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

Qualsiasi dato diventa importante se è connesso a un altro.
Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another.
—Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
To learn to remember, we must learn about the nature and location of memory. Scientists working in
the 1940s and ’50s began their search for memory in the most obvious place: within the cells of our
brains—our neurons. They cut out parts of rats’ brains, trying to make them forget a maze, and found
that it didn’t matter what part of the brain they chose; the rats never forgot. In 1950, the researchers
gave up, concluding that they had most definitely searched everywhere, and that memory must be
somewhere else.
Researchers eventually turned their search for memories to the wiring between neurons rather than
within the cells themselves. Each of the hundred billion neurons in our brains are, on average,
connected to seven thousand other neurons, in a dense web of more than 150,000 kilometers of nerve
fibers.
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These interconnected webs are intricately involved in our memories, which is why scientists
could never find the mazes in their rats. Each rat’s maze was spread throughout its brain. Whenever
the scientists cut out a piece, they damaged only a small portion of the involved connections. The
more they removed, the longer it took the rats to remember, but they never forgot their mazes
completely. The only way to remove the maze entirely was to remove the rat entirely.
These patterns of connections form in an elegantly simple, mechanical process: neurons that fire
together wire together. Known as Hebb’s Law, this principle helps explain how we remember
anything. Take my first memory of cookies. I spent ten minutes waiting in front of the oven, bathed in
radiating heat and the scent of butter, flour, and sugar. I waited until they came out of the oven and
watched the steam rise up off of them as they cooled. When I could bear no more, my father gave me a
glass of milk, I grabbed a cookie, and I learned empathy for my poor blue friend from Sesame Street.
My neural network for cookies involves sight, smell, and taste. There are audio components—the
sound of the word cookie and the sound of milk pouring into a glass. I remember my dad’s face
smiling as he bit into his own delicious cookie. This first cookie experience was a parade of
sensations, which wired together into a tight web of neural connections. These connections enable me
to return to my past whenever I encounter a new cookie. Faced with a familiar buttery scent, that old
web of neurons reactivates; my brain plays back the same sights, sounds, emotions, and tastes, and I
relive my childhood experience.
Compare this experience to a new one: your currently-forming memory of the word mjöður.
There’s not much of a parade here. It’s not obvious how to pronounce it, and in a particularly
obnoxious move, I’m not even telling you what it means. As a result, you’re stuck looking at the
structure of the word—it has two foreign letters sandwiched between four familiar ones—and not
much else. Without Herculean efforts, you will forget mjöður by the end of this chapter, if not sooner.

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