A (very) short read about memory and learning...

...and a little security, too

We are home from Colorado. At Denver airport I went for a wander before we boarded our flight. Inevitably, I ended up in the bookstore and, equally inevitably, I bought a book. It turned out to be a good thing to have done. The book I bought is called ‘Remember’. It is written by neuroscientist and novelist Lisa Genova. It’s about the science of memory.

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I’ve been working with schools and other organisations around learning for a long time now. Most of my work is based around a number of core ideas. I try not to stray into the overcrowded shelves of speculation. Helping learning happen is hard enough without being distracted by sexy but unproven ideas.

Sticking with these core agreements comes with a little nervousness. What if there is no longer agreement about them? What if new evidence is dismantling previously held ideas? The reason I read and connect with different people all the time is to make sure I am on safe ground but each new thing I read or conversation I have creates an initial nervousness that I might now be on shaky ground.

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This is why buying and reading ‘Remember’ has been a good thing. It has given me a continued confidence in the core agreements on which Looking for Learning is based. Here, briefly, are a few of them.

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Learning is a brain thing

You might remember the ‘sort-of trick’ question my colleagues and I have asked educators over the years: ‘Where does learning take place in schools?’ Most often the initial answers are about classrooms, the school yard or someplace similar. Our answer is that learning takes place in the brain. Learning is a brain thing.

In ‘Remember’ Lisa Genova talks about skills learning and muscle memory. She says that ‘muscle memory is a misnomer. I’m here to restore credit to its rightful owner. Your body might perform the Chicken Dance once you have learned the routine, and it might feel as though your arms and legs remember to do the steps, but the program for this choreography doesn’t live in your muscles. It’s in your brain.’

It’s still true. All learning is a brain thing.

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Learning is a matter of appropriate repeated experiences

I have written and said everywhere that the core experience of learning is repeated experiences, and that without those repeated experiences learning is unlikely to happen. A consequence of this is that an over-full curriculum, too little time in lessons (and other things, too) all contribute to repeated experiences losing out to simple coverage.

In ‘Remember’, Lisa Genova continually stresses the importance of repeated experiences. she says that ‘Repetition definitely fortifies memory’’; ‘You can sustain the same information longer in your working memory by repeating it’. ‘If you repeat it enough times, it will be consolidated via your hippocampus into longer-lasting memory'; ‘With repetition and focused practice, complex sequences of previously unrelated physical movements can be bound together and executed as a single action’; ‘your ability…to do this better…has primarily developed because you have repeatedly activated and strengthened specific neuronal connections within your brain.’

It’s still true. Repeated experiences are at the heart of learning.

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Knowledge, skills and understanding are learned, taught and assessed differently.

I have said that although knowledge, skills and understanding share the brain as the locus of their learning, and share repeated experiences as their core learning activity, these experiences and the way they are delivered by teachers and then assessed or evaluated are different in kind.

In ‘Remember’, Lisa Genova points out the reasons for these differences. She says, for example, that the brain activity that causes knowledge learning is significantly different from the brain behaviour that causes skills learning.

Genova shows how knowledge learning (I know that Paris is the capital of France) is processed through short-term working memory into long-term memory through the hippocampus. Skills learning (I am able to navigate my way to Paris), on the other hand, occurs through a part of the brain called the basal ganglia and then reinforced through the cerebellum. She says that ‘while the hippocampus is essential for forming…knowledge…this brain structure isn’t involved at all in creating’ skills.

It’s still true. Knowledge, skills and understanding need to be learned, taught and assessed differently.

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Memory wasn’t one of our 12 factors that most affect learning for a good reason.

I spent way too long trying to work out how to use memory as one of the core factors that affect learning. Now I know why I failed and why I am glad I didn’t try to squeeze it in somewhere. It’s because memory is the result of learning and not independent of it. Genova says: ‘Where are memories stored? In no one place. They are distributed throughout the parts of the brain that registered the initial experience. We don’t have specialised memory-storage neurons or a memory cortex. When we remember something, we’re not withdrawing it from a memory bank. There is no memory bank.’

Memory is what happens when learning is made sticky through repeated experiences. Memory is the result of the learning experience and not a factor that contributes to it. Having a ‘bad’ memory is caused by not paying initial attention, not being given the right learning experiences and not having the repeated experiences to make the learning sticky. There is no memory that is bad of its own accord.

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At some point in the future we may look at memory in a little more detail, but not right now. What reading Lisa Genova’s recent book has done for me is two fold. First, it underpins how memory is the result of the learning process and not independent of it. Second, it reassures me that the core ideas that are behind everything contained in Looking or Learning remain valid.

With a sigh of relief, I can begin the new season knowing that the game hasn’t changed. I hope you can, too.

See you soon.

Martin