Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (12 page)

The school year began, and the students were forced to walk on the grass to get to their classes. Very soon, defined trails started appearing all over campus, as well as large islands of beautiful green lawn. By the end of the year, the buildings were connected by paths in a surprisingly efficient manner. “Now,” said the president to the contractors who had waited all year, “you can install the permanent sidewalks and pathways. But you need no design. Simply fill in all the paths you see before you!” The initial design, created by the initial input, also became the permanent path.

The brain has a storage strategy remarkably similar to the wily president’s plan. The neural pathways initially recruited to process new information end up becoming the permanent pathways the brain reuses to store the information. New information penetrating into the brain can be likened to the students initially creating the dirt paths across a pristine lawn. The final storage area can be likened to the time those pathways were permanently filled with asphalt. They are the same pathways, and that’s the point.

What does this mean for the brain? The neurons in the cortex are active responders in any learning event, and they are deeply involved in permanent memory storage. This means the brain has no central happy hunting ground where memories go to be infinitely retrieved. Instead, memories are distributed all over the surface of the cortex. This may at first seem hard to grasp. Many people would like the brain to act like a computer, complete with input detectors (like a keyboard) connected to a central storage device. Yet the data suggest that the human brain has no hard drive separate from its initial input detectors. That does not mean memory storage is spread evenly across the brain’s neural landscape. Many brain regions are involved in representing even single inputs, and each region contributes something different to the entire memory. Storage is a cooperative event.

3) Retrieval may best be improved by replicating the conditions surrounding the initial encoding.

In one of the most unusual experiments performed in cognitive psychology, the brain function of people standing around on dry ground in wet suits was compared with the brain function of people floating in about 10 feet of water, also in wet suits. Both groups of deep-sea divers listened to somebody speak 40 random words. The divers were then tested for their ability to recall the list of words. The group that heard the words while in the water got a 15 percent better score if they were asked to recall the words while back in those same 10 feet than if they were on the beach. The group that heard the words on the beach got a 15 percent better score if they were asked to recall the words while suited on the beach than if in 10 feet of water. It appeared that memory worked best if the environmental conditions at retrieval mimicked the environmental conditions at encoding. Is it possible that the second characteristic, which tries to store events using the same neurons recruited initially to encode events, is in operation in this third characteristic?

The tendency is so robust that memory is even improved under conditions where learning of any kind should be crippled. These experiments have been done incorporating marijuana and even laughing gas (nitrous oxide). This third characteristic even responds to mood. Learn something while you are sad and you will be able to recall it better if, at retrieval, you are somehow suddenly made sad. The condition is called context-dependent or state-dependent learning.

ideas

We know that information is remembered best when it is elaborate, meaningful, and contextual. The quality of the encoding stage—those earliest moments of learning—is one of the single greatest predictors of later learning success. What can we do to take advantage of that in the real world?

First, we can take a lesson from a shoe store I used to visit as a little boy. This shoe store had a door with three handles at different heights: one near the very top, one near the very bottom, and one in the middle. The logic was simple: The more handles on the door, the more access points were available for entrance, regardless of the strength or age of customer. It was a relief for a 5-year-old—a door I could actually reach! I was so intrigued with the door that I used to dream about it. In my dreams, however, there were hundreds of handles, all capable of opening the door to this shoe store.

“Quality of encoding” really means the number of door handles one can put on the entrance to a piece of information. The more handles one creates at the moment of learning, the more likely the information is to be accessed at a later date. The handles we can add revolve around content, timing, and environment.

Real-world examples

The more a learner focuses on the meaning of the presented information, the more elaborately the encoding is processed. This principle is so obvious that it is easy to miss. What it means is this: When you are trying to drive a piece of information into your brain’s memory systems, make sure you understand exactly what that information means. If you are trying to drive information into someone else’s brain, make sure they know what it means.

The directive has a negative corollary. If you don’t know what the learning means, don’t try to memorize the information by rote and pray the meaning will somehow reveal itself. And don’t expect your students will do this either, especially if you have done an inadequate job of explaining things. This is like looking at the number of diagonal lines in a word and attempting to use this strategy to remember the words.

How does one communicate meaning in such a fashion that learning is improved? A simple trick involves the liberal use of relevant real-world examples embedded in the information, constantly peppering main learning points with meaningful experiences. This can be done by the learner studying after class or, better, by the teacher during the actual learning experience. This has been shown to work in numerous studies.

In one experiment, groups of students read a 32-paragraph paper about a fictitious foreign country. The introductory paragraphs in the paper were highly structured. They contained either no examples, one example, or two or three consecutive examples of the main theme that followed. The results were clear: The greater the number of examples in the paragraph, the more likely the information was to be remembered. It’s best to use real-world situations familiar to the learner. Remember wonderful Aunt Mabel’s apple pie? This wasn’t an abstract food cooked by a stranger; it was real food cooked by a loving relative. The more personal an example, the more richly it becomes encoded and the more readily it is remembered.

Why do examples work? They appear to take advantage of the brain’s natural predilection for pattern matching. Information is more readily processed if it can be immediately associated with information already present in the learner’s brain. We compare the two inputs, looking for similarities and differences as we encode the new information. Providing examples is the cognitive equivalent of adding more handles to the door. Providing examples makes the information more elaborative, more complex, better encoded, and therefore better learned.

Compelling introductions

Introductions are everything. As an undergraduate, I had a professor who can thoughtfully be described as a lunatic. He taught a class on the history of cinema, and one day he decided to illustrate for us how art films traditionally depict emotional vulnerability. As he went through the lecture, he literally began taking off his clothes. He first took off his sweater and then, one button at a time, began removing his shirt, down to his T-shirt. He unzipped his trousers, and they fell around his feet, revealing, thank goodness, gym clothes. His eyes were shining as he exclaimed, “You will probably never forget now that some films use physical nudity to express emotional vulnerability. What could be more vulnerable than being naked?” We were thankful that he gave us no further details of his example.

I will never forget the introduction to this unit in my film class, though I hardly recommend imitating his example on a regular basis. But its memorability illustrates the timing principle: If you are a student, whether in business or education, the events that happen the first time you are exposed to a given information stream play a disproportionately greater role in your ability to accurately retrieve it at a later date. If you are trying to get information across to someone, your ability to create a compelling introduction may be the most important single factor in the later success of your mission.

Why this emphasis on the initial moments? Because the memory of an event is stored in the same places that were initially recruited to perceive the learning event. The more brain structures recruited—the more door handles created—at the moment the learning, the easier it is to gain access to the information.

Other professions have stumbled onto this notion. Budding directors are told by their film instructors that the audience needs to be hooked in the first 3 minutes after the opening credits to make the film compelling (and financially successful). Public speaking professionals say that you win or lose the battle to hold your audience in the first 30 seconds of a given presentation.

What does that mean for business professionals attempting to create a compelling presentation? Or educators attempting to introduce a complex new topic? Given the importance of the findings to the success of these professions, you might expect that some rigorous scientific literature exists on this topic. Surprisingly, very little data exist about how brains pay attention to issues in real-world settings, as we discussed in the Attention chapter. The data that do exist suggest that film instructors and public speakers are on to something.

Familiar settings

We know the importance of learning and retrieval taking place under the same conditions, but we don’t have a solid definition of “same conditions.” There are many ways to explore this idea.

I once gave a group of teachers advice about how to counsel parents who wanted to teach both English and Spanish at home. One dissatisfying finding is that for many kids with this double exposure, language acquisition rates for both go down, sometimes considerably. I recounted the data about the underwater experiments and then suggested that the families create a “Spanish Room.” This would be a room with a rule: Only the Spanish language could be spoken in it. The room could be filled with Hispanic artifacts, with large pictures of Spanish words. All Spanish would be taught there, and no English. Anecdotally, the parents have told me that it works.

This way, the encoding environments and retrieving environments could be equivalent. At the moment of learning, many environmental features—even ones irrelevant to the learning goals—may become encoded into the memory right along with the goals. Environment makes the encoding more elaborate, the equivalent of putting more handles on the door. When these same environmental cues are encountered, they may lead directly to the learning goals simply because they were embedded in the original trace.

American marketing professionals have known about this phenomenon for years. What if I wrote the words “wind-up pink bunny,” “pounding drum,” and “going-and-going,” then told you to write another word or phrase congruent with those previous three? No formal relationship exists between any of these words, yet if you lived in the United States for a long period of time, most of you probably would write words such as “battery” or “Energizer.” Enough said.

What does it mean to make encoding and retrieving environments equivalent in the real world of business and education? The most robust findings occur when the environments exist in dramatically different contexts from the norm (underwater vs. on a beach is about as dramatic as it gets). But how different from normal life does the setup need to be to obtain the effect?

It could be as simple as making sure that an oral examination is studied for orally, rather than by reviewing written material. Or perhaps future airplane mechanics should be taught about engine repair in the actual shop where the repairs will occur.

Summary

Rule #5
Repeat to remember.

• The brain has many types of memory systems. One type follows four stages of processing: encoding, storing, retrieving, and forgetting.

• Information coming into your brain is immediately split into fragments that are sent to different regions of the cortex for storage.

• Most of the events that predict whether something learned
also will be remembered
occur in the first few seconds of learning.The more elaborately we encode a memory during its initial moments, the stronger it will be.

• You can improve your chances of remembering something if you reproduce the environment in which you first put it into your brain.

Get more at www.brainrules.net/short-term-memory

Nobody uses this metaphor anymore, and there are ample reasons to wish it good riddance. Short-term memory is a much more active, much less sequential, far more complex process than the metaphor suggests. We now suspect that short-term memory is actually a collection of temporary memory capacities. Each capacity specializes in processing a specific type of information. Each operates in a parallel fashion with the others. To reflect this multifaceted talent, short-term memory is now called working memory. Perhaps the best way to explain it is to describe it in action.

I can think of no better illustration than the professional chess world’s first real rock star: Miguel Najdorf. Rarely was a man more at ease with his greatness than Najdorf. He was a short, dapper fellow gifted with a truly enormous voice, and he had an annoying tendency to poll members of his audience on how they thought he was doing. Najdorf in 1939 traveled to a competition in Buenos Aires with the national team. Two weeks later, Germany invaded Najdorf’s home country of Poland. Unable to return, Najdorf rode out the Holocaust tucked safely inside Argentina. He lost his parents, four brothers, and his wife to the concentration camps. In hopes that any remaining family might read about it and contact him, he once played 45 games of chess simultaneously, as a publicity stunt. He won 39 of these games, drew 4, and lost 2. While that is amazing in its own right, the truly phenomenal part is that he played all 45 games in all 11 hours
blindfolded
.

You did not read that wrong. Najdorf never physically saw any of the chessboards or pieces; he played each game in his mind. From the verbal information he received with each move, to his visualizations of each board, several components of working memory were working simultaneously in Najdorf’s mind. This allowed him to function in his profession, just as they do in yours and mine (though perhaps with a slightly different efficiency).

Working memory is now known to be a busy, temporary workspace, a desktop the brain uses to process newly acquired information. The man most associated with characterizing it is Alan Baddeley, a British scientist who looks unnervingly like the angel Clarence Oddbody in the movie
It’s a Wonderful Life
. Baddeley is most famous for describing working memory as a three-component model: auditory, visual, and executive.

The first component allows us to retain some auditory information, and it is assigned to information that is linguistic. Baddeley called it a phonological loop. Najdorf was able to use this component because his opponents were forced to declare their moves verbally.

The second component allows us to retain some visual information; this memory register is assigned to any images and spatial input the brain encounters. Baddeley called it a visuo-spatial sketchpad. Najdorf would have used it as he visualized each game.

The third component is a controlling function called the central executive, which keeps track of all activities throughout working memory. Najdorf used this ability to separate one game from another.

In later publications, Baddeley proposed a fourth component, called the episodic buffer, assigned to any stories a person might hear. This buffer has not been investigated extensively. Regardless of the number of parallel systems ultimately discovered, researchers agree that all share two important characteristics: All have a limited capacity, and all have a limited duration. If the information is not transformed into a more durable form, it will soon disappear. As you recall, our friend Ebbinghaus was the first to demonstrate the existence of two types of memory systems, a short form and a long form. He further demonstrated that repetition could convert one into the other under certain conditions. The process of converting short-term memory traces to longer, sturdier forms is called consolidation.

consolidation

At first, a memory trace is flexible, labile, subject to amendment, and at great risk for extinction. Most of the inputs we encounter in a given day fall into this category. But some memories stick with us. Initially fragile, these memories strengthen with time and become remarkably persistent. They eventually reach a state where they appear to be infinitely retrievable and resistant to amendment. As we shall see, however, they may not be as stable as we think. Nonetheless, we call these forms long-term memories.

Like working memory, there appear to be different forms of long-term memory, most of which interact with one another. Unlike working memory, however, there is not as much agreement as to what those forms are. Most researchers believe there are semantic memory systems, which tend to remember things like your Aunt Martha’s favorite dress or your weight in high school. Most also believe there is episodic memory, in charge of remembering “episodes” of past experiences, complete with characters, plots, and time stamps (like your 25
^th
high school reunion). One of its subsets is autobiographical memory, which features a familiar protagonist: you. We used to think that consolidation, the mechanism that guides this transformation into stability, affected only newly acquired memories. Once the memory hardened, it never returned to its initial fragile condition. We don’t think that anymore.

Consider the following story, which happened while I was watching a TV documentary with my then 6-year-old son. It was about dog shows. When the camera focused on a German shepherd with a black muzzle, an event that occurred when
I
was about his age came flooding back to my awareness.

In 1960, our backyard neighbor owned a dog he neglected to feed every Saturday. In response to hunger cues, the dog bounded over our fence precisely at 8 a.m. every Saturday, ran toward our metal garbage cans, tipped out the contents, and began a morning repast. My dad got sick of this dog and decided one Friday night to electrify the can in such fashion that the dog would get shocked if his wet little nose so much as brushed against it. Next morning, my dad awakened our entire family early to observe his “hot dog” show. To Dad’s disappointment, the dog didn’t jump over the fence until about 8:30, and he didn’t come to eat. Instead he came to mark his territory, which he did at several points around our backyard.

As the dog moved closer to the can, my Dad started to smile, and when the dog lifted his leg to mark our garbage can, my Dad exclaimed, “Yes!” You don’t have to know the concentration of electrolytes in mammalian urine to know that when the dog marked his territory on our garbage can, he also completed a mighty circuit. His cranial neurons ablaze, his reproductive future suddenly in serious question, the dog howled, bounding back to his owner. The dog never set foot in our backyard again; in fact, he never came within 100 yards of our house.

Our neighbor’s dog was a German shepherd with a distinct black muzzle, just like the one in the television show I was now watching. I had not thought of the incident in years.

What physically happened to my dog memory when summoned back to awareness? There is increasing evidence that when previously consolidated memories are recalled from long-term storage into consciousness, they revert to their previously labile, unstable natures. Acting as if newly minted into working memory, these memories may need to become reprocessed if they are to remain in a durable form. That means the hot dog story is forced to restart the consolidation process all over again,
every time it is retrieved
. This process is formally termed reconsolidation. These data have a number of scientists questioning the entire notion of stability in human memory. If consolidation is not a sequential one-time event but one that occurs repeatedly every time a memory trace is reactivated, it means permanent storage exists in our brains only for those memories we choose not to recall! Oh, good grief. Does this mean that we can never be aware of something permanent in our lives? Some scientists think this is so. And if it is true, the case I am about to make for repetition in learning is ridiculously important.

retrieval

Like many radical university professors, our retrieval systems are powerful enough to alter our conceptions of the past while offering nothing substantial to replace them. Exactly how that happens is an important but missing piece of our puzzle. Still, researchers have organized the mechanisms of retrieval into two general models. One passively imagines libraries. The other aggressively imagines crime scenes.

In the library model, memories are stored in our heads the same way books are stored in a library. Retrieval begins with a command to browse through the stacks and select a specific volume. Once selected, the contents of the volume are brought into conscious awareness, and the memory is retrieved. This tame process is sometimes called reproductive retrieval.

The other model imagines our memories to be more like a large collection of crime scenes, complete with their own Sherlock Holmes. Retrieval begins by summoning the detective to a particular crime scene, a scene which invariably consists of a fragmentary memory. Upon arrival, Mr. Holmes examines the partial evidence available. Based on inference and guesswork, the detective then invents a reconstruction of what was actually stored. In this model, retrieval is not the passive examination of a fully reproduced, vividly detailed book. Rather, retrieval is an active investigative effort to re-create the facts based on fragmented data.

Which is correct? The surprising answer is both. Ancient philosophers and modern scientists agree that we have different types of retrieval systems. Which one we use may depend upon the type of information being sought, and how much time has passed since the initial memory was formed. This unusual fact requires some explanation.

mind the gap

At relatively early periods post-learning (say minutes to hours to days), retrieval systems allow us to reproduce a fairly specific and detailed account of a given memory. This might be likened to the library model. But as time goes by, we switch to a style more reminiscent of the Sherlock Holmes model. The reason is that the passage of time inexorably leads to a weakening of events and facts that were once clear and chock-f of specifics. In an attempt to fill in missing gaps, the brain is forced to rely on partial fragments, inferences, outright guesswork, and often (most disturbingly) other memories not related to the actual event. It is truly reconstructive in nature, much like a detective with a slippery imagination. This is all in the service of creating a coherent story, which, reality notwithstanding, brains like to do. So, over time, the brain’s many retrieval systems seem to undergo a gradual switch from specific and detailed reproductions to this more general and abstracted recall.

Pretend you are a freshman in high school and know a psychiatrist named Daniel Offer. Taking out a questionnaire, Dr. Dan asks you to answer some questions that are really none of his business: Was religion helpful to you growing up? Did you receive physical punishment as discipline? Did your parents encourage you to be active in sports? And so on. Now pretend it is 34 years later. Dr. Dan tracks you down, gives you the same questionnaire, and asks you to fill it out. Unbeknownst to you, he still has the answers you gave in high school, and he is out to compare your answers. How well do you do? In a word, horribly. In fact, the memories you encoded as adolescents bear very little resemblance to the ones you remember as adults, as Dr. Dan, who had the patience to actually do this experiment, found out. Take the physical punishment question. Though only a third of adults recalled any physical punishment, such as spanking, Dr. Dan found that almost 90 percent of the adolescents had answered the question in the affirmative. These data are only some that demonstrate the powerful inaccuracy of the Sherlock Holmes style of retrieval.

This idea that the brain might cheerily insert false information to make a coherent story underscores its admirable desire to create organization out of a bewildering and confusing world. The brain constantly receives new inputs and needs to store some of them in the same head already occupied by previous experiences. It makes sense of its world by trying to connect new information to previously encountered information, which means that new information routinely resculpts previously existing representations and sends the re-created whole back for new storage.

What does this mean? Merely that present knowledge can bleed into past memories and become intertwined with them as if they were encountered together. Does that give you only an approximate view of reality? You bet it does. This tendency, by the way, can drive the criminal-justice system crazy.

repetition

Given this predilection for generalizing, is there any hope of creating reliable long-term memories? As the Brain Rule cheerily suggests, the answer is yes. Memory may not be fixed at the moment of learning, but repetition, doled out in specifically timed intervals, is the fixative. Given its potential relevance to business and education, it is high time we talked about it.

Here’s a test that involves the phonological loop of working memory. Gaze at the following list of characters for about 30 seconds, then cover it up before you read the next paragraph.

3 $ 8 ? A % 9

Can you recall the characters in the list without looking at them? Were you able to do this without internally rehearsing them? Don’t be alarmed if you can’t. The typical human brain can hold about seven pieces of information for less than 30 seconds! If something does not happen in that short stretch of time, the information becomes lost. If you want to extend the 30 seconds to, say, a few minutes, or even an hour or two, you will need to consistently re-expose yourself to the information. This type of repetition is sometimes called maintenance rehearsal. We now know that maintenance rehearsal is mostly good for keeping things in working memory—that is, for a short period of time. We also know there is a better way to push information into long-term memory. To describe it, I would like to relate the first time I ever saw somebody die.