Fluent Forever : How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It
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| Feedback to the Rescue
Of course, you must remember a memory before you can rewrite it. You will remember “American Express: Don’t leave home without it” to your dying day because American Express has spent millions of dollars making its ads memorable. Every time you see a new American Express ad, the vivid images and sounds are rewritten into your memory of their all-important slogan. You would forget their slogan between each commercial cycle if they eliminated the famous actors and imagery- laden travel scenarios from their ads. If this happened, the crucial rewriting process would never occur. “Don’t leave home without it” would become just another forgotten advertisement, rather than one of the most successful ad campaigns in history. In practicing recall, we are striving to continuously rewrite our memories. We create a memory for gato, and we build upon that memory with every recall until it is as unforgettable as an ad slogan. But what happens when we can’t remember? Surely we won’t be able to remember everything we learn, particularly if we’re trying to wait as long as possible between practice sessions. The day may come when we try to remember gato and draw a blank instead. We’ve forgotten the word, and in this scenario, it will stay forgotten. Like Ebbinghaus’s gobbledygook, we’ll be able to learn it faster in the future, but we won’t get any benefit from our practice. We need a way to restore our forgotten memories, and we’ll find it in immediate feedback. Feedback is a simple concept with dramatic results. If we encounter our gato flash card and get stumped, then we can simply look at the back side of the card and see a picture of a cat. We have just given ourselves immediate feedback, and as a result, one of two things happens. If our memory of gato has vanished, then we start over. We form a new, “original” experience at the moment we got stumped and looked at the answer. This is not as good as remembering our actual original experience, but it’s still very effective. Our brains are primed and ready to create a new memory. As we search our memories for gato-related images and associations, we build a wide network of neural connections. We may remember that gato is a type of animal but can’t remember which one. If we encounter an image of a cat while these connections are still active, our completed network will burst into activity, the reward centers of our brains will activate, and we’ll have a new, deep, and memorable experience to build upon. Alternatively, we may still have access to our original memory of gato. This memory will burst into life—“Oh, yeah!”—at the moment we see that picture of a cat. In this scenario, we’ll relive our memory, our new experience will join it, and the memory will be rewritten with new connections. Thanks to a simple act of immediate feedback, we’ve regained our rewrite. Feedback allows us to resuscitate forgotten memories and get the most out of our practice sessions. tải về 3.86 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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