A Brain That Learns About The World

Henry Molaison had become the world’s most famous psychological patient but had no knowledge of that important fact. He’d been told of his fame many times, but to no avail. Mr. Molaison had no way to remember that or anything else.

Called HM to preserve his anonymity, Henry had developed severe epilepsy as a young man and, seeking relief, had the inner parts of both temporal lobes removed, including the hippocampus. Relief he obtained, but at a terrible price. From that day on, HM could not form a lasting memory. He could hold a conversation and performed well on an intelligence test, but he couldn’t remember anything about his day-to-day life.

We’ll talk further about HM’s contribution to science but it should be pointed out that, in his own way, HM sacrificed greatly but contributed to a revolution in science that aims to accurately describe what it is to be human.

Structure

Many Circuits

Let’s first get a sense of the geography of the brain and a few of the roles that various regions play. We previously learned that neurons form connections with each other at their synapses and that the magic of information processing in living flesh has to do with their massive inter-connectedness—up to one thousand trillion connections in the human brain. By themselves, neurons don’t do much. The magic of a nervous system lies in the connections and most of the connections form integrated units called circuits.

The process of circuit building begins very early during fetal development in the womb. Neurons under the genetic control of DNA spread out from discrete starting locations on pre-built scaffolds made of glial cells. Once a neuron is in its final location, it seeks out connections by sending out its single axon to make synaptic contact with other neurons, usually at their dendrites. The neural pattern that forms is the basic structure of the working brain—an assembly of circuits ready to experience the world and, in turn, be modified by that experience. It’s ready to learn.

A Good Pruning

Signals from the outside world now have a startling effect on the number of neurons in the brain. One would be inclined to postulate that with growth and experience, an infant should develop increasing numbers of synaptic connection. That intuition would be wrong. As we saw in the previous discussion of neurons, whenever a strong electric potential runs through the axon of a neuron, the connection to the receiving neuron is strengthened. This is the basis of learning, sometimes called Hebbian plasticity after the researcher who showed that neurons that fire together wire together. As an infant experiences the world, some synaptic connections become stronger than others. These stronger neuronal connections are allowed to remain but the weaker ones undergo a programmed cell death and are pruned from the brain.

The current evidence suggests that the pruning process in humans occurs in several waves. One happens during the first few years after birth when trillions of connections are eliminated and a second large event takes place at adolescence. The process is remarkably Darwinian and has come to be called neural selection—only the strongest neurons and synapses are selected for survival.

For some psychologists, neural pruning puts a time limit on learning, but most argue that learning is a lifelong process because Hebbian plasticity is never turned off. Neurons that fire together, continue to wire together for a lifetime in normally functioning brains. Perhaps some aspects of a person (personality, for example) are somewhat locked down, but the ability to learn information, alter one’s perceptions, and grow as individuals can operate well into old age.

Motivational Triggers for Learning

With some imagination, we can conjure up the slightly disturbing image of a disembodied brain living in a tank of nutritional fluids. Given the proper inputs, perhaps our brain in a vat could “live” contentedly with only its cognitive and emotional abilities (thinking and feeling). Reality, however, imposes requirements on all living organisms who must survive and reproduce in a highly competitive Darwinian world. Failure to seek out food, mates, companions, and information about one’s circumstances invariably has consequences about as serious as they get: (namely: starvation, death, and extinction). It’s no wonder then, that the motivation to attain all sorts of goals, important or trivial, is highly correlated with emotion, arousal, anxiety, and satisfaction. So closely allied are motivation and emotion, that the root Latin word for motion appears

Motivation

As we have seen previously in papers 105 and 106, cognitive and emotional processes are major components of learning that can be described in evolutionary terms. In other words, we can understand why certain learning triggers allowed creatures, including humans, to survive and prosper under their guidance, and we can see how those triggers are instantiated in the living tissue of the brain. One question looms however. How do cognitive and emotional components create behavior out in the real world? Thinking and feeling go only so far, as our brain in a vat might testify. Without a desire to transform cognition and emotion into physical action, how useful would those attributes be? Not very. This is the third and final pillar supporting the psychological architecture of a living creature that thinks, feels, and must act in the real world. What motivates us beyond merely existing,? What drives us to do anything at all?

“Motivation has many defnitions. I use the term to refer to neural activity that guides us toward goals, outcomes that we desire and for which we will exert efort…Goalsdirect action andcanbe as concrete as a specifc stimulus (for example, a particular consumer product) or as abstract as a belief or idea (for example, the belief that hard work will lead to success).” —Joseph LeDoux, The Synaptic Self

All successful organism are motivated to engage with the world to accomplish biological ends, and human beings come equipped with the usual array of motivations plus an enormous variety of goals and incentives seen in no other creature on the planet. Like philosophical truths, motivation lies on a spectrum. It begins with the most basic requirements of life, the kind we share with all mammals, and proceeds to the pinnacles of achievement and human aspiration.

The questions that the designers of Amplifre have asked are:

• What are the factors that enhance the motivation to learn?
• How can a learning protocol utilize this last pillar in the mental trilogy?
• What psychological experiments demonstrate learning conditions that boost motivation?
• What brain circuits mediate motivation?
• How does evolutionary theory guide us in a search for optimal learning environments that foster motivated students?
• Does culture play a role?

These seriously important questions, if answerable, may contain the keys to a prosperous and satisfying future for the better part of humanity if only educators successfully heed the answers. By no means is what follows a claim to a solution for this problem of problems. At best, it is a summary of motivational concepts, brain circuits that mediate them, and the environmental triggers that appear to switch motivation into high gear.

Perhaps it is the most interesting of the three pillars because one can conceive of motivation as the force that drives lifelong learning and gives rise to an educated civilization. If a society were to error badly by institutionalizing educational processes that damaged the motive force to learn, the negative consequences, while probably taking years to play out, would be potentially irreversible. On that somber note, lets’ see how motivation works and how it might be made to serve the interests of the future—an optimistic note to spur us on.

7 Emotional Triggers for Learning

In the real world, Mr. Spock from Star Trek would be paralyzed without the guiding power of emotion. The countless moment-to-moment decisions we take for granted would be impossible for him to resolve. Paralysis would result.

This paper is concerned with emotion and its pervasive, but unappreciated influence on life, learning, and memory. Emotion is the second of three canvases upon which one can paint a full portrait of the psychological self. This mental trilogy has an ancient Greek heritage and its modern scientific interpretation can be conceived thusly:

• Cognition (thinking) allows us to focus on information and circumstances so that we can then decide among possible courses of action.
• Cognition creates and draws upon forms of memory that operate in the present moment and also on forms that are stored away in conscious and unconscious brain regions.
• Emotion is a mental process that assigns value to our perceptions. It influences our thinking and behavior far more than most people realize.
• Motivation concerns how we order the drives, goals, and incentives that propel us to engage in one activity and vigorously avoid another.

Emotion

Without emotion we would be lost in a sea of conflicting values, bereft of any rational way to quickly decide on a course of action. Emotion, in this view, is the human trait that computes the value of incoming sensory information. Let the profundity of that deceivingly simple notion wash over you for a while. Emotion determines value.

In this view, emotion is constantly updating and influencing decision making processes. Modern theorists have become convinced that a character like Star Trek’s consistently logical Mr. Spock would be at a serious disadvantage in a universe based on physical action and decision making. Without emotion, Spock would be forced to rationally compute the factors that influence the probable outcome of every trivial undertaking. How would he ever decide on a plan of action regarding the most basic or the most serious decisions in life? Should I go out to dinner tonight? Is it wise to do business with Mr. Jones? Is a career with Starfleet something I should pursue? Only feeling can guide those decisions.

The permutations of possible futures is utterly non-computable because their number grows exponentially. Very quickly, there are more possibilities during a walk to McDonalds than there are atoms in the universe. Hence, emotion and the “gut instinct” of heuristic decisions guide many, if not most, of our decisions. The big ones, like a career choice, surely need cognitive processes brought to bear. Still, think of the people you know who followed a rational process into a career rather than letting their “heart” inform some of the selection process. Some very unhappy outcomes flow from putting exclusive weight on reason while ignoring emotion.

The Psychology of Learning

Poor Solomon Shereshevsky couldn’t help but create detailed memories of nearly everything that entered his unusual brain. He never forgot. He could be given long lists of numbers, words, and non-sense syllables and remember them perfectly years later—and backwards, no less.

While that talent seems like a blessing, and it certainly was responsible for his career as a mnemonist and showman, the neuro-physiologist Alexander Luria, who studied Shereshevsky in the 1920s, found that he was handicapped by this remarkable ability. Every experience, even the most mundane, consisted of the reliving of countless associated details. The simple act of asking a street vendor for a scoop of ice cream brought forth remembered imagery of such intensity that the transaction was quickly brought to a halt. Intelligence tests revealed an average IQ, yet interestingly, Shereshevsky could not easily create abstract thought. The level of detail that plagued his conscious attention precluded him from forming general principles by which to conduct a normal and happy life.

So, why do the rest of us forget? Why is memory transient —here today, faint in a few weeks, gone in a year or two? Is transience due to faulty wiring or the cellular limitations of the brain? Maybe it’s just like the old marketing joke about bad software code, except in this case it’s true—forgetting is not a bug, it’s a feature. Are there different types of memory? How does a brain store memory and what can be done to improve it?

Beginning with psychological research in the 1870s and leading up to the very latest theories and working models, this paper examines the key discoveries of the most influential experimental psychologists. Over many decades of toil, their work has revealed how we learn and remember—perhaps the biological activity that makes us most human. As Noble Prize winning neurobiologist, Eric Kandel proclaims,

“For me, learning and memory have proven to be endlessly fascinating mental processes because they address one of the fundamental features of human activity: our ability to acquire new ideas from experience and to retain these ideas in memory. In fact, most of the ideas we have about the world and our civilization we have learned so that we are who we are in good measure because of what we have learned and what we remember.” —Erik Kandel, Nobel Prize Lecture, 2000

7 Cognitive Triggers for Learning

Correspondence to reality is a phrase that philosophers have long used to describe the goal of humanity’s quest for a description of nature. No undertaking yet devised gets closer to reality than the methods of science. Nevertheless, many people don’t believe that science can contribute all that much to the important questions of existence. Questions like: What is a conscious human being? How can we be capable of speaking, thinking, loving, hating, and of creating the extraordinary and beautiful works of civilization. How can we then go to war and destroy the same? What is the source of the myriad drives and contradictions that exist in human society and within its building blocks—the individuals that organize it? Science, not philosophy, is now making progress towards answering those kinds of questions.

Before we turn to learning and memory, let’s first consider the larger notion of individual self-hood within the realms of psychology and neuroscience. After all, the self is formed through a combination of genetics, experience, and memory. Therefore, a framework on which to hang ideas about the most effective ways to learn is necessary before we can truly understand how learning takes place.

To that end, an idea with an ancient pedigree is returning to center stage and proclaiming a way forward. It is the idea that three components of self form a canvas large enough to paint a complete portrait of any and every individual. While a true likeness of any self will contain millions of daubs of paint and trillions of possible color combinations, we can conceive three areas of canvas that will hold the material—three psychological domains that are capable of making sense of such a grandiose claim. They are cognition, emotion, and motivation. These three pillars of selfhood fully describe who we are psychologically and what we have learned through the patterns of neurons that form the physical circuitry of the brain.

Confidently Held Misinformation

Confidently held misinformation (CHM), refers to misinformation that is relied on as if it were true. Our clients have found an average of 25 – 35% false confidence within their organizations. This indicates that within their workforce, almost a third of employees’ knowledge is unknowingly incorrect — which opens the door to risk, harm, and loss for both themselves and their clients.

Risk that most organizations encounter stems from decisions to act based on misinformation disguised as truth. The graph below shows the amount of CHM we have uncovered throughout various industries and among thousands of working professionals — from doctors to pilots to satellite TV technicians. Notice that the level of false confidence is similar across industries. Everyone is susceptible to CHM.

The graph raises important questions: Is there something about human nature that’s causing this universal pattern across industries? Is the nature of information itself partly to blame?

The 6 best ways to make learning stick

How to Make It Stick

The application of scientific research to questions about learning and memory has been underway for over a century, and luckily for us, enormous progress has been made in just the last thirty years. Science attempts to mark a bright line between opinion and fact. Opinions are legion in the world. To be human is to hold an opinion on most everything. We are judgmental by nature and we judge our perceptions of reality to fit our own preconceived notions, beliefs, intuitions, and hopes. Science is the only way out of this self-referential pickle.

Make It Stick by Henry Roediger and his co-authors, Peter Brown and Mark McDaniel, is perhaps the best public expression of scientific research about learning and memory so far. Clear and compelling, full of stories about pilots, entrepreneurs, and surgeons, it’s currently the most understandable guide to a competent, successful, and satisfying life through learning that lasts. It shows how the study methods that most of us use are based on nothing more than ancient history, habit, and intuition. And it shows what actually works and explains why.

Here are the six best methods discussed in Make It Stick as expressed by Roediger and his co-authors.

RETRIEVAL PRACTICE (self-testing)

“ Students whose strategies emphasize re-reading but not self-testing show overconfidence in their mastery. Students who have been tested instead have a double advantage over those who have not: they have a more accurate sense of what they know and don’t know, and stronger learning that accrues from retrieval practice. ”

SPACING

“ When retrieval practice is spaced, allowing some forgetting to occur between tests, it leads to stronger long-term retention.”

INTERLEAVING

“ During practice, the students who worked the problems clustered by type averaged 89 percent correct, compared to only 60 percent for those who worked the interleaved problems. But in the final test a week later, the students who had practiced solving problems clustered by type averaged only 20 percent correct, while the students whose practice was interleaved averaged 63 percent.”

FEEDBACK

“ Studies show feedback strengthens retention more than testing alone does, and, interestingly, briefly delaying the feedback produces better long-term learning than immediate feedback.”

SETBACK & FAILURE

“ The qualities of persistence and resiliency, where failure is seen as useful information, underlie successful innovation in every sphere and lie at the core of nearly all successful learning. Failure points to the need for redoubled effort and liberates us to try different approaches.”

PRIMING

“ Unsuccessful attempts to solve a problem encourage deep processing of the answer when it is later supplied, creating fertile ground for its encoding, in a way that simply reading the answer cannot.”

Forging Long-Term Memory

The end product of learning is information stored in the brain as memory. Yet, most of us are unaware of the mental mechanisms and learning techniques that will contribute so mightily to our success in life. After a career spent researching the problem, the UCLA psychologist and chairman of Amplifire’s Science Board, Robert Bjork expressed this dilemma succinctly…

“ Current customs and standard practices in instruction, training, and schooling do not seem to be informed by an understanding of the complex and unintuitive dynamics that characterize human learning and memory. Nor do we, as individuals, seem to understand how to engage fully our remarkable capacity to learn. Instead, we seem guided by a faulty mental model of ourselves as learners that leads us to manage our own learning activities in far from optimal ways.” —Robert Bjork, On the Symbiosis of Remembering, Forgetting, and Learning, 2011

Information coming in through our senses is encoded by the brain into the language of neurons. The information is stored in hierarchical and highly associated memory patterns throughout the brain. We retrieve the “trace” of a memory by using cues in the moment of perception to reconstruct details of the original input. And, the trace fades if not strengthened in some manner— by recalling, testing, or repeating the information. Science has revealed much about the optimal conditions for learning and memory, but most of the insights have not been readily adopted by educators.

Sadly, traditional methods deliver simply abysmal results. After a lecture delivered in the classic stand-up format, students will remember only 20% of the material within 24 hours and only 5% after a few weeks. This is a bleak statistic, especially when one considers the fact that all higher order thinking must be built on a solid foundation of easily recalled facts and concepts.

Why is memory fragile? As Bjork and his many colleagues have shown, brains are designed by evolution to forget. Learning that isn’t associated strongly with related information or that lacks emotional content is the first to become inaccessible to retrieval. Without employing certain non-intuitive strategies, everyone forgets.

11 Motivational Triggers to Include in an Effective Learning Strategy

All thriving organisms have built-in motivation to seek food and reproduce. As humans, we’re equipped with a few extra motivational triggers. We have an enormous variety of incentives, seen in no other creature on earth, that push us to achieve our goals.

We have compiled a list of eleven motivators you should include in your learning strategy:

1. Curiosity
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it’s also a way to discover – and retain – new information. Curiosity is essential for long-term memory formation.

2. Seeking
Think of seeking as the ancient, vital need to hunt and forage for food, mates, companions, and answers. Being on a quest also proves to be a motivation when learning.

3. Rewards
Using rewards is a classic motivator. The timing and certainty of the payoff determines a reward’s value. If the reward seems too far off or is insignificant, the motivation level diminishes.

4. Uncertainty and Risk
Having a consequence tends to sharpen focus and causes dopamine levels to rise. Uncertainty and risk work together to form a crucial motivator for learning.

5. Confidence
Building confidence in a specific area provides an extra motivational push. Self-assessing one’s confidence is crucial for effective learning.

6. Anticipation
Anticipation is essentially the motivated state of mind characterized by high dopamine production which causes the behavior of seeking. Anticipation is heightened with uncertainty.

7. Goals
Realizable goals can really get people moving. For a goal to be realizable, it needs to be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely.

8. Intentions
The manner in which learners set their intentions and plan for the future has a profound effect on their desire to learn.

9. Flow
“The flow” describes a highly focused state of mind paired with masterful activity. People in the flow are completely immersed and lose track of time and space, enjoying the task at hand.

10. Progress and Optimism
Nobody likes feeling stuck in a rut. Learning suffers with pessimism yet flourishes with optimism. When we feel like success is possible and we can see progress, motivation rises.

11. Gamification
Games keep your dopamine levels optimized so you stay engaged and keep learning.

An effective learning strategy is one that engages learners and helps them learn more efficiently. The Amplifire learning platform is built on cognitive triggers that enable mastery and smart decision-making.

Study Less. Learn More.

If you’ve ever used flash cards to study for a test, you’ve probably run through a deck several times in a row. The second round felt easier than the first—a clear signal that you were learning and spending your study time wisely, right?

Actually, you were experiencing the fluency illusion. An immediate, second study session feels powerful (because the material is so familiar), but it provides almost zero benefit. Your subjective experience during learning is often unrelated to the quality of that learning.

In fact, many conditions of learning that feel difficult are far superior to the alternatives. Robert Bjork at UCLA calls these conditions “desirable difficulties.” Study protocols that feel more difficult are often much better at engaging the mental processes that support learning. Of course, the desirable part is not the extra hurdles during studying; it’s the higher test score at the end.

Unfortunately, most students haven’t read Dr. Bjork’s work. They use intuition to guide their study habits. But because what’s good for your brain is often counterintuitive, students usually wind up spending their study time poorly. For example, it’s better to let some time pass—hours or even days—before you run through a deck of flash cards again. The second round will be harder, but your score on a later test will be higher (a phenomenon called the spacing effect).

At Amplifire, we’ve assembled a Science Advisory Board that includes Dr. Bjork and other esteemed professors and researchers. We’ve based our software on thousands of pages of their research, plus work from other labs. The result: Amplifire makes a big impact on test scores and grades.

One of our clients helps law students become lawyers by preparing them for the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE). These learners spend hundreds of hours preparing, and must continually make decisions about how to spend that time. Then they take the test and get the score they have to live with.

We analyzed data from their practice exams to determine whether they would have scored better if they had used more Amplifire.

This type of analysis can be a bit tricky. Comparing two groups of learners (a between-subjects design) would either be unethical or invalid. Obviously, we couldn’t withhold Amplifire from some learners and require it of others. On the other hand, if we let learners choose whether to use Amplifire, any differences we found might have been due to study habits or motivation or anything else that varies from person to person.

We had to compare learners to themselves. But this can be tricky, too. We couldn’t have each student take the MBE twice—once with Amplifire and once without.

Instead, we looked closely at each individual’s behavior in our software.

Getting ready for the MBE requires studying dozens of topics. Learners can choose to do more or less work in Amplifire on each of those topics.

Our hypothesis: The more Amplifire you do, the better you’ll score. For example, if a learner completed 20% of Amplifire on Topic A, but 80% of Amplifire on Topic B, we expected them to score relatively higher on Topic B than on Topic A. This within-subjects design controls for the effects of aptitude, motivation, sleep quality on the day of the exam, and everything else that varies between learners. Any observed differences must therefore be due to Amplifire.

We analyzed data from 3,352 learners preparing for the MBE and presented the findings at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. The data supported our hypothesis. The more Amplifire the learners did—independent of everything else they could have done—the better they scored.

Doing all available Amplifire work increased the proportion correct on a simulated MBE by 3.6%. That may not sound like much, but keep in mind that these learners log hundreds of hours of other work on those same topics. The fact that Amplifire nevertheless made a difference is a testament to the ability of the software to adapt to what learners need according to the principles of learning and memory. Also, the MBE is a pass-fail exam. For many people, a single correct response is the difference between becoming a lawyer and becoming a lawyer’s assistant.

The cognitive phenomena that Amplifire harnesses are robust and have been demonstrated in many different contexts. The spacing effect, for example, is such a fundamental property of how brains work that it can be found in the rudimentary nervous systems of sea slugs.

Yet as we enter 2018, many educational settings still feature conditions of learning that merely feel better, but are actually far from optimal—and can even be counterproductive. Learning researchers have lamented for decades how infrequently their findings make their way into the classroom and other educational settings.

The benefits of Amplifire provide yet another validation of these scientists’ efforts, and give them reason to celebrate. Through our software, their findings are now reaching millions of learners.

If you’d like your students to start benefiting from hundreds of counterintuitive discoveries about how people learn, reach out here.