help us in light of all these myths? Here’s the answer: We need to rethink our own way of learning—and ensure that the path we take to build knowledge, develop skills, or change behavior actually works.

In other words: we need to relearn how to learn.

How can we get started? A pen, a sheet of paper, five minutes. Take a moment—preferably right now—and answer two questions as specifically as possible:

1. When was the last time you really learned something—in a way that stuck?

Specifically—when did you expand your knowledge—or replace old knowledge with new? Develop a skill? Truly improve a behavior or habit? Or even change your attitude toward something?

1. And what would you do even better next time?

What comes to light when answering the first question can already be a huge step. Because we rarely enough realize what really worked—but that’s exactly the point: to deliberately repeat the things that were successful. Sounds simple? Yes, it should be. But many of us do this consciously too rarely.

Regarding the second question: what could we do even better? This is often where the real breakthrough lies. And experience shows: sometimes a small adjustment is enough, sometimes it’s a completely new approach.

If you want to build skills, you might want to practice more instead of sitting in seminars. If you want to change habits, you might want to shape your environment instead of overtaxing your willpower. And if you really want to anchor knowledge—you might just want to explain it to someone else.

That is learning to learn. It can be quite simple. And lead to great success.

By the way, Joshua Foer has never claimed to have a particularly good memory. He says he simply learned how to use it.

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Endnotes

1. Colvin, G. (2008). Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else. Portfolio/Penguin.

2. Fallace, T. (2023). The long origins of the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning style typology. History of Psychology.

3. Huber, M. & Muller, C. (2023). Is there a learning type?! European Journal of Education Studies.

4. Macdonald, K. et al. (2017). Dispelling the Myth. Frontiers in Psychology.

5. Jenkins, J. (2001). The Mozart Effect. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 94.

6. Mehr, S. (2015). Miscommunication of science. Frontiers in Psychology, 6.

7. Sala, G. & Gobet, F. (2020). Cognitive and academic benefits of music training. Memory & Cognition, 48.

8. Geake, J. (2008). Neuromythologies in education. Educational Research, 50.

9. Anum, S. et al. (2024). Evolution of the Human Brain and the Myth of its Ten-Percent Use. Social Evolution & History.

10. Vijayakumar, N. et al. (2018). Puberty and the human brain. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 92.

11. Goldberg, H. (2022). Growing Brains, Nurturing Minds. Brain Sciences, 12.

12. Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.

13. Foer, J. (2011). Moonwalking with Einstein. Penguin Press.

14. Hartshorne, J. K. et al. (2018). A critical period for second language acquisition. Cognition, 176.

15. Lapakko, D. (1997). Three Cheers for Language: A Closer Examination of a Widely Cited Study of Nonverbal Communication. Communication Education, 46(1).

16. Lally, P. et al. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6).

17. Clear, J. (2018). Atomic Habits. Portfolio/Penguin.

18. Karppinen, P. et al. (2018). Opportunities and challenges of behavior change support systems. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 84.