Here is a brief excerpt from Dan Hurley‘s review of Benedict Carey’s recently published book, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens, published by Random House (2014). It appeared in The New York Times (August 22, 2014).To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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A spate of recent best sellers has trumpeted a supposedly surprising secret to success, both in school and in life. It’s called hard work.

In Outliers, a fixture on best-seller lists since it was published in 2008, Malcolm Gladwell assured us that talent and intelligence matter little, but that 10,000 hours of practice in our chosen endeavor is all it takes to become a chess grandmaster, Bill Gates or a rock star as successful as the Beatles.

Taking that can-do message toward a Jillian Michaels level of hysterical intensity was Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011). A similar but gentler approach came from Paul Tough, in How Children Succeed (2012), who described the benefits of grit and character — the ability to overcome and learn from failure. Last year, Amanda Ripley chimed in with The Smartest Kids in the World, showing why students in countries like South Korea perform so well: because they study so much.

Now comes the inevitable counterattack against these purveyors of the hard-work school of schooling. In How We Learn, Benedict Carey tells us to ease up, take a break, get a good night’s sleep and stop the cramming. Instead of beating our brains into submission through 10,000 hours of drudgery, we need to study smarter, not harder.

Carey, a New York Times science reporter, begins his book with a confession: He once was a grind. Like those high-school students in South Korea, he was “the kid who sweated the details, who made flashcards. A striver, a grade-hog, a worker bee.” Then, after being rejected by all but one of the colleges to which he had applied, and dropping out after a year, “I loosened my grip,” he writes. “I stopped sprinting.”

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Dan Hurley is an award-winning science journalist whose 2012 feature in The New York Times Magazine, “Can You Make Yourself Smarter?” was one of the magazine’s most-read articles of the year. Featured in the 2013 PBS documentary feature, “Smarter Brains,” Dan has written on the science of increasing intelligence for the Washington Post and Neurology Today. His previous book, Diabetes Rising, was excerpted in Discover and Wired. He has written nearly two dozen articles for the New York Times since 2005. Dan’s most recent book is Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power. To check out my review of it, please click here.

To learn more about him and his work, please click here.

To learn more about Ben Carey and his work, please click here.