Dave’s Whiteboard

The Neurophilosophy blog reposts a 21-minute interview with Erik Kandel, who won a Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work on learning and memory (see my comments on his book, In Search of Memory).

The original interview appears at Scienceblogs.de, a German-language cousin of Neurophilosophy. That site includes some highlights and related timecodes in German (which I can’t read).

I also found an online episode of the Charlie Rose television show, with guest host Dr. Harold Varmus (CEO of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center) interviewing Dr. Kandel. (Note: this is a one-hour program. At the link, you can download the program for iPod or PSP.)

Just a snippet from around the 21-minute mark in the Charlie Rose video, regarding short-term and long-term memory:

…the critical thing that we found…is that short-term memory involves a transient strengthening in the communication between nerve cells…

With long-term memory…the signaling systems move into the nucleus, and there they turn on genes… Genes will be altered in your brain…

Many people think that the genes are the determinants of behavior… In the brain, genes are the servants of the environment…

It was a bit surprising to me.

Anyone concerned with how learning occurs owes a great deal to Kandel, who readily acknowledges owing a great deal to the sea slug Aplysia, whose large and relatively few neurons provided the ideal subject for Kandel’s research.

Great thanks to Jay Cross for his post, The True Meaning of Customer Service Messages, and in particular for a link at the end of it.

If, like Jay or like me, you’ve ever wanted to break through the automated-call barricades (”For last names ending with T, press 1. For last names without the vowel U, press 2…”), you’ll appreciate a true performance support solution:

The image above is a link to gethuman.com, which explains how to bypass a company’s system and get a human on the phone.

For example, if you are unlucky enough to need to call AFLAC (800-992-3522),:

• When the system answers, press #.
• At the prompt, press #.
• At the prompt, press #.
• At the prompt, press 3.

(Pretty sneaky, those AFLAC guys.)

Series: The brain rules!

Rule #5 in John Medina’s Brain Rules is, “Repeat to remember.” He’s talking about short-term memory and the ways we work with information. Working backward from what people have learned, we know there are at least two types of memory.

Bertie Wooster, the genial imbecile of the P. G. Wodehouse stories, demonstrates declarative memory — facts we are consciously aware of. (His man Jeeves demonstrates a higher level of skill with regard to declarative memory.)

“Newts, Jeeves. Mr. Fink-Nottle has a strong newt complex. You must have heard of newts. Those little sort of lizard things that charge about in ponds.”

“Oh, yes, sir. The aquatic members of the family Salamandridae which constitute the genus Molge.”

Nondeclarative memory, logically enough, refers to what we’ve learned that we are not consciously aware of. When Bertie is tooling about in his motorcar, he’s usually unaware of how he knows when to steer, when to shift, and so on. You may know how to ride a bike, but you can’t consciously recall the details, because that’s not in declarative memory.

Medina discusses for processes involved in memory: encoding, storage, retrieval, and forgetting. One point he makes is that our memories are not stored like tape recordings. You can’t just press play and stream them out again.

He cites one striking example. A stroke victim lost the ability to use written vowels. If you asked her to write, “Your dog chased the cat,” this is what she’d write:

Y r d g ch s d th c t.

She not only got all the consonants right, she left room for the vowels she couldn’t write. Consonants seemed to be stored in a different part of the brain from the one affected by her stroke, which did affect the region dealing with written vowels.

This phenomenon illustrates the binding problem — how does the brain connects the widely scattered elements of memory? The problem is even more complex when you consider we encode it in different ways. For example:

• Semantic encoding, or the meaning of what we’ve learned.
• Phonemic encoding, or the sound of what we’ve learned.
• Structural encoding, or the shape or arrangement of what we’ve learned.

There’s also automatic encoding, which all of us have experienced. We seem able at times to build rich memories that we can easily retrieve in great detail with almost no effort.

We’ve all experienced the challenge of deliberate encoding when we want to remember something but can’t drag it out of storage. What IS the password for this website? What is my wife’s Social Security number (which I have looked up at least 50 times)? What are some implications for learning?

Elaborate encoding means stronger memory.

Paradoxically, we can learn better when presented with great detail. It does seem that the detail needs to be relevant rather than distracting, though. Imagine two groups of people given a list of words to study. The first group is asked to focus on words containing the letters I or E. The second group is asked to rate each word and indicate whether they like it on a scale of one to 10. When asked to recall the words later, the “like” group recalls two to three times as many words.

One obvious aid to learning: real-world examples. Rather than focusing solely on principles or theory, we’d learn better with specific examples that provide connections or relationships to what’s already in our memory. It’s one thing to say, “Use striking visuals.” It’s another to see three examples in context.

Retrieve the way you stored.

Research suggests that memory works best if the conditions at retrieval mimic those at the time of storage (initial learning) .

One way to capitalize on this principle is to close the gap between “training” and on-the-job performance— the dilemma known as transfer. Making training or learning part of the job, rather than and auxiliary activity, something you do when you’re not working, helps ensure that the conditions for storage replicate the conditions for retrieval.

Tape recorder photo by AlphaDelta / Peter.

I came across the Xyleme Learning blog and then their podcast series, Xyleme Voices. I’ve got a long drive today, so as I write this, I’m downloading the four items currently shown.

In case you’re interested, they include:

• Dr. Conrad Gottfredson on Learning at the Moment of Need
• Elliott Masie on Informal Learning
• Dr. Allison Rossett on Sidekick & Planner Performance Support Tools
• Bryan Chapman on Single Sourcing

I rearranged my office for the second time in a week, proving to myself once again that my platonic ideal is apparently a mirror image of an earlier one.

Tired from trying to arrange the rug under the desk, I revisited an old friend — Tom Gilbert’s Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance.

Gilbert was a major influence on human performance technology (as in the HTP model of ISPI). He also underscored his insights with wit, as in his Behavioral Model for Creating Incompetence.

You wouldn’t think people would need a model for that — incompetence happens pretty much everywhere. But his point was to highlight the dysfunctional ways that organizations operate.

The model has two levels: environmental (the organization as a whole) and individual.

Creating Incompetence (environmental level)

Information

• Don’t let people know how well they’re performing.
• Give people misleading information about how well they’re performing.
• Hide from people what’s expected of them.
• Give people little or no guidance about how to perform well.

Instrumentation

• Design the tools without consulting the people who use them.
• Keep the engineers away from people who use the tools.

Motivation

• Make sure that poor performers get paid as well as good ones.
• See that good performance gets punished in some way.
• Don’t make use of nonmonetary incentives.

…and the second level is like unto it:

Creating Incompetence (individual level)

Knowledge

• Leave training to chance.
• Put training in the hands of supervisors who are not trained instructors.
• Make training unnecessarily difficult.
• Make training irrelevant to the students’ purposes.

Capacity

• Schedule performance for times when people are not at their sharpest.
• Select people for tasks they have intrinsic difficulties in performing.
• Do not provide response aids (e.g., magnification of difficult visual stimuli).

Motives

• Design the job so it has no future.
• Avoid arranging working conditions that employees would find pleasant.
• Give pep talks rather than incentives to promote performance in punishing situations.