00:05
So Barb, let me tell you. I've been very fortunate to be in
some pretty amazing
places for my education. But I almost found interesting that
wherever I was, there
were some of these fellow students who seem really bright
and always on the
other side that I would help and I was always fascinated by
these differences
how we all seem to make it but not always as easily. Do you
have any insights?
How does this happen at the brain level and how can we use
that to guide us in our
studies? Got plenty there to help us understand learning and
the differences
between learners. So as it turns out, there are 2
fundamentally different types of
learners. The first I'll call the race car learner. And the
race car learner gets to the
finish line really quickly. They can learn fast. There is
another type of learner,
however, and that is something I'll call a hiker type
learner. I, for example, am a
hiker type learner. They can get to the finish line but it's
a lot slower. But think
about the differences between those 2 different entities,
the race car gets to the
finish line really fast but everything goes by in a blur.
The hiker gets to the finish
line very slowly but they can reach out, they can touch the
leaves on the trees,
they can see the little rabbit trails, hear the birds in the
air, completely different
experience than the race car and in some ways far richer and
deeper. So, there
are actual neuroscientific reasons behind why there are
these 2 different types
of learners. So, a race car may have a better memory and the
reason that happens
is their little dendritic spines can quickly emerge and fix
into place so that
helps them learn very quickly. For the hiker, their
dendritic spines can emerge but it
takes them longer to fix into place. The difference between
these 2, however,
meaning that the race car learns swiftly but once they've
learned it they can be less
flexible with what they've learned. The hiker can learn more
slowly but they can
be more accurate and more flexible about what they've
learned. So 2 very different
learning processes and you can't say one is better than the
other even though we
would all love to have wonderfully swift memories. Now,
that's talking about
long-term memory but I should also give you some insight
into working memory.
03:19
It's kind of like short-term memory. And it means that it's
that temporary
information that you're holding in mind. For example if I
asked you to remember
74392 something like that. You'd hold it temporarily in
working memory in the
prefrontal cortex. So, I like to imagine this prefrontal
cortex working memory as an
octopus. And this octopus can hold certain amounts of
information, typically it can
hold 4 pieces of information. If it can hold more it's
because it's grouped that
information together. Now, what your working memory does is
it helps you put
together links that are stored in long-term memory. So then
whenever you need
a fact or a skill, you can pull that information from those
sets of links in long-term
memory, pull them into mind, and then you've got the memory
or the information
readily at hand. So, to better understand this, for once I
won't use a metaphor.
04:36
Instead, I'll introduce you to my daughter. This is our
younger daughter and she is
going to model for us what it felt like when she was first
learning to back up a car.
04:51
So when she was first learning to back up a car, well, she
didn't know which mirror
to look at, I mean do you look on the front, do you look in
the back, and of course
then off she goes into a ditch. The thing is when she was
first learning to back up
a car, she had nothing in long-term memory. So, she would
try to work with sets of
links in working memory. She couldn't hold much in mind and
that meant she had a
heavy cognitive load, all of the arms of her attentional
octopus or quadrupus
with 4 arms were taken up with trying to learn to back up
the car. So, word of
the wise, don't speak with someone when they're trying to
learn to back up a car
because they don't have any arms left on their attentional
octopus to process
whatever you're saying to them. But once you've learned to
back up a car as with
Rachel here, she can just pull that set of links to mind "I
wanna back up a car
and off she goes, no problem at all, and she even has extra
arms on her attentional
octopus that she could use to think about other things like
what's on the radio
or is her seatbelt buckled. So, the key idea here is that
when you're learning you
want to create sets of links that are stored almost like in
a locker of long-term
memory and then whenever you need to, for example you're
sitting down to a test
your working memory kind of hops right up and it can pull
sets of links from
long-term memory, put ideas together, and help you solve
problems. But if you
don't actually put those sets of links in long-term memory,
so for example you haven't
studied effectively, then what can happen is you sit down to
a test, you open it up,
and you realize there's no sets of links there and you
panic, you may think "I have
test anxiety" because you are sure you knew it before. But
if you hadn't used
retrieval practice, you don't necessarily know that you had
put that information in
long-term memory. So this is why testing yourself with
retrieving that information
is so important, it puts those sets of links in long-term
memory. Now, if we just
look, for example, here is a typical octopus of working
memory, it has 4 arms so it's a
quadropus. And what this octopus is doing is it can reach
up into long-term
memory and grab sets of links as you need to know some
information now or process
some skill. And as long as you got those links there, all
works well. But one thing
to be aware of is that people have different sizes of
working memory capacity.
08:22
Some people have, maybe on average, it's 4 sets of arms in
working memory, some
people have 8 or 9 or 10, others like me may have 3 arms in
working memory.
08:37
And the way these different people learn is kind of like the
race car versus the
hiker. So, bigger working memory capacity you can, in some
sense, leap tall
buildings with a single bound. You can learn very difficult
material perhaps more
swiftly because you can hold more in working memory. But if
you have lesser
capacity working memory, you can still learn exactly the
same information,
it's just that you need to learn it in smaller pieces and it
can be then put in long-term
memory and combine together in a process called
consolidation that we'll talk about
later. And that will help you to learn just as effectively
if you're a hiker type
learner as the race car learner. So, breaking things into
chunks, that's a key idea
and this brings me actually to my favorite scientist of all
times. His name was
Santiago Ramon y Cajal. And Cajal was the epitome, it was the
perfect example of the
terrible learner. He flunked out of several schools and he
just couldn't get
things into his long-term memory very easily, in fact he got
a really poor working
memory. But Cajal decided when he was about in his 20s, he
was going to try to
become a professor of anatomy. He worked really hard and he
took the tests.
10:30
First year he took the test he flunked. Second year he took
the test, he flunked.
10:36
Third year he took the test, that's the last year he could
take it, he passed.
10:41
He became a professor of anatomy. But that's not all. Then,
his studies of how
neurons actually function led him to win the Nobel Prize.
And that's not all.
10:59
Then he is now known as the Father of Modern Neuroscience.
So, he was asked
once "How did you become such a great discoverer and how did
you make all these
terrific inventions and discoveries?" And he said, "You know
I was no genius."
And he was no genius. But he said "I have worked with many
geniuses.
11:29
And the challenge with geniuses is they're very smart, they
jump to conclusions,
and when they're wrong they can't change their mind, they
will instead use their
genius to intellectually justify why they must have been
right after all." So, again,
there we go with the race car who can be fast but inflexible
versus the hiker
who is slow but can be much more flexible. So if you, like
Cajal, are not a genius,
rejoice because you can also do something even geniuses
cannot. Thank you.
12:18
So, Barb what a great example and I remember studying and
hearing of Cajal
and his work when I was in medical school and I have to
frankly say as a fellow
hiker boy that's great to know I didn't know those things
about, you know, his
challenges and limitations and I hope for all everyone once
you missed you can see
that you can really make a lot of your capabilities if you
apply them appropriately
and that's really the heart of this course is to figure out
how to maximize your
potential and be a doctor. As doctors we don't have to be
geniuses, we have
to be good compassionate people and know our basics and
apply them.
13:11
So, really helpful Barb. Thank you so much.