Remembering and Forgetting

This paper was published in Distracted Masses on May 12, 2015. 

Revelations concerning  the self deceit of  celebrities and politicians was not a surprise.  Upon leaving Vietnam it became apparent to me that some of the stories told by others on the trip home began to give the teller more credit than he claimed the first time the story was told in the barracks.  My wife has spent her entire life helping me to keep my stories in check, but then we began to realize that not all of her memories were accurate.  

We are brain hobbyists who attend Learning and the Brain Conferences on a regular basis to keep up to date with the latest neuroscience research about learning and memory.  As former teachers we were always interested in brain growth and development to help us understand how to better present lessons to our students so they would remember what they had been taught.  Despite being mindful of trying to teach for recall, former students I have met over the year seldom remember what course I taught, much less specific detail.  Some of that may be explained by the fact that I taught history.  I can not tell you how often, upon learning I was a history teacher, adults tell me how much they disliked history classes but now that they are older they love reading about the past.  

That is an important aspect of learning, you must first be interested if you are to remember.  Although that seems obvious, but to understand why that is true one must know that learning and memory are two parts of a whole process.  Neuroscientists who investigate these things say that memory is dependent upon more than electrical interactions between sodium and calcium, it is emotional and personal driven by both nature and nurture.  Neuroscientist are exploring the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective domains to help them understand how brains remember. Their discoveries provide a wide variety of methods for teachers to enhance student learning, but more importantly these methods can help a person to live a healthier life by developing strategies to strengthen their brain's learning/remembering systems.

The first step to understanding memory is to know how brain cells or neurons transmit information.  Neurons are composed of dendrites and a cell body (the soma) where information can be received and a tube shaped axon which connects to the dendrites of another neuron.  Communication takes place within the neuron and between neurons.  The communication within the neuron is electrical and between neurons chemical.

A sensory stimulus (ouch) sends an electrical impulse to a neuron and that signal travels quickly along the axon of that cell until it reaches the synaptic gap, a tiny opening between cells.  This is where the electrical potential triggers a chemical reaction that releasing hormones that cross the gap to the adjoining cell’s feathery dendrites.  Thus beginning a process that can form thousands of links with other neurons giving a typical brain well over 100 trillion synapses. 

The movement continues until the stimulus has created a neural network categorized by function that was created by the stimulus and neurotransmitters.  This network is a pathway that shares itself with the hippocampus where the axons in the neural network are strengthened through the process of myelin ( white matter or glial cells)  building up on the axon.  If the axons do not get strengthened appropriately the network fades away from the brain. 

Learning is the act of making and strengthening the neurons forming the network and memory is the ability to reconstruct or reactivate the previously made networks.  It is important to remember that networks that fire together wire together.  When another similar stimulus (ouch) is received the old networks light up saying hey there is more about that over here.  And that in turn mylenates the axons.

So what can we do to strengthen our memories to remember what we have done or even who we are?  John Medina, a neuroscientist from Harvard, advocates first of all a healthy brain.  The brain is one of the most amazing organs in the human body. It controls our central nervous system, keeping us walking, talking, breathing and thinking. The brain is also incredibly complex, comprising around 100 billion neurons which are each connected to a thousand more.  Thinking and remembering occur because of the integrated action of these neurons.  Every thought and action is controlled by the brain. The brain uses more energy than any other human organ, accounting for up to 20 percent of the body's total use. There are over one hundred thousand miles of vessels and capillaries intertwined with the brain to supply the oxygen needed to fire neurons, for cell maintenance and to produce the proteins needed for synaptic transfer.  

All of this convinces me that John Medina is right.  He recommends a healthy diet, exercise, adequate sleep and stress reduction as some of the ways to maintain a brain that will remember, even in old age.  This is a life long process and commitment that each person has to decide to make in order to live a full and healthy life.

My father contracted congestive heart failure  when he was in his late 80s.  The lack of blood flow caused his brain to change.  He lost his immediate memory and was unable to create new memories.  He was able to recall many events and details from his early life, childhood and his young adult life.  He remembered chemistry, his major in college and some family events if he was primed.  He could, however, talk in detail about his experiences in WWII as a bomber pilot and he could remember some things about his career as an Air Force officer.  But, he couldn’t recall what we had just discussed minutes before.  It pointed out to me the importance of a healthy brain.  You have to keep the blood flowing and insure your body can produce the elements needed to keep your nervous system and brain firing. 

If you don’t sleep well your brain can not consolidate the neurons into networks to give you plenty of points of recall for the things you have recently learned.  It is obvious that exercise causes the blood to flow and carry oxygen to the brain.  A healthy diet impacts your total health, obesity, for instance, causes changes in the brain that impair memory.  Stress is the most toxic of memory disrupters.  It releases cortisol, a chemical that inhibits the information processing system.  The impact of not following a lifestyle to have a healthy brain and body may take a while to impact a person, but eventually your memory will exhibit symptoms of poor care and maintenance if you don’t.

The doctor who examined my dad after he had experienced rapid deterioration of his memory did not believe Dad had a stroke, although many of the symptoms were similar.  They weren’t sure what caused it, but in retrospect he was probably already experiencing symptoms of low blood pressure and his brain lacked the blood flow necessary to provide energy his brain needed to work at full capacity. 

Dad had always been really smart, Mensa type of smart.  He had been a pilot, a nuclear chemist, and an officer in the Air Force among other attainments.  The loss of his memory was hard for me as I recalled what a witty and humorous man he had been and now he read the same story in the newspaper all day long.  I could sort of prime Dad’s memory and get him talking about many things from the past and event recent family or world events.  His memory pretty much stopped at about the time he had the rapid deterioration. 

He hated exercise, it was kind of a joke in the family.  He was physically strong but his cardiovascular system was weak.  He had smoked when younger, his primary diet for many years centered on foods that are not heart healthy, he had high blood pressure most of his life (stress), and he had sleep apnea for quite a while.  So the amazing fact was that he lived to 93, about five years with impeded memory and immobility.  

But what he could remember is a testament to memory being personal and emotional.  If you want to remember something find a way to make it yours and feel strongly about it.  Dad’s most vivid memories were from WWII.  He could remember missions, people, places, procedures and policies.  He could remember Mom and many things about our family as we moved to where the Air Force sent us.  It was astounding the things he could pull out of his mind. 

He could also remember things he had learned in school.  Especially those subjects he had been curious about and where he studied and prepared for exams.  At the last Learning and Brain conference in San Francisco which we attended this year these two techniques had undergone scrutiny by neuroscientists who reported students remembered best if they were tested repeatedly.  Not high stakes testing, but repetition of the information.  Quizzing yourself would work.  My dad could remember quite a bit about chemistry a subject he loved and one he had been tested on throughout his studies and then in the field.  

Current research adds some useful information to the concept of repetition.  It demonstrates that it is best to pause between those tests or  repetitions.  Our brains need time to consolidate information in order to build strong networks of neurons.  Everyone has experienced that aha moment when you have taken a break from a difficult task and suddenly the answer is upon you.  That is a reason sleep is so important, it is during deep sleep that your brain consolidates previous information.  If stimulus events do not get put into networks they fade and eventually are forgotten.  Even information you work hard to remember can fade over time.  That is why my former students have difficulty remembering my class, they did not keep firing the networks I tried to help them develop.

Nothing works to build strong memories if you do not pay attention.  You have to attend to the information you are trying to learn.  There are a number of ways to enhance attention through the use of media, peer teaching and hands on learning.  The value of those methodologies can be negated, however, if the student has a mindset that puts them in opposition to learning or attention can be diminished by multitasking.  Using electronics, passing notes, day dreaming and an over stimulative environment can keep information from ever reaching the hippocampus.  You might think you can do more than one thing at a time, but it is unusual to do all of these things well.  It is better to complete one task before tackling another if you want to be able to remember what you have done.  

Even if you are healthy there are many impediments of strong recall.  Evolutionary biologist, Robert Trivers from Rutgers University believes that self deception, an evolutionary adaptation, distorts what we remember.

“Our sensory systems are organized to give us a detailed and accurate view of reality,” he says, “but once this information arrives in our brains, it is often distorted and biased to our conscious minds.” We repress painful memories, create false ones, rationalize immoral behavior and jack up our self-esteem. We deny ourselves the truth.”

We are influenced by, as Robert Sapolsky, evolutionary biologist from Stanford, posits a range of nature nurture events.  These events shape who we are and contribute to our mindset and begin with evolutionary impacts from prehistory right up to what we are doing when a stimulus is introduced into our sensory system.  What we remember is truly a matter of our genetic makeup, the environment in which we have been raised, and our surroundings at the moment of input.  

Since there is no way that the brain can pay conscious attention to all sensory data that constantly bombard the body, it filters out that which is not relevant.  That means that, according to Pat Wolfe, a brain educator, approximately 99% of all information entering through senses is immediately dropped.  That is probably why so many eye witnesses differ with other eye witnesses when describing what happened to whom.

Add to that the idea that every time you remember an event you actually remember the last time you remembered it event.  It is a little like the gossip game where nobody can keep a story straight.   That is what happens to all of us.  That is why Brian Williams and Bill O’Reilly are defending their integrity, it is a human thing.  Just like the young marine I recall returning from Vietnam at the same time I did.  In the barracks in Danang his stories were creditable.  In Okinawa he had become a central character in his stories, by the time we reached the states he was a hero.  I think we do this inadvertently to put ourselves at the center of our stories.  

There is a way to ensure you will remember.  You could use technology to record your life.  Maybe there is a government  agency that can help you.  If you don’t want to do that you will have to live a fully human life coping with your brain’s strengths and weaknesses while trying to stay healthy.

Brain-Based Learning

Useful Websites
Read•Write•Think is a website providing educators and students access to the highest quality practices and resources in reading and language arts instruction.
Academic Earth provides free video courses from leading universities in most subject areas.  You can not get credit, but you can audit some awesome classes from universities like Yale and Stanford.
There is also a complete AP Test Prep course for your college bound students.
The 60 Second Brain Game and Word Wanderer are two games from Posit Science , a  company that provides brain training software.
More Brain Exercise is a site that has tons of interesting facts about the brain and exercises to help develop your brain's potential.

Articles of Interest
Kindergarten crunch: Lack of playtime killing joy of learning, say advocates : Early childhood education is becoming the first step in our stressful public schools.  We are creating high stakes testing for our youngest children! This article promotes the importance of play for kindergarten children. 
A Program Teaches Students What to Believe in the Digital World  This article discusses the topic of media literacy and the News Literacy project that brings seasoned journalists into high schools to help them learn how to interpret the news. 
From Brain-Based Research to Powerful Learning: Innovative Teaching Techniques In the Classroom visits Key Largo, a P-8 school of 1,200 students where all classrooms are wired and where the student-to-networked-computer ratio is 3 to 1.  It demonstrates ways to use technology to put brain-based research to work for our kids.

Thoughts from Yrisarri-Neuroscience and Education
I have always been interested in research concerning how the brain works and learning.  In 1980 my principal at La Plata Jr. High School brought a brain researcher to speak to the faculty and he told us of very interesting research concerning young adolescents and learning.  Since then I have attended workshops with Tim Burns, Eric Jensen and others speaking to this topic.  I believe that what neuroscientists are learning about how the brain works will change the way we teach.

In February LaWanda and I attended the Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco.  The Learning and the Brain society is an organization dedicated to sharing information between educators and neuroscience.  They state in their members site that:

educators and neuroscientists share a great many goals. Neuroscience is delving into realms that have pre-occupied educators for years, such as learning and memory, the emotional development of children, the basis of musical talent, bilingual experiences, and dyslexia to name only a few areas of mutual interest.

At the conference almost every speaker spoke to this statement.  Neuroscientists are very interested in using their research to help teachers and are looking for feedback from eduacation to help them direct their research in useful ways.  As I think about what I have learned from my studies of how the brain works, I realize that much of their research reinforces what we already know about good teaching.  For instance, brain researchers have shown that if we want to remember something for a test, we need to practice with the information we want to remember.  Another finding that many educators already know is that vision trumps the other senses when learning new information.  But the brain research goes much deeper than just reinforcing what we know about good teaching.

An important neuroscientist's work that comes to my mind is Robert Saplosky .  His  Great Courses' class Biology and Human Behavior taught me how we are truly unique biological beings.  His presentation made me realize that there is no one way to teach everybody.  When we put students together in a lecture, we are lucky if only a few hear what is said, much less remember it.

Eric Medina's 10 brain rules have had a great impact on my thinking about teaching and learning.  His studies on stress strike me as one of the most important facts about our brains that all teachers should know.  Medina states that stressed brains do not learn the same way and:

Stress damages virtually every kind of cognition that exists. It damages memory and executive function. It can hurt your motor skills. When you are stressed out over a long period of time it disrupts your immune response. You get sicker more often. It disrupts your ability to sleep. You get depressed.

I believe that our competitive nature and fear of the future for our children have caused us to create schools that are institutions of stress.  Teachers can cause a child to feel stressed with a look, a few demeaning words or work that is beyond their ability.  We have not created places of safety and security for all children.

The research on memory holds much promise for teachers.  There is no one place that holds a memory.  Memory is a web of nueronal connections that have been prompted by something that can pull them together.  You have to cause students to remember what they already know in order to teach them something new!  In addition,  memories are suspect, brain research indicates that after you learn something you do not recall it exactly as it was learned.  Then, each time we recall that memory it is remembered as it was the last time it was recalled.  Memory is a complex process and if we want students to remember what we teach, brain research can help us understand how to do that.

The concept of the plastic brain is an important for educators to understand.   As Mariale Hardiman and Martha Denckla state in their article,  The Science of Education: Informing Teaching and Learning Throught the Brain Sciences:

Research shows that learning changes the brain. The brain is “plastic”—it makes new cellular connections and strengthens existing ones as we gain and integrate information and skills. In the past decade, the enormous growth in understanding brain plasticity has created an entirely new way to consider how learning and achievement take place in the education of children.

This means that everyone can learn.  The brain can change and adapt to meet the needs of each person.  Almost every child in school can learn what they need to know!

Probably the most important thing for teachers to know about brain research is that when a statement begins with "based upon brain research...." we should be skeptical.  Last week I used the article about Disney refunding money because of their claims about the Einstein Baby videos and learning were false.  There are many brain myths circulating in our culture and we need to research claims of better learning based upon brain research before we purchase programs making those claims.

Book Review

Daniel T. Willingham is a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Why Students Don’t Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009). I have always been intrigued by the question of "liking" school. In my experience most people do not like doing things they do not want to do. School seems to be a place that fits that profile for almost everybody at some time during their education. I disagree with the premise of this book. Children do like school! They like meeting their friends, they like learning new things, they like activities, they like some teachers, they like some subjects, but they do not like all of school every day. In other words they feel about school much like adults feel about work. This book presents some other ideas about "liking" school.

Willingham brings some important ideas to the classroom teacher. As a cognitive scientist he discusses the importance of story, emotion, memory, context and routine in building knowledge and developing learning experiences. He also dispels some cognitive myths that pervade the teaching profession. He shows that learning styles are much less important than the fact that people’s processes for learning and thinking are more similar than different and he provides information about the plasticity of the brain and intelligence.

Willingham’s most important argument has to do with his definition of thinking. He argues that the brain has limitations in terms of our ability to think and that if we do not teach with this idea in mind, children will not like school. His definition of thinking is that working memory receives input from the environment and then connects with long term memory to begin to create new neural pathways that remember this new information in the context of our old information. This seems logical and I think it is a useful way to define thinking.

The limitation is that our brains are not designed for thought, but for the the avoidance of thought. Most of our brain is devoted to seeing and moving and those functions operate efficiently and reliably while thinking is effortful, slow and uncertain. One of the problems is working memory, remember the model of how thinking works? Working memory is at the center of that process. One of the things neuroscientists know is that working memory can only hold about 5-7 thoughts at a time. So if thinking is retrieving information and procedures stored in long-term memory to create something new and working memory has limitations, how do we make thinking easier. Willingham believes that one must know the information and procedures well in order to come up with something new. It is our background knowledge that facilitates thinking.

Despite the brain’s limitations Willingham stresses that hard work in the form of practice pays off. IQ is not totally genetic and has been steadily rising around the world for some time. The message this should send to students is that the only limitations they have are ones they place on themselves. But, this work coupled with lots of practice that is too hard cause students to not like school.

In my opinion Willingham has overlooked the importance of motivation and seems to believe learning core knowledge is at the heart of student success. The pursuit of core knowledge often kills motivation in children. It also seems that a person can only obtain this information in school through hard work and it must be learned at a determined rate to be successful. Students will tell you they like to learn but want to have fun. Willingham believes that if the work is too hard it turns students off and if it is too easy it turns students off. I believe that if the students enjoy most of the work they will not be turned off!!