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April 5 - June 3, 2018
Distractions can aid learning. Napping does, too. Quitting before a project is done: not all bad, as an almost done project lingers in memory far longer than one that is completed. Taking a test on a subject before you know anything about it improves subsequent learning.
The brain is not like a muscle, at least not in any straightforward sense. It is something else altogether, sensitive to mood, to timing, to circadian rhythms, as well as to location, environment. It registers far more than we’re conscious of and often adds previously unnoticed details when revisiting a memory or learned fact. It works hard at night, during sleep, searching for hidden links and deeper significance in the day’s events. It has a strong preference for meaning over randomness, and finds nonsense offensive. It doesn’t take orders so well, either, as we all know—
If the brain is a learning machine, then it’s an eccentric one. And it performs best when its quirks are exploited.
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,
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.
it is not that there is a right way and wrong way to learn. 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.
“We assume it’s all bad, a failure of the system. But more often, forgetting is a friend to learning.”
If recollecting is just that—a re-collection of perceptions, facts, and ideas scattered in intertwining neural networks in the dark storm of the brain—then forgetting acts to block the background noise, the static, so that the right signals stand out. The sharpness of the one depends on the strength of the other.
Some “breakdown” must occur for us to strengthen learning when we revisit the material. Without a little forgetting, you get no benefit from further study. It is what allows learning to build, like an exercised muscle.
retrieving any memory alters its accessibility, and often its content. There is an emerging theory that accounts for these and related ideas.
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.” Memory does not have just one tendency over time, toward decay. It has two. The other—“reminiscence,” Ballard called it—is a kind of growth, a bubbling up of facts or words that we don’t recall having learned in the first place. Both tendencies occur in the days after we’ve tried to memorize a poem or a list of words.
The Forgetting Curve was misleading and, at best, incomplete. It might even need to be replaced altogether.
An automatic reward for a correct answer leads to little learning; occasional, periodic rewards are much more effective.
memory, as Erdelyi put it in a recent paper, “is a heterogeneous, mottled system that both improves and declines over time.”
(“Forget to Learn,”
The first principle theory is this: Any memory has two strengths, a storage strength and a retrieval strength.
Storage strength is just that, a measure of how well learned something is. It builds up steadily with studying, and more sharply with use.
According to the Bjorks’ theory, storage strength can increase but it never decreases. This does not mean that everything we see, hear, or say is stored forever, until we die. More than 99 percent of experience is fleeting, here and gone. The brain holds on to only what’s relevant, useful, or interesting—or may be so in the future. It does mean that everything we have deliberately committed to memory—the multiplication table, a childhood phone number, the combination to our first locker—is all there, and for good.
Volume is not an issue. As for the mundane, it’s impossible to prove that it’s all there, every meaningless detail. Still, every once in a while the brain sends up a whisper of dumbfounding trivia.
That is, 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. Without reinforcement, however, retrieval strength drops off quickly, and its capacity is relatively small (compared to storage). At any given time, we can pull up only a limited number of items in connection with any given cue or reminder.
Compared to storage, retrieval strength is fickle. It can build quickly but also weaken quickly.
The theory says that that drop facilitates deeper learning once the fact or memory is found again. Again, think of this aspect of the Forget to Learn theory in terms of building muscle.
The harder we have to work to retrieve a memory, the greater the subsequent spike in retrieval and storage strength (learning). The Bjorks call this principle desirable difficulty,
In its nomadic hominid youth, the brain was continually refreshing its mental map to adapt to changing weather, terrain, and predators. Retrieval strength evolved to update information quickly, keeping the most relevant details handy. It lives for the day. Storage strength, on the other hand, evolved so that old tricks could be relearned, and fast, if needed.
Because those memories are inaccessible, they don’t interfere with current information and procedures. But because they remain in memory they can—at least under certain circumstances—be relearned.” Thus, forgetting is critical to the learning of new skills and to the preservation and reacquisition of old ones.
Using memory changes memory—and for the better. Forgetting enables and deepens learning, by filtering out distracting information and by allowing some breakdown that, after reuse, drives retrieval and storage strength higher than they were originally.
we perform better on tests when in the same state of mind as when we studied—and, yes, that includes mild states of intoxication from alcohol or pot, as well as arousal from stimulants. Moods, preoccupations, and perceptions matter, too: how we feel while studying, where we are, what we see and hear. The scientific investigation into these influences—the inner mental context, so to speak, as well as the outer one—has revealed subtle dimensions of learning that we rarely, if ever, notice but can exploit to optimize our time.
“recall is better if the environment of the original learning is reinstated.”
Having something going on in the study environment, like music, is better than nothing
the experience of studying has more dimensions than we notice, some of which can have an impact on retention. The contextual cues scientists describe—music, light, background colors—are annoyingly ephemeral, it’s true. They’re subconscious, usually untraceable. Nonetheless, it is possible to recognize them at work in our own lives. Think of an instance in which you do remember exactly where and when you learned something.
Those are contextual cues, when they’re conscious and visible. The reason I can recall them is that they’re also part of a scene, an autobiographical memory. The science tells us that, at least when it comes to retention of new facts, the subconscious ones are valuable, too. Not always—when we’re submerged in analytical work, they’re negligible—and not necessarily all of them. Only sometimes. So what, though? When it comes to learning, we’ll take any edge we can get.
Moods color everything we do, and when they’re extreme they can determine what we remember.
A simple change in venue improved retrieval strength (memory) by 40 percent.
One possibility is that the brain encodes one subset of the words in one room, and a slightly different set in the other. Those two subsets overlap, and two subsets are better than one. Or it may be that rehearsing in two rooms doubles the number of contextual cues linked to any single word, fact, or idea being studied.
how we do something part of the “environment,” too? It is. Yet the larger message of context research is that, in the end, it doesn’t much matter which aspects of the environment you vary, so long as you vary what you can.
This kind of experimenting itself reinforces learning, and makes what you know increasingly independent of your surroundings.
The Advantage of Breaking Up Study Time
the spacing effect. People learn at least as much, and retain it much longer, when they distribute—or “space”—their study time than when they concentrate it.
Distributed learning, in certain situations, can double the amount we remember later on.
Studying a new concept right after you learn it doesn’t deepen the memory much, if at all; studying it an hour later, or a day later, does.
Children absorb a new language quickly when forced to speak and understand it—
To build and retain foreign vocabulary, scientific definitions, or other factual information, it’s best to review the material one or two days after initial study; then a week later; then about a month later. After that, the intervals are longer.
Spaced study—in many circumstances, including the neighbor example—also adds contextual cues,
good class should make the material stick, and spaced review (in class) is one way to do that.
That optimal first interval declines as a proportion of the time-to-test, the Internet study found. If the test is in a week, the best interval is a day or two (20 to 40 percent). If it’s in six months, the best interval is three to five weeks (10 to 20 percent). Wait any longer between study sessions, and performance goes down fairly quickly.
Remember, spacing is primarily a retention technique.
