*Memory* Understanding how our memory works is one of the key - TopicsExpress

*Memory* Understanding how our memory works is one of the key elements to be able to learn, retain needed knowledge and to be able to apply it in real life. People often mistakenly think that they have bad memory and/or they are below average in their intelligence and ability to learn. The real issue is that people are ignorant about the way our brain works and what are the most effective ways to learn and retain important ideas. We are going to discuss here several of the most important aspects that would give you the key to effective learning: - high level neurological structure of our brains - millions of redundant pattern recognizers, - necessity to repeat when learning, - necessity to practice difficult problems, - necessity to revisit the learned information and skills regularly. Our brain is a collection of hundreds of millions of neural pattern recognizers that store information in great redundancy [1]. All significant neural patterns are stored in our brain not once, but hundreds and thousands of times. Only in this case we can recollect things easily and operate these pieces of information effectively - signals from those patterns that are stored only once or twice are lost in neurological “noise” and are soon erased so that the neurons be reused for other patterns. Understanding this key concept in how our brain works explains many things at once - from the question “why my 4 years old child is asking me the same thing thousands of times” to “why I have to re-read the book occasionally if I want to cite it and use its information effectively”. So what must we do to maximize the capacity and effectiveness of our memory? 1. Repeat and Link When we are learning we must repeat the same information many times, look at the new information from all possible angles and devise analogies to link the new concepts to the existing neural patterns. This allows our brain to create stable redundant neurological patterns that will be easy to retrieve, to use and to link with other patterns. Dr. Barbara Oakley calls this process chunking [2]. Understanding the information and creating as many links with already known concepts is one of the key ingredients for successful learning and retaining information in memory because new neurological pathways are linked to many existing patterns that makes them stable and retrievable in the future. Recollecting the information that you have just learned helps to strengthen the new patterns, and make them much more readily accessible at a later time. 2. Challenge Yourself with Difficult Problems One of the integral requirements for effective learning is applying your knowledge to solving real problems. The more difficult and challenging the problems are the more deeply you will understand the material and the more firmly the new patterns will be stored in your memory. It does not make sense to practice easy problems, they can create illusion of competence while at the end there would be no much new and useful information retained in memory. As Salman Khan, a famous educator and the founder of Khan Academy, put it: “They [researchers] have found that neural connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones” [3]. 3. Use It or Loose It Our brains truncate unused neural patterns and in time we tend to forget those pieces of information that we do not revisit and do not use. So it is a good practice to come back to the information and skills that you once learned but have not used in some time. A technique called Spaced Repetition utilizes this: according to it you should revisit your knowledge in a day, in a week, then in a month or so. For the best results we must come back to the information that we recently learned, actively retrieve this information by recollection, do some more difficult practice, make more notes from memory (just like I am doing now while writing this text), teach this information to somebody else. Please share your thoughts and your experiences in the area of memory and learning in the comment section bellow. [1] “How to Create a Mind” by Ray Kurzweil [2] “A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science” by Barbara Oakley [3] https://khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/95208400815/the-learning-myth-why-ill-never-tell-my-son-hes