The Science Behind the Science
Since this series of articles is dedicated to science literacy, this seems like it might be a good time to touch on the subject of learning. It seems relevant on several levels for readers, and it’s sort of in my wheelhouse, both as a Neuroscientist and as an educator. I got way into the subject of “learning how to learn” when I was teaching introductory science classes to college Freshmen and I got tired of my students not learning the things I wanted them to learn. There is a lot of good science behind what I’m going to tell you about, here. It’s not just me spouting pet theories.
First off, you should know that there is no such thing as multitasking, in the sense that people tend to refer to it. Your brain is a truly, truly magnificent organ. It weighs somewhere around 3 or 4 pounds, and most of that is fat and water, but it has a remarkable capacity to store information. The only little limitation is in getting information into your memory in such a way as so you can get it back out again when you need to. In computer terms, your brain has a single track serial input bus, meaning you can only do one thing at a time with any particular part of your brain. If you would like proof of that, try this simple experiment—pick a song you like to sing and pick up a book. Try to sing along with your song and read the book at the same time. You can’t do it. The reason you can’t do it is that you are trying to make the part of your brain that deals with language do two tasks at the same time, and it can’t. If you would like to continue your experiment, try this. Write down some math problems. Start your song over again and start singing along while you work the math problems. You will find that you CAN do that, and the reason is because the part of your brain that you are using to work the math problems is different from the part of your brain that is dealing with singing the song, so you aren’t asking any part of your brain to do two things at once.
That you can’t multi-task is one thing. You also can’t divide your focus effectively, meaning you can’t really pay full attention to more than one thing at a time. This means that if you are paying attention to one thing—say a message on your phone—you cannot be paying attention to driving your car. You can shift your attention between them—you can read a little, then look at where you’re going, then read a little more, but you can’t do both. Hopefully, your attention won’t be momentarily on your phone when the kid runs out in front of you.
So, why is this important for learning? It’s important, because most people who are purposefully trying to learn something, like a student studying for a class, set themselves up for failure (or at least make things much harder on themselves) by trying to learn in an environment where learning is hard, or maybe even impossible. Do you study better when there is music playing? Nope. You don’t. You just like to have music playing, even though it is interfering with your studying. You can either pay attention to the music, or to what you’re studying, but not both at once. If you are trying to study something in a noisy, active environment, or if you are “multitasking”, you’re just studying poorly. That is important learning tip number 1.
Important tip number 2 comes from how you process information. You might have heard about how some people are “visual learners” or “auditory learners” or “kinesthetic learners (learn best by doing things)”. You might have even been told which one you were and have tried to adjust your learning style to fit that. The thing is that most of the current research says that all of that isn’t really true. People do have preferences for how they are exposed to information—by reading, or listening or doing hands-on things—but it turns out that they are just preferences. Just because you prefer one way doesn’t mean that the others don’t work for you. In fact, learning actually occurs best when you are combining all those different ways of learning.
People may have preferences for how they “digest” information, but once the information gets in, everyone processes it the same way, which is why there really are techniques that work for everyone to help them learn. You really can “learn how to learn”! It has always amazed me that we, as a society, spend thousands of hours and thousands upon thousands of dollars to expose children to math, science, language, humanities and all the other important things that make life rich and make it work, but we generally never spend any time at all teaching kids how to learn. We just expect them to know how.
Anyway, when you are first exposed to a bit of information that you want to retain and retrieve at some later time, that bit of information first goes into what is called “short-term memory”. It’s called that because it generally only lasts a few minutes, at best. Short-term memory is used mostly to help you do things like not bump into the chair you just got out of when you turn around again. If you need to hold onto a piece of information for later use, it has to be transferred from short-term memory into what is called, oddly enough “long-term memory”. There is a really interesting part of your brain, called the hippocampus, that is involved in this process. Nobody really understands how it all works, yet, but there has been a lot of progress on research into cognition and learning in recent times. In any event, when some bit of information is transferred to long-term memory through the hippocampus, it will stay there, potentially for the rest of your life. The trick is getting the information back out again when you want it. That’s the hard part.
This is important learning tip number 3. Being able to retrieve a piece of information, like a phone number or an item on a grocery list, requires that you process the memory in such a way that your brain knows where it is and can find it when you want it. Everything you know—everything that makes you, you—every instinct, every instruction your brain sends to your body—is stored as bits of information that is encoded by thousands of connections between neurons (nerve cells) in your brain. Somewhere in your brain is a pattern of connections that means “four”, and every time you think of “four”, your brain accesses that pattern and you are able to remember what it means. Here’s an example: I just told you the definition of “neuron”. When you read it, the definition “nerve cell” went into your short-term memory. You would probably have forgotten it, if you didn’t have some reason to remember it, before you got to the end of this article. Now, because I’ve made you think about it again and in a little more detail, you’ll probably remember it for a while. It’s moved into long-term memory. You’ll probably forget it soon, if you don’t use the memory, but it’s there for a little while, now.
Tip number 4 to working with your brain to learn things is that slow and steady wins the race. There’s a rule of thumb that says you should spend 2 (or even 3) hours studying outside of class for every hour you spend in class. That’s probably not unreasonable, but it almost certainly depends on the subject matter. Some things are just inherently easier to learn than others. Things that come harder for you require more time. Here’s the point, though. If you are in class for 6 hours and have a test coming up, sitting down and studying for 12 hours in one go the night before the test isn’t going to work. Again, your brain can’t process information like that. You need to put in the time, but you need to do it in short stretches—no more than 20 or maybe 30 minutes at a time. Then you need to do something else. Take a walk. Listen to music. Grab a snack. You can even study another subject for a while, and come back to the first one later, but you need to give your brain a break and let it process things in digestible chunks. I’m not talking about just reading a book for English Literature class. You can read all you want in a session, but you can’t overdo the serious studying. The best way is to study each subject daily for a short session or two. I always found it best to not really study at all the night before an exam, unless there were formulae to memorize or stuff like that. Never hurts to review those for rote memory. I always suggested to my students to get their studying done early. Get a good night’s sleep before the exam (important for formation of long-term memory). Don’t show up early for the exam and sit outside the classroom, with your books and notes all over, watching everyone else panic. Show up with a pencil or two at class time, be confident that you know your stuff, walk in, sit down and get it done. That pre-exam panic period with last minute cramming that people tend to have disorders the mind, sets up all sorts of stress reactions and will pretty much always decrease your performance.
Here’s the last and most important learning tip: if you want to remember something, WRITE IT DOWN. Taking notes is a remarkably good way to move information into long-term memory. You even already know this is true, because you’ve done the experiment to test the hypothesis many times. How many times have you made a list, say for the grocery, then walked off and left the list, but still were able to remember most everything on it? Happens all the time. Contrast that with you trying to just remember the three things you need as you’re walking out the door. You’ll be lucky to remember two of them by the time you get to the store, unless you see something while you’re there to jog your memory. So, if you want to learn things, and if you are a student or know a student, pay attention to this: WRITE. Take lots of notes. Take notes in class. Take notes when you are reading. Recopy your notes after class to make them better. This is the best way I know to help you learn. The reason is because writing is very, very complicated. Written letters are symbols for sounds. The sounds, when we put them together, form words. The words have specific meanings. That is some seriously complicated stuff, and it involves many different parts of your brain. Beyond just the difficulty you brain has with processing spoken and written language, there is the complexity of writing. Your brain has to tell your hand how to make the tiny little squiggles that we use as letters. That is a hugely complex task that uses whole different parts of your brain. The difficulty of writing is incredible! The thing is this, though. The harder your brain has to work to process a bit of information, the more different parts of your brain that are involved, the more likely that information is going to be stored permanently in your long-term memory, and in such a way as you will be able to get it out again. So, if you want to learn, take notes. Write them out. Write them more than once. Don’t use a keyboard. Keyboarding is much easier for your brain than writing, and it won’t help you learn as well as writing.
There are other aspects of learning, other techniques you can use to help you learn, and more importantly, retain information that you can use, but that will have to wait for another day. Seriously, folks, there is probably nothing you can ever learn more important than learning how to learn. It works all the time, and it will stay with you forever, making learning everything else way, way easier. If you would like to learn more about this, there is a ton of stuff on the internet, and there are lots of books. There is one I really liked, and I actually used it in some of my classes. It’s called “Make it Stick: the Science of Successful Learning”. If you are a student, or even if you are just someone who likes to learn, you might want to read it. It could be the most valuable book you ever read.