A Mind for Numbers

Engineering professor Barbara Oakley, who struggled with math before retraining her own brain, lays out the science of how people learn difficult material. She explains the interplay of focused and diffuse thinking, how the brain builds and links chunks of knowledge, why procrastination undermines learning, and how to avoid the illusion of competence. Though framed around math and science, the techniques apply to learning anything new, and the book treats the mind as adaptable rather than fixed, a view that underpins Epstein's argument that people can move into unfamiliar fields and still excel.