Retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving and other interventions improve learning, but—and this is key—we tend to be unaware of it. There is value in understanding and deploying these studying strategies precisely because they defy our intuitions.

5.  Make it Stick  by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel

Straight-A is easily the best of Cal’s student-oriented trilogy. Cal derived the content and strategies he recommends from his interviews with relaxed, high-achieving students. He offers concrete, practical advice for getting through college without burning out.

1.  How to Become a Straight-A Student  by Cal Newport

This book argues for the importance of background knowledge, the crucial role attention plays in memory, and how cognition changes as we become more proficient.

4.  Why Don’t Students Like School?  by Daniel Willingham

While Ashman’s advice—that teachers should fully and thoroughly teach their subjects—don’t sound surprising, it’s an important message because of the alternative theories it rejects. This book is a must-read if you’ve ever struggled with teaching or learning.

6.  The Power of Explicit Teaching and Direct Instruction  by Greg Ashman

Gray’s book is a highly-readable summary that highlights some interesting research on how we might learn motor skills better.⠀

8.  How We Learn to Move  by Rob Gray

Ahrens’s book is a helpful guide to zettelkasten as it’s a bit more nitty-gritty in the implementation details. If you want to know how to organize the things you learn, this book is a great place to start.

9.  How to Take Smart Notes  by Sönke Ahrens

In this book, Ericsson works to set the record straight, arguing both for what deliberate practice is and what it isn’t. Ericsson argues that much of the prowess we see in elite performers is due to huge quantities of this specific kind of practice rather than talent alone.

7.  Peak  by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

This book is an engaging tour through the science of learning led by one of the world’s leading cognitive neuroscientists. Dehaene elegantly links research on how we learn to the science of how the brain works.

3.  How We Learn  by Stanislas Dehaene

Joshua Foer dives into the strange world of super-memorizers. Using mnemonic systems, these people can memorize decks of cards, random digits or entire poems perfectly in around the same time it takes you or I to read them.

10.  Moonwalking with Einstein  by Joshua Foer

In A Mind for Numbers , Oakley shares how to tackle difficult quantitative subjects—even if you’ve struggled with math in the past. Oakley speaks from experience, having gone from a self-described “language person” to getting a PhD in engineering.

8. How We Learn to Move by Rob Gray

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Work to learn.

The HMV (How Might We) Question