Conventional and outdated wisdom asserts that we each have 'learning styles' unique to ourselves. The implication is that if you don't learn using your preferred style you'll fail to acquire the knowledge desired. It also allows you an excuse not to work hard at learning something new.

In Soft-Wired, however, Michael Merzenich shows that the plasticity of the brain extends to the way we learn. In other words, we can learn how to learn. Indeed, we should focus strongly on doing this.

As well as reading or attending lectures, look at cultivating different learning styles or, more precisely, learning strategies. Micromastery enables you to experiment and use a vast array of different learning strategies. Since all are designed to succeed brilliantly (with a modicum of persistence) at the micromastery concerned, you have a perfect chance to increase your store of potential learning strategies.

This in turn increases your ideational fluency, your ability to switch between idea sets that may be opposed or contradictory. If one strategy doesn't seem to work, no matter how wedded you are to it, you switch seamlessly to another. Ideational fluency is an attribute required of anyone working in a fast-changing, rapid-learning environment, the kind increasingly encountered today.