Fluent Forever : How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It

Try this one: after reading through your Spanish word list, you can:
A. Get five more minutes with your word list.
B. Get a blank sheet of paper and test yourself.
C. Get three blank sheets of paper and test yourself three times.
Here are your final recall results, one week later:
Madness. How can taking an identical test three times in a row produce such a large effect? Odd
as it is, this follows rules of common sense. When you study by reading through a list multiple times,
you’re practicing reading, not recall. If you want to get better at recalling something, you should
practice recalling it. Our blank sheet of paper, which could be replaced by a stack of flash cards, a
multiple choice test, or simply trying to remember to yourself, is precisely the type of practice we
need. It improves our ability to recall by tapping into one of the most fascinating facets of our minds

—the interplay of memory and emotion.
Deep within our brains, a seahorse and a nut are engaged in an intricate chemical dance that allows
us to decide what is important and what is forgettable. The seahorse-shaped structure is known as the
hippocampus, and it acts as a mental switchboard, connecting distant regions of the brain and creating
a map of those connections. You access this map in order to recall any recent memory.
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The
connected neurons reactivate, and you relive your past experience. Over the course of months and
years, these networked neurons lose their dependency on the hippocampus’s map and take on an
independent, Bohemian lifestyle in the outermost layers of the brain.
The Curious Case of H.M.
The hippocampus’s role in memory was discovered relatively recently, in one of the most famous case reports in neuropsychology
—the case of Henry Molaison. In 1953, Molaison had his hippocampus surgically removed in an attempt to cure his epilepsy. His
illness was cured, but the surgery left him with severe amnesia. He retained most of his old memories, but without his
hippocampus, he lost his ability to store new ones. Molaison could recall his distant past because the map of those memories had
spread throughout his brain. In losing his hippocampus, he lost the ability to make and access new maps and thereby lost his ability
to form new memories. His story later became the inspiration for Memento, Christopher Nolan’s film about a man with
anterograde amnesia in search of his wife’s killer.
The hippocampus’s nut-shaped dance partner is the amygdala, and it tells the hippocampus what to
keep and what to throw out. It does this by translating our emotions into chemicals, causing our
adrenal glands to send out bursts of memory-enhancing hormones according to the situation. If we
encounter emotionally arousing input—“Look, a tiger! Ow, my arm!”—then the amygdala will
strengthen that memory. If not—“Look, a pencil. I’m hungry”—then it won’t. This leaves us with a
healthy fear of tigers and a healthy disregard for pencils as food items.
Coupled with the nearby reward centers in the brain, the amygdala provides the mechanism behind
our magical blank sheet of paper. Our emotions are reflexive creatures. They respond to our
environment whether we want them to or not. While we can try to trick our brains into getting excited
over a list of Spanish words, our brains know better. Unless learning that el dentista means “the
dentist” in Spanish gives you goose bumps, your amygdala will not give those memories much of a
boost. El dentista is just not as important as el tigre. You can try to inject amphetamine directly into
your amygdala, which will work, but that may prove to be more trouble than it’s worth.
Our blank page, however, changes everything. At the moment where your performance is judged,
your brain realizes that it had better get its act in gear. As a result, every memory you recall gets a
squirt of memory-boosting chemicals. Those memories are reactivated, your amygdala calls for
hormones, your hippocampus maps out the involved networks, and your neurons wire tightly together.
Every time you succeed at recalling, the reward centers in your brain release a chemical reward
—dopamine—into your hippocampus, further encouraging long-term memory storage. Your blank
sheet of paper has created a drug-fueled memory party in your brain. Your boring word list never
stood a chance.

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