This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

Each day teachers all over the world try to explain new ideas to their students.

Sometimes it goes well. The teacher conveys information, the students absorb it.

But many times things get stuck. Students get frustrated and so do their teachers.

The transmission of ideas gets bogged down in a morass of failed expectations.

I remember an exchange I had with my own father. I must have been around ten.

He was trying to teach me a math concept, the order of operations, division before subtraction, multiplication before addition.

I didn't get it, he thought it ought to be easy. He got frustrated, I felt stupid.

The worst part was that all the psychological turmoil got us nowhere.

At the end of the day, he had failed to teach me something he knew, and I had failed to learn something I could have mastered.

In fact, I might have internalized the wrong lessons, that I was bad at math, or that my father thought poorly of me.

Why don't I understand what does he think? Why am I so bad?

Is he mad? I can't forget that.

Can I show him? Can I make my dad proud?

Today we explore an innovative idea about how we learn.

It'll take us from a dolphin exhibit in Hawaii to a top teaching hospital in New York.

It's about one method to quiet the noise in our heads, the sort of clutter that can turn learning into a minefield of misery.

One evening in the early 1960s, after putting her kids to bed, a young mother sat in her living room and read a small technical manual on dolphin training.

The ideas in it seemed new and strange.

The woman felt an unexpected thrill. As she thumbed through the typericent pages, she saw for herself a future she had never imagined.

It opened a door for me. I saw a whole new game there. How to control behavior, how to build behavior, how to teach skills, all of that.

With a little set of clear cut rules that would work with anything.

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