Mind Skills

Memorization Builds Brains

By Amy E. Barr at The Lukeion Project

 

    Charles attended his local gym every other day for months but nothing about him changed. He was no more fit and no more flexible than when he had first joined this ultramodern facility. To him it was a mystery! He attended the very epicenter of fitness and health so often that the front desk crew knew his name. He put in a full hour each weeknight. He put in two hours on Saturday. The other regulars knew exactly where to find him during his habitual visits. Charles made zero progress and saw no results but yet he continued to attend. His failure to make gains was no surprise to anyone who knew him. Charles refused to lift any weights, work on any cardio equipment, or take part in any swimming or cycling opportunities. 
    This sounds ridiculous. Charles paid the membership fee after extensive research looking for the right facility with the right coaches. He even bought a handsome exercise outfit which allowed full flexibility and to show-off any future gains. All this only to enter the gym and do nothing but see others lift weights, swim, exercise, climb, move, and stretch. 
    Charles attending an expensive gym for sizable parts of his week and doing nothing to improve his heart and muscles is very much like a student who plans to navigate 12+ years of education without once memorizing anything.
    Never being asked to engage one’s brain in this manner explains our public educational plight, at least in the U.S. though certainly the practice continues to spread to other nations. Never memorizing anything means that students live in the perpetual state of first steps and first impressions with no ability to climb the educational ladder to anything more complex. The brain is a muscle. It needs work and heavy lifting. Looking at charts, videos, and other students doing the work creates no benefit for yourself though it will certainly fill one’s day.
    Working memory, our superficial thoughts, takes any first exposure to new information and begins to engage the brain into a sorting exercise. The brain must decide if information needs to be stored short term, long term, or only briefly engaged and quickly forgotten. At best, working memory can keep around 7 items stored before everything gets jumbled. 
    If you look at your vocabulary flash cards for your Latin class only once or maybe twice before evaluating your retention, you’ll probably get around 5 to 7 things right and the rest wrong. If you enter a room to meet a bunch of new people, good luck. You might remember 5 to 7 names if the only thing people tell you is their name and nothing else like “nice to meet you” and “lovely day isn’t it!” Our brains are usually thinking up clever responses and we’ll not likely remember any names at all if we aren’t making a real effort. 
    Long term memory is what gives you the top score on your quiz and the ability to greet your new teammates when you see them again in a couple of days. Working memory is, at best, a tiny holding place for a handful of facts that will fade before the hour has ended. An educational system that is not built around developing long term memory skills condemns a student to live in mental deficit, like a case of amnesia. 
    Depending on how you prepare long term memory facts, you can store information in your mind for days to years to a lifetime. Learning the fundamentals of a subject for one year and then applying fundamentals the next as you add newer and more complex elements requires long term memory. This success requires memorization. If you’ve come from the vast majority of brick-and-mortar schools you’ve likely never been expected to memorize much. You’ve certainly never been taught methods to help yourself because “trendy education” has thought it old fashioned as our nation’s scores plummet lower than any other developed nation. The inability to develop topics over years means students limp through life with only a jumble of ideas temporarily stored in working memory and nothing more than hopes to look it up online.
    “When will we ever need algebraic formulae?” you might ask. Good luck moving up to more complex levels if you are juggling pages of facts you never learned but only saw. You can’t. Your brain can’t juggle working memory and the introduction of new concepts beyond that small group of 5-7 facts. You aren’t progressing because you are never learning. You are never learning because you have cognitive overload by asking your short-term memory to try to the job of long-term memory. Comprehension collapses. Your brain can’t juggle information and tires quickly, your learning slows, you get frustrated, and then you lose all motivation. 
    Listing the necessary outcomes of only using short-term working memory and never memorization sounds like a typical diagnosis of a learning disability: low comprehension, mental fatigue, delayed learning, frustration, disinterest, and low motivation. What if we didn’t need to hire all those classroom assistants? What if we started teaching students how to memorize and then expected them to progress beyond the basics by having long term memory functioning normally if not robustly?
    Let working memory do its job (juggling 5 to 7 new facts) but then move the important things into long term memory every night. The outcome makes an average student into a genius in today’s terms: increased comprehension (you memorized yesterday’s facts and can juggle the new ones today), increased mental stamina (you have sorted out how to process information efficiently and have confidence that you can keep doing it), faster learning (you don’t need to spend half your time looking up the things that you should have memorized but never did), and increased enthusiasm (look at that successful exam or project after the hard work paid off!)
    Having mastered what memorization can do for you, you get to move on to application (build that engine or complete that experiment or participate in that cool project), creation (apply what is known to new problems that must be solved), evaluation (swiftly sort out good ideas form bad ones to plan even better projects). 
    n the modern educational arena, too many have made a choice between memorizing a thing and understanding a thing. Use both as a tool to aid the other. 

The Trained Brain

You Need Mental Exercise

by Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Walk through any big box store in January and you’ll see two types of things: bottles of health supplements and exercise equipment. Yesterday I saw a lady who appeared to be in her 80s trying out a very expensive piece of weight training equipment because we humans love trying to make a new start. As the new year starts, people feel motivated to get healthier and start exercising in response to feeling less than their best after a few long weeks of eating extra treats and lounging about more than often.
Starting a new semester is the perfect time to consider our mental health routines. We all likely do things differently in the deepest part of the winter and feel less than our best mentally. How do we get our mental health back and start training our brain? Enjoy three steps that anyone can do for free.

Start

Choose your biggest distraction and decide to defeat it. I’ll help. If you have unfettered (or even just slightly reduced) access to technology (phones, tablets, games, TV, etc.) presume it is your biggest obstacle because app developers have made it their business to make you hyper-focused on their product while you become hyper-distracted from completing much else. Most of us know it is a problem while at the same time we don’t really want to change. That’s what an addiction is! Imagine regaining 30-40% of your time each week. “What good is that,” you might opine, “if I’m missing out on everything online?” If you want a trained brain—one that is far more efficient at reading what you like to read and thinking what you prefer to think—it is indeed a very good thing to regain your time.
If you live in a digital-free home or a relatively digitally diminished life, congratulations. You can skip to the next step because no other distraction is as debilitating as technology.
First, don’t change anything but do track your time for at least three days. One of those days should be a weekend and two should be weekdays. Work out how you distribute your time. Be precise because you are doing this for yourself, not somebody giving you a grade -- though you’ll soon find that it makes a difference in that area too. Track yourself in terms of 10-minute blocks rounded up.  If you wake up but spend 23 minutes looking at your phone, don’t count those as 23 minutes sleeping but 30 minutes on screen time. If you are on the phone every time you eat a meal, count that time as screen time, not eating since it is likely you didn’t even taste your food or keep track of how much you ate. If you can’t take a walk without looking down at your phone the whole time, don’t count that as exercise but as screen time.  Do a little math and find out your average daily time investment on different tasks. Remember, anything that you do that includes screen time only counts as screen time. Most will quickly discover why your life is passing by with limited returns. The five hours you claim you are spending on mental work is closer to around 32 minutes.
It is time to train your brain. The fastest way to reprogram yourself away from distractions is to find a good book, preferably one that has more than one volume in a set. Moving from one type of distraction to another will simplify your predicament while extending your ability to focus. Depending on how deep your addiction is to digital distractions, you may need to start at 2 minutes, but most can make if for 5. Use your phone or device as a timer. Set it for 5 minutes and 10 seconds. The extra 10 seconds is added so you can set the device and leave it in the next room while you go to a part of your home that has no digital entertainment whatsoever. For some, this might be your closet. Pick up your book and read it for five minutes without getting up to check any device. Some will have few problems. Others will only make it a minute or two before they want to grab their phone. Repeat this 5-minute process as many times as you need until you find you are a bit surprised when the timer goes off. Next try 10 minutes, then 20, etc. Once you can keep reading for an hour without reaching for a device, maintain that level for at least a week or, better, two. Congratulations! You’ve now restored your ability to focus and you might even want to finish reading the whole series now.

Advance

Now you can concentrate on a different entertaining distraction but that doesn’t mean you are mentally productive yet. Cajole yourself into reading something you do not yet enjoy. Instead of just using the timer to get yourself to read more about calculus or history or 18th century literature, engage further by taking notes. What you write, how you write, or the elegance of your letters makes zero difference. If all you do is write out a proper name, date, fact, or important term on your chicken-scratch notes for each page you read, you are training your brain. Do not replace note-taking with highlighting the book nor underlining things. Doodlers: don’t just doodle unless your image relates to the text. Writing out relevant words and very short descriptions means you must track with the material to a greater and extent. You don’t need full sentences (unless you find words to live by). Expect to be irritated at first by how slow you write. You might have to train your hand as well. You’ll quickly discover why people used the almost lost art of cursive. Printing takes a lot longer than cursive writing which was the original point of cursive.  Once you can get all the way through an assigned reading without getting distracted, well done! You’ve come a long way.

Enjoy

So now you’ve trained diligently and won a few victories. How do you know when you have a nicely trained brain? Success is when you stop craving the petty distractions (for most alive today that would be something on a phone, gaming, or TV but some are hooked on sports or music or a zillion other things). If you swap zillions of 2-minute videos of people doing dumb things for being able to ready for an hour without interruption or distraction, you are going to begin to do things that will surprise you. As your taste for reading expands, you’ll begin to think and communicate in more and more complex ways that mimic the type of things that you like to read. Vocabulary will grow, ideas will increase, and your writing will speed and improve in quality. Maybe your new focus tool is building something. Congratulations! Now you have a useful skill! Perhaps you decided your focus tool is art, animals, exercise, or writing. All of these things will continue to develop your ability to enjoy life in ways that are far more meaningful than watching strangers on short videos.
It is worth it to train your brain. Try it.
   

Popcorn Brain

Do You Have It? How Can You Recover?

By Amy Barr

Do you have popcorn brain? I bet you do. I certainly do. I didn’t invent this disease. It is an affliction that causes problems for most of modern humans. It is a pervasive affliction that causes daily troubles for all of us. Popcorn brain can drastically change one’s life trajectory and damage our relationships even though most don’t know they have the problem.

Popcorn brain is not caused by a pernicious virus. We can’t blame too many sweets, too few vitamins, too much food dye, nor even popcorn. The main symptom of popcorn brain is that you are easily distracted and will have difficulty focusing on one task at a time. You’ll find it is impossible to put aside technology, even for one or more waking hours. 

The average sufferer plays music while he is trying to perform an intellectual task like homework, studying, writing, or reading. If the list stopped there, that's not so bad. Now he adds a constant stream of notifications from social media accounts, playing apps, sharing funny videos, watching TV, and grabbing snacks during the few hours set aside to get work done. 

Popcorn brain feels productive because we are so busy. Popcorn brain fools us (and others) into thinking we are getting stuff done when we are not. Besides doing a poor job on mental tasks you also suffer from an intolerance for being bored even for a moment. Even the smallest lapse in activities means you will get distracted from even your distractions. 

Popcorn brain means you may never have a single creative moment in your life. All day long, your poor brain pops and pops and pops, looking for the next imposed impulse from a dozen sources simultaneously. You will constantly feel overwhelmed, over-scheduled, unproductive, and uncreative. 

What are the causes of popcorn brain?

There’s no way to soft sell this so you better sit down. Your sophisticated expensive time-saving technology is to blame. Those who don’t have computers (phones, tablets, whatever) don’t have popcorn brain. Their lives tend to be a full expression of focus, effort, creativity, and productivity. To remind myself that such a life is possible, I drive through one of the two Amish communities near my house. It is clear which houses are Amish and which are "English" not because the Amish have no power lines. Amish houses are dynamic, busy, well-tended, and full of life.They are able to easily accomplish daily chores with plenty of time for social time, community events, and opportunities for volunteer work. Their mental, physical, and spiritual health is robust.

Meanwhile popcorn brain spreads like wildfire in the modern world because the addiction is real. The mere thought of unplugging or living with minimal technological input likely made you feel uncomfortable or indignant. How horrible! Don’t they get bored? Unlikely but when they do, they also get creative unlike the rest of us.

How does popcorn brain change lives for the worse?
Drive through any modern neighborhood. You’ll find yards are empty and untended, playgrounds are sparsely used, and even joggers or dog walkers don’t just complete that one task. They listen to music, check texts at stop lights, and look to count steps, their heart-monitor app., and their social media.
Many studies and my own experience as an educator prove that that the average I.Q. is dropping, and our population is getting dumber by the day. Student assignments that should take 20 minutes now take 90 minutes between the constant distractions. Compare what an average high school graduate knows now and what was expected from an 18-year old 100 years ago! Visit parts of the world that enjoy limited technology and compare their productivity and personal skills with your own. Friends, it isn’t pretty. Popcorn brain is so serious that most of us will labor decades to master skills that non-tech humans can pick up at age 16 simply because our days, creativity, and minds are squandered for nothing.
How many artists, writers, and musicians will never develop their arts because they never once get bored enough to paint that mural, finish that novel, or form the muscle memory needed to become great at their instruments of choice? How many people that are wired to be carpenters, gardeners, inventors, linguists, dancers, or scholars will instead spend their lives doing none of that because they can’t find the time?   

How to Combat Popcorn Brain

If technology has caused this crisis, limiting, or eliminating it will cure it. Ouch.

Like many of you, I can’t get rid of the necessity for screen time because that’s how I make a living. Students are in the same boat until further notice, alas. I am working on some disciplines to limit myself.

Habits die hard so start with reduction. Diminish technological demands even while employing technology. Too many tabs, apps, videos open at the same time shrinks your ability to focus. If you give yourself an hour to finish an academic job, break it into 30 minutes and then close everything but your appropriate app and maybe some music to drown ambient sounds. Don’t play music with lyrics because your popcorn brain will tell you to sing along! At the 30-minute mark—if you have remained focused—enjoy a short non-technology reward or set the timer for 5 minutes to check texts, email, etc., before closing all those tabs again. Don’t go over that limit. Set the timer for 30 minutes again and repeat. Like learning to lift weights, you’ll need to build up to 60 minutes and then 90, 120, etc. 

Learn to MEGABATCH or work on getting a lot done in one time block. Now that you’ve tuned up your ability to go stretches of time with limited technology input, eliminate tech for longer stretches of time each week. Turn it all off and set a manual timer for 3 or more hours doing any one activity that needs no tech or maybe a single app. Do this at least once a week. At first pick something that you adore (reading, sports, garden work, painting) but do it for three hours with zero phone, tablet, laptop, or gadget anywhere near you. You are reconditioning your brain to go for longer and longer periods without the little addictive endorphin treats that you’ve trained yourself to seek. You’ll know when you have made progress when you can drag out a good book and read in silence for 3 hours. Soon you will need an alarm to force yourself to stop reading that good book. If you have popcorn brain, this is something you've not done for a long time.

After you’ve reconditioned your brain to focus on a single task you enjoy, now force yourself to spend three or more hours mono-tasking things you don’t like as much. Whatever you consider a chore, do it for three hours uninterrupted by anything but short necessary breaks. Make it a date with just you and that chore. You’ll soon find that something that used to take 3 hours will now take a fraction of that time. If you don’t need 3 hours, add several more chores to your list because you’ll likely get much more done.

To avoid relapses, if you mess up while megabatching by grabbing that device, reset your three hours and begin again. Your reward for making it through all three hours of mono-tasking is that sense of satisfaction over a big pile of finished projects.

More brain reconditioning behaviors:

• Don’t look at devices for the first 30 minutes that you are awake in the morning and the last 30 minutes at night.Work to extend this time as you recover from popcorn brain.
  
• When you do listen to podcasts, tutorials, classes, etc., force yourself to take notes with pen and paper instead of fiddling with 3 or 4 other things on your device.
• Take up any physical exercise that requires focus. I do yard work or gardening. Others might practice hitting a target, shooting a ball, blacksmithing, biking, roller skating, or building something.
• A little music helps improve focus, but set your device far away and pick a playlist that requires no changes. Once your device lands in your hands, popcorn brain will go pop, pop, pop. Go to great efforts to not touch tech during focus time. 
• Make room for social time. Quit (school or professional) work at a specific hour then find your family or friends to catch up on your day. Popcorn brain forces us to be unproductive until we give up or run out of time in our day. This means we miss out on much needed social interactions. Focus lets us schedule an end to work and enjoy personal time daily.
• Plan a tech-free weekend at least once a month. Avoid all screens from Friday night through Monday morning. Camp, paint, exercise, compete, create, write, read, build, garden. Focus will help you find yourself once more.