How a simple mental shift can improve your memory… your marriage… and your parenting…

Sunday, January 7, 2024. My clients know I love brain hacks!

I love making the human potential for change as easy as humanly possible…

One of the reasons I prefer to work with couples who have children is because a family with kiddos allows for novel experiences of applied research. There are many opportunities for, as Gottman calls them, sliding door moments for useful epiphanies.

In other words, changing your mindset during your learning experience directly organizes exactly what you will remember later.

Humans remember more details, and tend to learn better, when they are expecting to teach that information to another human, according to this study from St. Louis.

How the study was conducted

• The researchers gave some study subjects the notion that they would have to teach another person the information they’d learned after they’d learned it themselves.

• A different cohort of study subjects were told that they would simply be tested on the information they’d learned.

• The reality of the study was that both groups were given the same test afterwards. Neither cohort had to teach the information to another human.

  Dr. John Nestojko, the study’s lead author, explained the results:

“When compared to learners expecting a test, learners expecting to teach recalled more material correctly, they organized their recall more effectively and they had better memory for especially important information.

The immediate implication is that the mindset of the student before and during learning can have a significant impact on learning, and that positively altering a student’s mindset can be effectively achieved through rather simple instructions.”

The power of Relational Processing…

The likely reason why this fairly simple trick works is that it tends to automatically activate more successful learning strategies, the kind routinely used by… teachers.

The researchers explained:

“When teachers prepare to teach, they tend to seek out key points and organize information into a coherent structure.

Our results suggest that students also turn to these types of effective learning strategies when they expect to teach.”

Organising information and placing it within a coherent structure are vital components of effective learning.

Psychologists and neuroscientists call this ‘relational processing’:

Let’s embrace a pedagogy of neurotypes, and aspire to not only understand, but also sculpt and shape our learning experiences as ideas as well as feelings.

“Relational processing — processing the relationships amongst units of information — is proposed to enhance recall by increasing the elements incorporated into memory traces and by allowing for an effective search strategy at the time of retrieval via generative, reconstructive means.

[A] higher degree of output organization displayed by our teaching-expectancy participants reflects their greater relational processing at encoding.”

Final thoughts

Sometimes I’ll meet a couple where emotional regulation is an issue.

In these cases, I apply this research by simply pointing out the math of the situation, Because, as I’ve said many times, the math of human experience does not pity human weakness.

Your children are learning from you moment by moment. They hear what you say. They see what you feel. If you remember, in that moment, your awesome teaching responsibility, it might evoke some needed gravitas at just the right moment.

This is the hedgehog, monotropic idea. If you remember that your behavioral choices will be instructive to your children, you might remember to display your better, learning, teaching, self during a crucial “sliding door” moment.

Live well, stay kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Nestojko, J.F., Bui, D.C., Kornell, N. et al. Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages. Mem Cogn 42, 1038–1048 (2014). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-014-0416-z