Repeat to Remember. Repeat to Remember.
Well, I am back to blogging after an extended absence – sorry for that hiatus! I am returning to a great book I’ve been reading this past year, Brain Rules by John Medina. In my last post I shared the “every brain is wired differently” rule. Here is another rule that intrigues me, it is related to short term memory, “Brain Rule #5: Repeat to Remember.”
Hermann Ebbinghaus, born in 1850, is most famous for determining that people usually forget 90% of what they learn in a class within 30 days. Rather depressing to think about! In addition, his studies also showed that a majority is forgotten within the first few hours after the classroom experience. Over a 30-year period Ebbinghaus discovered additional interesting facts. One is that memories have different life spans – some may be minutes, while others last a lifetime. Is that why I can put my keys down and forget where they are within 5 minutes?
Here’s where Brain Rule #5 comes into play – Ebbinghaus shared with us that we can actually increase the life span of a memory by repeating the information in timed intervals. So, what can learn from this? Spaced learning is better than massed learning. Good to know.
But, we still need to understand a bit more about our memory and how we can increase our chances of learning something versus just simply recalling it later. Medina provides a great example of this in his book. Try and remember your Social Security number. Easy, right? Your brain may have visually queued in on the last time you saw the card or when you wrote it down. Now try to remember how to ride a bike. That’s easy too, right? Not really – you don’t call up a list of each action step, such as where to put your foot, how to angle your back, where your thumb needs to be placed. You recall these memories differently.
Through research, four sequential steps have been identified for the life cycle of declarative memory – your conscious memory: encoding, storing, retrieving, and forgetting. This is not the time or place to go into the detail that Medina provides, but rather let me just summarize the main concepts.
As information comes into your brain it’s stored in different regions, it’s not a one stop shop for all those thoughts. The more elaborate we encode the information that’s coming in, the better the chance our brain has of finding the information in the future. Making something more elaborate often means making it more complicated, which can tax the memory system. This can improve learning: more complexity means greater learning. Finally, another way to improve your memory of information is to reproduce the environment where it first entered your brain.
Summary: information is remembered best when it’s elaborate, meaningful and contextual.
Ways that you can capitalize on this concept:
1) Incorporate real-world examples as learning points to help “encode” the information.
2) A compelling introduction to a learning activity can help the learner “retrieve” the information from memory in the future.
3) Offer learning activities in an environment that is similar to where / when the information may need to be “retrieved” from memory in the future.
Next time, let’s talk about long-term memory and “Brain Rule #6: Remember to Repeat.”