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How your brain learns
There has been so much research done on this - I'll just say some of
the basics:
The brain learns by making connections. These connections
are real; they involve connections between nerve cells. This suggests
that in order to learn best, we should link facts and ideas together
in order to create a big picture - no surprises there!
Connections are also made with senses and feelings.
So, if you imagine a banana, you'll probably sense the smell, taste,
and feel as well see an image. We see patterns, connections, links and
associations between all of our five senses (touch, smell, hearing,
sight and taste) as well as our emotions. This means that we can create
amazingly rich memories if we use as many of these senses as we can.
Doing this strengthens our brain's memory connections and increases
their number.
The brain is not good at learning from text or from lists.
It has to interpret information in these forms and create a picture
or pattern before it can store the a memory. So...
What can we learn from this?
Traditional learning, involving just reading text from a book, is a
hard way to learn. You will learn better if you use more than
just one of your senses and if the information is presented
in a multi-media way. For example, if you are learning a new topic,
you will learn better if you read the text, see diagrams, read examples
from real life, link new knowledge to existing ideas, view photographs,
act out the information somehow, and so on. This helps the brain to
create memory patterns which you can recall easily.
The sections on learning activities and note-taking use lots of ideas
that are brain-friendly. It is usually helpful to read the information,
see it, imagine it, think about it, talk about it, act it out even -
and then put everything together in your own words, pictures and patterns.
That's a creative learning process and is the key to
effective learning and remembering.
[-> next, go to the section on - How
memory works ]
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