Improving Memory Involves More Than Gimmicks

Two elderly couples were enjoying friendly conversation when one of the men asked the other, "Fred, how was the memory clinic you went to last month?"

"Outstanding," Fred replied. "They taught us all the latest psychological techniques - visualization, association - it made a huge difference for me."

"That's great! What was the name of the clinic?"

Fred went blank. He thought and thought, but couldn't remember. Then Fred smiled and asked, "What do you call that red flower with the long stem and thorns?"

"You mean a rose?"

"Yes, that's it!" He turned to his wife. . ."Rose, what was the name of that clinic?"

Memory techniques, like visualized associations, are important for improving memory. I sometimes get chided, as in a recent commentary, for writing about things that readers think are unrelated to memory.

But memory is not independent of everything else that brains do. This includes general thinking abilities, motivation, attitudes, lifestyle, and the mental challenges that a person seeks. General health, exercise, sleep, response to stress, and diet are also important. I have elaborated on these influences on memory in my books and learning and memory blog. Research continually expands our understanding of these indirect influences on learning and memory, and I try to keep readers informed of the practical applications of these developments.

Another under-appreciated area about memory is the role of learning. As two sides of the same coin, learning and memory are interdependent. How we approach a learning task has enormous impact on how much of it we remember. These factors include study strategy, attentiveness, distractibility and cognitive interference, and organization and categorization of learning material. Likewise, how much you remember of learned material affects one’s capacity for understanding and memorizing new material. Experts in a given field have become experts because what they have memorized includes learning templates and schema that help them to be better learners than non-experts. They may have learned to increase working memory capacity, which in turn improves the ability to think and solve problems.  That is, the more they know, the more they can know.

Memory ability is multi-dimensional. The complete learner employs all the means of improving knowledge.

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Your Kid May Be Smart. Just Don’t Tell Him So Too Often

Some people say that we learn best from our mistakes. But all of us know about people who never seem to learn from their mistakes. This failure to learn is most obvious with people who keep making poor decisions and lifestyle choices. The psychological explanations are many and complex.

For simplicity, let us restrict explanation to the world of education. Educational philosophy has changed a great deal in the 50 years since I was in school. Back then, for example, I had the highest grades in school, but many of my teachers went out of their way to cut me down a notch or two so I wouldn’t get conceited. Aside from the debatable question of whether that worked, the point is that today, the educational establishment has the opposite philosophy. They tend to tell all kids they are smart. I have seen elementary schools where most students are selected as “Honors Students.” I know college education professors who won’t give anything less than an A.  Why is praise so liberally applied? In part, the idea is to bolster student self-esteem. Also motivating teachers is the reluctance to admit that some kids are smarter than others. Equal outcome is the politically correct expectation. That’s why we have the No Child Left Behind law. Everybody is supposed to succeed because all are presumed equal. Of course the reality is that this is a lie, and the only way everybody achieves the same is to lower the standards to the least common denominator.

Research clearly shows that whether students learn best from their mistakes depends on a student’s self-perception. Research by Carol Dweck and colleagues at Stanford demonstrated that the students who are most likely to learn from their mistakes are those who don’t think of themselves as smart as such but smart enough to get smarter. They have a “growth mindset,” a belief system that they can get better if they will just invest the time and effort. In one of the group’s experiments, half of the students were repeatedly praised for “being smart,” and these students were not good at learning from mistakes. It is not clear why. Maybe they thought the problem was in the learning material, not in them. The other half of students were praised for effort and improvement and these students got better and made fewer mistakes. Several months later, all students repeated a standardized test, and the “smart” students’ scores dropped 20%, while the “growth mindset” students scored 30% higher.

Jason Moser followed up this idea with an experiment in which subjects performed a tedious task in which some mistakes were inevitable. Those who did best at learning from the mistakes were those who believed most strongly that they could get better at this task and make fewer mistakes. Brain electrical recordings during the task revealed two electrical signatures of the mindset, the first being an error-related negative voltage about 50 milliseconds after an error occurred, and a second positive voltage up to about a half a second later. The size of this second signal correlated with how intensely the subject paid conscious attention and was distressed by the mistake. This second signal was larger in those subjects that were the best learners, and they made even fewer mistakes as the task was repeated.

Ego is probably a factor. The “smart” students may seem to have plenty of self-esteem, but apparently failure is too painful a challenge to their ego and they find ways to rationalize or dismiss the mistakes. Students with a growth mindset may have better self-esteem, because they accept the challenge to their ego, and believe they can get better, which usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A little humility is a good thing. Most of us, even the smartest, have a lot to be humble about. There is even a book on the subject, “Why Do Smart People Make Such Stupid Mistakes.”

Sources:

1. http://www.brainology.us/default.aspx?gclid=CNn04-q_oq0CFbEDtgodQj4iuQ

2. Mangels, J. A. (2006) Why do beliefs about intelligence influence learning success? A social cognitive neuroscience model. SCAN, 1, 75–86. doi:10.1093/scan/nsl013

3. Merrington, C. (2011). Why Do Smart People Make Such Stupid Mistakes, St Albans, Herts, United Kingdom: Ecademy Press.

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My other blog activities

I am delighted to have so many followers. However, it is not nearly as many as I apparently have at Psychology Today, where the reader views of my posts there now total over 65,000 (see http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic). Some of my posts there are cross posts from this blog, but others are unique.

You may want to know about my other blog on excuse-making, misplaced blame, and how to grow in competence and self-esteem by dealing with deception of self and others. See http://blamegameblog.blogspot.com.

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Save Us From the Education Experts

The New Framework for K-12 Science Education. 

What They Missed.

The National Research Council of the National Academies recently released their landmark epistle, A Framework for K-12 Science Education. This book advocates the practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas that students should know at each K-12 grade level. The purpose is to influence the science educa

While I applaud the purpose, I find much to criticize about these recommendations from this august body of experts. I won’t burden you with the details on everything I find lacking, but one whole category of recommendations seems to have been overlooked. Their guidelines say almost nothing about brain and behavior. Students are humans, and the most distinctive and important feature of being human is the brain and the behavior it controls. Why don't we require students to understand more about their brain and behavior, particularly as to the relationships to social interactions, emotions, and learning and memory? This is the one category of human experience where children especially need guidance and education. And in this category something that is especially applicable to school children is the science about learning and memory. We tell school children WHAT to learn (much of which is irrelevant to their life at the moment), but not HOW to learn. That is really bizarre. U.S. education needs to be rescued from the clutches of the establishment “experts.”

Bill Klemm

http://thankyoubrain.com

Author of e-book, Better Grades, Less Effort

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Fix Bad Federal Education Policy

Congress is now going through the ritual of tweaking the No Child Left Behind law for the nation’s schools. The law is vigorously opposed by both teacher unions and the TEA party. That should tell you all you need to know about this bad legislation. Of course the reasons for opposition are quite different, but all have a large degree of validity. Teachers don’t like bureaucrats judging them and their schools, and the TEA party thinks we have too much federal government intrusion in general.

The law, however tweaked by revision, is fatally flawed by its basic assumptions. Foremost is the fantasy that government should provide not only equal opportunity but equal outcome. The only way you can get all students to have equal learning is to dumb down the curricula, which is what is done. Schools cater to the lower performing students at the expense of good students. For example, over the last two decades an analysis by the Wall Street Journal revealed that the lowest-performing students have shown clear gains in test scores but little improvement for other students.

A second flaw is that the law ignores the extraordinary range of mental development in children. Some students cannot be salvaged at a given grade level. Moreover, student motivation for learning is a highly mutable, often changing from year to year. Some students cannot be salvaged at any stage, either for reasons of neglect, abuse, bad parenting, or the students’ own negative attitudes. “Do-gooder” focus on these students drags down the whole educational enterprise.

Then there is the problem of misplaced incentives. Where are the incentives for students to do better? In fact, the students are being asked to help make their school and teachers look good.

Finally, this era of No Child Left Behind and high-stakes testing fails to help us understand how to accomplish the basic purpose of assessment: figuring out what students know and need to learn. Multiple-choice tests are certainly not reliable. In fact, these tests mostly measure recognition memory, the least reliable indicator of what has been remembered.

One teacher, Ryan Kinser, endorses the idea of “teaching to the test,” but we need better tests: ones based on “curriculum-embedded performance assessments that are valid, reliable, and accurate measures of what and how students learned.” I would add that testing per se is not the problem. Indeed, research shows that tests reinforce retention of what has been learned. At a local school level, low-stakes benchmark tests should be routine and frequent.

Teachers do need to be held accountable. But not for the weaknesses of the culture of their community, or for bad school administrators and policies, or for the poor educations they get in Colleges of Education, or for the flawed requirements of No Child Left Behind.  Teachers have no control over many of the bad things schools do. The school year is too short, summer vacation is too long, more short holidays are needed, the school day needs to be restructured, most textbooks are just terrible, subjects are taught along academic themes rather than the integrated real world students live in, and the school environment in general just kills the joy of learning.

What should the role of the federal government be in education? It should be in administering meaningful educational research, providing guidance (not mandates) on academic standards, and disseminating “best practices.” No more, no less.

W. R. Klemm

Professor of Neuroscience

http://thankyoubrain.com

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New e-book on Better Grades, Less Effort

Better Grades News Release, Sept. 20, 2011
From: Benecton Press

Dr. Bill Klemm, "Memory Medic," has just released a new e-book, Better Grades, Less Effort. The book is available from Smashwords.com IN ALL E-FORMATS for only $2.49 (order from http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/24623). Read the 5-star reviews there. Amazon has it for Kindle.

The book explains the memory tips and tricks he used to become valedictorian, an Honors student in three universities -- including graduating with a D.V.M. degree, and to secure a PhD in two-and-a-half years. He shares what he has learned about student approaches to study over 47 years as a professor. Klemm claims that poor memory is what holds most students back from superior achievement.

Dr. Klemm has priced the book so that every student can afford it. He argues that this book can change a person's life, as his own experience with learning how to learn changed his life. He says, "If you won't invest the cost of a burger in your future, what does that say about your future?"

The ideas in the book are directed to students in high school or college. Parents are urged to explain these ideas to their elementary-school children.

This book is also for any working professional engaged in on-the-job training programs. Dr. Klemm claims It will also help workers master their field and become more competent -- and more likely to be successful.

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Neuro-education: hot new area in education

I just returned from the Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning conference that I attended in Aspen, Colorado. Neuro-education is a hot new education movement based on transitioning discoveries about brain function into teaching practices. Actually, this is what I have been doing since 2004 with my efforts to find practical applications in memory research and explain them to teachers and students (see http://thankyoubrain.com).

You would never guess who the conference organizers invited to be the keynote speaker. It was Goldie Hawn. Yes, I mean the famous actress many of us think of as a ditsy blonde. She is a grandmother now, but still vivacious and attractive (and I was thrilled with our brief visit). Goldie has created a neuroscience-based “Minds Up” educational Foundation and program to improve learning in elementary school children (see www.thehawnfoundation.org/minsup). Her program espouses some of the things that are central to brain-based education. She shows that even those we think of as ditsy blondes are interested in neuroscience and how it can help us learn and remember. Elementary school teachers are using her approach not only to teach neuroscience (see, it is not arcane), they also teach kids to be more introspective about how what they feel, think and do affects the brain and their learning.

Showing kids how to be aware of and control their feelings and behavior is a key part of neuro-education. The experts refer to this capability as “Executive Function,” which they simplistically ascribe to the prefrontal cortex (pfc). The pfc is the part of the brain that is most developed in higher primates, such as chimps, apes and humans. As such, the pfc is certainly crucial to executive brain functions. But many researchers, including me, have shown that higher cognitive functions arise from widespread action across many parts of the neocortex.

Anyway, from a teaching perspective, what is important about Executive Function training is teach kids how to be better at it. Goldie’s program emphasizes teaching kids to recognize when they are wired, upset, angry, or have other emotions that interfere with their learning. By being more self-aware, they have a better chance to control themselves.  

I also met at that conference, Nobel Prize physicist, Carl Wieman, now Associate Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology. His talk stressed that educators need to emphasize concepts and principles. He also made the point that everybody who has gone to school tends to think they are an expert in learning. But he emphasized, “novices seldom recognize what they do not know, especially in education.”

Also presenting at the conference was the U.N.’s World Bank’s education director, Helen Abadzi of the (and fellow Auburn graduate), She told me about the science-based reform initiatives the Bank is pursuing in developing countries.

We all know that U.S. education is in crisis. Many think the solution is just to spend more money. But there is plenty of non-partisan research showing there is no reliable correlation between funding and educational achievement. The plea for more money is akin to the fallacy of solving the federal budget deficit crisis by borrowing still more money. No, the solution for both problems is to stop doing things that don’t work and do more of what does. The ideas of “neuro-education” are crucial to effective reform.

Research in this area includes, in addition to training Executive Function, such things as reasoning training, improving working memory, ways to improve memory consolidation and retrieval, and treatments for reading disabilities and ADHD. 

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