SuperLearning: Somatic Hooks
In This Episode
Do you use your senses to help you learn something faster? Check out episode #3 in our SuperLearning series on The LeaderLab to find out how.
Transcript
Vanessa Tanicien, narrating: Hello, and welcome to the LeaderLab, the podcast powered by LifeLabs Learning. I'm your host and LifeLabs leadership trainer, Vanessa Tanicien. In each episode, my Labmates and I distill our findings into powerful tipping point skills – the smallest changes that tip over to make the biggest impact in the shortest time.
Vanessa Tanicien: Welcome back to LeaderLab listeners, and we are still talking about SuperLearning, learning how to be a better learner, so you can help yourself and your team acquire new skills and knowledge faster. Today on the show we've got our co-CEO, Tania Luna. Fun fact about Tania, she had to repeat first grade so she's disliked school all her life. But lucky for us, she has always loved learning. So welcome back to the Lab, Tania.
Tania Luna: Thank you, I'm so excited to talk learning with you today.
Vanessa Tanicien: Yes. Learning. SuperLearning, to be clear. So I'm curious-
Tania Luna: Not average regular learning.
Vanessa Tanicien: Not average regular learning, not at all. So what specifically are we going to be experimenting with today?
Tania Luna: Yeah. Today we're going to be talking about one of my favorite SuperLearning tools, somatic hooks. Somatic means the body or the senses. So somatic hooks are all about how to help yourself and others learn faster by hooking new knowledge onto our physical senses.
Vanessa Tanicien: I'm already hooked. So how do we use somatic hooks to be SuperLearners?
Tania Luna: Okay. So I'll explain that in just a moment, but first let's try a quick experiment together. I'm going to ask you to remember a really random metric, since as leaders, it is important to remember metrics ourselves and help others remember those goals too. And then at the end of this episode, I'm going to retest the effectiveness of your learning retention. How does that sound?
Vanessa Tanicien: Okay. Let's walk through it.
Tania Luna: Okay. So I'm going to give you a metric and then I'm going to ask you to actually hook it onto your senses. It'll make sense in a moment. The metric is to increase sales by 27% in the next 8.5 months, increase sales by 27% in the next 8.5 months. So no -
Vanessa Tanicien: 27, 8.5, 27, 8.5.
Tania Luna: So you're trying to rehearse it, instead of rehearsing it, I'm actually going to ask you to visualize it. What might be a visual way to remember 27%, 8.5 months?
Vanessa Tanicien: So a visual way to remember 27 and 8.5... I'm already still repeating it out loud because this is the way that I remember to remember things.
Tania Luna: But what's like... And the weirder the better. So try to picture it in some visual way.
Vanessa Tanicien: Okay. So I'm imagining the words two and nine talking about the number 8.5, because it's smaller than them. So it's like they're at a party-
Tania Luna: Wait, wait, 27, 27.
Vanessa Tanicien: 27? Right! 27% in 8.5 months. Got it. So 27 is bigger than 8.5 and it's like pointing and being like, "I'm bigger than you." Okay?
Tania Luna: Ooh. Okay. So 27 is this big, kind of bully of a number, and it's pointing down at 8.5.
Vanessa Tanicien: Yes.
Tania Luna: Okay. And now just pick one more sense, because we're talking about somatic learning; how to hook learning onto your senses. So it could be a sound, so you can maybe listen to them laughing at each other and picture their voices, or a smell, or a taste, or a texture.
Vanessa Tanicien: Okay. I'm going to go with sound. So I think 27 is going to... I don't know why I'm going down this taunting route, but it just feels so 27-
Tania Luna: You came to bring out some childhood memories of yours-
Vanessa Tanicien: Maybe you got laughed at back in first grade. It's brought up some stuff for me. So maybe 27 is just taunting 8.5 a bit. And then it's just going like, "Ha ha."
Tania Luna: "Ha ha." Okay. All right. Great. So hold onto that and I'll explain why we're actually doing this and then at the end we're going to see how well it worked. Does that sound good?
Vanessa Tanicien: Okay. Yes. I'm already weirded out by that. So I'm wondering how this would be helpful for a super learning technique.
Tania Luna: So actually, the way somatic learning works, and you just did a little bit of that right now, is you're hooking information onto as many different neural pathways as possible. The more neural hooks, the better. And the strongest hooks you can make are hooks to our physical senses. And what I want to do is just walk you through three somatic hook types. And then we can talk about how as a leader, you can apply this to learn better and to help others learn better too.
Tania Luna: Okay, so we started with visuals before. So I'll start with visual hooks. Visual hooks are hooks that link to your visual senses. So an example that I love comes from Richard Branson. I love this one because he has dyslexia, like I do, and one of the things that is tricky about dyslexia is that it might be hard to remember information, unless you really tie it to something that makes it easier to stick. So he tells the story of learning the difference between net versus gross profit. So to remember this difference, he would picture a net going into a lake and pulling up all sorts of gross stuff. So gross profit is the stuff in the net before you take anything out. And net is the stuff that drips through the net. So it's the profit that you have after expenses.
Vanessa Tanicien: I love that.
Tania Luna: And so by creating that visual, he was able to stop embarrassing himself in business meetings and actually know the difference between net and gross profit.
Vanessa Tanicien: I think he's also helped me from embarrassing myself in future business meetings. That is a very easy way to remember that.
Tania Luna: So I love this as an example because it reminds us that it's not enough to just remember information. We need to really use visual cues for ourselves and others to help that information stick.
Vanessa Tanicien: So what's the next hook?
Tania Luna: Let's talk about auditory hooks. So auditory hooks are hooks onto your auditory cortex. Research by Forrin and Macleod showed that reading something out loud improves our memory of it. This is known as the production effect because you're using multiple senses to encode that information.
Vanessa Tanicien: Ah, so reading out loud in school is not just a stress technique by teachers. It's also a learning technique.
Tania Luna: Yeah. And actually, in the study they found that it's not enough to just hear it. Ideally, you actually have people say it themselves.
Vanessa Tanicien: Hmm. Okay. And then what's this mystical third one.
Tania Luna: Okay. So the third hook, and there are many others, but I'm just calling out my favorite three, are tactile hooks. So these are hooks that tie onto physical sensations. So, for example an fMRI study by Sathian and team found that our brains process the phrase, "He had a bad day," differently than the phrase, "He had a rough day." So when we hear "rough" it actually activates the part of our brain that lights up when we feel a rough texture, like sandpaper. So to help yourself and others remember things better, you can use evocative, kind of textured language as a way to hook onto those physical neural pathways.
Vanessa Tanicien: Hmm. This reminds me of rote rehearsal versus elaborative rehearsal, which is super funny because at the beginning of the episode, I was going, "27, 27, 27." Listeners, that's rote rehearsal and we all know how hard that is. It's not as brain-friendly as elaborative rehearsal because elaborative rehearsal uses more neural pathways, right? We're embedding the learning further because we're linking it to a bunch of other things. So this must be why so many of the tools that we teach are so sticky. I'm recognizing that we use somatic hooks a ton.
Tania Luna: Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah. So we don't just say words. We actually intentionally design words that stick in our memories because they're tied to somatic cues.
Vanessa Tanicien: Okay.
Tania Luna: At least that's part of the secret.
Vanessa Tanicien: Got it. It's not the whole secret sauce [crosstalk 00:07:26].
Tania Luna: No, we were... I'm not ready to give away the whole secret.
Vanessa Tanicien: Okay, got it.
Tania Luna: So how about we retest whether you remembered that metric.
Vanessa Tanicien: Okay, I remember 27 is pointing and laughing at 8.5 because 27-
Tania Luna: Yes!
Vanessa Tanicien: Is that right?
Tania Luna: You got it! Just to double check, do you remember what those numbers even represent?
Vanessa Tanicien: We need to increase sales by 27% in 8.5 months?
Tania Luna: Yes! You got it.
Vanessa Tanicien: Oh, okay. You're right, I had those images in my brain so it was easy.
Tania Luna: We don't naturally do this, but the best learners, the fastest learners, know to hook onto these somatic aspects of the way that our minds work to help that learning stick faster for ourselves and for others.
Vanessa Tanicien: So if you want to help yourself and others acquire new information faster, retain it longer, somatic hooks are the thing to do. So if I wanted to port this into any company to create somatic hook SuperLearners, how would I go about doing that?
Tania Luna: Yeah, I think the easiest way to do this is just to constantly make your message richer by creating more of those somatic hooks. So, for example, you can use visuals when you're communicating. Don't just say things with your words, draw them out; have pictures, repeat things out loud, and you can use sensory language and metaphors and gestures to really help that information hook on more quickly.
Vanessa Tanicien: So that brings us to our LeaderLab listener experiment. So, Tania, what should people be experimenting with in their laboratories of life?
Tania Luna: Yeah. I love this part. This is where you get to actually put theory into practice. So to get yourself and others hooked on somatic hooks, this week, my mission for you is when you say something that you want yourself or others to remember, don't just say it; show it as well. You can do that by using visual metaphors, like the Richard Branson example, to help people imagine whatever information you want them to learn faster.
Vanessa Tanicien: Well, I will never forget 27 pointing at 8.5 and -
Tania Luna: You'll be tossing and turning in bed going 27, 8.5, 27, 8.5.
Vanessa Tanicien: Exactly. Thanks, Tania.
Tania Luna: Thanks, Vanessa.
Vanessa Tanicien: And that's a wrap of another episode of the LeaderLab. Make sure to subscribe and share this with at least one other person so we can all benefit from being super learners. It's pretty exciting. The LeaderLab is executive produced and hosted by me, Vanessa Tanicien. NeEddra James is our senior producer, and Alana Burman is our director and editor. If you'd like to hang out with us on social, go ahead and find us on LinkedIn at LifeLabs Learning, and on Twitter at Life Labs Learn. To bring training to your team, head on over to lifelabslearning.com. See you in the Lab soon.
