…creating memories.
Hello and welcome to the 83rd edition of our fortnightly newsletter, Things in Education.
Our brain remembers some of the new things that it encounters, while other things it may not notice, forget immediately or forget after sometime. Our endeavour as educators is to deliver new information and experiences to students in a way that they become long lasting memories for the students. So what can we do to increase the chances of students remembering the new material? Information processing is a vast field of cognitive science, and we will deal with different parts of this in our upcoming editions. In this edition, we will focus on the core of information processing and on how our brain responds to new information.
Conceptually, we can think of our memory having three parts or registers – sensory memory, working memory and long-term memory. The goal is to get information into long-term memory and keep it there for a long time.
Sensory memory
Our sensory memory is made up of our senses - eyes, ears, skin and so on. Our senses register information from the environment all the time. At this very moment of reading, your ears may be hearing the traffic outside, or the chirping of birds, or the sound of the fan; your skin can feel the texture of your clothes; your eyes can see slight movements around you – at any given point, there is a lot of information that our senses encounter. Even though all this information is perceived by the sensory memory, a lot of it is ignored in the brain. And this is useful. Imagine if the brain constantly kept processing the fact that your shirt is touching your shoulders – you would be constantly overloaded by thoughts about each and everything in your environment, and you would not be able to focus on any single thing! And so, the brain being a pretty smart organ, ensures that you stop registering the shirt touching your shoulders after some time. If we pay attention to any stimulus in the environment, the information is passed on to the working memory.
Working memory
Working memory has limited capacity – it cannot hold too much information at a time and it cannot hold any information for more than a few seconds. The only way information in the working memory can be retained for any duration of time is for it to make connections with information that you have already stored in long-term memory. Try to do this: flash a card with letters like P-X-M-G-L-D-F in front of anyone for 3-4 seconds, and ask them to recall the letters in the correct order. On another card, write down letters like P-E-R-P-L-O-X-A-D, and flash it again for 3-4 seconds. Ask them to recall the letters in the correct order. It is more likely that people will be able to recall the second set of letters way more often than the first set of letters. Why?
When the set of letters is flashed, our sensory memory (eyes) picks up the information and transfers it to working memory. Working memory is trying to keep this information from being forgotten. In the second case, the arrangement of letters reminds us of some other words that already exist in our long-term memory. So your working memory is making connections with existing memories. This means information is retained in the working memory for a longer time thanks to these connections with long-term memory. With the first set of letters, such a memory may not exist for most of us. And this means the working memory is not able to make connections with existing memories, resulting in the working memory losing this information.
An important feature of working memory is that it is the most active memory register. This is where all the remembering, recalling, connecting and thinking happens. It would be like comparing this part to the RAM of a computer. Once there are connections made between the new information in the working memory, this new information can be passed on to long-term memory through various ways.
Long-term memory
Long-term memory is essentially the hard drive of a computer. This is where all experiences, information, emotions, etc. are stored. While you were reading about the working of working memory, you most certainly have forgotten the series of letters mentioned earlier (yes, even the second set of letters). Just being able to make a connection between new information and recalled information in the working memory is not enough. At this stage the connection is delicate and fragile. This connection needs to be reinforced for the information to be retained in long-term memory.
It is almost certain that you do not recall your class 9 final examination score or rank. But at that time, and maybe even through to class 12, you would have remembered your class 9 scores. So when is a memory long-term? Remembering class 9 marks for a few years happens because it was part of your long-term memory. But this information was not reinforced after some time. It was not brought back into working memory for a long time, and hence it is now lost from your long-term memory. Reinforcing, repetition, recalling are all important in retaining information in long-term memory.
How does this information help us in the classroom?
Given what we now know about sensory memory, we know that there will be multiple things or events jostling for the attention of students’ sensory memory. And if a student is not paying attention to the lesson in class, no matter how clearly the teacher explains something or how ‘interesting’ the lesson may be, the student will not remember the lesson. However, if you pay attention to the new information, it will get passed on to the next memory register–from your sensory memory to your working memory.
We now know that working memory is fleeting and limited, and there is a need to recall things from long-term memory to ensure students remember the new information. This makes it even more important that educators make connections between existing information and experiences in students’ long-term memory and the new information.
If information is not brought into the working memory from long-term memory, it is likely to be forgotten. This should help us, as educators, to plan when revision lessons should be planned, etc.
Apart from these there are specific reasons why we remember things, why we forget them and why we still need to remember facts in the age of the Internet. We will continue to write about these things in our series on information processing and how it should influence our lesson plan and term schedule.
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Edition: 3.31
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