Course Reflections – SCIE 300 Communicating Science

If someone approached you claiming their product would allow you to use 100% of your brain, would you buy it?

Source: National Institute of Mental Health

You are probably familiar with this scenario if you watched the thriller ‘Limitless’, released earlier this year, starring Bradley Cooper. The plot of ‘Limitless’ is based on one of the most commonly perpetuated ideas in society, that we use only 10% of our brains (this number varies depending on who you ask). But is this science fact or science fiction? Before you aspire to become an all-encompassing genius like Bradley Cooper in the film, let’s let science speak for itself.

The human brain is the most complex organ of the body and controls every aspect of our lives. It weighs roughly 1.4 kg, and uses a whopping 20% of all the food energy we take in. Scientists have divided the brain into many sections based on the functions they perform. These are some of the major brain lobes and their function:

-Frontal Lobe: reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, emotions, and problem solving.

-Parietal Lobe: associated with movement, orientation, recognition, and perception of stimuli.

-Occipital Lobe: associated with visual processing.

-Temporal Lobe: associated with perception and recognition of auditory stimuli, memory, and speech.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, as these lobes contain several sub-divisions, which are known to perform even specific tasks.

Evidently, these divisions compose the entire brain, not a mere 10% of it. What is true then, is that we may not use all parts of our brain at the same time, but every section of the brain is necessarily used at some point to perform certain tasks. We know this to be true by studies of brain damage. When almost any part of the brain is damaged, there is always a loss of abilities. Furthermore, brain-imaging technologies have shown several areas of the brain (more than 10%) to be active at the same time under many circumstances, such as during sleep. This fact alone is enough to debunk the notion of using 10% of our brains as a myth by default.

So, despite how much science has progressed in studying the brain, most people still dwell in ignorant bliss. Perhaps because advertisers and the media prey on them by stating this phrase as scientific fact. Shockingly, even people who profess scientific background take part in spreading this misinformation. The truth is, this is a misquote that has gone viral, and is absolutely misleading people as science.

Let’s focus on the opening question.

There do exist substances, such as certain drugs or functional foods that can improve or enhance mental functions. One such substance that you may be familiar with is the caffeine in coffee or energy drinks, which improves memory and concentration. Nonetheless, based on the claims of the person, it would be wise to refuse their offer, because truly humans already use 100% of their brains.

Further reading:

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/tenper.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10%25_of_brain_myth

Temporal Spacing and Learning: The Potential of Spaced Practice to Reduce Forgetting

The Winter 2011 Term is well underway at our University now and many of us return after, what is always at best, a well deserved break ending too soon; summer of course. Returning to our classes in various disciplines even just in the Faculty of Science we always seem to develop a sense of doom when the expectation of having to recall previous year’s material is stressed upon in almost every introductory lecture of our courses. Not the most comforting feeling when starting a new year but there it lies filling us with dread.

The problem lies in not our being forgetful but rather in the methods which we adopt in order to retain and commit to our memories the different pieces of information which we work so hard throughout our academic careers to engrave into our minds. Reading articles I came across an interesting one suggesting a potential answer to this problem.

Temporal Spacing

Numerous studies going centuries back have asserted that spacing learning episodes across time sometimes enhances memory. This so-called spacing effect can aid learning and effective retention of information. However, whether in classrooms, instructional design texts, or language learning software, there is little sign that people are paying attention to temporal spacing of learning.

Optimal Spacing Intervals

In a recent study, the researchers gave 161 subjects two learning sessions (separated by an inter-study interval, or ISI, from minutes to 3 months). Each session involved learning a set of obscure facts. Six months after the second session, subjects were brought back for a final test. Performance was best when the ISI was 10 to 20 percent of the retention interval (Cepeda et al., 2006). Furthermore, similar results were found when the same subjects learned names of unusual objects depicted in photographs.

In a study currently under way using the Web, more than 2,000 subjects are being trained at inter-study intervals from minutes out to one year, with a final test taking place after an additional year. While still underway, results accumulated so far suggest similar results as above. Furthermore, the benefits of spacing seem to grow ever larger as retention intervals are lengthened; thus, for one-year retention, a one-month spacing produces a three-fold or greater increase in memory as compared to a day or even a week of spacing. While increasing spacing too much always produces some decline, as earlier short-duration studies had implied, the decline is invariably quite modest. Therefore, to facilitate retention over years, it seems critical to space training over several months at least, but avoiding overly long spacing seems like a relatively minor concern.

Mathematics Learning

To move beyond these somewhat “rote” learning tasks, another study focused on teaching students abstract mathematics skills (Rohrer & Taylor, 2006). Students learned to solve a type of permutation problem, and then worked two sets of practice problems. One-week spacing separating the practice sets drastically improved final test performance (which involved problems not previously encountered). In fact, when the two practice sets were back-to-back, final performance was scarcely better than if the second study session was deleted altogether.

While there is still much to be learnt as far as temporal spacing and learning are concerned, the results I found and shared above do reflect the potential of spaced practice to reduce forgetting as enormous. Perhaps finding the right spacing varies from student to student but being aware of such techniques and fine tuning these to optimize our learning is more of an individual task rather than a collective one!

References

Cepeda, N. J., Mozer, M. C., Coburn, N., Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T., & Pashler, H. (2006). Optimizing distributed practice: Theoretical analysis and practical implications. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (in press). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin.
Rohrer, D., & Taylor, K. (2006). The effects of overlearning and distributed practice on the retention of mathematics knowledge. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Rohrer, D., Taylor, K., Pashler, H., Cepeda, N. J., & Wixted, J. T. (2005). The effect of overlearning on long-term retention. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19, 361-374.