Recipe for Success: How Children Learn

Skills that Contribute to Success (02:31)
Experts identify seven skills that contribute to success: music activity, logical ability, understanding emotions, creativity, narrative ability, spatial awareness, and physical ability. Adults try to learn how to set a timer on a VCR.

Musical Activity (03:09)
Understanding music requires not only a good ear, but also concentration, logical thinking, and memory--all useful tools for success. Learning to play a musical instrument may possibly increase IQ.

Role of Motivation in Learning New Skills (03:55)
A wife is highly motivated and runs her own business. Her husband does only what he likes, and jumps from project to project. He is only motivated by the new and exciting, not the routine and mundane.

What Makes People Motivated? (03:21)
Motivation is "all about rewards." An experiment with six-year-olds reveals that giving children unexpected rewards increases their perseverance in a drawing task.

Tests of Logic (03:30)
In an experiment, parents and children must complete three tests of logic to learn how to get themselves out of a locked room.

Chronic Learning Problems (03:11)
For some people, certain types of learning will always be a struggle. For example, a super achiever in the world of business cannot remember his phone number because he suffers from dyscalculia.

Parents' Confidence About Learning (04:22)
Bullying at school can adversely affect children's confidence, which in turn affects learning abilities. Lack of confidence spins into other areas of people's lives and they may avoid new situations. Others welcome new learning situations.

Recognition of Other People's Emotions (03:10)
Understanding other people is a key ingredient to success. Children identify emotions on an animated figure. In real life, one-fifth of humans have trouble identifying complex emotions by reading faces and body language of other people.

Creativity and Adaptability (02:39)
Being creative is about making unlikely associations between things. The more elaborate thinking is, the more creative ideas are. Questions can encourage creative thinking. Most people reach their creative peak in their late 30s.

Memory Improvement Through Story-Telling (03:51)
The winner of the world memory championship and record-holder for memorizing binary numbers knows the secret to success. He associates images with the things he wants to remember. With 300 pictures in his head, he can memorize 3000 ones and zeroes in a sequence.

Spatial Awareness: Imagine, Visualize, and Remember (04:20)
Families use a flight simulator to learn how to fly a plane. Five-year-old children have difficulty. Older children and parents do best. Spatial awareness skills are essential to this task.

Importance of Concentration (04:28)
The ability to concentrate is key to managing spatial awareness. Thinking about a numbers problem distracts a driver's eyes from his task and he loses control of the car.

Synesthesia: Linked Sensory Experiences (04:09)
Synesthesia is a neurologically-based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory pathway. For example, a woman 'sees' music, and a man 'tastes' words.

Learning with the Senses (03:16)
Do sensory experiences enhance learning? Five-year-old children try to earn five new Polish words. They are allowed to smell, taste, and touch the foods they are learning to name.

Easiest Learning Stages: Teens and Twenties (02:37)
On flight simulator tests of three generations of families, five-year-olds performed worse than the grandparents. The easiest learning times are in the teens and twenties. Teens have coordination, competence, and motivation.

Tests of Physical Ability and Visualization (02:07)
Families learn disco dancing and are encouraged to visualize the steps until they return. By practicing in their minds, the next practice session goes much better. The brain is a learning machine that is always changing.