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The brain converts your perceptions into chemical and electrical changes that form a mental representation of the patterns you’ve observed. This process of converting sensory perceptions into meaningful representations in the brain is still not perfectly understood. We call the process encoding, and we call the new representations within the brain memory traces.
The process of strengthening these mental representations for long-term memory is called consolidation.
Prior knowledge is a prerequisite for making sense of new learning, and forming those connections is an important task of consolidation.
Consolidation helps organize and solidify learning, and, notably, so does retrieval after a lapse of some time, because the act of retrieving a memory from long-term storage can both strengthen the memory traces and at the same time make them modifiable again, enabling them, for example, to connect to more recent learning. This process is called reconsolidation. This is how retrieval practice modifies and strengthens learning.
First, as we recode and consolidate new material from short-term memory into long-term memory, we must anchor it there securely. Second, we must associate the material with a diverse set of cues that will make us adept at recalling the knowledge later. Having effective retrieval cues is an aspect of learning that often goes overlooked.
Knowledge, skills, and experiences that are vivid and hold significance, and those that are periodically practiced, stay with us.
Knowledge is more durable if it’s deeply entrenched, meaning that you have firmly and thoroughly comprehended a concept, it has practical importance or keen emotional weight in your life, and it is connected with other knowledge that you hold in memory.
The paradox is that some forgetting is often essential for new learning.6
First, that some difficulties that require more effort and slow down apparent gains—like spacing, interleaving, and mixing up practice—will feel less productive at the time but will more than compensate for that by making the learning stronger, precise, and enduring. Second, that our judgments of what learning strategies work best for us are often mistaken, colored by illusions of mastery.
This paradox is at the heart of the concept of desirable difficulties in learning: the more effort required to retrieve (or, in effect, relearn) something, the better you learn it. In other words, the more you’ve forgotten about a topic, the more effective relearning will be in shaping your permanent knowledge.9
During this focused, effortful recall, the learning is made pliable again: the most salient aspects of it become clearer, and the consequent reconsolidation helps to reinforce meaning, strengthen connections to prior knowledge, bolster the cues and retrieval routes for recalling
it later, and weaken competing routes.
It’s the effortful process of reconstructing the knowledge that triggers reconsolidation and deeper learning.
Mental models are forms of deeply entrenched and highly efficient skills (seeing and unloading on a curveball) or knowledge structures (a memorized sequence of chess moves) that, like habits, can be adapted and applied in varied circumstances. Expert performance is built through thousands of hours of practice in your area of expertise, in varying conditions, through which you accumulate a vast library of such mental models that enables you to correctly discern a given situation and instantaneously select and execute the correct response.
It’s thought that this heightened sensitivity to similarities and differences during interleaved practice leads to the encoding of more complex and nuanced representations of the study material—a better understanding of how specimens or types of problems are distinctive and why they call for a different interpretation or solution.
(Of course, learning will not improve if the difficulty completely obscures the meaning or cannot be overcome.)13
It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution. It’s better to attempt a solution and supply the incorrect answer than not to make the attempt.14 The act of taking a few minutes to review what has been learned from an experience (or in a recent class) and asking yourself questions is known as reflection.
Reflection can involve several cognitive activities we have discussed that lead to stronger learning. These include retrieval (recalling recently learned knowledge to mind), elaboration (for example, connecting new knowledge to what you already know), and generation (for example, rephrasing key ideas in your own words or visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time).
Why? It seems that a significant portion of their working memory capacity is expended to monitor their performance (How am I doing? Am I making mistakes?), leaving less working memory capacity available to solve the problems posed by the test. “Working memory” refers to the amount of information you can hold in mind while working through a problem, especially in the face of distraction. Everyone’s working memory is severely limited, some more than others, and larger working memory capacities correlate with higher IQs.
The results support the finding that difficulty can create feelings of incompetence that engender anxiety, which in turn disrupts learning, and that “students do better when given room to struggle with difficulty.”17
As we said earlier, the process of trying to solve a problem without the benefit of having been taught how is called generative learning, meaning that the learner is generating the answer rather than recalling it.
Cognitive scientists know from empirical studies that testing, spacing, interleaving, variation, generation, and certain kinds of contextual interference lead to stronger learning and retention. Beyond that, we have an intuitive sense of what kinds of difficulties are undesirable but, for lack of the needed research, we cannot yet be definitive.
To be desirable, a difficulty must be something learners can overcome through increased effort.
Intuitively it makes sense that difficulties that don’t strengthen the skills you will need, or the kinds of challenges you are likely to encounter in the real-world application of your learning, are not desirable.
Learning is at least a three-step process: initial encoding of information is held in short-term working memory before being consolidated into a cohesive representation of knowledge in long-term memory. Consolidation reorganizes and stabilizes memory traces, gives them meaning, and makes connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long-term memory. Retrieval updates learning and enables you to apply it when you need it.
Long-term memory capacity is virtually limitless: the more you know, the more possible connections you have for adding new knowledge.
Because of the vast capacity of long-term memory, having the ability to locate and recall what you know when you need it is key; your facility for calling up what you know depends on the repeated use of the information (to keep retrieval routes strong) and on your establishing powerful retrieval cues that can reactivate the memories.
Trying to come up with an answer rather than having it presented to you, or trying to solve a problem before being shown the solution, leads to better learning and longer retention of the correct answer or solution, even when your attempted response is wrong, so long as corrective feedback is provided.
Monitoring your own thinking is what psychologists call metacognition (meta is Greek for “about”). Learning to be accurate self-observers helps us to stay out of blind alleys, make good decisions, and reflect on how we might do better next time.
To become more competent, or even expert, we must learn to recognize competence when we see it in others, become more accurate judges of what we ourselves know and don’t know, adopt learning strategies that get results, and find objective ways to track our progress.
Learning when to trust your intuition and when to question it is a big part of how you improve your competence in the world at large and in any field where you want to be expert.
(The British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli once said of a political opponent that his conscience was not his guide but his accomplice.)
Our understanding of the world is shaped by a hunger for narrative that rises out of our discomfort with ambiguity and arbitrary events.
ineluctable
We gravitate to the narratives that best explain our emotions. In this way, narrative and memory become one. The memories we organize meaningfully become those that are better remembered. Narrative provides not only meaning but also a mental framework for imbuing future experiences and information with meaning, in effect shaping new memories to fit our established constructs of the world and ourselves.
Humans do not give greater credence to an objective record of a past event than to their subjective remembering of it, and we are surprisingly insensitive to the ways our particular construals of a situation are unique to ourselves.
Memory has some similarities to a Google search algorithm, in the sense that the more you connect what you learn to what you already know, and the more associations you make to a memory (for example, linking it with a visual image, a place, or a larger story), then the more mental cues you have through which to find and retrieve the memory again later.
Imagination inflation refers to the tendency of people who, when asked to imagine an event vividly, will sometimes begin to believe, when asked about it later, that the event actually occurred.
What psychologists call the curse of knowledge is our tendency to underestimate how long it will take another person to learn something new or perform a task that we have already mastered.
Something you once heard that you hear again later carries a warmth of familiarity that can be mistaken for memory, a shred of something you once knew and cannot quite place but are inclined to believe. In the world of propaganda, this is called “the big lie” technique—even a big lie told repeatedly can come to be accepted as truth.
Fluency illusions result from our tendency to mistake fluency with a text for mastery of its content.
commiserating
triage
Incompetent people lack the skills to improve because they are unable to distinguish between incompetence and competence.
For success everything must go right, but by contrast, failure can be attributed to any number of external causes: it’s easy to blame the tool for what the hand cannot do.
The answer to illusion and misjudgment is to replace subjective experience as the basis for decisions with a set of objective gauges outside ourselves, so that our judgment squares with the real world around us.
People who as a matter of habit extract underlying principles or rules from new experiences are more successful learners than those who take their experiences at face value, failing to infer lessons that can be applied later in similar situations.
tenet
Some of these differences matter a lot—for example, our ability to abstract underlying principles from new experiences and to convert new knowledge into mental structures.
On any list of differences that matter most for learning, the level of language fluency and reading ability will be at or near the top.
