If you’ve ever zoned out during a lecture, or if your students are prone to distraction as you click through your PowerPoint deck, that’s partly because we’re hard-wired not to focus intently for longer than ten or fifteen minutes at a time. Our bodies, after all, were evolved to master survival in nature, rather than staring at glowing bullet points on a screen.
That’s the argument made by Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University, who spends a lot of time these days thinking about how people learn.
