Unfortunately it isn't. Many students feel if they don't get it rapidly its because they're stupid or proof that they'll never understand it. A quick way to disprove this is to spend some time with a 5 year old who's learning to read. It's slow and difficult but we all get there in the end.

We need to be patient with ourselves and give ourselves the time and space to learn. In the end it won't matter if we're a bit faster or slower than our friends, just that we get there.

We explore this misconception by figuring out why my poor mother can't check her email. I will be in deep trouble if she ever reads this page but the question of why a successful professional woman can't do what most 1st year students can is an interesting one. 

In the end, a lot of learning is about connecting the new material we are faced with to things we already know. These connections are crucial to understanding, remembering and being able to recall the information later. While it is possible to memorise isolated facts its very hard and time consuming. Most of the time, there's no need because there are connections everywhere once we take the time to look. 

The world is regularly telling us we shouldn't do this yet, let's be honest, we all think we can do it just fine. Rather than yet another message about how we shouldn't do this, we carry out a little science experiment where we do two simple tasks one after the other and then compare our performance when doing both simultaneously. It's simple but surprisingly effective.

For those interested in delving deeper into the science, the evidence from research into multitasking shows strongly that we are less effective when multitasking than when focusing one task. Interestingly, the reason why we think we can do it is that one of the ways our brain deals with the extra load of multitasking is to stop monitoring how well we're doing each task, therefore we literally don't notice the drop in our performance. The one time when we can multitask is when one of the tasks is learned to the point of automaticity - that means we know it so well that we no longer have to consciously think about it. However, the time that we absolutely can't multitask is when learning something new. 

Are some people born good at maths, others good at football and some poor sods good at nothing? Many people would say yes but the research into this area would disagree. This topic draws heavily on the work of Carol Dweck with the idea of Growth Mindsets and this would be a key underlying concept in the whole study skill programme. You may look around the classroom and see others who appear much better at a certain subject that you however history is littered with many people who did great things but were rather unimpressive in their younger years. What made them great was not how fast they got there but the work they put in along the way.

We explore this through the (rather hardcore) experiment on this topic by Laszlo Polgar with his three daughters. To explore this yourself, check out the excellent National Geographic documentary on Laszlo's experiment to create a chess grandmaster.