Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning
Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning
Cognitive neuroscience is a fascinating discipline that looks at the way your brain works, thinks, and makes connections between your memories. There's a lot more to this, but for your sake, I wanted to introduce some techniques and theory that I think can help make learning a more engaging activity.
As I mentioned in class and over email, I'm going to include these quick videos on topics that I think bolster our synchronous lectures and activities. This week for academics, we'll be going over things like active learning, learning styles, and also about why procrastination is a thing humans do. These videos will instead cover topics that I think are important, but wouldn't have time to otherwise cover in depth.
Working Memory
Memory is a phenomenon that no one can truly explain, but we've started using different models (like the one seen in the video) to better analyze and predict learning outcomes. The long-and-short of it is that memory requires some kind of stimulus, time for your brain to process said stimulus, and then progresses to a short term memory phase. When we repeatedly learn or choose to retrieve memories about something, that becomes our long term memory.
Improving Your Working Memory
There are a lot of heuristics (strategies our brains use for thinking) that can help with your memory, but I think that the ones I'm including here are the easiest/most intuitive for most people.
In this video, you'll learn about memory palaces, chunking, and place cells.
This last video is just a quick look at how scents can affect your memory. My suggestion is to get a scent for a subject, and then smell it before studying and doing homework, then smelling it again before an exam to remember things better. Here's a really cool article that explains a possible mechanism for this phenomenon Links to an external site..
_________________________________________________________________________________________
If you're interested in some of the literature, I'd suggest checking out these links!
Working Memory - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25251486/ Links to an external site.
Memory Palaces - https://artofmemory.com/wiki/How_to_Build_a_Memory_Palace Links to an external site.
Place/Grid Cells (This is a hefty review article I used for a class, you can also use Wikipedia for a more comprehensible explanation) - https://cshperspectives.cshlp.org/content/7/2/a021808.full#:~:text=%20Place%20Cells%2C%20Grid%20Cells%2C%20and%20Memory%20,maps%20are%20stabilized%3F%204%20Footnotes.%20%20More%20 Links to an external site.