Fundamentals of Learning

Chapter 4. Associations and Unfinished Business

This chapter marks the last of the ragbag findings to make learning easier. Here I’m going to delve into just how silly you can be in making associations to get your brain to accept details, terms, or those individual elements that our brains want to ditch upon hearing. Associations can be big helpers in getting past the gist!

The other element we need to explore a little further is asking yourself questions to the point of having no immediate answers. That sounds counterintuitive, I know, but it’s based on a well-known finding about the brain and memory.

Crazy Connections

The idea of learning by associations is centuries old. The idea is that, instead of saying the same word over and over to stick it in your mind (“Della, Della, Della” after you meet someone named Della), you try to make as many associations as you can, even if they would sound weird to someone else.

So, for example, take Della. You met her while walking your dog in the evening, and you so enjoyed chatting with her you’d like to connect again.  

Let’s consider some associations that could work for you: 

• Della: delightful.

• Della: there could have been a moon out when you met…Della luna!

• Della in the dell: you may not even be sure what a dell is, but you think it’s downhill, maybe grassy, reminding you of the outdoors where you met.

If Della was walking her dalmatian, that would be awesome as a connection! Della with dalmatian. You could still imagine this, even knowing it’s untrue, just to see if “dalmatian” could get your neurons to cough up “Della.”  

What I have found is that these crazy connections drop out of mind and the original word remains. But it doesn’t matter as long as you remember the Della part!

Up Your Association Game

Let’s dig a little deeper and try to remember a term that most people would have trouble remembering (unless you’re a mycologist, a fungus expert). Think of four associations to remember aspergillus and these facts about it:

Aspergillus is a group of fungi (or molds), some of which can cause a lung disease called aspergillosis.

Okay. Give yourself a minute or two to cook up some associations. Even if they seem weird, go for it!

Warning

Don’t keep reading until you’re ready to see some ideas.

You may have latched onto the “gill” to help you remember that it relates to lung disease. Or “aspirate” for breathing. Or you made up a man named “Jasper” who has trouble with the “asper,” or a “Mr. Asparagus” who’s coughing from aspergillosis. Anything, anything to plant a lot of new connections in the brain to be able to answer, say, a fill-in-the-blank question for the name of the fungus or a short description of what aspergillus is.

You can practice this on virtually anything. Just remember to be patient with yourself—your brain will likely put up some resistance. And have fun with the silly associations!

Make Some Unfinished Business

In the early 20th century, the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik discovered something counterintuitive that has held up after much research. She found that if people are presented with a problem and then given the answer, they are far less likely to remember the problem than if they were presented with only the problem. She divided participants in her study into two groups: one group was given just the problem, and the other was given the problem and the answer. Six weeks later, the second group didn’t recall either the problem or the answer. But that first group did tend to recall the problem—and demanded to know the answer!

This is somewhat counterintuitive from the point of view of teaching. People who teach want to offer “answers,” because that’s what effective learning is thought to be. But here we are, with another weird feature of the brain. Here, the brain is only too happy to remember that it didn’t learn something! But you can use this to help the brain remember the problem, by pushing your questions to a point where the answers are beyond your grasp.

But how can you do this, how can you create your own Zeigarnik effect when learning? It connects back to quizzing yourself until you reach the point when you don’t know something (or things) about what you’re learning. Think back to the brain’s diffuse state from the previous chapter—that is an example where questioning the concept, and what kind of thinking it exactly is, creates more connections in the brain than if we had not done this.

Note

When writing essay answers, people who demonstrate that they have done deeper thinking about what they have learned often get higher grades. While these students should always get higher grades in my opinion, some teachers may not like a particular point of view of theirs to be challenged. I fear this is an unfortunate lapse in the teacher’s critical thinking, but it is something that, as a practical matter, you need to be aware of.   

Time to ask you once again how much you recall of that silly sentence from Chapter 2. Give yourself a minute, and after you say or write it, or parts of it, out, tell yourself how those words in the sentence relate to a given learning strategy.

Summary

We practiced two powerful learning techniques, namely, associations and the Zeigarnik effect. They both serve to cement details (especially in the case of associations), as well as larger concepts (especially in the case of the Zeigarnik effect). As a recovering Griselda, I find both of them to be more fun than just running at the same material to eventually learn it. And I hope you feel the same! Of course, it’s more work than doing nothing, but we budding Lauras will take the bargain.

In the latter part of this report, you will learn what to do with what you’ve just learned, i.e., practice applying the learning techniques to some information. The next chapter deals with how to present what you’ve learned for best results.