A guest blog from Dr Jenny Shipway, who studied biochemistry at university and now works in science communication and education training.

Memory Is The Residue Of Thought

Think About It

Daniel Willingham, an influential educational psychologist, said it first: “Memory is the residue of thought”. Whatever tricks we might use to help our memories - linking concepts to prior knowledge or practicing recall - we will never remember things we don’t think about.

It’s the classic ‘in one ear, out the other’ problem. But it doesn’t only happen when the information is boring; it can also be witnessed after superb lectures given by talented speakers.

Have you ever listened to a talk where the lecturer explained everything so clearly that following their train of thought was effortless - everything made such perfect sense, and flowed together so well that it was a pleasure to listen to? I’ve been to talks like that, and loved them. I’ve gone home rhapsodising about how I learned so much. And then someone asks “What did you learn”? And - I realise there’s no residue of the talk in my mind. I can remember the experience, but not the information.

They say people remember how you make them feel, not what you say. Students and teachers have to fight against this default. That speaker would be a terrible teacher.

Effortful Thought

When we’re young, we seem to pick up information without trying. New vocabulary, the names of dinosuars - our brains just sponge it up. Psychologist Frank Geary calls this ‘Biologically Primary’ learning. It happens with things our brains are primed to absorb, like how to communicate, what is good to eat, and dangerous things in our environment.

The academic learning we do in colleges, in contrast, would be called ‘Biologically Secondary’. It’s not necessary for survival to know how muscle contractions move the skeleton, and so - although we all have skeletons and muscles - we have to make effort to learn this. This type of learning isn’t joyously soaked-up; it requires effortful thought. Writing, too, is biologically secondary - it has to be consciously learned with effort, rather than being effortlessly acquired just from living in a society with labels, notices and signs everywhere.

How to Revise

Biology A Level is definitely biologically secondary in this categorisation. Understanding the concepts requires a lot of effortful thought. Reading around the subject for fun is great, but you need to stop and really think about the ideas if you want the concepts to stick. You need to process them in relation to other knowledge you have, and practice using them in different ways.

This is one of the reasons why taking notes is good: you are forced to process the information to turn it into writing.

And one of the reasons taking notes during lessons/lectures can be bad: you have less time to think about the topic.

It’s also why using someone else’s notes is pretty pointless. It’s the action of making the notes that has value, not the notes themselves.

If you carefully go through a topic, working it out, making sense of it in your own way, and then prove you have it tidily organised in your mind by demonstrating this on paper (usually realising in the process that there’s something you haven’t quite got right, so that you go back and fill that knowledge gap) … Then you have thought about the subject for sure. Creating notes gives motivation to think, and also provides a test of the quality of that thought.

Someone else’s notes? They are no different from a text book. They will have meaning to the person who made them - imbued with the memory of the thought that developed them, and referenced with their own memories and prior knowledge in ways that are unique to them. But all they can give you are surface facts. Not the deeper understanding that you need. There are no short cuts, sadly.

I’m so confused

The good news is that the feelings of confusion and difficulty you might experience while learning can actually be good signs (not always, but often!). Good teachers will make you feel this way, because these are feelings we get when we’re really thinking about something, trying to make sense of it. Our brains are actively turning over the new information and trying to fit it with our prior knowledge. Sometimes we come to realise our prior knowledge is wrong, and have to change the way we think about things on a wider scale. This is mentally uncomfortable because brains don’t like being wrong so they’ll fight against this. Feelings are discomfort are necessary to this process.

All this means that if something is too easy to understand, it can actually be a problem. If you don’t need to think about something to understand it, then you will not leave traces of it in your memory. In this case, it can be useful to purposefully make it somehow more difficult, just to give your brain something to chew on.

In a nutshell:

• We remember what we think about - you will need to make mental effort

• Feeling a topic is difficult or confusing is part of effective learning

• Don’t borrow a friend’s notes, make your own (at home)!

Dr Jenny Shipway
www.jennyshipway.com