Using the Brain to Help You Learn posted by Tim Hardy @ Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:38:29 -0000

Tim Hardy — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:38:29 -0000

I’m enjoying the book so far, thank you, which is written with the clarity and elan I’ve come to expect from Pragmatic Programmer titles. I suspect, however, that I’ll find more use from the later so far unwritten chapters. I’m possibly not your target audience since I’m predominantly an R-mode person (one who loved those “horrid English classes” so much that he did a degree in the subject) and bought it looking to improve my L-mode thinking. More on this in another post perhaps.

Meanwhile, I thought I’d share some tips on memory: inspired by chapter 2.2. My apologies in advance for a long post; if I had more time I would make it shorter.

People who believe they have bad memories are wrong.

I firmly believe that we remember everything to which we pay attention. Recall is the difficult part. It’s not a bad memory, it’s just badly organised.

Many people with alleged bad memories actually have difficult paying attention. If you weren’t really listening when you were told something then the brain just sticks it in a large unsorted bin of data, along with all the information from those other missing hours of your life when you were zoned out on workaday tasks. Finding something in there takes time and effort. Generally we give up in disgust and just look the fact up, like the hobbyist who cannot find anything in his cluttered tool collection and ends up buying a new hammer every time he needs one.

Recall is improved by comprehension – by understanding something we relate it to what we already know and in doing so provide the brain with pointers (pun intended) to the new knowledge. If you make an effort to understand something when you first encounter it, the brain will do the filing for you. No need to buy a new hammer: you know it will be right there in the hand tools section.

Recall is also reinforced by repetition. Using knowledge reinforces the paths in the brain to it. This is one way in which biological systems are crucially different to mechanical ones.

As you note in the book, the brain can also go off searching in the background for you. This is the default behaviour if we don’t look up the fact externally. Think of the brain spooling a search thread that comes back and wakes you up three days later when it finds the information. More importantly, when we do this, the path to that information is reinforced. The next time we want to remember this fact, we’ll find it more quickly.

Deliberately cultivating this is a way of getting the brain to help you to remember.

When you have the luxury of not needing to know something immediately, don’t look it up. Enjoy that “it’s on the tip of my tongue” sensation for a while and throw related thoughts and words at it. For example, imagine struggling to recall the name of the male lead in Wall Street. You know, that guy who was in all those films in the eighties. Whatshisname. He was in that one with Sharon Stone. And that one with Kathleen Turner. Looks a bit like… Perhaps the memory has just been misfiled. By throwing related knowledge at the brain you give it suggestions of where to look. Now let go and relax. The thread has been spooled: the answer will pop into your head some time in the next few days. And the next time you want to talk about Michael Douglas, you’ll remember his name instantly.

Since we don’t always have the luxury of time, you can artificially provoke this process by regularly reviewing new knowledge, testing yourself by trying to recall the key facts – then letting go and seeing if the brain can find the information itself. This takes a degree of faith: it’s very hard to resist the temptation to just look up the answer. But it does work. Don’t, however, rely too much on it either and put off studying your new topic until the answer springs to mind. It may well be that you hadn’t really understood the matter in the first place or simply weren’t paying enough attention. Take your failure to recall in a timely manner as a spur to greater concentration next time you hit the books. If you’re someone for whom this will not ruin a good night’s sleep, then try it late evening: the process will keep running while you sleep. If you’re a more anxious type, then try recalling the information on your commute into work where you cannot look it up. Either way, the trick is to get the brain’s processes working for you, refiling and reviewing your knowledge so that it’s there for you when you need it.

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Using the Brain to Help You Learn posted by Tim Hardy @ Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:38:29 -0000