What you already know is the key to learning new things
The facts piled up in your brain can turn into fertile soil. But you have to plough through them so the new ideas you’re planting have a chance to take root
Imagine how much you already know. Just contemplate everything you have learned and experienced during all the years that you have been alive. Everything. Seems pretty vast, doesn’t it?
Your brain is full of knowledge gathered throughout your lifetime. Storing all this knowledge is beneficial because it can be used to predict future occurrences. For example, you have seen so many chairs that you instantly recognise a new one for what it is, even when it has a slightly different appearance.
This predictive power allows your brain to process everyday occurrences quickly and efficiently – you need to store only the things that are new. In the chair example, your brain records the way this particular chair deviates from previously encountered ones.
Something different happens when we encounter things completely outside of our usual experience. If your brain is surprised, it finds that memorable – and this is known as the“novelty effect”. The element of newness helps your brain form a strong memory.
We do not always consciously make use of what we already know when we try to learn new information. Butevidence is piling upthat suggests this is a smart thing to do.
So how can you make the most of your prior knowledge to prepare for acquiring – and retaining – new knowledge?
1. Remind yourself about what you already know
Always recall related knowledge actively when you’re learning new information. For example, if your task it to learn about the current situation in a certain country, recall what you already know about its history.
Don’t be tempted to look everything up immediately – even though Google has made that so easy. Take some time to retrieve what your own brain has stored about the topic first, even if it doesn’t relate directly to what you’re studying.
Thisact of retrieving knowledgehas been shown to be very beneficial to learning, strengthening both the stored and the newly learned knowledge. If you’re unsure you’ve got the facts right, or find there are gaps in your knowledge, you can always check online afterwards. This is a good way to help identify and correct misconceptions as well.
2. Make use of the novelty effect
Imagine you’re trying to learn that “cheese” in French is “fromage”. Nothing in your prior knowledge would help you make that link. But you can still use both prior knowledge and the novelty effect to help you remember the word.
First, link the information artificially to your prior knowledge (you could say to yourself: “fromage” = “from age”) and then try to make this association as novel as possible.
You can do this by mentally placing the cheese in a weird spatial situation, optimally involving as many senses as possible (imagine a truly aged cheese in your bathroom, a cheese that smells strongly and is sweaty).
The trick being used is called themethod of loci: arbitrary information is connected together by linking it to locations within a familiar environment. It helps if you make the memory as bizarre and vivid as possible.
Theancient Greekscottoned on to this method and they used it to remember their famous lengthy speeches. Nowadays, it’s oftenused by memory championsto recall frighteningly long lists of facts or numbers.
3. Get an overview of the study material
Before starting to study, make sure you get anoverviewof the study material by browsing through a study book, looking through the table of contents, and trying to answer questions, even if you have no clue what they are about.
Preparingfor what you’re going to learn can help you to take in the knowledge as it comes your way. Skim through the chapters in your set texts so you can see the direction you’ll be taking. Keep repeating this procedure throughout the learning process; it is useful to have an overview in your mind at all times.
4. Take your time and be patient
Time itself will help you learn. Building structured knowledge takes a while – it requires effort and a lot of repetition over several days, weeks, even months.
Most of the knowledge that has stuck in your brain is a result of active recall, repetition, and – not unimportantly –unconscious lingeringbrain processes thatorder and generaliseyour knowledge.
On the other hand, last-minute cramming is unfortunately only helpful in the short term. It will not give you strong long-term retention, and that in turn hampers the integration of future knowledge.
These tips will help you to be more consciously aware of your prior knowledge and how it relates to learning new information when studying. When you’re at school, curriculums are carefully designed to build on previously acquired knowledge. But once you’re an adult, at university or at work, you come across new information all the time in a random order.
Recapping your older knowledge – by actively making yourself recall what you already now – will not only help you add on new bits of information, but will reinforce and refine the knowledge you already have.
Marlieke van Kesteren is a postdoctoral researcher in educational neuroscience at the VU University Amsterdam.
Use your head
Want to learn faster? Stop multitasking and start daydreaming
NeuroscientistDaniel Levitinexplains how students can avoid letting social media and multitasking ruin their study time
Activities that promote mind-wandering, such as reading literature, are hugely restorative. Photograph: Alamy
This content is sponsored.
Daniel J Levitin
Daniel J Levitin is a neuroscientist and author of The Organized Mind.
Information is being created and disseminated faster than any of us can absorb it. Google estimates that humans have created more information in the past five years than in all of human history - 300 exabytes of information (300,000,000,000,000,000,000) to be precise. If all that information were written on 3x5 index cards, your personal share of it would wrap around the earth twice. The pile of cards would reach to the moon three times.
Social media, emails, texts, WhatsApp messsages and phone calls take up an increasing amount of time. Our to-do lists are so full that we can’t hope to complete every item on them. So what do we do? We multitask, juggling several things at once, trying to keep up by keeping busy.
Researchby Earl Miller of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and others however shows that multitasking doesn’t work - simply because the brain doesn’t work that way. If you’re studying from a book and trying to listen in on a conversation at the same time, those are two separate projects, each started and maintained by distinct circuits in the brain. Pay more attention to one for a moment and you’re automatically paying less attention to the other.
To make matters worse, learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain,as shownby Russ Poldrack of Stanford. If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their course work goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised, making it easier to retrieve it.
“People can’t do [multitasking] very well, and when they say they can, they’re deluding themselves,” says Miller. And it turns out the brain is very good at this deluding business.
What happens in your brain when you make a memory?
As if that weren’t enough to stop you from multitasking, switching back and forth between tasks uses up glucose, which neurons need to function optimally. So, after a morning of switching between Netflix, your lecture notes, and cute cat videos, if you feel as though you can’t settle your mind down to focus and really get something done, it’s because you’ve depleted the neural resources you need to stay engaged and focused.
Students who uni-task, immersing themselves in one thing at a time,remember their work better, get more done, and their work is usually more creative and ofhigher quality. Fortunately there are a few pieces of advice to help stop modern life getting the better of you.
Make time to let your mind wander
Healthy breaks can hit the reset button in your brain, restoring some of the glucose and other metabolic nutrients used up with deep thought. A healthy break is one in which you allow your brain to rest, to loosen its grip on your thoughts.
Activities that promote mind-wandering, such as reading literature, going for a walk, exercising, or listening to music, are hugely restorative. Many students find that a work-break cycle of 25 minutes work followed by five minutes rest, or even two hours of work followed by 15 minutes of rest promotes efficiency to the extent that they get back the time they spent resting, and then some. A 15 minute nap is even better.
Create a ‘no fly zone’
The pull of social media and the internet is today one of the biggest barriers to effective revision or learning. This is because the brain has a tendency to seek new stimulation, and to try to find the path of least effort. Have you ever sat at your computer, focusing on writing an essay and then found your attention start to flag? You might remember that you had wanted to see a movie, so you go to the internet to look up show times. Then you find there are three movies playing in your area that you’re interested in, so you go to Rotten Tomatoes to look at the reviews, and after that to Facebook to see what your friends thought about it. Before you know it, two hours have gone by and you haven’t gotten any work done. And your brain is worn out from all that stimulation.
Increasingly, students, scientists, and corporate CEOs are enforcing a “no fly zone” period of time when they shut off the internet, a time to focus, to concentrate, to engage deeply in what’s in front of them. This can be as simple as shutting down the browser or turning off your wireless connection. Chrome now hasan extensionthat allows you to limit the amount of time you spend on certain sites, andmany other apps are available to help enforce the no fly zone.
Slowly take back the power
The addiction to multitasking and social media is real, there is adopamine-addiction-feedback loopbehind it . The human brain seeks novelty — more pronounced in some of us than others — and dopamine is the brain’s reward for finding it. Dopamine can be thought of as the “give me more” neurochemical. We encounter something new every few seconds through multitasking, we release dopamine, which makes us want to encounter something new, which releases dopamine, and so on, until we’re exhausted.
Many of us allow texts and social media to interrupt us, giving it the power to decide how we’ll spend our time and what we’ll think about. Just small changes in the way we approach the internet, small increases in self-discipline can make all the difference between managing the internet versus letting it manage you. We can’t slow down the flow of information. But we can slow down how much of it we let intrude on our plans, our study time, our social lives, and the daydreaming time that is a necessary part of being productive and creative.
Daniel J Levitin is a neuroscientist and author of The Organized Mind. He tweets at@danlevitin
Let a grandmaster of memory teach you something you will never forget
Teachers and students can benefit from knowing the techniques of memory champions. It just takes imagination…
Engage your imagination and connect information with your personal interests to help you remember it. Photograph: Olivia Grabowski-West
If you wanted to pinpoint the most absurdly geeky event in the world calendar, it would be difficult to beat the binary numbers challenge at theWorld Memory Championships. In it, a bevy of trained memory masters fight it out over 30 minutes to memorise as many 1s and 0s in order as they possibly can.
Back when this was my idea of a good time, I was able to “do” more than 2,000 1s and 0s in the half-hour. My then arch-rival,Dr Gunther Karstenof Germany, was not afraid to tell me this level of performance was “really quite lame”. He could do 3,200. The currentworld record is over 4,000: more than two 1s and 0s every second.
Dig past the mystery of such feats, and you discover a set of techniques and an approach to learning that is full of strikingly simple wisdom and fun. Even if, quite sensibly, you’ve no interest in learning to recite computer code, the memory techniques that enable such performance are a treasure trove of insight into how to motivate and direct the learning brain.
I first got hooked on memory techniques when – 18 years old and in hospital with nothing to do but try to impress the nurses – a friend brought me a book by “seven-times World Memory Champion”Dominic O’Brien(I remain unable to think of a more badass epithet).
In the book, O’Brien dangles the extraordinary and unbelievable claim that that there is nothing special about his memory: he has trained himself to be world champ through the use of techniques. He goes on to describe the methods he uses, which go all the way back to the 5th-century BC in Greece, when they began to find popularity among orators, oral poets and students.
Following the path O’Brien set out, I learned how to use my imagination to bring to life what I was learning, how to connect new information to what I already knew, and how to review and practise my memories to keep them in full health. Soon, I was able to memorise 200 foreign words in an hour, or a shuffled deck of cards in a few minutes.
It was immediately obvious that this supercharged learning wasn’t even remotely boring or computer-like: it was intensely colourful and fun, the opposite of most rote-learning at school. It was more an exercise in emotion than it was in concentration.
I kept toying with my memory skills over seven years of study in psychology and philosophy that took me through such diverse topics as the difference between smell and colour sensations (the answer is time) and how to make someone think their hand has got bigger (employ the “rubber hand illusion” – with a bigger glove).
As I immersed myself in these topics, I kept finding memory in the most unexpected places, and came to the view that rather than being a storehouse in the centre of our brains, memory is much more integral: it’s a tissue that underlies our thoughts, words, feeling, and our perception of the outside world. And I found that this tissue isn’t a kind of robotic storage, but is instead intensely creative, and full of humanity.
What happens in your brain when you make a memory?
How to put these insights to practical use? The greatpsychologist William Jamesonce said that “the great thing in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy”. What our memories reveal is that our nervous system is tuned to anything that excites emotion, that’s personally interesting, that’s colourful, unusual and, above all, anything that’s personal. Let’s take a look at some practical things you can do today to boost your memory.
Make learning musical
Huge chunks of school learning comes in the form of little verbal sequences: whether thats “amo, amas, amat”, the colours of the rainbow, the sequence of planets, or the dreadedHaber process. Sequences are difficult to remember by themselves. By turning them into a little musical ditties (ideally tied to a pop tune you know and like), you can make them vastly easier and more fun to learn.
Make learning visual
Want to remember that deleterious means “causing harm and damage”? Link the sound to the meaning with a creative image.“It caused Van Gogh some harm and damage when he deleted his ear. It was delete-ear-ious to his health.”Such images are of course completely silly: and that’s one reason the memories it produces are stronger, last longer and are easier to recall.
Make learning human
Let’s imagine you’re trying to understand the internal structure of a cell, and you need to get your head around all these intensely boring-sounding concepts such as cytoplasm, centrioles, mitochondria or, more encouragingly, the “golgi apparatus”.