... the road towards learning can be seen as a bifurcation. This occurs at the thing you're trying to learn (show an image of a road leading to the topic and bifurcating depending on the type of topic) You can look at the brain for queues about ...
No one has to read about how cognitive scientists think the brain processes information (absorbing, storing, processing and recalling) and then complement that theory with studies about recall, error minimization or learning techniques done in learning theory in order to start learning. This would be a recursive nightmare - where does learning start if you're required to be able to learn in the first place?! No. It comes naturally doesn't it? You might remember when you were fresh out of the womb and couldn't walk from there to anywhere - or should I say, you might remember the idea of it, but you actually, factually speaking and theoretically sounding, can't really remember jack shit about it. Let me start here then. We don't really know why it is so, and this is the general rule in regards to brain mechanics - we don't know that much about it. But anyhow, it has to do with neural networks and/or the absence of these and their meaningful connections. Basically, you had no saved games yet. But! We know about what comes straight after that. In your (roughly) first three turns around the sun you will have learned the basics of language, having solidified your mother tongue in a way that you will never manage to do with any other language from then on. This is in part because you won't have the same processing structure available. You are born with an unfair boost of neurons that dissipate with age which cognitive scientists believe gives you the superpower of learning a language without any prior knowledge. Every other language will be learned by analogy to your first language. You will have learned how to move as well. Your motor cortex, which is a slice of neurons that's roughly in the middle of your brain will have developed so many connections through trial and error, stumbling and falling so many times that you will have brute-forced yourself into standing. Aided by specified cortexes and lobes and circuitry of neurons with enough cable line to go around the world about 4.4 times (earth's circumference is more or less 40,000 km and an average 20-year-old man has 176,000 km of myelinated fibres - this is the white matter of the brain, or rather, the cabling that connects the grey matter which holds the compute power). You will have learned to identify people by their face, voice, movement and with some margin of error, just from looking at their backs. You will be able to output smiles, pouts, crying and all sorts of complex human emotional expression. What I am trying to say is that you learn all the time independently of you wanting to do so or not. That's it. You can go. Hmm. Well, maybe before you blame this article for your next failed exam I should be more specific... Ok, wait! Although your brain catches and learns patterns automatically these patterns are somewhat specific - like those play-doh factory toys, the ones that make the doh into a specific shape, squares, circles, triangles, etc. Your brain is shaping the signals coming in into meaningful information which is dependent on your previous recorded experiences. Meaningful in regards to what it can compute. Your brain has all these specific circuitry which can process and store information in a specific way. Thanks to the gazillions of years that the brain has been rolling back and forth in the ocean of evolution and randomness, it can do very interesting things indeed. Maybe you might have to run from shit that is running after you or you might have to be the one doing the chasing. Evolution is a dumb impartial algorithm. It selects for whatever machine seems to survive and propagate its genes better - and if you let the simulation run for long enough even marginal advantages make huge differences. This is to say that we can't forget that our brain evolved or was optimized for a specific environment type. This is important to acknowledge because the reason why you're reading this article is that you might be trying to optimize your learning, and you're probably not trying to learn how to climb a tree, or detect tigers better. You're probably trying to learn math, or physics or memorizing something that you need to know for an exam.
When you're learning, you're making connections between the newly acquired material and other information already in your memory. These connections help you because they make new knowledge findable later on. Rather, these connections serve as retrieval paths: The theory is that whenever you try to retrieve a specific piece of memory your brain follows crumbs or pieces of thread that lead to this particular memory (some sort of threshold is probably used as that is how neurons work - connections get aggregated and strengthen the closer they are by some negligible value or biological equivalent. So can there be different threads to the memory in question? Can some threads be better/faster than others? Context-dependent learning: basically the data shows data learning is context-dependent and aided by context as well - studies using randomized control groups show that mimicking the learning context during testing aids retrieval for the people with whom the learning context matches the testing context (Eich, 1980; O, 1985), Godden and Baddeley (1975), Grant et al., 1998; Balch, Bowman, & Mohler, 1992; Cann & Ross, 1989, Schab, 1990; Smith, 1985; Smith & Vela, 2001. A Smith (1979) should in his studies thought, what matters is not the physical context per se but the psychological context - he urged participants to remember and picture the learning-context while doing that test task in a different place and when matching their results to a group that did the test in the same learning-context, the results were equivalent. One could say that any context is simply psychological as cues and signals are unravelled and built into the mind's picture that we all "see". This means that you can get the benefits of context-dependent learning through a strategy of context reinstatement - a strategy of re-creating the thoughts and feelings of the learning episode even if, at the time of recall, you're in a very different place. What matters for memory retrieval is the mental context, not the physical environment itself to the extent that you can abstract and extract yourself from the latter.
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