The Disappointing, Actual Reason Why We Forget What We Learn

No one really wants to learn. We only want to be entertained.

Hold on to your eyelids, because the next paragraph reads like the most boring person, explaining the most boring thing, boringly:

An accurate diagnosis of helminth infection is important to improve patient management. However, there is considerable intra- and inter-specimen variation of helminth egg counts in human feces. Homogenization of stool samples has been suggested to improve diagnostic accuracy, but there are no detailed investigations.

Luckily, the authors of this scientific paper about human feces and parasitic infections knew they couldn’t get away with being boring, not even in an academic journal, where boring paragraphs are the industry standard.

They needed to seduce the attention of specialists and practitioners that could make good use of their discoveries.

They needed to entertain them. So they baptized the paper with a special name.

“In-depth analysis of a piece of shit.”

It worked. The paper went viral. Maybe not “TikTok” viral, as it would be hard for some influencer to make a choreography on how to collect your feces for a diagnosis — but viral nonetheless.

The truth is, you may have something important to learn about. You may have your little strategies, your checklists, your speed-reading — but none of that will help you if you can’t prevent things from being boring.

This is what “being entertained” really means

Learning is about rearranging synapses. But our brains sometimes hate change so much they would’ve preferred to stay in the womb of mother nature, swimming naked in amniotic fluid and having lunch through a tube, rather than all this “survival of the fittest” thing.

We hate change and we hate learning — but oh, we love to be entertained. To pursue our curious impulses and dive into an endless scrolling of what’s new in our world, forever chasing the tail of dopamine.

What is it that we seek? Pleasure? You could say that about Netflix, which is unmistakably entertaining: an uninterrupted stream of content delivered directly into your retinas.

But what about rock climbing? The climber is stuck in a rock, with increasingly more fatigued muscles, trying to decide whether to painfully climbing up or to painfully falling down. The most radical of them all may even climb a wall 900 meters tall without any ropes — because of course, at that height, what you need is a helicopter.

The same painful ordeal goes to a jazz musician, who has to endure a decade of sucking at improvisation and harmony until she “gets it.”

But these three things are equally, addictively entertaining. So what’s the common quality?

In the Netflix binge, something narratively important is revealed to you in every scene, over and over. The rock climber is physically stuck at every position, and by rearranging his body he discovers a solution towards the next position. As the jazz musician improvises, she’s finding out the line she’s going to play an instant before the audience hears it, note after note.

Entertainment is not about having fun. It’s about discovery.

More concretely, an uninterrupted cascade of discoveries, each leading up to the next in rapid succession.

And although it takes more skill for the rock climber than for the Netflix watcher to keep this cascade of discoveries stable, they are both doing the same thing: learning new information, rearranging brain synapses to make the new fit with the old — and being delighted in the process.

That’s why we all want to be entertained. Because without entertainment, learning becomes a dull, frustrating, meaningless bureaucracy. We hate learning when we’re not discovering anything, or when we’re not discovering enough.

Want me to pay attention? Give me something NEW

What made the “In-depth analysis of a piece of shit” title so effective was that it captured people’s attention: the prelude of entertainment that signals your willingness to learn.

But as Ben Parr explained in his book Captivology, our attention hums around thousands of surrounding stimuli like a thirsty hummingbird with ADHD. So we need a special nectar to attract it. That’s why Bill Gates had to bring mosquitoes to his TED Talk.

“Malaria is spread by mosquitoes. I brought some here. I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected.”

Of course, the mosquitoes were only stunt doubles of real malaria carriers. But the reaction of the attendants was evidence that Bill had delivered his point.

500 million new cases of malaria in Africa and Asia, every year, is not enough of a figure to get us to pay attention to the problem. Not because it’s small, but because it’s far away.

So Gates brought the problem home. He got the audience extremely entertained with the problem — which means, let me remind you, not that they were having “fun,” but that they were discovering something new.

What Gates did was to feed novelty to the problem. And that’s how you get people to pay attention.

The same problem had Steve Jobs in 2008, a year after he crushed it with the first iPhone presentation. He had to go up the stage and let people know he still had the mojo of captivating showmanship, but with a product that was not new at all: a laptop.

So he brought an envelope to the stage (An envelope? What does have to do with laptops? Do tell more!), he opened the envelope — and there it was: the new laptop. Not any laptop you’ve seen before: this was the thinnest laptop ever invented, so thin it fits into an envelope.

The only thing that is not new about these examples is our evolutionary attraction to novelty. Our ancestors got used to paying attention to shaking bushes, as it was likely that what was lurking there was not an Apple but a rattlesnake.

How to be entertained in the long term (when novelty fades)

Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Elton John, Queen, Madonna.

Back in 1985, those names didn’t have any novelty at all. If anything, they were the antithesis of novelty. Nonetheless, those musicians played at a benefit concert that needed to entertain people for as long as possible.

Live Aid already had its fair amount of novelty: it was going to be the biggest benefit concert ever made, broadcasted around the globe (1.9 billion people watched it; nearly half of the world population at the time), all to raise money to battle the ongoing Ethiopian famine.

Entertainment starts with novelty, but novelty doesn’t last for long. And that’s why Live Aid succeeded: it first ramped up the novelty with its bonkers nature and its virtuous mission. But then, once it got people’s attention, it switched to the thing that maintains people’s attention: familiarity.

Novelty caught people’s attention. Familiarity kept it.

This is also essential in a learning experience. If you keep chasing novelty, you are going to jump between different courses and books, always looking for the next new idea, always chasing dopamine. It would be like trying to keep a relationship inside the honeymoon phase, and thus sacrificing a meaningful, deep connection with someone.

Learning must get deep at some point, for discovery is just the beginning of the process. When you get deep into a subject you develop familiarity. It becomes part of you, it may influence your tastes, your beliefs, your identity.

With depth comes nuance. You won’t need novelty anymore to become entertained by what you’re learning. A painter can look at sunsets for hours, when the inexperienced eye would be bored to death 4 seconds after snapping the selfie. A sunset is not entertaining for the painter because it’s new; it’s entertaining because of his deep understanding of color, contrast, imagery, and artistic expression.

Conclusion: are you entertained?

Whether it’s watching Netflix, playing a jazz standard, or climbing El Capitán, you are learning.

You are also entertained. First, seduced by a spark of novelty, like Bill Gates’ mosquito squad, or Steve Jobs’ enigmatic envelope of secrecy.

Then, married to the topic by the tranquility of familiarity. It’s not just the rumblings of some guy, it’s Bill Gates: let’s listen. It’s not just another company launching a laptop, it’s Steve Jobs’ laptop: let’s listen.

Whatever you do: don’t be boring. Because being entertained is not just a means to prevent forgetting about what you learn, like those other strategies, tips and tricks.

Being entertained is what learning is.