Learning has two components…- The ability to create the correct neural pathway (Short-term memory)
– And the ability to fire the same neural pathway with the right associated pathway (Recall)
Repetition leads to synaptic conditioning – the brain is plastic, and it allows the neural pathway to fire at a faster pace than before. That’s why repetition over a long period of time creates an instantaneous recall – that’s why you can recite your ABCs and 123s.
Try reciting your ABCs in the opposite way, and you’ll have a bigger difficulty than doing it forward.
What’s important is that you must realize that memories aren’t intangible – they are, as a matter of fact, physically touchable. They are simply patterns of neurons in different ways – just like how you would join the dots on a dot puzzle in a specific manner.
There’s another way:
Psychologists call it conditioning and some call it anchoring – but associating a very powerful previous neural pattern to your new memory is almost always going to give a very powerful trigger.
For example, you see it demonstrated in “memory techniques”…
You know your 1, 2 and 3s. But let’s say you peg them to RHYME with a certain word…
1 = bun
2 = shoe
3 = tree
4 = door
5 = hive
6 = sticks
7 = heaven
8 = gate
9 = line
10 = hen
Once you’ve gone through it a few times, it should be nearly impossible for you to forget the rhymes. Since each word is linked to your already powerful neural construct of numbers, each of these words get triggered once you think of each number and the methodology of rhyming.
And this is called “priming”. One thought leads to another – almost certainly.
Think about it…
When you think of a “bun”, you don’t simply think of the word. The image of a bun inevitably floats out. The smell maybe. The associated memories with it floats up.
But it doesn’t end there. The image might lead to something else. The smell might lead to something else. It’s an endless chain.
It’s a train of thoughts.
That’s how the Journey method works too. This method works on journeys you go on everyday, like a walk back to your home from your workplace or school. Obviously, you will be able to know what’s on your journey back home as well as your ABCs. And linking your memories is a method the Greeks used in the past.
Same with the Room method.
If you notice, “memory techniques” are almost all based on connections. Because that’s how the brain works.
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I’m not just talking about memory here. It’s your whole approach to the brain. We’re leaping from thousands of thoughts per second to thousands of thoughts per next second. We’re only conscious of a few.
When you learn something, you immediately try to relate it to a past, strongly connected neural pathway (past memory).
Think about it. The first time you saw a four-legged animal, as a toddler, you might learn that it is a dog. But when you see a cat with four legs, you might understand that there are differences, but you might still call it a dog. When someone else corrects you, you build a new memory on that past memory that allows you to differentiate a cat and a dog.
We learn from contrast and connections. Imagine your brain to be extremely non-linear. It’s extremely random, and the only way to consciously organize it is to create non-entropic “tree branches”.
A similar technique known as the “Mind-map” is based off this. You can Google it.
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Now that the background information is out-of-the-way, let’s talk about learning new stuff.
New stuff = Creating contrast from old memories
That’s it. And to do that, you need to ensure that the old memory that you’re “piggy-backing” off is strongly connected.
For example, for a pro tennis player, practice has allowed him/her to do a strong volley stroke on a tennis ball as proficiently as he can spell out his ABCs. That’s the meaning of a strong connection. (Again: The more you repeat it, the more conditioned the synapses.)
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To learn something, you need to understand that the people who created these ideas also have had “past memories”. The timeline looks something like this…
Basic Info… -> Background Info… -> “Your new information”
It’s kind of what I’ve done above. I’ve lined out the background information so you can somewhat better understand my post here.
What you do… is you go way back to that person’s basics. Then you go to the background information. Then you go to your new information and soak it up like a sponge.
It’s kind of like a dartboard. You start from the outside (the easier foundation thoughts)… and slowly move in and zone in (your new concept).
It’s kind of an upside-down approach to the “WHY? WHY? WHY?” approach that a lot of people are advocating. It works, and it’s still going from the basic info -> new information.
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To go a step even higher, you start to apply it on a lateral perspective.
You go sideways.
For example, there are tons of theories that can be applied to thousands of other seemingly unrelated scenarios.
Think of examples of the concept happening.
For example, the chaos theory says that the smallest things can create a huge difference in the results.
Classic example: Butterfly flaps its wings, creates a tornado in another part of the world.
You research: Tiny molecule contacts body cell, triggers over hundreds and thousands of chain reactions.
Or: 1 gene mutation creates a huge radical change in a body, leading to early death.
And if you actually go deeper, you’ll see that it correlates to other fields like economics… physics… chemistry… mathematics… sociology… anthropology…. literature…..
Well yeah.
The gist was “Connections using old connections”. But I hope the exemplification helped.
Delusions of Adequacy 