Guest Post by David Stephen looking at Digital Education trends.
Learning, retention, understanding and creativity are operations of memory. Not knowing how the memory does often makes learning and education complicated across stages. There are several approaches to learning better, understanding and remembering, but they don’t work for everyone because they are subject to memory determinations.
Digital Education trends
So how does the memory pick, relay, place and give whatever comes in, per moment? What other factors aside the memory are involved? Why is something easier to learn for some but difficult for others? What is the role of interest, as a factor in learning anything? Why is it generally easier to learn, hold, pass a test, or learn by necessity then forget? Why is understanding difficult in some subjects? Why is retention of learning a second language difficult for many adults? Why do people explain what they understand differently, even when discussing the same things? What constants of memory make these decisions?
If the memory is a building, what goes on inside, if this is displayed, how does it change what it means to learn or influence the future of education, beyond remote and others?
Representation
First, how does the memory represent senses? Or whatever is heard, smelled, touched, tasted or seen, how does it become what the memory can use? Or in what form is it to memory?
In brain science, all senses converge at the thalamus, except for smell that does at the olfactory bulb. It is where they are processed or integrated, before relay to the cerebral cortex for interpretation.
This means that in class, or while studying with any method, all that sensory input from the eyes, ears, hands goes to the thalamus. It is where they are first processed, before relay for interpretation in the cerebral cortex. It happens so seamlessly that it looks like there are no stages but there are.
It is theorized that sensory processing or integration is into a uniform unit, or identity. This means that after senses get to the brain, they go into what can be described as a changing room, getting into a uniform, before proceeding or relaying to the field to play.
This uniform unit is postulated to be thought or its form. This means that any word, image, video, board, note, paper, pen, person, all exist in the brain in the form of thought. It is what they have to become before going to the cerebral cortex for interpretation.
Smell is different from sight, which is different from sound, taste and touch, getting into the brain in their differentiated forms.
Proceeding as differentiated could reduce efficiency for the brain, hence the integration into uniformity, albeit they still have their equivalent indexes—so to speak.
Interpretation in the cerebral cortex is theorized to be knowing, feeling and reaction. Knowing is memory. Sense to memory is so fast that sensing is almost a process to know. Or simply, see and know, or hear and know.
It is by knowing something—or not, that relation or interaction is made. The process, however, is not sense and know, because something comes in between [thought], or sense-thought-know.
This is how the brain creates the mind, where senses become thought, then proceed to memory.
Thought and memory are builds or constructs of cells and molecules of the brain, for mind. Thinking, memories, imagination, dreams, subvocalization, inner speech and others are all forms of thought.
Feelings follow knowing, since a smell, or sight or alarm can cause fear because what it is, is known, before reaction, which can be parallel or perpendicular.
Memory
Memory is where everything that is known is stored. It is what goes on in memory that holds the power to shape the future of learning and education, when displayed, as constants.
It is the quantity, thought that comes into memory, as the first stage of interpretation of any sense. Thought is picked up by a transient packet.
Conceptually, there are two kinds of stores in memory, small and large. Small stores the smallest possible unique information on anything, while large stores what is common between two or more small stores.
There is a sender or picker, which mostly works with small stores, or can be described as transient, but it is what picks up thought to meet with resident small stores initially or after going to large stores.
Small stores can be prioritized or pre-prioritized. Prioritized is just one in any moment, which is what gets the most access and reach—within the memory and beyond, but there are often fast and numerous interchanges with pre-prioritized, which is also in motion but limited. It is possible to read in switches of both, such that minimal transport still works to point or find something, but prioritization is the full access to study. Pre-prioritization also makes looking at pictures easier, because transport requirement is lower, though details on pictures can be missed because of this.
Small stores relay across in sequences, old and new. Sequences are also a form of memory. For example, finding a watched movie or listened audio familiar when watching or listening again, even without the details, but because the sequences of small stores to large, were similar.
Also, sequences define protocols, such that it has to be the same to feel right, like spelling something also, or naming a term in the right way. Sequences also make things boring, or cliché, if the same. Sequences also drive exploration or adventure for something new, including addiction, to change how it goes for a maximum possible high.
Small stores also have splits such that as the transient comes in, a part splits, going before to an old sequence like in a prior experience, to expect or anticipate something. It may match or not, which may be responsible for delight or disappointment. This explain holding information in mind for what to say, or type, or in situations, to know what to do. It exceeds predictive coding and processing, as well as explains beyond what should be termed neutral working memory.
Large stores have sides and slices including bounce points. They also have a principal spot that just one goes, where it dominates. Common experiences are by large stores in memory: depression, delight, anxiety, sadness, worry, interest, dislike, love, lethargy, energy, calm, anger, craving, understanding, and so on.
It is the large store that a small store goes that shapes experience.
Memory can be described as a property destination, where the incoming quantity [thought] relays in small stores [a property], though sequences [path properties] to large stores [key properties].
There are also relays of small stores to large stores within the memory, without anything coming in, following the same mechanism, with sequences and to stores, where properties acquired are expressed as experiences.
Things can be traumatic or not, funny or not, interesting or not, inspiring or not, depending on that property, at the store, at each moment.
Property can also decide if what becomes of senses is thinking or imagination. People feel differently about things at the moment due to different properties acquired in large stores across situations.
Learning
This is a process where small stores relay in sequences to large stores. There are things learned long ago that stuck because it created a new sequence, ensuring permanence. There are others that used an old sequence. There are things that became difficult because some large stores [interest and understanding] were not touched, and some things were forgotten after a test because the unique small stores created.
While studying lost their connection to the transient, or the sides to large stores for what was learned were not accessed, or that rote was used by going through an old sequence, to surfaces of some large stores, or sides that are easily reachable, so that when they are no longer needed, others took their place. Things that stick longer stay on a different side or slice in the large store, including second language learning for adults.
Interest is a large store in memory, so is understanding and so on. For the experience to be interested in something means that the large store has to be touched, at different degrees, same for what it means to understand. There may be everything possible but no interest in learning because the large store was not touched. This applies to understanding. The understanding large store has sides that have previously understood stuff to different intensities, so that when new ones arrive, they are easily understood along old variations or close.
There are also roles of prioritized and pre-prioritized switches, making it possible to be in class and be focused or distracted. If distracted, the lecture stays mostly pre-prioritized and unable to access major large stores or sequences needed to understand or retain as much.
This can also be a problem where the small store touches some stores it should not, like sleep or boredom, making the lecture become difficult.
There are also cycle problems that may affect this, like lack of sleep. Normally, sleep ensures prioritization of others stores in memory that are pre-prioritized during the day but get full access around while asleep, but with lack of sleep, they don’t get to, and may jolt the memory enough to make whatever is prioritized, at that moment, become inefficient.
Display
How does an instructor know that whatever is being learned has to touch the interest large store, or that whatever has to be understood has to do the same? Also, how does a student know that sometimes, creating new sequences to learn might be difficult, but using descriptions might work, or old sequences in memory?
How do these constants become how to understand why learning anything for an individual is easy or difficult per moment?
How can this display extrapolate learning personally and in general by the instructor, as memory architecture to shape learning methods?
The memory is not secondary in what structures learning but central, so adjusting the memory for its constants and how it works would improve education across levels.
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