After reading chapters 1 and 2 in the text (Carey, 2014), write a 2- to 3-paragraph discussion about the most surprising fact you discovered in your reading. Choose a fact that informs your work (teacher), life(mum), or relationships with family or children. This is about your learning, your needs, and your discoveries, written in a scholarly fashion.

Book How we learn by benedict carey

Chapter one important notes

Part One – Basic Theory
Chapter One – The Story Maker
The Biology of Memory

• Much of how the brain works remains a mystery
• Autobiographical or episodic memory seems to be stored and retrieved differently than semantic memory
• Each time we access a memory, we change it a little bit; we recall different details and intertwine the memory with other memories

Chapter two important notes

Chapter Two – The Power of Forgetting
A New Theory of Learning

• In a sense, learning is focused forgetting; to learn one thing, we must let go of many other less important sensations and details that bombard us all the time
• A certain amount of forgetting also stimulates us to study again, strengthening the information we had begun to forget and much of the associated information as well
• Accessing memory alters its accessibility and its content
• Dr. Hermann Ebbinghaus was the first to measure the time decay of information (forgetting); he created nonsense syllables, studied them, and measured his recall across time intervals; he published this research in 1885
• A couple decades later, an English schoolteacher named Ballard gave working-class children a passage to memorize, and then tested them on it immediately and then additional, unanticipated, unannounced tests over the days and weeks that followed, and he found that recall improved over time with no further study
• Ebbinghaus tested with nonsense syllables which were unlikely to fit with any existing neural networks; Ballard’s poetry test included recognizable words and patterns – the effect Ballard observed is highly dependent on the material being used
• Follow-up research to understand the relationship of decay and improvement showed…
  • Any memory has two strengths – storage strength and retrieval strength
  • Storage strength can increase, but never decreases; plenty never gets stored, but once we’ve committed it to memory, it’s there forever, and we have nearly unlimited space
  • Retrieval is separate and measures how easily something stored comes to mind; compared to storage, retrieval is fickle; it can build and weaken quickly
  • The act of finding and recalling memories increases storage strength and retrieval strength (learning); the researchers (Bjorks) call this principle desirable difficulty
  • With this system, memories can become inaccessible but remain in storage, which creates advantages. They don’t interfere with current information and procedures, but they can more quickly be re-learned under certain circumstances.

Part Two – Retention

helpful link

http://spdrdng.com/posts/summary-of-how-we-learn-t...

http://med.stanford.edu/md/academic-support/learni...