How we Learn - What wires together, fires together.
Cool sounding catch phrase, right? But what does it mean?
How do you learn for exams?
This takes me back to an old episode of Stargate: SG1. For those geeks of my vintage, I recommend you watch this again. Over 20 years old and it still holds up (minus the 90s fashion, of course!...double denim? ouch!).
There is an episode where the team, meets an alien civilisation where some children are implanted with nanites (tiny computers) and learn the knowledge for their civilisation. One would learn physics, one would learn history etc. Eventually, these nanites would be harvested and given to the population and the knowledge would be spread amongst the people. For now, let’s put aside the moral dilemmas of using children and what happened to them after their nanites were ‘harvested’ (I won’t give away the ending).
What was interesting is that when the humans from Earth talked about learning, it confused the aliens. They didn’t understand why people would learn the ‘old fashioned’ way. To them, it was inefficient to learn the way we do.
What about the movie The Matrix where people can be plugged into a computer and knowledge was downloaded into their mind.
Can you imagine being able to just gain knowledge without having to study?
Unless you are in The Matrix or about to receive nanites with knowledge, you’ll have to remain with the rest of us who have to work very hard to remember things.
How do you study for exams? If you are like me, the process probably involves, reading, re-reading, writing, re-writing, reading and re-reading etc etc. Essentially, we go over the material over and over and over and over, until the information finally ‘sticks’.
But why does this work? Why is this necessary?
Earlier we learned about plasticity. About how our brains can change and adapt to the environment.
The same process is at work when we learn.
In neuropsychology we call this consolidation. It is what it sounds like. It is the way we take new information and put it into long-term storage.
The first level of consolidation is at the synaptic level. Synapses are the connections between our brain cells. Think of them as the wiring. Chemical electric signals are passed along from brain cell to brain cell. Except unlike wires, the signals are passed from cell to cell. Kind of like a game of Chinese whispers.
When we make a memory, we create connections in the brain. The neurons in the brain connect to each other. This connection gets stronger and stronger the more they are used. Eggheads call this long-term potentiation.
Next week we’ll look into how long-term potentiation works.
