How Do We Learn? What Memory Research Means for Teaching with Héctor Ruiz Martín (Ep 83)

Now, we're going to talk about learning because your book is all about that.

Your book is all about how we learn.

And so before we talk about that, we talk a lot about cognitive architecture on this podcast.

But, you know, we often have new listeners.

So I'm hoping that you can give us, before we start, a quick map of how memory works.

People usually think that memory is some kind of warehouse where we retain information so that we can search for it when we need it, as if it were Google.

But in fact, memory is our ability to learn anything.

And in fact, we don't have just one memory.

We have different memory systems.

which depend on different regions of the brain, at least partially, and support different types of learning, facts, concepts, skills, reactions.

Everything we learn is learned thanks to memory, because memory arises from the fact that all our experiences and actions trigger changes in our brain.

And these changes allow us to act differently, hopefully in a more beneficial way, adaptive way, the next time.

I guess, though, that you were asking about semantic memory, which is a memory system that contains our knowledge about the world.

This is different from episodic memory, by the way.

Episodic memory is the one that records the events of our lives.

So episodic memory allows me to remember what I had for breakfast today, while semantic memory allows me to know what breakfast is.

That's the difference.

How does semantic memory work? Well, it works by connecting the knowledge that we already have about what we are experiencing well, some pieces of this knowledge with the new information we are receiving.

So learning is about making connections, connecting what I already know with new information or connecting different things that I already knew, but I have never connected before.

And I connect them thanks to the clues that the experience gives me to make that connection.

Okay, so you're talking about new knowledge being learned by connecting it to knowledge that is already in long-term memory, right? So why does that prior knowledge have such a powerful effect on what we're able to learn next?

Well, our memory depends on what we already know, because in order to learn something, our memory makes use of everything about the experience that was already learned through previous experiences and then uses everything to build new knowledge.

I mean, we don't function like a video camera.

We don't record everything.

We connect pieces of what is happening to pieces of knowledge that we already have in our memory and that we recognize as related to the experience that we are having.