Memory Key Newsletter

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T h e M e m o r y K e y

<http://www.memory-key.com>

Your resource for information about memory and memory improvement

January 2008

<http://www.memory-key.com/newsletters/issue_116.htm>

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THIS MONTH ON MEMORY-KEY.COM:

IMMERSION AND HABIT: TWO PILLARS OF SUCCESSFUL LEARNING

THE ROAD FROM DATA TO WISDOM

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NEW: The original Memory Key is now available as an e-book!
Check it out at:
http://www.memory-key.com/shop/memkey_ebook.htm

Note that you can now use your credit cards on Paypal.

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Check out the e-book on "Effective notetaking" at:
http://www.memory-key.com/shop/notetaking_workbook.htm

and the e-book on "Remembering intentions" at:
http://www.memory-key.com/shop/intention_ebook.htm

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Find out about my YA novel at:
http://www.fmmcpherson.com/

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IMMERSION AND HABIT: TWO PILLARS OF SUCCESSFUL LEARNING

I read something recently about an interesting difference between men and women in goal-setting behavior. The study followed 3000 people who had made New Year’s resolutions in 2007. Sadly, only 12% succeeded in keeping their resolutions, but more intriguingly, there were important differences between men and women regarding what factors improved the chances of success. For men, the most important thing was to form specific, step-by-step, realistic goals, keeping their focus on the rewards for achievement (you may recall this was what I suggested in my article on goal-setting, http://www.memory-key.com/newsletters/issue_91.htm ), but interestingly, for women, the most important thing was to tell other people. This doesn’t necessarily mean that making specific, realistic goals isn’t useful for women — there was some suggestion that the strategy carried more impact for men because they tend to have unrealistic expectations. (You can read more about this study at http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/dec/28/sciencenews.research , and you can read more about Professor Wiseman’s interesting experiments at http://www.quirkology.com/UK/index.shtml ).

Of course, the most effective way of achieving such goals, regardless of such motivational differences, is in developing appropriate habitual behavior. But I’ve talked about the importance of establishing regular habits for achieving your goals before, and that’s not what I want to talk about this month. Instead, I want to comment on what might be considered the opposite: the role of intense periods of concentrated effort. I was encouraged to do so by findings from two disparate areas of activity.

The first is sport. We hear a lot of advice nowadays about the importance of regular physical activity and how just half an hour of moderate activity three times a week is sufficient to achieve the health benefits of exercise. And I’m certainly not speaking against that. But more recently, researchers are coming out and saying vigorous activity is important too. More interestingly, and relevant to this discussion, recent research shows that by training hard and often (but the emphasis on effort not frequency), older adults can maintain their muscles at the same (or near same) levels as when they were young. (The study was discussed in the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/health/nutrition/31BEST.html and will appear in the March issue of the American Journal of Sports Medicine)

The second area of activity that got me thinking about the broader implications of this sport research, is that of language learning. Now learning a second language, in a non-immersive environment (that is, you’re not living in a country speaking that language), is hard. Very hard. Establishing good habits of regular practice is vital. But periods of immersion are also extremely useful, as anyone trying to learn another language can testify.

What is perhaps less widely realized is that second-language learning isn’t a special case. Regular practice and periods of immersion are valuable for reasons that are fundamental to how learning works.

There are two critical principles involved here:

· Your link to information stored in memory is made stronger (thus making the information easier to retrieve) by repeatedly accessing it (which is why repetition is so vital for learning).

· Information that has recently been accessed will be easier to access again.

Now the first principle is of course the one underlying the importance of practice or habit. The second principle is the one that points to the value of immersion. When you spend, say, several days really getting into a subject, or immersing yourself in a language, then you are keeping the information readily accessible. This enables you to more quickly dig deeper. For example, if it’s a language, you might be able to absorb enough vocabulary and grammar to read passages of text that you would have thought far beyond you; if it’s a topic, such as medieval wall paintings or particle entanglement, you might be able to hold enough partly understood material to reach a deeper level of understanding.

That’s the value of immersion. The catch is, unless you follow it up with the necessary, spaced, repeated retrieval (see my article on practice for more on that: http://www.memory-key.com/strategies/practice.htm ), then a lot of the information apparently gained during immersion will be lost. The danger with periods of concentrated effort is that you gain an inflated confidence in how much you’ve learned — at least, how well you’ve learned it. BUT, if you follow it up, you’ll have a boost from that period of immersion. Thus, for a language, if you achieve a certain reading level during that immersion period, you can hold onto much of the vocabulary you sort-of-learned by keeping your reading up (a much more enjoyable way to learn vocab that from lists!).

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THE ROAD FROM DATA TO WISDOM

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Isn’t this a wonderful quote? Dwell for a moment on this hierarchy of concepts: data -> information -> knowledge -> wisdom.

I did some prowling in the Oxford English Dictionary, and picked out these meanings:

datum: something known or assumed as fact, and made the basis of reasoning or calculation; an assumption or premise from which inferences are drawn.

information: knowledge communicated concerning some particular fact, subject, or event.

knowledge: intellectual acquaintance with, or perception of, fact or truth; clear and certain mental apprehension; the fact, state, or condition of understanding.

wisdom: Capacity of judging rightly in matters relating to life and conduct; soundness of judgement in the choice of means and ends.

Ok, the distinction between data and information is a particularly fuzzy one, but a common way to distinguish them (my apologies to the OED) is that data is raw, and information has been processed to a certain extent. And that’s a clue to what underlies this hierarchy: the extent of processing.

The key word in the definition of knowledge is understanding. Understanding, as I explain in The Memory Key, is rooted in connection, because it’s the connections between different bits of information that give them meaning.

The key word in the definition of wisdom is judgment. That’s a product of a higher-order level of connection — connecting with information that is far more distantly related.

Let’s look at an example. Here’s a fact, a datum: the amygdala is a brain region that shows activity in response to rewarding or aversive stimuli (that’s a pretty complex datum — you could easily make the case we’ve gone beyond data into information there, but that’s what I mean when I say the distinction between the two is pretty fuzzy).

Here’s some information: The role of the amygdala in processing emotion may rest on the way different neurons in the amygdala differentially respond to either rewarding or aversive stimuli.

And here’s something that might be termed knowledge: We seek out pleasant experiences and try to avoid unpleasant ones, but both types elicit our attention, and more so when they surprise us. It is probably adaptive for us to be able to very quickly calculate the value (pleasant or unpleasant; attractive or aversive) and intensity of stimuli. Such rapid calculation is best achieved by a direct response, and hence it is not surprising to find that there are neurons that are directly responsive to either pleasant or unpleasant stimuli. These different types of response properties may underlie the role of the amygdala in multiple processes related to emotion, including reinforcement learning, attention, and arousal. It’s interesting to note other recent research showing that there is a specific gene that governs the creation of neurons in specific parts of the amygdala. Mice lacking this gene, and these neurons, died in infancy. Those with only one copy of the gene, and fewer neurons in those areas, showed an impaired ability to learn from aversive experiences.

And wisdom? Perhaps something like this: While education emphasizes logic and reason, our ability to learn rests on the emotional valence of what is being learned. Facts can only be grasped in so far as they call up experiences we have had, experiences that come, inextricably, with emotions entangled. To attempt to remove the emotional component from learning material is a fool’s errand. A great teacher transmits passion.

And why am I pontificating about the difference between information and knowledge, data and wisdom? Because a lot of people obsess about the acquisition of facts (actually, I was inspired to write this by someone who was practicing their rote learning skills with the avowed intention of memorizing entire chapters of their textbooks!), and many older adults see their ability to do this decline as they get older. But though your ability to acquire new data may well deteriorate, the wealth of data you have accumulated over your decades of experience lends itself well to the more important aspects of learning: developing knowledge, expertise, wisdom.

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