The brain's capacity is unlimited, if only you use it correctly (Credit: Getty Images)
What is the easiest way to learn? David Robson meets a group of
scientists and memory champions competing to find techniques that make
facts stick... fast.
This post on how to learn was originally published on BBC. Face to face with the world’s leading memory experts, my mind is
beginning to feel very humble. Ben Whately, for instance, tells me about
the famous mnemonist Matteo Ricci, a 16th Century Jesuit priest who was
the first westerner to take China’s highest civil service exams. The
exam was an excruciating ordeal that involved memorising reams of
classical poetry – a task that could take a lifetime. “Only 1% of people
who took them passed them, yet Ricci passed them after 10 years, having
not spoken any Chinese before.”
Think of learning like a buffet, rather than a set dinner
Can
psychology give us all the same astonishing command of our minds?
That’s Whately’s aim. With former memory champion Ed Cooke, he’s already designed a learning app, Memrise,
that uses some of the mnemonist’s principles, as BBC Future has
described in the past. Now they’ve teamed up with researchers from
University College London to launch a competition to find the best
possible way to enhance their techniques. Memory experts from across the
world were asked to conduct experiments to find the easiest, and most
effective, way to memorise new information.
I’m here to observe
the first round of judging. It offers a fascinating exploration of the
way our memories work. Whether you are a university student cramming for
your finals, or have simply yearned to pick up some tourist French,
their insights could take the pain out of digesting facts.
Can new tricks take the pain out of studying? (Credit: Getty Images)
The competition’s task is superficially simple, says Rosalind Potts
at UCL. “We wanted to know if you had an hour to study a list of 80
words, what do you have to do in order to remember them a week later.”
The task is made more difficult by the fact that those 80 words are all
Lithuanian. The entrants had to test the strategy on participants and
compare them to a group who were not using any particular technique.
Despite
the fact that world-leading scientists entered the competition, some
approaches failed to lead to any improvement in memory recall. “It shows
how difficult it is to translate scientific principles into real-life
learning,” says David Shanks, also of UCL.
Boredom, for instance,
proved to be a hurdle: one team found a subject falling asleep during
the hour-long word-memorising session – despite the fact they were being
paid with cakes to take part in the study. “It happens,” says Yana Weinstein at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who is also on the judging panel.
Notwithstanding
those minor hiccups, many teams found some benefits – as much as
doubling the amount their subjects recalled. Rather than focussing on
one single technique, they tended to use combinations of the following
strategies:
Fail once, and you'll remember better the next time (Credit: Thinkstock)
1) Embracing ignorance. Self-testing is one of the best ways to improve recall. For me, the most
surprising, and potentially useful twist, on this technique was a
strategy called “errorful generation”. Without any training, subjects
were forced to guess the meaning of the Lithuanian words. “They will
always be wrong the first time round,” says Shanks – yet psychological
studies have shown that the initial mistakes subsequently make the words
stick. “It’s remarkably better than if you had studied the word.”
Simply
recognising your own ignorance, it seems, primes your mind into action –
doubling the recall compared to a group who didn’t use the technique.
This builds on the idea of “desirable difficulty”
in psychology – by making a task a little bit harder, it can engage
your attention and construct firmer foundations for later recall.
You need to ride the crest of your memory's natural rhythms (Credit: Thinkstock)
2) Surfing the memory’s waves.
You can easily waste time over-studying. So many of the entrants had
designed algorithms that cleverly work out how strong your memory for
each of the 80 words is, so they could rekindle it once you had started
to forget. Memrise’s app has one version of this approach that you can
use for now – and the entrants may suggest ways to further refine it.
Alternatively, you can rely on your intuition to help time your learning
– leaving longer and longer periods before you retest and learn from
your mistakes.
One entrant also experimented with giving short
breaks to the participants during the word memorising task – allowing
them to watch a video of a waterfall – potentially allowing the
information to sink in. When you’re studying, it’s certainly worth
taking short breaks to ensure that fatigue doesn’t overcome your natural
abilities.
3) Buffet studying. It might seem
tempting to chunk the material into themes and learn them one by one –
so some of the entrants organised the words into categories and themes.
But one team found that simply cycling through all 80 words was
effective. Whately points out that memory champions memorising a pack of
cards take a similar approach – rotating quickly through the whole pack
rather than learning it block by block.
If that sounds confusing,
research does at least suggest that you should add variety to a study
session. It’s better to spend small blocks of time on a variety of
subjects and skills – rather than concentrating on a single topic. Think
of it as taking from a buffet, rather than eating a set dinner.
Take a pick-and-mix approach to studying.
Switching topics makes your brain work harder, with surprising effects
(Credit: Getty Images)
4) Story-telling. Any form of
“elaboration” can help reactivate those synapses and seal the memory.
One entrant asked the participants to build a story with the words they
were learning, for instance. Cooke and Whately were also excited to see
one team implement a “memory palace” – in which you try to link the
words to objects in a room.
The program they designed might show a
picture of a living room and give you the Lithuanian word “lova” – bed.
You could then imagine your lover laying on a sofa bed. Once you have
mapped out your learning in this way, you should be able to retrace your
steps and recall the word with ease.
This was, in fact, the
technique that allowed the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci to learn Chinese
to such an advanced level – and it also lies behind Cooke’s ability to
remember 2265 binary digits in less than 30 minutes. The team’s computer
program may simplify the process by making it more automatic. “If this
does turn out to be the winner – that’s a serious discovery,” says
Cooke.
Making surreal connections can boost recall - and now an app can help fire your imagination (Credit: Thinkstock)
The judges’ energy is infectious, but I can’t
help wondering if all this is still removed from the kind of learning we
need in everyday life. Indeed, for a previous assignment, I had tried
to use mnemonic techniques to learn around 1000 words of Danish – and
although it was useful to help me memorise the individual words, it
didn’t translate to the spontaneous recall needed to hold a
conversation, on the fly, in a bar or restaurant.
Cooke agrees
it’s just the first step. “A lot of this stuff is what I call nurturing
and scaffolding while you are getting the memory down,” he says. “It’s a
brace – it’s there as long as you need it.” Importantly, he thinks the
same methods could easily be used beyond language learning to all kinds
of disciplines – history, maths, or trivia for a pub quiz. “Repetition
testing, spacing – all these techniques work for almost everything.”
Having
short-listed five entries, the team are now in the process of uploading
them to Memrise’s website. This will allow them to pit the techniques
head-to-head to find the ultimate winner for a prize of $10,000. The
advantage for Memrise is to find ideas that might improve their app; for
Potts and Shanks, it will help them see which combinations of
techniques work best in the real world – while testing them on many more
volunteers than would be possible in a typical lab study.
Learning game
The
judges hope to run the competition every year as they further refine
the art of memory. In the future, there may be many more inventive
approaches to consider. Shanks, for instance, points to one project that
failed to enter this year, but may still be a promising strategy for
the future. “They were building a video game where you shoot the
spaceships out of sky, and completely incidentally, the spaceships have
Lithuanian and English words on them,” he says. “I thought it was a
brilliant idea.”
The real challenge for these memory experts,
however, isn’t just to make learning quick and effective. As every
student knows – the biggest obstacle to learning is distraction, whether
it’s the idea of sunbathing in the park or switching on the TV. We may
need many more competitions before we can overcome that hurdle.
If you fancy testing the short-listed entries, you can sign up for the trial here on Memrise’s website.
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