“There is no harm in repeating a good thing.” Plato
We receive messages from all corners that in order to live a rich, full life, we should accumulate as many new experiences as possible. Most of us are happy attending the same celebrations year after year, or taking vacations to the same places, we lovingly work with the same people for years, and look forward to the same takeout every Friday. But our modern economy encourages us to do exactly the opposite.
While ancient philosophers like Plato may have wisely sung praises of repetition, adults typically don’t celebrate or revel in doing the same things over again.
We read books and then file them away on the shelf. 📚
🎥 We watch movies or shows through to the end, maybe some of us listen to podcasts, but likely never return to watch or listen to them again. 🍿
We might even roll our eyes when we hear people retell the same story, or share the same joke because ….if you already know the ending, what’s the point? ✏️
Ingrid Fettell Lee recently shared an observation of her new baby. Her reminder? Babies love nothing more than to do the same thing again and again. They’ll happily play with the same toy, read the same books, or knock down the same pile of blocks, whether it’s the first or the hundredth time they’ve done it. In fact, for babies, many things seem to become more joyful the more they are repeated.
We’re quick to dismiss those who like to eat the same meals, travel to the same places, engage in routines. We even see terms like repetition and repetitiveness as negative, and new and novelty as positive. But witnessing the joy that babies find in repetition, we are reminded that there’s an often overlooked delight in the familiar.
The bottom line: everyday life is far more interesting to actually live than how it plays out in our minds. And repetition helps us learn, live and love in multi-layered and deep ways.
This powerful lecture by Cornel West on W.E.B. Dubois speaks to the powers of repetition in both its content and delivery.
School of Thought of the Week
According to research published in the Journal of Experimental Biology we’re predisposed to thinking that new experiences are more exciting and attention-grabbing than repeat experiences. As the human story goes, evolution designed us to find novelty compelling.
Our brains are hard-wired to pay extra attention to firsts – to stay alert to possible dangers, to derive lessons from the unknown. It’s fight or flight psychology — our brains can’t process all the stimuli around us, so we evolved to pay attention to new, flashy and potentially dangerous things more intently than familiar things, which we’ve seen enough to know they’re not dangerous.
When we do something we’ve done many times before, we’re less attentive – and our minds retain less from the cognitive experience. BUT this is the REASON that there is unexpected joy in repetition. Our minds are primed to wander. Consequently, we miss a substantial part of every experience.
Repetition is GOOD. And not because sameness lulls us into a comfortable trance, but because we discover new things we’ve missed first time around. Repetition has a singular way of enchanting and implanting on the brain.
the big idea
Repetitio mater studiorum est. Repetition is the mother of all learning.
We love this phrase at School of Thought, because maximizing repetitions is one of the cornerstones of foundational learning, living and loving. And there is compelling research that backs up this folk truth with hard data. Not only that, but research confirms that people frequently underestimate how much they’ll enjoy a repeat experience, such as a museum exhibit, movie, or restaurant.
As researcher Ed O’Brien puts it: “Doing something once may engender an inflated sense that one has now seen ‘it’, leaving people naive to the missed nuances remaining to enjoy.” It’s less a question of loving the familiar, then, than of discovering it wasn’t so familiar after all.
Repetition enables us to listen to our world and ourselves, to build healthy habits in our brains, and to truly grasp both big ideas and small.
How does delight in repetition translate to other areas of learning and life?
Making Big Ideas Usable
Repetition is everywhere.It’s in our jobs, our learning experiences, our daily routines. This need for ritual and familiarity is deep-rooted in the recesses of the human brain. So why is repetition so important to us? In what ways – good and bad – does it affect us?
1) exposure increases preference
There is in fact a psychological phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect. This effect (also known as the familiarity principle), suggests that simply being repeatedly exposed to a person, thing, or idea increases our liking for it.
We yearn for more than just learning, innovating and achieving, of course. But there, too, the things that make life worthwhile – friendship, for instance, or love – are inconceivable without repetition. Psychologists have known for at least half a century that “repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus object” causes positive changes to our attitude to that stimulus.
2) repetition helps see the familiar anew
French author Marcel Proust says, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Doing things again is at least as important as doing things for the first time. We do the vast majority of things more times, many more, than once. In fact, first times stand out because repetition is the norm. Our brains are excellent pattern matchers, and this helps memories grow deep roots.
But repetition isn’t just the background against which the new stands out. It’s often a necessary condition for it.
Have you ever read two articles on the same topic? Or, maybe more than one book on the same topic?
Many times the books and articles I enjoy the most are those that shine fresh light on an old idea, that vuja de lightbulb. There are articles that have me nodding, and smiling in agreement and recognition. It’s very rare for me to initially enjoy something that’s a wholly novel idea. Many times interest happens when a new angle is introduced, fitting new puzzle pieces together, rather than by saying something entirely new each time.
Having knowledge of the plot of a book or a movie, for example, frees us to focus more on the characters or the setting of a story. Knowing that we like a particular recipe allows us to pay more attention to mixing it up, or savor the layered flavors.
3) spaced repetition is effective for memory
Learning through rote memorization is tedious and—more importantly—ineffective. If we want to remember something, we need to work with our brains, not against them.
This is where the spacing effect comes in. Ideally, this results in knowing something by heart, not by rote. Spaced Repetition equals sticky learning.
“It’s a wildly useful phenomenon,” according to Benedict Carey in his new book, How We Learn. We are better able to recall information and concepts if we learn them in multiple, spread-out sessions. We can leverage this effect by using spaced repetition to slowly learn almost anything.
It works for words, numbers, images, and skills. It works for anyone of any age, from babies to elderly people. The effect cuts across disciplines and can be used to learn anything from artistic styles to mathematical equations.
Shane Parrish shares how it works: If you are trying to commit something to memory, try repeating the information throughout the day, at increasing intervals. For example, you might first look at a word on a flashcard, and repeat it in your head a few times. Then look at it one minute later. Then five minutes later, then ten, and so on. Here is a useful guide for more.
4) repetition motivates action
We almost never take action the first time we hear something.
As Jeff Weiner, CEO of Linkedin remarked in an interview:
“A friend of mine once paraphrased David Gergen, saying on the subject of repetition, “If you want to get your point across, especially to a broader audience, you need to repeat yourself so often, you get sick of hearing yourself say it. And only then will people begin to internalize what you’re saying.”
Why does action rarely happen in a first encounter?
You might see an article (or a blog post) and think it looks interesting, but get distracted. You might see it again and download it… but pop it in the ‘read it later’ list. Then another prompt about the same piece might trigger you to actually read it.
Repetition is important as a reminder to take action. For more, check out Impactivism.
5) ichigo ichie- repetition not sameness
A Japanese phrase, ichigo ichie can be translated as 'once, a meeting' and also as 'in this moment, an opportunity'. This means that each meeting and everything we experience is a unique treasure that will never be repeated in the same way again.
While the phrase more closely translates to paying attention and celebrating the moments, it also extends to the fact that even in doing things again, repetition does not mean sameness. Each time you ….see a piece of art, teach a class, spend time with a friend…you are different. This moment right now, will never happen again.
6) ritual repetitions bring happiness and calm
Lorna Denton, a mindfulness practitioner and clinical psychologist, asserts that it’s not the ritual itself that works, per se, but the state of mind repetitions create.
Specific rituals help us deal with potentially stressful situations and by taking a few deep breaths or adopting the Superhero stance (an ‘X’ shape, legs out wide, fists punching the air) we can bring reassurance, improve confidence and performance.
Perhaps even more compelling, a ritualized mantra can quiet the mind. A 2015 study in the journal “Brain and Behavior” showed that silently repeating a single word led to a widespread reduction in activity across the brain, primarily in the “default mode network,” which is responsible for self-judgment and self-reflection.
A healthy bit of repetition helps ground us.
7) repeated failure + attention = growth
How do we acquire a skill, hone it, develop it and make it our own? From riding a bicycle to learning to write persuasively, from learning lines for a play to engaging in a new exercise routine, what is the one constant variable? Repetition. Continued practice. And failure.
Ok, I suppose that’s two, but aren’t they invariably linked? Without failure, we cannot succeed. To quote Alfred the Butler in Batman Begins; “Why do we fall down Mr. Wayne? So we can learn to pick ourselves up again.”
8)repetition rewires the brain
It’s through repetition that we rewire our brains. Doing something over and over, no matter how small, has a huge power.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear, shares that when you look at goals this way, you start to realize that setting up a system for putting your reps in is more important than choosing a goal.
Everyone wants to make progress. And there is only one way to do it: put in your reps.
The goal is just an event — something that you can't totally control or predict. But the reps are what can make the event happen. If you ignore the outcomes and focus only on the repetitions, you'll still get results. If you ignore the goals and build habits instead, the outcomes will be there anyway.
Forget about the goals this year. What is your plan for getting in the reps you need? What is your schedule for putting in a volume of work on the things that are important to you?
We would love to hear from you: What is an idea, big or small, that you have now that you didn’t have at the start of this article?
🌟 Scrolling...
4 Causes for Zoom Fatigue (and Their Solutions) | Stanford
How to Identify and Tell Your Most Powerful Stories | Harvard Business Review
Black History Month and Women's History Month are the Same Season for Me | Zora
📚 (re)Reading...
“Wad-Ja-Get? is a unique discussion of grading and its effects on students. Written in the form of a novel, the topic is explored through the eyes of students, teachers, and parents in one high school embroiled in a controversy around grading. Possible alternatives to the grading system are examined. Wad-Ja-Get? remains timely five decades after its original publication, and will be inspiring to students, parents, educators, and policymakers.” Patricia Russell, Mastery Transcript Consortium
In The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, Toni Morrison noted that stillness was an option when dealing with chaos: “Such stillness can appear to be passivity or dumbfoundedness. But sometimes it is prayer. Sometimes it is meditation. Sometimes it is art."
🍿 (re)Watching...Loads of inspired storytelling on the student-run media channel, Poppyn.
🎧 Sharing with the group chat…. “More Breaking Down the Walls between Learning and Life! Octavia Butler is having her moment(s). Parable of the Sower recently made the NYT Bestseller list. And here is her NPR moment.” Mike Pardee, Founding Educator at Revolution School
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