In the past few decades, researchers have uncovered and road-tested a host of techniques that deepen learning—techniques that remain largely unknown outside scientific circles. These approaches aren’t get-smarter schemes that require computer software, gadgets, or medication. Nor are they based on any grand teaching philosophy, intended to lift the performance of entire classrooms (which no one has done, reliably). On the contrary, they are all small alterations, alterations in how we study or practice that we can apply individually, in our own lives, right now. The hardest part in doing so may be trusting that they work. That requires some suspension of disbelief because this research defies everything we’ve been told about how best to learn.
Consider the boilerplate advice to seek out a “quiet place” and make that a dedicated study area. This seems beyond obvious. It’s easier to concentrate without noise, and settling in at the same desk is a signal to the brain that says, it’s time to work. Yet we work more effectively, scientists have found, when we continually alter our study routines and abandon any “dedicated space” in favor of varied locations. Sticking to one learning ritual, in other words, slows us down.
Another common assumption is that the best way to master a particular skill—say, long division or playing a musical scale—is by devoting a block of time to repetitively practicing just that. Wrong again. Studies find that the brain picks up patterns more efficiently when presented with a mixed bag of related tasks than when it’s force-fed just one, no matter the age of the student or the subject area, whether Italian phrases or chemical bonds. I can’t help thinking again of my own strained, scattered existence in college, up all hours and down napping many afternoons, in blithe defiance of any kind of schedule. I’m not going to say that such free-form living always leads to mastery. But I will argue that integrating learning into the more random demands of life can improve recall in many circumstances—and that what looks like rank procrastination or distraction often is nothing of the kind.
The science of learning—to take just one implication—casts a different light on the growing alarm over distraction and our addiction to digital media. The fear is that plugged-in Emily and Josh, pulled in ten directions at once by texts, tweets, and Facebook messages, cannot concentrate well enough to consolidate studied information. Even worse, that all this scattered thinking will, over time, somehow weaken their brains’ ability to learn in the future. This is a red herring. Distractions can of course interfere with some kinds of learning, in particular when absorption or continued attention is needed—when reading a story, say, or listening to a lecture—and if gossiping on social media steals from study time. Yet we now know that a brief distraction can help when we’re stuck on a math problem or tied up in a creative knot and need to shake free.
In short, it is not that there is a right way and wrong way to learn. It’s that there are different strategies, each uniquely suited to capturing a particular type of information. A good hunter tailors the trap to the prey.
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The story begins twenty feet underwater, just off the coast of Oban, Scotland.
Oban, on the Sound of Mull and facing the islands known as the Southern Hebrides, is a premier diving destination. It’s within easy range of the Rondo, an American steamer that sank here in 1934 and sits—jackknifed, nose-down—in 150 feet of water, a magnet for explorers in scuba gear. A half dozen other shipwrecks are also close—the Irish Thesis, lost in 1889; the Swedish Hispania, which went down in 1954—and the waters course with dogfish, octopus, cuttlefish, and the psychedelic sea slugs called nudibranchs.
It was here, in 1975, that a pair of psychologists from nearby Stirling University recruited a group of divers to participate in an unusual learning experiment.
The psychologists, D. R. Godden and A. D. Baddeley, wanted to test a hypothesis that many learning theorists favored: that people remember more of what they studied when they return to that same study environment. This is a variation on the detective novel line, “Now, Mrs. Higgins, let’s return to the night of the murder. Tell me exactly what you saw and heard.” Like the detective, psychologists hypothesized that features of the study location—the lighting, the wallpaper, the background music—provide the brain “cues” to shake free more information. The difference is that Mrs. Higgins is trying to revisit a dramatic scene, an autobiographical memory, and the researchers were applying the same idea—reinstatement, they called it—to facts, to what the Estonian psychologist Endel Tulving called “semantic memories.”
The idea seems far-fetched. Who on earth remembers what was playing through the headphones when he or she learned the definition of an isosceles triangle, or an ionic bond, or the role of Viola in Twelfth Night? And when Godden and Baddeley dreamed up their experiment, the evidence for reinstatement was shabby at best. In one previous experiment, for example, participants tried to memorize word lists they heard through earphones while standing with their heads inside a box containing multicolored flashing lights (two dropped out due to nausea). In another, subjects studied nonsense syllables while strapped to a board, which tipped on an axis like a teeter-totter, as in some cruel school yard prank.
The reinstatement seemed to facilitate better memory but Godden and Baddeley weren’t convinced. They wanted to test-drive reinstatement theory in an environment that was unusual but found in nature, not created by imaginative psychologists. So they had a group of eighteen scuba divers study a list of thirty-six words while submerged twenty feet underwater. The researchers split the divers into two groups. An hour later, one group took a test on the words on dry land, while the others strapped on their equipment and took the test back down under, using a waterproof mike to communicate with those on land doing the scoring. The results indeed depended strongly on test location. The divers who took the test underwater did better than those who took it on land, remembering about 30 percent more words. That’s a lot, and the two psychologists concluded that, “recall is better if the environment of the original learning is reinstated.”
Maybe the bubbles streaming past the diving mask acted as a cue, accentuating the vowels in the studied words. Maybe it was the rhythmic bellows of the breath in the mouthpiece, or the weight of the tank, plus the sight of swarming nudibranchs. Or the fact that those semantic memories became part of an episodic one (learning while diving). Perhaps all of the above. Reinstatement seemed to work, anyway—for underwater learning.
The Oban experiment lent comfort and encouragement to what would become a somewhat haphazard exploration of the influence of context on memory. The study materials in these experiments were almost always word lists, or word pairs, and the tests were usually on free recall. In one investigation, for example, people who studied a list of nonsense syllables on blue-gray cards remembered 20 percent more of them on a later test when the test cards were also blue-gray (as opposed to, say, red). In another, students who got exam questions from the same instructor who taught the material did 10 percent better than getting them from a neutral test proctor.
A psychologist named Steven M. Smith performed some of the most interesting experiments in this area, and it’s worth looking at one of his in detail to see how scientists measure and think about so-called contextual cues. In 1985 Smith, at Texas A&M University, convened a group of fifty-four Psych 101 students—psychologists’ standard guinea pigs—and had them study a list of forty words. He divided the students into three groups. One group studied in silence. Another had a jazz number, Milt Jackson’s “People Make the World Go Around,” playing in the background. The third had Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number 24 in C Minor. The music was on when the subjects arrived in their assigned rooms, and they had no reason to believe it was relevant to the experiment. They spent ten minutes memorizing, and left.
The students returned to the study room two days later and, without warning, they were given a test to see how many words they could freely recall. This time, Smith changed the tune for many of them. He subdivided the three groups. Some who’d studied to jazz took the test with jazz again; others took it with the Mozart; and others in silence. Likewise for those who studied with Mozart or in silence: They tested either in the same condition, or one of the other two. Nothing else changed.
Nothing, that is, except their scores.
Smith found that those who studied with Milt Jackson playing and took the test with the same music recalled twenty-one words on average—twice as many as those who studied with Jackson and took the test to Mozart, or in silence. Similarly, those who studied with Mozart recalled nearly twice as many words with Mozart playing than in silence or with the jazz in the background.
The punch line: Of those who studied and tested in the same condition, the silence-silence group did the worst. They recalled, on average, about half the words that the jazz-jazz or classical-classical groups did (eleven versus twenty). This is bizarre, and it raised an unexpected question: Could quiet somehow be inhibiting memory? The answer was no. If it had, then those who’d studied with jazz would have done worse taking the test in silence than with Mozart (vice versa, for those who’d studied with classical). They hadn’t.
~~How We Learn -by- Benedict Carey
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