Understanding How Memory Works

Memory has been the subject of speculation and wonder for at least two thousand years.

As early Greek philosophers pondered the workings of our minds.

And it has only been during the last 100 years or so that we began to scientifically explore the biological basis of memory involving neurons and synapses in the brain, and they form and change as we age.

This science of the brain has taken great leaps forward recently with the development of new imaging technologies like functional magnetic resonance imagine, or fMRI.

But our study of memory in this course will not involve the neuro-physiological aspects of learning because at this point that field of study doesn't yet inform the day-to-day practice of teachers.

Rather, we will be learning about the research emerging from cognitive science which now powerfully informs us about how we can teach and learn more effectively

So what is cognitive science?

It involves a variety of different research disciplines including psychology, computer science, linguistics, artificial intelligence, anthropology, neuroscience, and philosophy, all striving to understand through interdisciplinary study how human cognition and intelligence develops and shapes our behavior.

By studying human behavior and performance, we can learn much about how memory works and how deep learning occurs.

We'll begin our study of learning and memory through the lens of cognitive science by looking at a simple schematic model, acknowledging up front that we're simplifying an enormously complex and dynamic set of processes.

The model we will present is a modified version of that first published by Atkinson and Shiffrin in 1968.

Let's start by imagining a science teacher introducing a lesson about food pyramids and energy flow to her class.

As she talks and points to images on the Smart Board, her students initially perceive this auditory and visual information and store it temporarily in their sensory registers.

Then if attended to by each student, this information is moved into what's called short-term memory for processing Short-term memory can be thought of as our immediate consciousness of where we do our thinking and reasoning.

Short-term memory holds a limited amount of information for only short periods of time.

Usually five to 30 seconds.

It is similar to what you might have heard before as working memory and it can be overloaded.

This overload diminishes student learning, something we'll discuss in later units.

Next, depending on how the information is processed in short-term memory, it may or may not be moved into long-term memory for storage and later use.

An important set of questions we will be addressing throughout this course is one, how can we help our students make memories that are enduring and durable?

And two, how can we help our students make memories that can be transferred to new situations later?

Now let's look in more detail at how the different components of this model of memory work together and interact.

Incoming environmental stimuli are picked up by our senses and enter what are called our sensory registers.

Of course, we do not perceive most of the stimuli in our environment.

For example, compared to other mammals, our human auditory sensory range is somewhat limited, as is our sense of smell.

But our capability to pick up visual information in our environment is pretty good.

Whatever information we do sense then goes into our sensory registers and remains for only a very short time.

Usually measured in fractions of a second.

Then some small proportion of what our senses perceive is attended to.

And we become aware of it in some conscious way.

Although we certainly perceive our surroundings in important ways even without becoming consciously aware.

For example, the tactile pressure of the chair you might be sitting on right now.

This information filters or bottlenecks, is what we call selective attention.

In other words, to become aware of sense information from our surroundings, we must pay attention to it some way in order to move it into our short-term memory for processing.

It is crucial to manage our attention in this way.

Otherwise, the world would be as the famous psychologist William James expressed it, "One great big blooming, buzzing confusion."

This explains why two people can be in the same sensory environment, yet experience that environment in sometimes very different ways.

Now let's go back to our three students sitting in the science class.

All three students will hopefully perceive the teacher's voice and watch what she is doing.

At least, in the beginning.

So this information will enter into each of their visual and auditory sensory registers.

What happens next is where things can go right or wrong from the standpoint of teaching.

For example, one student may quickly become engrossed in surreptitiously looking at her smart phone.

Another may initially attend to what the teacher is saying, but then the picture of the lion prompts him to remember seeing the movie The Lion King, and he starts thinking about that.

The third student on the other hand, does what we hope all of our students do most of the time.

Pays attention to the teacher, and actively engages what is being taught, in this case by taking notes.

For the cell phone using student, there is probably very little if anything of what the teacher is doing that enters into the conscious awareness of her short-term memory.

This student may vaguely sense the teacher talking but she is not comprehending her in any meaningful way.

This is because the student's attention is focused on the smart phone.

However, she is paying attention and processing something in her short term memory, but it's the wrong thing.

The information on her smart phone.

The second student also ends up attending very little to what the teacher is doing because his focus is on the thinking about The Lion King.

He's paying virtually no attention to his surrounding environment but he is attending and cognitively processing in short-term memory the memories he is retrieving from long-term memory about the movie.

Both students are paying attention and processing incoming information, but with regard to the wrong things.

Despite their attentiveness, for our purposes as teachers, they are distracted and off task.

As a quick aside, we'll talk in week three about self-regulated learning and discuss different forms of student inattention and distraction and how to minimize them.

We'll even make the case that mind-wandering can sometimes be a good thing for the learners in our classroom.

For now let's go back to our model student paying attention to the teacher.

She is no doubt processing in short-term memory what the teacher is conveying by taking notes.

But here's an important insight from a learning standpoint. At the end of her time paying attention to her teacher and taking notes, the student may have either learned very little or possibly a lot.

It will mostly depend on how deeply she was able to cognitively process what her teacher was presenting and doing.

In other words, was the student able to meaningfully link the new information with what she already knew?

Her prior knowledge.

This will be determined by how much she actively and consciously reaches into her long-term memory from her short-term memory to retrieve and think about what she is seeing and hearing from the teacher.

This dialogue between short-term memory and long-term memory is what will make and store memories for this new learning.

This is the essence of active learning.

On the other hand, if a student mostly listens and or watches in a learning environment without being given the chance to actively process new information, it likely won't stick in the form of new and usable memories.

That's even if the students are rapt with attention because most of their thinking and processing will still be in short-term memory which soon decays and is lost.

Unfortunately this happens too often in schools when students aren't encouraged or required to actively process what they are meant to be learning.

There are many ways to do this and we will focus on this in later sessions.

Long-term memory is undoubtedly the most complex component of our memory system, so as educators, it is critically important to understand the basics of how it works.

Something we'll do in the following sessions.

That's because enduring and useful memories are what we hope results with regards to the essential concepts and skills we teach all of our students.

We want them to be able to transfer what they learn in our schools.

The most important learning, anyway, to situations in their own personal lives and ultimately to their work and civic lives in the future.

If they can't transfer beyond our classrooms some important aspects of what we teach them, does it matter then what we teach them?

Let's review some of the important ideas from this unit.

All of which we hope to deepen your understanding in the coming weeks.

First, creating long-lasting memories is most successful when new information is meaningfully linked to already-existing knowledge in our memories.

Second, the more we process and think about something new to the learned, the more enduring and retrievable the memories become.

This most often involves a dialogue between short-term memory, and long-term memory.

In other words, we have to think to learn.

By actively and consciously processing new information and experiences.

Our later session about making enduring memories will explain more in-depth.

Third, if the first two don't happen, our students can be super attentive and work very hard, but learn very little in terms of making durable memories and learning that they can later use.

Finally, short-term memory is limited in time and capacity and can be overloaded in a way that limits learning.

We will address this and ways to avoid it in later sessions. So that's a simple model of how memory works, and we hope our subsequent sessions will deepen your understanding of its major features, always with this question in mind:

How can this developing understanding of how learning happens be used to enhance my own teaching practice?