How the Brain Learns, Memorization and Language Learning
*As this is a long post, I bolded the key points to reduce reading time for those who want to just skim the article.
Memory and the Brain, using Spaced Repetition to pick up the slack, and learning tips
Language learning has lead me to the learn more about how the brain stores and recalls information. When you understand how the brain stores and recalls information, you can then judge what the best way to learn a stack of words will be, and if it’s worth it for you to do so.
The human mind stores information based on importance. Something needs to be important to you and specific to your life before your mind will go out of its way to memorize it.
Imagine for a moment that you are a caveman wandering through the forest with your mate, and you come to some thick brush. Your mate goes ahead before you and after a few steps you hear a scream “ahhhhhhhhhhh” and you rush forward in a moment of panic and feel the ground slip away below you. Your mate walked off a cliff, and you are about to follow suit. You have quick reactions and manage to grab a branch and save yourself, but your mate is gone for good. I bet you’ll remember exactly where that cliff is, probably even including how many steps into the brush it is located. It’s important for your survival to remember that cliff. The same goes for poisonous berries and dangerous animals. Trying to remember names of the mountains in China let alone the number of rocks in his cave is going to be extremely difficult – it doesn’t affect his life in any way.
Memory actually gets stored in multiple pieces as an experience, not just “location = x”. We actually use an ancient part of our brain called the hippocampus to store short-term memories into long-term memory. The sound of your mate falling gets stored in the auditory area, while the actual visual is stored in another area. Feelings and emotions are also stored in our memory (although in a different place). These together form an experience, which can then be linked to previous experiences to further strengthen the memory. When you retrieve this experience, any key can lead you to the full memory.
During the information storage process, our brain performs a process called encoding, which packages all of the senses in the memory, along with context. After that, the memory is then linked to past memories that are similar. Finally, concept is attached to that.
You can think of it like a spider web. The memory is the entire spider web, while each string and loop are the different pieces of the puzzle that make up the memory. All of the strings attach and lead to other strings in the web.
The more strings and more connections there are, the stronger the spider web is. By painting this picture for you, you’re actually visualizing a spider web, right? That spider web just attached to the concept I’m trying to explain, thus strengthening the connections to this concept in your memory.
This is all an oversimplification of the process, and some parts might be slightly off, but I hope you get the idea.
Rote Memorization:
We can store information by rote memorization. If you force yourself to see something enough times over a period of time, you can force it into your brain. The problem is that there are not many connections formed; the spider-web is very weak. The information will be hard to retrieve in the future, so you have to spend more time up keeping the retrieval key.
If you try to learn a list of 30 vocabulary words, it will probably take you a good 2-3 hours of copying the words over and over again and staring hard at them. The process will be arduous and boring, but I’m sure that eventually you can do it.
After a few hours, these words are going to quickly slip away from you, and once they’ve slipped, even a little, there are not many keys to help you retrieve it again. You’ll have to relearn them.
Memorization through experience:
When you learn something through experience, such as a word in a language, the connections run deep. Not only will the word be stored with the meaning, but everything that surrounded the word – the sound of the word, the look on someone’s face when they spoke it, the conversation before and the conversation after, etc. Your senses are involved, and context is created. There will be multiple connections made in your brain, and the memory will be firmly planted.
Learning things this way will always be considered important enough to store, as it is happened to you. It will be easier to recall, and you will have a deeper understanding of the item due to context.
Memorization tricks: Storing information through Mnemonics, Pegs, and Pi
There are memory tricks that can help you make rote memorization seem like experience. A set of numbers by themselves, say pi or the order of a deck of cards, does not mean anything to a person, but if you can create an interesting story by attaching pictures or meaning to the numbers, you can fake an experience.
The first thing you need to do is to peg unknown concept to a known concept, making the association easier to remember. These pegs must be created and memorized beforehand, or else you won’t remember how to get back to the original meaning. Usually pegs are created by associating something that looks or sounds similar to the original item, such as “stick” for “1” and “swan” for “2”, etc.
You can use pegs to create a story, bringing the numbers (or whatever other arbitrary fact you are trying to remember) to life so your brain store them. The key here is that it has to be interesting. The more interesting it is to you personally, the better. Sexual and crude stories are usually easier to remember.
Heisig’s method for learning Japanese Kanji uses mnemonics. First, he pegs a meaning to each of the different unique pieces that make up a Japanese character, then has the learner create stories using these meanings to aid in the storing of the character into memory. As long as you create stories that are interesting to you, this method can work. Some people have logged incredible results, including learning 2000 words in just 2 months.
And yet, fake experiences are still not real experiences. If you can avoid having to use memory tricks, then do so, as the connections are not going to be as deep and you will have to put out a lot more work to achieve lesser results.
In language learning I can see being able to learn a language 100% from start to test ready without ever actually using the language – just through pure rote memorization + memorization techniques. Besides learning the alphabet for most languages, and then learning Chinese and Japanese characters, memorization in this way is going to be very inefficient.
The preferred alternative:
Immersion and learning in context is the preferred alternative. I’ve been asked for language learning: “then how do you learn 30 words in a day if not by spending hours with flashcards”? The answer: you spend that same amount of time immersed in the language. Also, and most importantly, only people with a crazy amount of time on their hands should expect themselves to be able to learn 30 words a day. Time produces results – there’s no substitute – so those of us who don’t have time will have to slow down a bit to maintain the quality of our learning.
Unfortunately, not everything can be learned solely through experience. If you are studying to be a doctor, there is a vast amount of information you need to memorize before you can start working. The same goes for many other professions.
In the past people learned by apprenticeship, which worked with our brains instead of in spite of them. People learned by watching and participating, and would gradually start doing supervised work as they gained experience. Things would stick quickly as they actually DID have experience. The downside is that often information that was needed was not available, even when it was needed. If you have the opportunity to learn through doing and have access to the internet, you will find that you can learn an incredible amount of things in a short period of time.
Retrieval:
We don’t yet know everything there is to know about the brain and memory, but from my research it seems that the brain doesn’t forget, it just can’t retrieve information that was originally stored. Perhaps the key that originally held the information faded away, or another memory got in the way. Either way, our brains are not adept at keeping all files at hand and ready to use.
The best way to avoid retrieval problems (aka forgetting), is to refresh your memory. There is a forgetting curve, developed by Ebbinghaus that I wrote about when I talked about SRS, that maps when our brains forget information, which then birthed Spaced Repetition. In order to keep memories fresh, you have to refresh them before they fade, and now that we know when they fade, we can plan review sessions accordingly.
If you are constantly using information, you do not need to do extra review: the keys to those memories are refreshed far more often than needed for maintenance already. This makes me wonder if separately learning the most common words in a language is actually useful. Simply by using the language you will come across these words very often, instead it is the less common vocabulary that you need to upkeep. In the beginning, these words are the necessary to quickly dive into a language. I’ll keep this in mind and post on it another day.
Conclusions about learning:
Our brains will remember things faster if they are necessary and important to us, and if there was experience along with the learning. This reinforces the idea that you should learn things that you can use right now, as they are important and are experienced, thus become more “sticky” in your brain. The more important and interesting something, the stronger the experience will be. Also, the more important and interesting something is, the more focused your attention will be.
For language learners, this means that the preferred materials for learning are exactly the materials that interest you and are useful for you. This may mean that learning all of the grammar of a language in the beginning is not as helpful as learning grammar points as you go along – so I may actually have been wrong about that. It seems to me now that learning how a language works in the context of using the language rather than during study will result in stronger and more lasting understanding; however this does not mean that grammar resources and cheat sheets are not helpful – simply that language learning materials should only be used for reference in helping you understand, not as stand-alone tutorials.
Another way to think about this is in terms of relevancy and activity. The more relevant a topic is to your life and the more active you during the learning process, the better you remember it.
Non-language uses:
Don’t go to a class about web-page design if there aren’t computers set up for you to try it as you go along – it might be best instead to just take an online tutorial that you can follow along with on your own computer.
Learning how to start or run a business, or open an EBay store will be far more effective if you are doing those things while you learn. Learning and doing should go hand-in-hand.
This article takes us full circle to another idea called motivation, but I’ll leave it here for now.
Related posts:
- Japanese Day 1 and New Language Learning Methods
- How to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn: The Spaced Repetition System
- Just Let Go – Recharge Motivation with Passive Language Learning
- Frustrating phases in language learning – How to focus your efforts
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http://beyondbounds.org/ Jason Sharp
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http://beyondbounds.org/ Jason Sharp
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http://beyondbounds.org/2010/12/become-a-productivity-guru-in-4-small-steps/ Become a Productivity Guru in 4 Small Steps | Beyond Bounds