Last week I wrote about Daniel Willingham’s book, Why Don’t Students Like School. I’ve been rereading it, and it’s fascinating all over again. It’s also a very odd experience, because he wrote a lot about memory and how it relates to thinking. One of his most important points in the beginning is this. A mind will not work at thinking through to a solution, if it can get the same result by remembering something from the past. 

Then Willingham encourages his readers to try little mind experiments and puzzles, and to pay attention to how their brain is functioning as they try. I watched myself remember doing some of the puzzles the first time I read the book, and I could see my mind reaching into the past to remind me of the solutions, though they are fifteen years back. Guess what? As Willingham points out, the mind IS much faster at retrieval than at solutions. He distinguishes this retrieval from true thinking, which is the process by which a problem whose answer really is unknown, is worked out. The book is his attempt to show ways to make that actual thinking/problem solving easier.

Willingham is not, by the way, looking down on retrieval as a bad thing. He devotes a lot of space to the proposition that the more information you have in storage, your long term memory, the more information you can put in. The more you can put in, the more you can pull out/retrieve. The more you can pull out, the better your chances of solving old problems by remembering, or new problems by analysis. 

Working memory and long term memory are key concepts. Long term memory is the place where the things you aren’t thinking about, right now, are stored. It includes facts, but it also includes action sequences like how to drive, and concepts like what a battle is, in general, as opposed to any particular battle you might know about. It might or might not include what happened ten minutes ago.

Your working memory can hold about seven ‘objects’. A major amount of brain power goes into expanding the range of a given ‘object.’ One of the most straightforward examples is the alphabet. Kids learn letters one by one, but eventually they have a whole concept called alphabet. Then they have one ‘object’ that encompasses all the letters, instead of twenty-six separate objects. If the letters stay separate, that is, if you are limited to thinking about seven letters at a time, then trying to learn to put them together into words is a nearly hopeless task. Willingham calls the process of turning them into one object, ‘chunking’. When they are ‘chunked’ then all the letters are available in one place to be thought about and there is room in the brain for six more ‘objects’ to think about.

Action sequences are another example of concepts that begin separately coming together as one single concept. The separate steps have been  ‘chunked’ together, thus freeing brain space. Frying an egg or a pancake is an action sequence. So is driving. When you learn to drive you have to learn to steer, and how to press on the brake with the right amount of pressure, and, if you are lucky, how to move the stick shift. Practice slowly teaches you to combine these actions so that steering and accelerating happen together, and you can drive correctly without clenching your teeth till your dentist makes money. At that point you can eat and talk while driving. Maybe.

There are limits. I can listen to music that I like, while driving, but I cannot listen to deep, new thoughts. Podcasts showed me this quite clearly. I can listen to the Bible, no problem. Listening to the Catechism? Not so great. It requires something from my mind that I’m already using; I feel like there’s no space left. (Or like I’m going to have an accident.) The explanation for this in part is that it’s easier to retain information when you can connect it to something you already know. Also, the better you know something the easier it is to find connections for something new. I know the Bible better than I know the Catechism. 

More another day.

** And yes, there’s different ways to think about the letters but that doesn’t change the point.