Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
HOW YOU SHOULD THINK ABOUT LEARNING AND MEMORY
Picture this: a donkey is pulling a two-wheeled cart. Hundreds of people run around the cart dumping stuff into it until the cart gets so heavy it lifts the donkey into the air. That's what I feel it is like to work and live in a world that overflows with information. Do you feel that way sometimes too?
In terms of Information Theory, we get bombarded with up to 100 million bits of information per second, but we can only consciously process at most about 45 bits per second. In terms of working memory, which is what we think with, our capacity is at most about 16 bits. And we're supposed to be effective learners and have good memories?
This chapter explains why learning and memory are more important today than ever before — Google notwithstanding. Schools are failing, jobs get more technical and complex, the workplace is more competitive, and we seem to have less time. Is it any wonder that people like you are looking for more effective ways to learn and remember?
Fortunately, in the face of increased demand on our brains, we are not limited to the learning and memory strategies and tactics of the past. Today, as this chapter points out, we are being helped by the discoveries of brain research, "neuroscience" as it is called. This chapter explains the role of neuroscience in improving our learning and memory abilities and the new trend of "neuro-education," which is a movement to apply the findings of neuroscience to schools.
This chapter also explains something we don't think enough about. What we learn and remember largely determines our attitudes, our character, our abilities — and even our brain!
Finally, the chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book by explaining what we know about learning and memory, such as how they relate to each other, where memory is located in the brain and the kinds of memory and how they differ.
Learning and Memory in Everyday Life
"Mommy, Grandma can't find her glasses. Have you seen them?"
"I know we've met somewhere — I'm sorry, but I can't remember your name."
"I know I came to the kitchen for a reason. What was I looking for?"
"Professor, I studied like a demon for this test and I still barely passed. What am I doing wrong?"
These common problems in today's culture were less prevalent in ancient times. Before the advent of written language and means of large-scale printing, whole cultures were transmitted from generation to generation by prodigious feats of memory. Greek orators, for example, memorized speeches and stories lasting seven hours or more. I will tell you how they did that later.
But who needs memory skills today? Not only do we have books where we can look something up, but now we can always just "Google it." But Google can't learn a foreign language for you. What about students trying to pass high-stakes exams? Google isn't enough. And can Google make businesspeople more knowledgeable and competent?
Being able to find information is not the same as knowing it. Access to the Internet is not always available or practical. Looking stuff up instead of memorizing it breeds mental laziness, which I think is a major problem with today's schoolchildren. Memory needs exercise or it atrophies like a muscle. Memory-contest competitors train for months to become mental athletes, but when they stop training, their memory capability shrivels back to a more ordinary level.
Being able to find information is not the same as knowing it.
More importantly, memory is crucial for powerful thinking. I will explain that in Chapter III when discussing "working memory" and how to train it. Here I would like to discuss some of the negative attitudes about the value of memory, often held by those in education who think emphasis on memory is old-fashioned and we should focus on teaching children to be creative and critical thinkers. I agree that the ultimate goal should be to teach people how to think, solve problems, and create. Central to these capabilities, however, is the ability to remember things.
Think about all the time and money we spend trying to learn, whether it's in school, on the job, or anywhere else. What good is it trying to learn something if you don't remember it? The only benefit I can think of is that such temporary learning makes it easier to learn something a second time.
The more one knows (remembers), the more intellectual competencies one has to draw upon for thinking, problem solving, and even creativity. Society does not need a workforce of trained seals, but it needs people with knowledge and skills that they can apply appropriately to different situations. US manufacturing company executives are complaining that, since manufacturing technology is so complicated, they have to rely on foreign workers who have better educational backgrounds than most US students do. The same problem exists for recruiters to graduate education programs at US colleges of engineering.
Think back to your school days. How many teachers explicitly taught you how to remember effectively and efficiently? Your teachers may have used a couple of acrostics and limericks, or warned you not to cram, but chances are that was the extent of your formal education in how to learn. The emphasis in school is always on what to learn. Who teaches how to learn?
The problem is that learning is hard for so many people. They have not learned much about how to learn from parents or teachers, or on their own. When learning is hard it's not fun, so they avoid learning until it is absolutely necessary. These people miss out on all the fun and rewards of lifelong learning.
Maybe you are a student trying to make better grades, especially with less effort. Maybe your work requires you to have a good memory, and you are not advancing in your career because of memory limitations. Maybe you have reached the stage of life when you begin to worry about your memory and that is why you have sought this book.
Let's be honest. The vast majority of us have problems with our memory. Politicians know this; they must remember many people, especially their benefactors. Businesspeople who must remember key details about their business and their clients know this. Shoppers who forget to pick up certain groceries know this. Professional football players know how hard it is to memorize the playbook. Students who have to prepare for exams know this. When I was younger, competing for good grades in school, and later competing to get into and excel in veterinary college, I quickly learned I had to work on improving my memory. Now, as I age, I have lost some of the memory capability of my youth.
Whatever memory failings we have are due to failure to use our innate memory capabilities to their full potential. The reason is mostly a matter of faulty education. In some cases we have been told erroneous things about memory, but, for the most part, we haven't been taught much about memory at all.
Learning and remembering open doors to new experiences, new career possibilities, new achievements, and new rewards and benefits. Knowledge and the insights that go with it move us from a narrow, shallow life into a big, expansive one. Our world becomes larger and more fulfilling.
Learning is the reason that humans dominate the planet. Our extraordinary ability to learn enables us to live in hostile environments, cope with difficult situations, solve new problems, and create new tools and procedures.
Humans have a special gift for learning how to learn. The more we learn, the more learning skills we acquire. And learning is self-reinforcing: the more we learn and remember, the stronger and faster our capacity for learning becomes.
Learning effectiveness depends on several things:
Degree of interest and enjoyment. Too often, people have limited interests, which limit what they learn. It pays to develop interest in many things. The drive to learn is killed by telling yourself that something is uninteresting or boring. Schoolchildren and young adults do this routinely.
Paying attention and thinking about what you are trying to learn. Thinking involves relating new information to existing knowledge by asking and attempting to answer questions. This is a part of the next item in this list.
Actively engage. This relates to the idea of learning by doing, either mentally or physically. Strive to identify meaning and gain insight. Getting involved with and applying what you are trying to learn is much more effective than passively watching a video or listening to a lecture without taking notes or otherwise engaging with the material. This point applies to lazy reading, too.
Striving for continuous improvement of learning skills and knowledge expansion. Learning-to-learn skills are cumulative and, I think, super-additive. Without continual striving to become a better learner, you will reach an "OK" plateau that keeps you from expanding your learning and memory capabilities. You will never know the satisfaction and joy you have missed.
Knowing memorization principles and tricks. There are lots of techniques to help you absorb new information, many of which will be discussed later in this book.
Confronting challenging learning material. When you make a conscious decision to learn hard material, you can move out of your OK plateau and begin expanding your learning and memory capabilities. Deliberate practice must be difficult in order to gain maximum benefit. It's like the physical-exercise mantra: "no pain, no gain."
I concede that networking and knowing important people can open many doors of opportunity, but at some point you have to produce in order to get ahead. And that requires certain skills, and all skills require knowledge. This truth was enshrined in the famous quote from the classic 1982 best-seller, In Search of Excellence: career people typically "rise to their level of incompetence." In other words, at some point in a career, your level of knowledge and skill limits how far you progress.
Competence matters and competence comes from your ability to learn and remember. Capacity to learn is itself a learned skill, one that this book aims to teach. Employers have always understood this principle, which is why they typically prefer to hire college graduates, even for menial jobs. The assumption is that if you can graduate from college, you have at least demonstrated some minimal capacity for learning how to learn. However, my nearly fifty years of experience as a college professor has taught me not to be too sanguine about this assumption. Graduating from college in many curricula doesn't demand much these days. Post-graduate studies are a different matter. The Ph.D. degree obtained from a rigorous graduate program signifies that the holder has substantial learning and discovery skills.
In high school and lower college levels, students tend to focus on learning for short term retention, just long enough to pass the next exam. In the real world, what matters is not what you once knew, but what you know now.
I began to learn these lessons in the seventh grade, but not for the most noble of reasons. My seventh grade teacher, Ms. Torti, was a real babe. My hormones were surging at that stage, and I developed a crush on her. But the student she paid the most attention to was the "teacher's pet," a girl who always knew the right answers and made the top grades. If that is how the game was played, I decided I must find a way to get Ms. Torti's attention by making good grades. So I tried. The more my hormones churned, the harder I worked, and the more I thought about how to create and optimize an approach to learning. And it worked. Of course, I never got anywhere with Ms. Torti, but I did discover that I could make good grades if I thought hard enough about how to do it. From the seventh grade until I graduated from high school, I never made a grade in any subject less than an A (with only a couple of exceptions, that also applied to seven years of college course work). And this was before today's era of grade inflation.
One high-school teacher (who never had me in class) said my good grades were a fluke, not truly representative, because I had a modest IQ score. He and other teachers called me an "overachiever" as if that were a dirty word. At least one teacher openly predicted I would have trouble in college. Oh really? These teachers didn't know how well I knew how to learn. I performed exceptionally well academically. This book shares a lot of what I learned about learning.
Knowledge is power, and is accessible to everyone who knows how to get it.
The Role for Neuroscience
Where do we get our ideas about improving learning and memory? In the old days, the advice in memory books originated from anecdotes and informal trial-and-error experiences. Today, we can add to such advice rigorously tested ideas in scientific experiments. Most of these new ideas come from the field of neuroscience — the study of the brain and psychology. And these ideas are beginning to find their way into educational practice. As I was finishing the final drafts of this book, I attended a great "neuro-education" conference in Aspen, Colorado. Neuro-education is a hot new movement based on applying discoveries about brain function to teaching practices. Actually, this is what I have been doing since 2004 with my efforts to find the practical applications of memory research and explain them to the public.
You would never guess who the conference's keynote speaker was. It was Goldie Hawn. Yes, I mean the famous actress many of us think of as the ditsy blonde in TV shows like Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and movies like Private Benjamin. She is a grandmother now, but still vivacious and attractive. Goldie has created a neuroscience-based educational foundation and teaching program called "MindUP" which is designed to improve learning in elementary school children (see http://www.thehawnfoundation.org/mindup).
Her program espouses some of the things that are central to neuroscience-based education. Elementary school teachers are using her approach not only to teach neuroscience (see, brain research is not arcane), they also teach kids to be more introspective about how their thoughts, feelings, and actions affect their brain and how it learns.
Showing kids how to recognize and control their feelings and behavior is a key part of neuro-education. The experts refer to this capability as "executive function," which they ascribe to the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The PFC is the part of the brain that is most developed in higher primates such as chimps, apes and humans. As such, the PFC is certainly crucial to executive brain functions. However, I and many other researchers have shown that higher cognitive functions arise from widespread concerted action across many parts of the cerebral cortex (the outer surface of the brain).
Anyway, from a teaching perspective, what is important about executive function training is that kids need to learn how to be more self-aware and self-controlled. Goldie's program emphasizes teaching kids to recognize when they are wired, distracted, upset, angry, or have other emotions that interfere with their learning. By being more self-aware, they have a better chance to control themselves. Research in neuro-education also includes such things as reasoning training, improving working memory and long-term memory consolidation and retrieval, and treatments for reading disabilities and ADHD.
At the same conference I met Nobel Prize physicist, Carl Wieman, now Associate Director for Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. His talk stressed the need for educators to emphasize concepts and principles to their students. This is an emphasis throughout this book: optimal learning and memory requires more than memorizing bullet points, gimmicks, and short-cuts (though you'll find plenty of those here, too). Another point Dr. Wieman made was that everybody who has gone to school tends to think they are an expert in learning. But he emphasized, "Novices seldom recognize what they do not know, especially in education." This is a problem not only with politicians and educational policy makers, but also the typical person's attitude about learning and memory. Too many people think that, when it comes to learning and memory, they are what they are and it's too late to change. This book should prove that it is possible to improve learning and memory capabilities regardless of where you are right now.
We all know that US education is in crisis. Many think the solution is to spend more money. But there is plenty of non-partisan research showing no correlation between funding and educational achievement. The solution is to stop doing things that don't work and do more of what does. Neuro-education principles are crucial to effective reform.
In developing countries, education problems run even deeper, as ignorance and illiteracy are common in burgeoning populations. Surveys by the UN's Development Program indicate that under-education is prevalent in nations that are widely considered seedbeds of economic dependency, dysfunctional governments, and extreme political unrest. When I spoke with Helen Abadzi, education specialist and senior evaluation officer at the UN World Bank (and fellow Auburn graduate), she told me about the many neuroscience-based reform initiatives the Bank is pursuing in developing countries. The social and economic costs of ignorance cannot be overstated.
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Excerpted from "Memory Power 101"
by .
Copyright © 2012 William Klemm.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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