By revisiting the work of Kathy Sierra, of Creating Passionate Users fame, I followed the breadcrumb trail to the new O'Reilly book series she helped to shape: Head First. The Head First Labs blog reveals some of the research and approach employed in these "brain-friendly guides"; I'll try to summarize their strategy as it's presented in the book I purchased, Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML.

To be clear, these are learning guides: it's not enough to get it -- they seek to make us retain it. First, they employ several strategies that will be familiar to those who've studied instructional design:

• Use 80/20: Cover the 80% that learners need -- don't attempt 100% coverage, as documentation does.
• Use multiple learning styles (e.g., steps + big picture + code examples), which dovetails into...
• Use redundancy: say same thing in different ways, with different media, with different senses, to give the content better odds of penetrating and sticking.
• Use activities, because brains are tuned to learn by doing. Keep to the sweet spot, of quickly doable but not trivially easy.
• Use challenges (puzzles, questions, exercises), so that active mental effort reinforces the learning (unlike the effort expended staying awake through difficult prose).

Very good practice, but that's only half of the strategy -- the other half is where the fun begins. Head First deliberately employs strategies that take advantage of how our social, adaptive, and creative primate brains work:

• Use people: literally, photos of people; particularly, photos of faces. Our brains pay great attention to those.
• Use pictures, because our brains are optimized for processing them; embedding text into the pictures is easiest for us to process.
• Use stories, and present multiple points of view. Our brains learn deeply when forced to evaluate and judge.
• Use conversations. Our brains pay close attention to keeping up with our side of a conversation, even when it's happening on paper!
• Use both right/left brain appeals; this engagement helps prolong focus, and alternating right (holistic, visual) and left (analytical, verbal) gives each side a rest.
• Use the unexpected: surprise, humor, emotion, interest-grabbers. These things help us feel, and feeling is a powerful channel into long-term memory.

It strikes me that many of these ideas have already been exploited to great advantage by Wiley's "Dummies" series, so I'll be looking at and comparing the two series. All in all, I find these learner-friendly approaches very compelling and worth studying!

But that's not all. Still another dimension of their approach is coaching the learners about what behaviors they can employ to help themselves succeed in mastering the new information:

• Go slow: read, pause, think.
• Write as you go: do the exercises, scribble notes. The physical act of writing itself helps you learn.
• Read before sleep: transfer to long-term memory happens after reading stops, so reading just before bed gives your brain time to process and digest.
• Drink water: dehydration (which you often can't detect) slows down your brain.
• Talk about it: speaking out loud helps with both comprehension and retention.
• Stop when you're full (signs = skimming, not recalling): an overloaded brain doesn't retain.
• Engage emotionally: groan at the jokes, think of captions for the photos -- anything to make you feel something, which makes your brain pay attention to the content.
• Apply and create: the sooner you can apply the knowledge or solve an existing problem from what you've learned, the faster you'll nail it into long-term memory.