Our learning journey is now moving into the engagement phase where we are recalling knowledge, practicing skills and engaging in experiences that form relationships between foundational concepts. In this lesson, you will learn what memory is, why it's so easy for us to forget things, and how to commit information to long term memory.
Our learning journey is now moving into the engagement phase where we are recalling knowledge, practicing skills and engaging in experiences that from relationships between foundational concepts.
The goal at this stage is to understand concepts one level deeper.
Focus switches from getting a feel for the topic to studying how things work to build up progressively more accurate mental models of core concepts that you can apply later.
You understand not only how to use a skill, but also how and why that skill is constructed the way.
In the Trivium, this is known as the logic, which answers the why of a subject and establishing valid relationships among facts yielding a systematic understanding of the subject.
Recall that in learning we are trying to move the knowledge we acquire in our short memory and store it to our long term memory:
Short-term memory (Working Memory) [1]: Where three to four groups of information are consciously attended to and only retained for about half a minute at most.
Long-term memory [2]: Contains everything that we've learned up to this point in our lives, all the facts, words, concepts, images, procedures, ect.
You're working memory created the set of links to be placed in long-term memory that can easily be accessed and used to solve problems and understand concepts later.
If we have too many things in our working memory, we reach our cognitive load.
Specifically we are creating two types of knowledge in our long-term memory.
Declarative knowledge: Building knowledge [3] in facts, concepts, words, or images which require intently focusing while studying.
When storing declarative knowledge in long-term memory, we link separate facts together into larger concepts - associations between facts that create chunk of retrievable information.
Procedural knowledge:Building skills that have procedures [4] or sets of steps that you're going to do over and over again in order make the procedure automatic.
We often begin by learning declarative knowledge about a rule or process, but after we use it a lot, it becomes procedural knowledge.
When we create sets of links in our memory, information becomes easer to remember because we only need to to remember on portion of the link to recall the whole set.
Declarative memories are cross-referenced directly and indirectly via other pieces of information that you hold in your mind.
Procedural memories are typically accessed by the appropriate trigger conditions.
Why it matters: By remembering information, you save time during situations you are unable to look it up.
Remembering large swaths of complex information can help you with complex problem solving and deeper understanding of larger topics.
Having these links readily available in long term memory, frees up your working memory enabling higher level thinking.
Why is it so Hard to Remember?
According to the Forgetting Curve research [5] by Hermann Ebbinghaus, we tend to have exponential decay in knowledge, which is steepest right after learning. Our minds are a leaky bucket.
Psychologists have identified at least three dominant theories to help explain why our brains forget much of what we initially learned.
Memory decays with time: we can recall things we have most recently learned with greater accuracy than information from a month, year, or decade ago.
Interference: whether proactive or reactive, memories that are similar to one another compete, causing confusion of which information applies to which memory.
Forgotten cues: memories become inaccessible because we have forgotten the initial trigger that helps to retrieve the rest of the information.
Engaging in active and focused learning, invoking deep processing, allows us to mitigate forgetting by embedding rich cues within our memory.
How to Commit Information to Memory
Our basic learning process is:
Engage in active and focused learning session: focused intently on your learning material & using active learning techniques and practices to engage with that material.
Alternate from the focused mode to the diffuse mode: take some time away from the learning material and resting before returning to work with it.
Engage in practice: use active learning techniques to strengthen neural connections of previously learned material, moving it from short-term memory to long-term memory.
Create Associations: Practice the foundational material first and start building associations with new material as continue learning, creating a larger neural network in your brain.
Master and apply the skill: continue practicing the skill until you are able to retrieve information easily and apply the skill to solving problems and reaching goals in real life.
The techniques in the rest of the engage section will help to move that information you're learning from short-term memory to long-term.
Activity
Practice active recall by recalling the key concepts from this lesson on memory.
Skill Lesson Mastered
Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have masteredthe knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.
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