How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

by Benedict Carey

And it’s when the brain lives with studied material that it reveals its strengths and weaknesses—its limitations and immense possibilities—as a learning machine.

It has a strong preference for meaning over randomness, and finds nonsense offensive.

they are all small alterations, alterations in how we study or practice that we can apply individually, in our own lives, right now.

Yet we work more effectively, scientists have found, when we continually alter our study routines and abandon any “dedicated space” in favor of varied locations. Sticking to one learning ritual, in other words, slows us down.

Studies find that the brain picks up patterns more efficiently when presented with a mixed bag of related tasks than when it’s force-fed just one, no matter the age of the student or the subject area, whether Italian phrases or chemical bonds.

I will argue that integrating learning into the more random demands of life can improve recall in many circumstances—and that what looks like rank procrastination or distraction often is nothing of the kind.

Yet we now know that a brief distraction can help when we’re stuck on a math problem or tied up in a creative knot and need to shake free.

It’s that there are different strategies, each uniquely suited to capturing a particular type of information. A good hunter tailors the trap to the prey.

Dyslexia improves pattern recognition. Bilingual kids are better learners. Math anxiety is a brain disorder. Games are the best learning tool. Music training enhances science aptitude.

No, this book is about something that is, at once, more humble and more grand: How to integrate the exotica of new subjects into daily life, in a way that makes them seep under our skin. How to make learning more a part of living and less an isolated chore.

with a storage capacity, in digital terms, of a million gigabytes.

That memory exists in the brain as a network of linked cells.

neurons.

synapses,

episodic, or autobiographical memory,

semantic memories,

Some molecular bookmark keeps those neuron networks available for life and gives us nothing less than our history, our identity.

motor learning,

Without a functioning hippocampus, people cannot form new, conscious memories.

The left hemisphere was the intellectual, the wordsmith, and it could be severed from the right without any significant loss of IQ. The right side was the artist, the visual-spatial expert. The two worked together, like copilots.

The more experiments that scientists did, the more specializing they found, and all of these mini-programs run at the same time, often across both hemispheres. That is, the brain sustains a sense of unity not only in the presence of its left and right copilots. It does so amid a cacophony of competing voices coming from all quarters,

The left hemisphere takes whatever information it gets and tells a tale to conscious awareness. It does this continually in daily life, and we’ve all caught it in the act—overhearing our name being whispered, for example, and filling in the blanks with assumptions about what people are gossiping about.

“the interpreter.”

The brain does not store facts, ideas, and experiences like a computer does, as a file that is clicked open, always displaying the identical image. It embeds them in networks of perceptions, facts, and thoughts, slightly different combinations of which bubble up each time. And that just retrieved memory does not overwrite the previous one but intertwines and overlaps with it. Nothing is completely lost, but the memory trace is altered and for good.

As scientists put it, using our memories changes our memories.

Yet there are large upsides to forgetting, too. One is that it is nature’s most sophisticated spam filter. It’s what allows the brain to focus, enabling sought-after facts to pop to mind.

We engage in this kind of focused forgetting all the time, without giving it much thought.

forgetting is a friend to learning.”

Normal forgetting—that passive decay we so often bemoan—is also helpful for subsequent learning.

Without a little forgetting, you get no benefit from further study. It is what allows learning to build, like an exercised muscle.

It’s that retrieving

any memory alters its accessibility, and often its content.

the New Theory of Disuse,

One implication, for instance, is that forgetting a huge chunk of what we’ve just learned, especially when it’s a brand-new topic, is not necessarily evidence of laziness, attention deficits, or a faulty character. On the contrary, it is a sign that the brain is working as it should.

the Forgetting Curve.

Our brain can impute meaning to almost anything.

the Law of Disuse, which asserted that learned information, without continued use, decays from memory entirely—i.e., use it or lose it.

Memory improved in the first few days without any further study, and only began to taper off after day four or so, on average.

“We not only tend to forget what we have once remembered,” he wrote, “but we also tend to remember what we have once forgotten.”

Forgetting, remember, is not only a passive process of decay but also an active one, of filtering.

The two men’s conceptions of recovery were virtually identical, except that Freud was talking about repressed emotional trauma. Excavating those memories and “working through” them could relieve chronic, disabling anxiety, he claimed.

An automatic reward for a correct answer leads to little learning; occasional, periodic rewards are much more effective.

reminiscence is strong for imagery, for photographs, drawings, paintings—and poetry, with its word-pictures.

The first principle theory is this: Any memory has two strengths, a storage strength and a retrieval strength.

According to the Bjorks’ theory, storage strength can increase but it never decreases.

no memory is ever “lost” in the sense that it’s faded away, that it’s gone. Rather, it is not currently accessible. Its retrieval strength is low, or near zero.

Retrieval strength, on the other hand, is a measure of how easily a nugget of information comes to mind. It, too, increases with studying, and with use.

Compared to storage, retrieval strength is fickle. It can build quickly but also weaken quickly.

Retrieval is a matter of how quickly a person’s name comes to mind. Storage, by contrast, is a matter of how familiar the person is.

The harder we have to work to retrieve a memory, the greater the subsequent spike in retrieval and storage strength (learning).