Memory

Don’t Offload Your Memory Quite Yet: Cognitive Science, Memory, and Education

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 68 Comments

Google may or may not being making us stupid, but it does appear to render human memory obsolete. By now most of us have probably heard someone suggest that with Google functioning as our reliable and ubiuqitous prosthetic memory, it is no longer necessary to waste time or mental effort memorizing facts. This is usually taken to be a positive development since our brains are now assumed to be free from the menial work of remembering to do the more serious work of creative and critical thinking.

This sounds plausible enough and gains a certain credence from our own experience. Some time ago we began noticing that we no longer know anyone’s phone number. We’re doing well if we can remember our own. Ever since cell phones started storing numbers, we stopped remembering them. And for the most part we’re no worse for it, except, of course, for those instances when we need someone’s number but we can’t access our phones for whatever reason. But those situations tend to be few and far between and on the whole we have little reason to begin memorizing all the numbers in our directories.

We should, however, think twice about extending that line of reasoning much beyond phone numbers. In his 2009 book, Why Don’t Students Like School, Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia challenges this popular line of reasoning and argues instead for the importance of storing factual knowledge in our long term memory.

Willingham notes that disparaging the need to memorize facts has a long and distinguished history in American education that predates the emergence of the Internet and of Google as a verb form. He cites, for example, J. D. Everett who in 1873 warned that,

There is a great danger in the present day lest science-teaching should degenerate into the accumulation of disconnected facts and unexplained formulae, which burden the memory without cultivating the understanding.

The modern day version of this concern leads to the notion that “instead of learning facts, it’s better to practice critical thinking, to have students work at evaluating all the information available on the Internet rather than trying to commit some small part of it to memory.” Contrary to this fashionable assumption, Willingham argues that that “very processes that teachers care about most — critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving — are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).”

The problem is that we tend to conceive of thinking analogously to how we imagine a computer works and we abstract processes from data. We treat “critical thinking” as a process that can be taught independently of any specific data or information. On the contrary, according to Willingham, the findings of cognitive science suggest that “[c]ritical thinking processes are tied to background knowledge” and “we must ensure that students acquire background knowledge parallel with practicing critical thinking skills.”

Willingham offers three main points in support of his claim listed here with a few explanatory excerpts:

1. Background knowledge stored in long term memory is essential to reading comprehension

a. it provides vocabulary

b. it allows you to bridge logical gaps that writers leave

c. it allows chunking, which increases room in working memory and thereby makes it easier to tie ideas together

d. it guides the interpretation of ambiguous sentences

2. Background knowledge is necessary for cognitive skills

a. “Memory is the cognitive process of first resort. When faced with a problem, you will first search for a solution in memory …”

b. Chunking facilitated by available knowledge in long term memory enhances reasoning as well as reading comprehension.

c. “Much of what experts tell us they do in the course of thinking about their field requires background knowledge, even if it’s not described that way.”

3. Factual knowledge improves your memory

a. “when you have background knowledge your mind connects the material you’re reading with what you already know about the topic, even if you’re not aware that it’s happening”

b. “having factual knowledge in long-term memory makes it easier to acquire still more factual knowledge”

Among the implications for the classroom that Willingham explores, the following are worth mentioning:

1. “Shallow knowledge is better than no knowledge”: You can’t have deep knowledge about everything, but shallow knowledge of some areas, while not ideal, is better than nothing. It’s at least something to build on and work with.

2. “Do whatever you can to get kids to read”: In Willingham’s view, nothing helps build a wide knowledge base  better than reading and lots of it.

3. “Knowledge must be meaningful”: Memorizing random lists of disconnected facts is not only harder, but ultimately less helpful.

That last point acknowledges that mere rote memorization and incessant drilling can be fruitless and counterproductive. Of course, that much should be obvious. What is no longer obvious, and what Willingham compellingly demonstrates, is that storing up factual knowledge in long term memory is not the enemy of thought, but rather its necessary precondition.

It would appear that the rhetoric of offloaded memory ignores the findings of cognitive science and leads to ineffective educational practice.

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Related posts: Offloaded Memory and Its Discontents and The Fog of Life.

Fatal Nostalgia and Generalized Anxiety: Signs of the Times

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

“At the end of the eighteenth century people began to be fearful of extended sojourns away from home because they had become conscious of the threat posed by nostalgia. People even died of nostalgia after having read in books that nostalgia is a disease which is frequently mortal.”  — Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia”

No need to read that again, you read it correctly the first time.

Whatever else we may say, this is clearly something very different than what you felt when you recently learned that MTV turned 30 (and didn’t tell anybody) or when you watch Mad Men. It is also different than the nostalgia which infuses the Pottery Barn catalogue, drives popular segments of “contemporary” music, and inspires playful design concepts. It is also quite different from nostalgia animating the handle-bar mustached mixologists populating trendy urban bars. In fact, it is very different from most of what we tend to label nostalgic. And as you may have noted yourself, there is quite a bit that we might label nostalgic all about us. This is not exactly a sudden development, the “vintage” turn has been around for a decade or two at least, but it certainly does seem to be permeating experience to ever greater degrees lately.

And yet the burgeoning nostalgia industry is only distantly related to the reportedly fatal nostalgia described in the opening lines and which Richard Terdiman, in his study of the nineteenth century memory crisis, labeled, with a dash of hyperbole perhaps, a “dangerous epidemic.” This earlier, acute nostalgia occasioned by  prolonged journeys away from one’s home was, owing to its physiological symptoms, treated as a medical condition. This may at first seem quaint and evoke the image of Victorian fainting couches, but let’s not rush to judgment without asking some questions. Why an outbreak of nostalgia, and why then? Why the severity? And how is it that “nostalgia” was subsequently domesticated and even commodified?

As per usual, I’m thinking out loud here, and raising questions to offer what are at best only suggestive responses. It would seem that any response to the first and second questions would take into consideration the ongoing and multiple disruptions of settled agrarian life which characterized the long nineteenth century. What is interesting about nostalgia, then, is that it appears as a symptom of sociological change. It registers the psychic consequences of the onset of modernity and the subsequent disorder introduced into the human experience of time and place. Eventually, what is initially experienced as an acute disorder becomes generalized and to some extent domesticated. That it is later commodified should be of little surprise; there is nothing the market can’t and won’t price. So the “vintage” turn in contemporary society might be understood as a distant ripple  of an original, profound disturbance in the experience of time and place occasioned by rapid social, economic, technological, and political transformations.

I suggested earlier that we not too quickly dismiss the epidemic of nostalgia. Here’s why. Nostalgia was then a psychological condition with physiological consequences brought about by the rapid disintegration of the social order. This led me to wonder if we might find anything analogous in our own experience. With all of the provisionality a blog post entails, perhaps we need look no further than the epidemic of anxiety. Anxiety too is a psychological condition with physiological consequences and, it could be argued, is also generated by sudden social shifts and disruptions. Anxiety is to the late twentieth and early twenty-first century what nostalgia was to the long nineteenth century — a symptom of social change.

My sense is that anxiety is well on the way to generalization and commodification. But will it ever be chic?

“Archival Consciousness”

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

From Richard Terdiman’s Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis:

“[Walter Benjamin] argued that the nineteenth-century city produced a particularly acute experience of disconnection and abstraction. Such abstraction defeats the associative structure of natural memory and induces in its place a different form of the habitus or technology of recollection that we could call ‘archival consciousness.’ Its principle would be the increasingly randomized isolation of the individual item of information, to the detriment of its relation to any whole, and the consignment of such information to what earlier I called ‘extrindividual’ mnemonic mechanisms. Such abstraction has been increasingly programmed by the practices of modern socio-economies since the industrial revolution.”

Is the structure of this 19th century “memory crisis”  recapitulated within the further abstractions of memory within 21st century digital culture?

Nostalgia as Active Memory and Index of Our Desires

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

Below is an excerpt of an email exchange between myself and Mark Garcia, my very thoughtful friend who generously reads what I write on here. The exchange was occasioned by my earlier thoughts on nostalgia in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. It was, I thought, worth posting here for a (slightly) wider audience. My thanks to Mark for pushing these reflections further along.

Collaboration in action, although you’ll see the real insights are not mine:

MG:  … is romanticized nostalgia for the ahistorical past itself a signal of transcendence, pace Berger, but not only of a heavenly and ‘other’ present or purely vertical, up-there, or beyond reality, but a reach for a certain kind of heavenly future?

MS: Yes, and few have captured that better than C. S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory in which he remarks that we take our revenge on what amounts to a longing for transcendence by, among other things, labeling it nostalgia and being done with it.

MG: Nostalgia as revenge is fascinating. Is it possibly, then, a form of memory in action, the action being the pursuit of some perceived form of justice? Is nostalgia at heart a longing for a certain form of “putting things right” and thus, in that way, a longing for an order of perfect justice and goodness?

MS: Yes, absolutely, memory in action. Memory, insofar as it is a search and not spontaneous, is in an index of desire. Nostalgia in this sense names the desire not only for justice, but also peace, joy, belonging, settledness, wholeness — shalom, shall we say?

MG: So whatever adjustments, reconfigurations, and manipulations of history nostalgia introduces are themselves the index to the desire nostalgia acts upon, e.g., nostalgic reconfigurations of one’s painful past reflects a desire for justice, reconfigurations of a lonely past along more satisfying lines reflects the desire for belonging, etc. This could take positive or negative forms, too: a positive or upward reconfiguration of a painful history might make things seem better than they were in order to aid present coping with it, whereas a negative or downward reconfiguration of that same past might make things seem worse than they were in order to aid present justifications of felt bitterness, injustice, or whatever. How varied are our grasping at shalom! As varied as we are, inside and out.

MS: Just so.

I also find it worthwhile to quote at some length from the essay by Lewis I referenced in the exchange. It is one of the most enchanting passages in the whole of Lewis’ oeuvre:

In speaking of this desire for our own far- off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

He later adds:

Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.

Midnight in Paris: Learning to Live With the Past

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

The past may be a foreign country where they do things differently as the L. P. Hartley line has it, but it is one to which many would readily immigrate given the opportunity. If you are among them, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris will likely enchant and delight you. (Warning: some spoilers ahead.) Gil, the main character played charmingly by Owen Wilson, and his fiancée tag along with her parents who have come to Paris on a business trip. She and her parents are crassly materialistic, he is a romantic — a romantic in love with the city, particularly its Jazz Age past. Having been a successful, but disenchanted Hollywood film writer he is determined to write real literature, even if it means surrendering the upscale lifestyle his fiancée craves. While they shop for chairs that cost as much as a moderately priced four-door sedan, he frequents outdoor shops that sell vintage vinyl records and works on his novel about a man who owns a nostalgia shop. The theme of his would-be novel tracks closely with Gil’s own sensibilities. He obsesses over the past and its artifacts, and his obsession is an index of his dissatisfaction with the present.

Without even a gesture toward explantation, and all the better for it, a vintage Peugeot filled with revelers stops to pick up Gil just after a clock has struck midnight. Gil, with some hesitation, joins the merry crowd and finds himself transported back to the 1920’s and the Paris of his dreams. Endearingly awestruck throughout the experience, he meets the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Picasso, Dali, Cole Porter, and a host of other luminaries just entering into the fullness of their legend. Each night he rides into the past, and each morning he finds himself again in the present, a progressively unfulfilling present.

When he is in the past, Gil comes alive. The characters are inspired: Adrien Brody plays a delightfully quirky Salvador Dali and Corey Stoll is almost absurdly intense as Hemingway. Kathy Bates’ Gertrude Stein provides Gil with straightforward counsel regarding life and writing. Gil, as he becomes increasingly at ease in the past, offers Luis Buñuel a suggestion for a film in which guests find themselves unable to leave a room. Buñuel, perplexed, wonders why they cannot simply walk out.  He also finds in Picasso’s lover Adriana, a woman who stirs his heart and a kindred spirit. Simply put, the past rekindles Gil’s passion.

Yet, Allen finally wants to critique nostalgia and reaffirm the present. The film builds up to an overly didactic moment when Gil, realizing that he cannot remain in the past indefinitely, launches into a not quite moving appreciation of the present. Allen foreshadows the moment throughout the film. While delivering one of his impromptu lectures, Paul, a pedantic intellectual and friend of Gil’s fiancee, pontificates about the “Golden Age Fallacy,” the unsubstantiated belief that the greatness  of some prior historical era eclipses the present, a chronological version of the grass is always greener. The character of Adriana is herself unimpressed with the ’20s and nostalgic for 1890s Paris, La Belle Époque. When Gil and Adriana, Inception-like, delve even further into the past via horse-drawn carriage they meet up with Degas, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec just as La Belle Époque commences.  But we find those  artists similarly dismissive of their own age believing it pales in comparison with the Renaissance. And it is then that Gil realizes the futility of inordinately longing for another age.

He returns to the present, reorders his life, and walks off happily ever after in the Paris rain. And we, likewise, leave the theater, returning to our own present, cured of our nostalgic longings, and determined to seize the moment. Yet, the film lingers in our minds and as we revisit it, we find ourselves charmed. It works its magic as we turn it over in our memory. Wasn’t the “Golden Age Fallacy” introduced by the most unlikeable, pompous character in the film? Wasn’t the past portrayed in delightful, vivacious, enchanting fashion? Wasn’t Gil, in fact, nourished and invigorated by his dalliances with the past? While Gil chose to return to his present, did not Adriana choose to stay in La Belle Époque? Finally, wasn’t Gil’s other climatic epiphany (that I will not spoil) revealed in the past?

Certainly, the past is shown to be complex and disordered in its own way. In one of the few more sober scenes, Gil and Adriana, on a moonlit stroll through the city, come upon Zelda Fitzgerald very near to taking her own life. Yet, even here there is ambiguity. Gil offers Zelda Valium which we learn he has been taking to cope with the anxieties of an impending wedding. Are we to conclude that while the past bequeaths great art and literature to the present, the best the present can offer the past is Valium? Not quite I suppose, I do recall penicillin also being mentioned at some point.

Midnight in Paris takes nostalgia as its theme, but the difficulty with any exploration of nostalgia is that in common usage the word indiscriminately names too many sensibilities, unfortunately dismissing appropriate and enriching ways of being with the past. Altogether, the film helpfully suggests that there is more than one way to have a disordered relationship to the past. We may succumb to the “Golden Age” fallacy and refuse the present, or we might also reject the past altogether uprooting ourselves from that which gives depth of field to lived experience. While Gil chooses the present, it is clear that the past nourished and educated him. While he has chosen not to live in the past, he has not abandoned it either. He will not live in it, but he will live with it.

It was Buñuel who wrote in his autobiography,

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives.  Life without memory is no life at all …  Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action.  Without it, we are nothing.

Thus we may turn the commonplace on its head and suggest that the past is the only place we can live.