Six Things You Should Know About How Your Brain Learns
Whether you want to learn a new language , learn to cook, pick up a musical instrument, or simply get more out of a book you read, it’s helpful to know how your brain learns. While everyone learns in different ways, we have similarities in how our brains perceive new information, and knowing how this works can help us choose the most effective strategies for learning new things.
This post originally appeared on the Crew blog .
Here are six things you should know about the brain’s learning systems.
1. We perceive information better when it is visual
It is often said that about half of your brain is directly involved in visual processing. It is difficult to generalize about the brain because most of it has multiple functions, but according to Discover, the neurons dedicated to image processing occupy about 30% of the cerebral cortex . This is a huge part of your brain’s capabilities, in fact, only for your eyes and the processes in your brain that turn what you see into information.
Vision is not only a power-hungry feeling, it surpasses all our other senses when it comes to gaining information.
An excellent example of this is the experiment in which 54 wine connoisseurs were asked to sample wine samples . The experimenters added odorless, tasteless red to white wines to see if tasters knew they were white by taste and smell. They didn’t. Vision is such an important part of how we interpret the world that it can overwhelm our other senses.
Another amazing sight discovery is that we treat text as images . As you read this paragraph, your brain interprets each letter as an image. This makes reading incredibly ineffective compared to how quickly and easily we can perceive information from a picture.
We are not only static, but we also pay special attention to everything that moves . So pictures and animations are your best friends when it comes to learning.
Action: How to use your brain’s visual ability? Find or make flash cards with images on them. Add doodles, photographs, or pictures from magazines and newspapers to your notes. Use colors and charts to illustrate the new concepts you are learning.
2. We remember the big picture better than the details.
When you’re learning a lot of new concepts, it’s easy to get lost in the flow of information. One way to avoid getting overwhelmed is to continually return to the big picture. This is probably where you start off with something new, so it can be helpful to come back to explore how the new concept you just grasped fits into the big picture.
In fact, our brains tend to cling to the gist of what we learn better than the details, so we might as well play on the natural tendencies of our brains.
When the brain perceives new information, it clings to it better if it already has some information with which to connect. This is where starting an idea can come in handy: it gives you a reason to hang up every detail as you explore it.
I once read a metaphor about this concept that I liked. Imagine that your brain is like a closet full of shelves: as you add more clothes, they fill up more shelves, and you start categorizing them.
Now, if you add a black sweater (new information), it can be placed on a sweater shelf, on a black clothes shelf, on a winter clothes shelf, or on a wool shelf. In real life, you can’t put your sweater on more than one shelf, but in your brain, this new information connects with every existing idea. Later, it will be easier for you to remember this information, because when you learned it, you connected it with other things that you already knew.
Action: Keep a large diagram or page of notes close at hand that explains the big picture of what you are learning, and add to it every important concept you learn along the way.
3. Sleep greatly affects learning and memory.
Research has shown that the night between learning something new and testing it can significantly improve performance . In a study of motor skills, participants who were tested 12 hours after learning a new skill with nocturnal sleep improved by 20.5%, compared with a mere 3.9% improvement for participants who were tested at 4-hour intervals during their waking hours. …
Sleep can improve learning, as can a good night’s sleep. A University of California study found that participants who slept after completing a challenging task performed better when re-performing the task later than participants who did not sleep between tests.
Sleep before you learn, too, can benefit. Dr. Matthew Walker, lead researcher at the University of California, said: “Sleep prepares the brain like a dry sponge, ready to absorb new information.”
Action: Try practicing a new skill – or read about it – before bed or before bed. When you wake up, write a few notes about what you remember from the last study session.
4. Lack of sleep significantly reduces your ability to absorb new information.
Not getting enough sleep is scary. Since we do not yet fully understand sleep and its purpose (although we have some ideas ), we do not always respect our need for sleep.
But while we can’t say for sure what sleep does for us, we know what will happen if you don’t get enough. Lack of sleep makes us play it safe by avoiding risks and relying on old habits. It also increases our likelihood of physical injury as our bodies don’t work as well when we are tired.
Most important for learning: Not getting enough sleep can reduce your brain’s ability to process new information by up to 40% . Compared to getting a good night’s sleep and waking up refreshed and ready to study, a sleepless night is not worth the effort.
A Harvard Medical School study found that the first 30 hours after studying something is critical , and sleep deprivation during this time can negate any learning benefits of getting a good night’s sleep after those 30 hours have elapsed.
Action: Forget the shelters. Save your practice and study sessions for the days when you are awake and well rested. And be sure to avoid getting enough sleep right after learning something new.
5. We learn best by teaching others
When we expect to have to teach others what we are learning, we are better able to absorb new information . We organize it better in our minds, remember better and better remember the most important parts of what we have learned.
One study told half of the participants that they would be tested on the information they learn and told the other half that they would have to teach someone else what they learned. Both groups of participants were tested on the information, and they did not need anyone to teach, but subjects who thought they would teach others, showed the best results in the test.
The study’s lead author, Dr. John Nestoyko, said the study implies that the way students think before and during learning can go a long way towards how well we absorb new information. “A positive change in a student’s thinking can be effectively achieved with fairly simple instructions,” he said.
While we are not aware of this, learning with the idea that we will have to teach this information later tends to require more effective subconscious learning methods . For example, we focus on the most important pieces of information, the relationship between different concepts, and we carefully organize the information in our minds.
Action: Keep a notebook or blog where you write about what you have learned. Write about each new concept you learn as if it were a lesson for others.
6. We learn better when new information is interspersed.
The conventional approach to teaching is what UCLA researcher Dick Schmidt calls “block practice . “ When you practice or focus on learning one particular thing over and over again, it’s block practice. For example, you might study history for hours on end, or practice just your serve in a tennis lesson.
Schmidt promotes a different approach to teaching called alternation, which mixes up the information or skills that you practice. Another UCLA researcher, Bob Bjork, is studying alternation in his psychology lab. One of his experiments involves teaching participants art styles by showing them a series of images on a screen. Some of the participants are introduced to the blocky practice of art styles (all six examples of an artist’s style are shown before moving on to that of another artist), while in others their images alternate (examples of different artist’s styles are mixed together).
When the two groups are subsequently tested for how well they can recognize an artist’s style in a painting they have not seen before, the interleaving group typically scores around 60% and the block group around 30%.
Surprisingly, about 70% of the participants in this experiment said they felt the block practice was most effective in helping them learn. Obviously, we need to do a little work to understand what helps us learn best.
Bjork believes alternation works better because it plays on our natural ability to recognize patterns and outliers . When applied in the real world, it also gives us the ability to regularly review information as we alternate what we already know with new information.
Some examples of alternation might be cycling between three different subjects you need to study before exams, practicing speaking, listening and writing skills in a foreign language in tandem rather than blocks, or practicing righthand, backhand and serve in the same tennis. lesson, rather than postponing one lesson for each.
Action: When you learn or practice a new technique, practice it alternating with other techniques. For example, if you train in golf, train in others at the same time to mix the two. If you are learning new information, mix information you already know – for example, old vocabulary words and new ones when you are learning a foreign language.
As Bob Bjork says, we all need to become smarter learners. “In almost any job, you have to continue to manage some new technology,” he said, so “it’s very important to just know how to manage your learning.”