Emotions and Humor in Learning and Memory

For many students, attention may not be the roadblock learning, but rather remembering what's been learned once, twice, or dozens and dozens of time. When we see these kids in our clinic, more often than not, we don't find a child with a severe memory impairment; rather we see a boy or a girl who has a good memory for certain types of things and a bad memory other types of things.

Some children (and adults for that matter) do seem to be powerfully interest-driven, and if a subject is uninteresting or seems to have no intrinsic value, it seems impossible to retain.

General memory training activities may be of help, but using humor and emotional memory might be the make it or break it for getting information into long term memory.

On tests of sentence memory, researcher Stephen Schmidt found humorous sentences were much easier to remember on free and cued-recall tests (below, right).

 

And when memory for words in emotional neutral sentences was compared (figure above), words that tweaked  emotions were much better remembered than 'bland' words. With emotional word encoding, the right amygdala and hippocampus became activated too.

 Rote memory and auditory verbal memory are especially difficult for many children and adults with dyslexia, but tweaking subjects with humor or emotional content may suddenly turn an impossible-to-learn subject doable.

Some low-tech ideas: making up funny associations, cartoons, or word plays with places, names, or new technical vocabulary that has to be learned. Talking aloud notes with funny cartoon voices, reciting notes to a popular tune, or standing on a chair. Surprisingly all this stuff really works. One time we saw an older dyslexic who had had a horrendous time with letter and number reversals for years. We asked him, what helped the most? How did he finally get things straight? He grinned and answered, "I just found out that I had to give the letters and number different personalities... like "nasty number nine". If you the information somehow touches you personally, you'll remember it.

Humor on Sentence memory pdf
Emotional memory: separating content and context pdf
Mnemonics
Memory Tricks at MindTools

The Blessings and the Burdens of High IQ

The paper showing the different brain developmental course for kids and teens is now available online free at the first link below.

The data are really remarkable to see, and they explain a lot.

The figure below shows that the highest IQ kids had the lowest prefrontal actvation in the early elementary school years, while cortical connections really turned on the gas (passing mildly high and average IQ kids) heading into the teenage years.

It'd be neat to speculate that ala the Right Brain difference post below, young advanced thinkers may more sparse but widely distributed frontal neurons early in their development. An anatomy such as this might account for why they may be so good at generating multiple possibilities for word similarities or associations, but why they may have trouble selecting from so much information (paralyzed with an open-ended writing prompt) or why the speed of processing occurs so slowly. Young brains don't have as much myelin as older brains, so like our Comcast cable, the longer the distances, the slower the signals. Sometimes it may just peter out; other times, connections may become short-circuited.

We empathized with the father of a brilliant, but slow-thinking and -talking young man who murmured, "If you were to tell me that one of my kids would grow up to win a Nobel prize I would still guess it would be him, but..." Sure it's nice to know it deep down, but it's still going to be frustrating listening to all the suggestions from well-wishers that he's retarded or has PDD-NOS.

Well, the research findings here are a case in which the biology supports real differences in how the brain develops for precocious children. Wouldn't it be nice if we could customize learning experiences for more of these kids - if the classrooms of the future had teachers who knew as much about individual differences in brain development as clinical researchers.

Different Cortical Development in Children and Adolescents of Superior Intelligence pdf
Superior IQ Cortical Development Abstract + Figures

Eide Neurolearning Blog: The Right Brain Difference
Sowell and Late Talking Children

One Father's Lessons About the Structure of Knowledge - Happy Father's Day

"One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?”

I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.”

He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you
anything!”

But it was the opposite. He had already taught me:'See that bird?' he'd say. 'It's a Spencer's warbler. (I knew he didn't know the real name.) 'Well, in Italian, it's a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it's a Bom da Peida. In Chinese it's a Chung-Iong-tah, and in Japanese it's a Katano Takeda. You can know the name of the bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the birds and see what it's doing - that's what counts!' (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)" - Richard Feynman, The Making of a Scientist

Happy Father's Day.

For another nice article, Bruce Albert's reflections on Feynman's essay pdf (it's about the importance of inquiry in education).

Why Math is Hard - Implications of Developmental fMRI Changes in Arithmetic

In this paper from Stanford, Menon reviews how brain pathways necessary for multistepped math problem solving take time to develop from early grades into adulthood. It's studies like these that are long overdue.

Children have to drive their procedural and working memory systems much harder when solving path problems because they haven't automatized number relationships or procedural steps. The brain areas involved show that math is difficult because it requires word / symbol recognition, basic number / quantity processing, fact and procedure retrieval, working memory, visual / semantic representations, episodic memory, attention, decision-making, and of course error detection, conflict resolution etc....and the truth is many of these cognitive systems don't come on online until later in childhood, and sometimes not fully into the early 20's. Some implications for educational programming are obvious - are some educational expectations developmentally appropriate? Are teachers sensitive to individual differences in neurodevelopment and can they modify educational expectations appropriately? The conventional school approach is to not advance students to the next grade if certain academic standards are not met. But what of the legions of students who are ahead in some areas and behind in others?

The developmental truth seems to be that brain processes important for math problem solving take time to develop:

Excerpts:

"maturation of the prefrontal cortex and development of connections to the
prefrontal cortex increase in children between ages 6 and 14 years"

"posterior parietal cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex regions that
support working memory continue to mature from the age of 7–25 years"

"the capacity of memory systems, the speed of retrieval and the strategies used to remember continue to develop through young adulthood"

And "Because the prefrontal cortex matures relatively slowly compared to the posterior parietal cortex, children may be slower or have particular difficulties with certain types of arithmetic problems that require reasoning and interference resolution even when computational and retrieval skills are mature."

In our dyslexia clinic, these developmental factor often become huge issues. Though a student may be advanced in many areas, if automatization of tasks such as rote math fact retrieval or handwriting or weak, it may be enough to sink their boat and hold them back a whole grade. But if you follow these kids into high school, college, and beyond, you see their abilities just come online later - suddenly everything is easier and tasks that would have taken them hours to days, now can be done in 20 minutes.

This paper also highlighted another bone we have to pick with the way things are in medicine and education. When a child has weakness in visual working memory, we can't use that as a diagnosis in the clinic (ICD9 codes) or classroom (504 or IEP). They have to be diagnosed with ADD or ADHD or nothing. It's like trying to fix a fine precision watch with a sledgehammer. If a review paper from a reasonable place like Stanford can address children's learning in terms of episodic and procedural memory, visual or semantic representations and decision making, can't some of these same principles be discussed at school? The better we can get at identifying the problem, the better we can get proposing an answer.

Developmental cognitive neuroscience of arithmetic

The Different Ways We Think: Conceptual Thinking and the Brain

In this interesting paper that looks at how conceptual knowledge develops in the human brain during decision making, the hippocampus (along with ventromedial prefrontal cortex), an area well known for its importance in spatial navigation and long term memory, seem to play an important role with decision making about future conditions. The importance of the hippocampus was a bit of a surprise. On other studies of conceptual learning, individual differences in patterns of brain activation were noted for conceptual decision making tasks, but the differences were more commonly related to right and left prefrontal areas, and not the hippocampus.

The reason we found this interesting, is because not uncommonly we see very different conceptual thinking and memory styles among the students. A common pattern among our gifted dyslexic students who are strong spatial thinkers (high spatial reasoning, love to build, hands-on learners) is their preference for autobiographical / personal memory. They have vivid memories for personal experiences, but may need many repetitions for dry information that is master by rote repetition. From Maguire and colleagues: "our findings (with the hippocampus and vMPFC)...offer a fresh perspective on the intriguing question of why these brain regions are engaged during such a diverse range of tasks (e.g. spatial navigation, imagination, autobiographical memory, self-projection, fear extinction)." Hippocampal involvement may also account for why associational strategies for learning such as mnemonics seem to be such a valuable approach for rote learning among these students.

Perhaps other group (the not-strong spatial thinkers, for want of a better term) are more likely to use the more conventional left prefrontal pathway - when they recall information or make predictions, it is less rooted in personal or autobiographical memory, but more abstracted like algorithms or rules. It's this pathway that may be more optimized for quick processing and retrieval, whereas the former, could be best for decision-making under uncertainty and be richer by its wider associations.