Learning and Memory

Imagine yourself carried away by two extra terrestrials to the moon and imprisoned. Soon, you see Harry Potter walk toward you and open the prison gate. He takes you towards a race car parked outside the prison gate. He asks you to sit in the car and drives in to space and lands in the planet, Mercury. There you meet your friend Mercy and she takes you and Potter around to show some amazing colorful craters. Next, Potter drives you to the planet Venus, where you meet your friend Veena… I can go on like this to build an imaginary story that helps you learn the names of the nine planets and its surface structure. Such stories, say memory experts and neuroscientists help us to remember and recall the data we want to learn or remember.

In this age of smart phones, we may wonder as to why we need to remember stuff when we can easily get the required information from our smart phones and tablets. However, we will all agree to the fact that our memories make us who we are and improving our memory would benefit us in many ways with or without the gadgets, especially when the techniques for good memory are not so difficult to follow.

Before we actually get to learn the techniques of good memory, let us understand what memory is and how it works and the relation between learning and memory.

In psychology, memory is the process in which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved.

• Encodingor registration means receiving, processing and combining of received information
• Storage means creation of a permanent record of the encoded information
• Retrieval,recall or recollection means calling back the stored information in response to some cue for use in a process or activity(Aires, 2015)
  

Memory is of three types, namely, sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. Sensory memory is the ability to look at something and remember what it looked like with just a second of observation or memorization. (wikipedia)

Short-term memory/Working memory acts as a kind of “scratch-pad” for temporary recall of the information which is being processed at any point in time, and has been referred to as "the brain's Post-it note". It can be thought of as the ability to remember and process information at the same time. It holds a small amount of information (typically around 7 items or even less) in mind in an active, readily-available state for a short period of time (typically from 10 to 15 seconds, or sometimes up to a minute). (human-memory.net, 2010).

Long-term memory is the ability to store much larger quantities of information for potentially unlimited duration (sometimes a whole life span). Its capacity is immeasurably large compared to the storage in sensory memory and short-term memory which have a strictly limited capacity and duration. For learning to happen, information has to move from the sensory or the short-term memory to the long-term memory. (wikipedia)

Learning and memory are very closely related concepts. Learning is the acquisition of skill or knowledge, while memory is the expression of what you’ve acquired. (http://www.apa.org, 2015)

The fascinating organ brain has everything to do with memory and learning. Like the rest of the body, it is composed of cells; but brain cells are different from other cells. The brain cells involved in learning are the neurons and glial cells. Although the brain has many other types of cells, these are the ones most involved in learning. An average human brain has about 100 billion neurons. The brain sends messages through its neurons. And when two or more neurons communicate “learning” happens. The more frequently a neural network is accessed, the stronger it becomes. (Sprenger, 1999)

Think about a small child’s first experience when his mother points out a red bird and tells the child, “That’s a red bird. It’s called a cardinal.” The child attempts to repeat the word. “Cawdnal. Bood.” The child’s brain has made a connection. A few neurons are now talking to each other about birds. If the child watched as the bird flew out of the tree, he may have the connecting neurons of bird-cardinal-fly. The next time he sees a cardinal, his brain will make those connections again. This time the neurons may connect faster, because when neurons learn or practice information, they become more efficient at connecting. (Sprenger, 1999)

Now, we may wonder why some people are good at remembering or learning things faster than many others, when biologically we are all the same. A group of researchers in London wanted to find out the answer to this. They wanted to know if the brains of the memory champions were structurally and anatomically different from the rest of ours. So, they put some of the memory champions under an FMRI machine and scanned their brains while they were memorizing the numbers, people’s faces, etc. In the process they found that the memory champions were using more of their visual and spatial memory compared to an average person. (Foer, 2012)

So, now we know that we have to learn to use our visual and spatial memory. How do we go about that? Let us see what some memory experts have to say.

Tony Buzan, an educational consultant and the man who popularized the thinking technique called “mind mapping” says that the human language is not English or any spoken language but “imagination” and multiple sensory “association”. This is the way we all speak. (Buzan, 2015)

A former world memory champion and primary school teacher Jonathan Hancock says that the best way to remember is by using our power of imagination, utilizing all our senses and putting ourselves into unforgettable adventures and journeys of the mind and making our own connections and following memory chains. (http://www.theguardian.com, 2015)

 Kevin Aires, a memory expert says that it is hard to forget vivid and silly images. Our minds are very good at remembering places and journeys. So he wants us to create a story with series of events with the help of the vivid and silly images and place them on a journey, say in our house or in our favorite park or elsewhere, and walk through our mental journey. We should not stop with that. We must read the list over and over again going through our journey in our minds. The reading must be spaced out so that it stays forever. For example, we must walk through the journey, a day after, three days after, a week after, a month after, etc. And see how well we remember. This is not rote learning he says. (Aires, 2015)

 Max Cynader, a neuroscientist says that memory is nothing more than our ability to reconstruct the whole, from a degraded fragment. Memory happens because of brain plasticity, which is defined as the process by which the brain changes depending on what has happened to it. However, brain plasticity is not just memory alone. Max summarizes all that we need to know about brain plasticity in one slogan – “neurons that fire together wire together”. For example, when you look at the picture of your grand mom or experience the smell of the perfume she used, all other attributes of your grandmother, that you have known or experienced such as the sound of her voice, touch of her skin, and the texture of her clothes, get activated, because the neurons that fire together wire together. (Cynader, 2013)

As per Max, the most important thing we need to do in order to improve our brain plasticity or memory is to do physical exercise more than playing Sudoku or having friends. (Cynader, 2013)

Peter Doolittle, Assistant Provost for Teaching and Learning at Virginia Tech says that we are built for images and therefore we need to think elaborately and illustriously. We are meaning making machines and therefore, we need to structure things in ways they make sense to us. What we process, we learn. (Doolittle, 2013)

Idriz Zogaj, a memory champion from Sweden says that all memory experts’ use the following three techniques/methods to remember and recollect any information along with repetition. They are:

1.  The linking method – This method helps us to remember many words. For this we must allow our brains to make a fun and animated story of what we want to remember and also allow the brain to make connections. The more fun in the story, the easier it will be for us to remember it.

2. The association method – This method helps us to remember abstract information. Usually, it is difficult to remember abstract information. Most people find it difficult to remember the 52 numbers in the cards. Therefore, we must associate information to something our brain can handle and understand. By associating every card with a person or an object that our brain knows, it is easier to activate all parts of our powerful imagination and therefore remember them easily. For example, we can associate the number zero to hero, one to sun, two to screw, etc.

3. The method of loci – This method helps to find the information we are looking for. It simply consists of walking around a place we know well such as a building, street, or any geographical entity and placing the information along the paths of our mental journey. We must link the information to the place. So when we want to find it – we know where to look. This technique will be useful while we give lectures or speeches. (Zogaj, 2012)

Joshua Foer, a memory champion, says that great memories are learned and they are not an innate gift. Good memory is possible, when we are completely aware, deeply engaged and pay full attention. Distraction is its worst enemy. So mindful thinking helps. (Foer, 2012)

Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist says that meditation can actually change our brain. She proves through her experiment how meditation increases the number of gray matter in the hippocampus, which is responsible for increase in memory. She says that when we engage in a behavior over and over again, it can lead to changes in our brain, since our brains are like plastic. Therefore, the neurons also change how they talk to each other with experience. (Lazar, 2012)

According to Josh Kaufman, we are living in the intelligent age. So, in order to learn a skill or improve our memory, we need to practice intelligently. And just twenty hours is enough to learn a new skill. The strategies he lists are:

1. Deconstruct the skill
2. Learn enough and self correct
3. Remove distraction
4. Practice for twenty hours

He also says that the major barrier to skill acquisition is not intellectual, but emotional. (Kaufman, 2013)

Now that we have seen many techniques to help us have a great memory, let us go ahead and practice them to be what we really want to be.

 References:

Aires, K. (2015, Feb 5). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_DrOglHtSk.

Buzan, T. (2015, June). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMZCghZ1hB4.

Cynader, M. (2013, April 26). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chr3rQ6Vpcw.

Doolittle, P. (2013, November 22). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWKvpFZJwcE.

Foer, J. (2012, May 10). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6PoUg7jXsA.

http://www.apa.org. (2015, June). learning. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org: http://www.apa.org/topics/learning/

http://www.theguardian.com. (2015, June). memory-tricks-boost-students-learning. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/: http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2012/sep/19/memory-tricks-boost-students-learning

human-memory.net. (2010). types_short.html. Retrieved from http://www.human-memory.net: http://www.human-memory.net/types_short.html

Kaufman, J. (2013, March 14). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY.

Lazar, S. (2012, January 23). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8rRzTtP7Tc.

Sprenger, M. (1999, June). Retrieved from http://my.stust.edu.tw/sysdata/48/27948/doc/7b9e5cf4886f4292/attach/1204200.pdf

wikipedia. (n.d.). Memory. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/: https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Memory

Zogaj, I. (2012, October 24). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ebJlcZMx3c.

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