Grokking the Brain: What AI Reveals About How You Learn • Barbara Oakley • GOTO Copenhagen 2026

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2026. #GOTOcon #GOTOcph Join us at GOTO Copenhagen 2027, October 4–8. https://gotocph.com/2027?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=cph26-talks Barbara Oakley - Professor of Engineering at Oakland University @BarbaraOakley RESOURCES https://x.com/Barbara97881398 https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbaraoakley/ https://barbaraoakley.com/ https://gotopia.tech/experts/1554/barbara-oakley ABSTRACT Train an AI model long past the point where it has memorized its examples, and something strange happens — it stops memorizing and suddenly "groks" the pattern beneath them. That hard-won pattern can then be "distilled" into a smaller, faster model that runs it with ease. These are ideas from AI — but they may give us our clearest view yet of the human brain. We grok a hard skill slowly, with conscious effort, then distill it into a fast, automatic system that needs no effort at all. That is what expertise is. The same “machinery” has a quieter side. A model is aligned by its training data — and in an analogous fashion, so are humans. Give me a child to the age of seven, the old saying goes, and I'll show you the adult. But adults are aligned too, usually without knowing it — and a brain aligned a little too well can harden into a mental fortress, deflecting new ideas. Curiosity provides a way out. Dopamine—reward-based learning—fuels the brain's ability to rewire — it helps us build new links, keeps the fortress gate open, and keeps hard-won knowledge from setting into a wall. We'll look at what all this means for how you learn, how you use AI, and how you keep thinking for yourself in an age that makes it easy not to. TIMECODES 00:00 Intro 00:50 Ernst Strüngmann Forum - Cognitive Offloading 03:04 Who Am I? 06:15 The Transformer - Flow of information 08:45 Here Is Our Brain - The neuron 13:40 AI Shows, But I'm the only one who KNOWS - Science of learning 22:42 Theta - The deterioration of the brain with time 25:22 Working Memory - Human and AI longterm memory 33:48 The FLynn Effect - Dopamine in curiosity 39:38 How can we get ourselves curious - Ask ChatGBT 41:00 How you can use this 49:30 Outro - Thanks for listening Download slides and read the full abstract here: https://gotocph.com/2026/sessions/4125 https://bsky.app/profile/gotocon.com https://www.linkedin.com/company/goto- https://www.instagram.com/goto_con #GOTOcph #GOTO #[topic] #[topic] #[SpeakerName] HEAR TALKS LIKE THIS LIVE GOTO Copenhag