I forget, therefore I learn

As a student of foreign languages, I have been interested for some time in the mechanisms that our brain uses to acquire new vocabulary, consolidate grammar, develop a particular accent, and how step by step we read, write, listen and speak our way to fluency. When it comes to second language acquisition, science knows the parts of the brain involved in the learning process, what works well and what doesn’t.

One of the things that work is a learning technique called “interleaved practice”. Let’s consider two forms of learning: In one form you massively try to learn a particular skill in a focused way, devoting all your concentration and effort to learn it well. On the other form, you learn a bit of information around that skill, and then immediately move to another bit of information, in a way that the pieces of information interleave, like layers. When these two forms of learning are compared, it turns that learning the skill in a single massive block will be better in the short term than doing it in a staggered way, but in the long run, the interleaved learners will learn better. They will just retain more information for longer.

In language learning, it would be the equivalent to study a grammar book from the first page to the end, memorizing every chapter until you are done. In the interleaved practice, you might instead start with the grammar book, to move short time after to learn vocabulary, then practice your listening, and maybe also to read or write easy sentences, mixing it all up.

When I am learning a new language, I try to expose myself to many different sources of information. If you try to casually look at a grammar point and then move into different activities like listening and reading, overtime you will notice how certain patterns start to stick in your brain, and your memory muscle starts to build automations. When you go back to that source your brain starts to strengthen the connections with that knowledge you already have from other sources. So you are effectively interleaving in that way.

Interleaving is intimately connected with forgetting. The more we forget, the more we learn. If we learn something and then just leave it, we will be obviously forgetting it. If we re-learn it later on (we retrieve it), that is where the real learning takes place. In language learning, this is heavily influenced by the context. You might be hitting the wall against that grammar book, but if you attach that new concept to a real life scenario that is meaningful to you, that will be all you need to suddenly make sense of it, and it will never leave you. This is the key difference between mere storage of information and its retrieval strength. The probability that you will be able to reproduce something from memory depends almost entirely on its retrieval strength.

These and many other facets of learning and memorization are beautifully explained by Robert A. Bjork. He is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, and I found his research and studies revisions clear and easy to understand. On his new theory of disuse he explains that you have to structure your learning in a way that allows you to forget just enough information between studying so that you ultimately remember more. This is a total shift of paradigm in comparison with the classic law of disuse (you forget what you don’t use).

I started by saying that, when it comes to the brain function, science knows what works well and what doesn’t. All research out there seem to be based on experiments which treat the brain as a massive hundred-billion-neuron black box. Something that puzzles me is how little progress we have made in comparison to other fields. We don’t know much more now than 30 years ago about the neurological mechanisms involved in remembering new ideas, and more concerning, we know even less about how and why we forget. We live in a world where humans’ genetic sequence gets modified, or robotic spacecrafts are sent to Mars… but we cannot tell why 50 million people worldwide are developing dementia.

While we get with the formula to eradicate this dreadful syndrome, the least we can do is to figure how to prevent it, and as it turns out is quite connected to language learning. One of the best news I heard in a long time came from another great communicator: Stephen Krashen. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Southern California, and he has spent most part of his career studying linguistics and second language acquisition. On his lectures he describes the 3 factors that can keep dementia from premature occurring:

1. Bilingualism: people who are bilingual have a better executive control (meaning not getting distracted easily when multitasking). We all become more forgetful as we age when the focus is spread into several tasks (the typical situation when you step in a room and you cannot remember why). Bilingualism slows that process down, enforced by the habit of changing languages often. There is, in fact, recent research showing that regular use more than one language in daily life can slow the onset of dementia.
2. Reading: Specifically free voluntary reading. People on their sixties who read a lot have the same verbal memory than people in their thirties who read less.
3. Coffee: (!!) Different studies show that 3 cups of freshly brewed coffee a day will delay senility significantly (6–7 years). This is great news. There is also this one study where they extrapolated from mice, and the conjecture is that this might even reverse Alzheimer (when caught in an early stage).

Being optimistic, it cannot get any better. As it turns out, my average weekend blends all these three factors simultaneously: grab a comfortable chair, sip cappuccinos and read a book in the language of Shakespeare. Not the bitterest medicine.