3 Quotes on Surprise That Stuck With Me from Lupe Fiasco’s MIT Lecture, “Rap Theory & Practice”
My fiancé laughed as I took notes while watching Lupe Fiasco lecture in front of an MIT auditorium on the principles of rap.
“What, are you going to learn to rap now or something?”
No, but there’s always something you can learn for someone who is invested in learning themselves. In this case: the role of surprise in the learning process.
3 Quotes on Surprise that stuck with me:
“Surprises not only influence individuals’ attention, learning, memory, attitudes, and behavior; they can also have larger scale social influences. This is because people seem to be interested in sharing surprises with others.”
-Heath, Bell & Sternberg, 2001
This made me reflect on the things I share daily; they all have some element of surprise–a reveal, a punchline, a twist. I’m going to use this tool in future writing.
“Surprising information has been shown to impact what we remember and to facilitate transfer of learning strategies; inducing an uncertain mood like surprise has been found to lead to more systematic processing which might aid learning…”
-Tiedens & Linton, 2001
No one remembers the expected. People remember the double-take, the “can you repeat that one more time”-inducing commentary. This is a reminder to work harder at delivering unexpected value to make memorable content.
“Surprise is evoked by unexpected (schema-discrepant) events and its intensity is determined by the degree of schema-discrepancy…Unexpected events cause an automatic interruption of ongoing mental processes that is followed by an attentional shift and attentional binding to the events, which is often followed by causal and other event analysis processes and by schema revision.”
-Rainer Reisenzein, Gernot Horstmann, Achim Schützwohlc 2016
Anyone who has spent any time reading personal development or habit-building books knows that our behaviors are all-but-automated when they have been repeated enough. This includes the learning process, and this quote is a reminder that a surprise is a way to jog the audience out of autopilot and increase retention.
This lecture’s lesson on using surprise to encourage learning and retention is a reminder that you can find value in unrelated topics simply by looking for it.
Watch the lecture for yourself for free on MIT’s Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBHRsYhYb-o
