How We Learn (8 page)

Did we actually know this to be true? No, of course not, we never tested it—we wouldn’t have known how if we’d wanted to. Yet we felt like we had a lucky charm, a way to put our head “in the same place” during test-taking as during studying. Essential it was, too, especially during finals week, with two and sometimes three tests falling on the same day. That kind of pressure drives people deep into their worst habits, whether chocolate and cigarettes, brain vitamins and nail-biting, cases of diet cola, or much stronger stuff. When hunkered down in this psychological survival mode, it can be a profound comfort to believe that a favorite “study aid” also improves exam performance. And so we did.

“Brain chemistry,” our theory went, “you want the same brain chemistry.”

For a long time afterward, I looked back on that kind of theorizing as pure rationalization, the undergraduate mind at its self-justifying finest. We had so many crackpot theories then, about dating and getting rich and studying, that I’d discarded the whole list. Still, millions of students have developed some version of the brain chemistry idea, and I think its enduring attraction is rooted in something deeper than wishful thinking. The theory fits in nicely with what we’ve been told about good study habits from Day 1—be consistent.

Consistency has been a hallmark of education manuals since the
1900s, and the principle is built into our every assumption about good study habits. Develop a ritual, a daily schedule, a single place and time set aside for study and nothing else. Find a private corner of the house or the library, and a quiet niche of the day, early or late. These ideas go back at least to the Puritans and their ideal of study as devotion, but they have not changed a whit. “Choose an area that is quiet and free from distractions,” begins a study
guide from Baylor University, though it could be from any institution. It continues:

“Develop a study ritual to use each time you study.”

“Use earplugs or a headset to block out noise.”

“Say no to those who want to alter your study time.”

Et cetera. It is all about consistency.

And so is the “Study Aid” brain chemistry theory, if you think about it. Using the same “vitamin”—or, okay, mind-altering substance—to prepare and, later, to perform may not be particularly Puritan. But it’s nothing if not consistent.

It is also, within reason, correct.

Studying while seriously impaired is wasted time, in more ways than one, as millions of students have learned the hard way. Yet, generally speaking, we perform better on tests when in the same state of mind as when we studied—and, yes, that includes mild states of intoxication from alcohol or pot, as well as arousal from stimulants. Moods, preoccupations, and perceptions matter, too: how we feel while studying, where we are, what we see and hear. The scientific investigation into these influences—the inner mental context, so to speak, as well as the outer one—has revealed subtle dimensions of learning that we rarely, if ever, notice but can exploit to optimize our time. Along the way, paradoxically, this research has also demolished the consistency doctrine.

• • •

The story begins twenty feet underwater, just off the coast of Oban, Scotland.

Oban, on the Sound of Mull and facing the islands known as the Southern Hebrides, is a
premier diving destination. It’s within easy range of the
Rondo
, an American steamer that sank here in 1934 and sits—jackknifed, nose-down—in 150 feet of water, a magnet for explorers in scuba gear. A half dozen other shipwrecks are also close—the Irish
Thesis
, lost in 1889; the Swedish
Hispania
, which went down in 1954—and the waters course with dogfish, octopus, cuttlefish, and the psychedelic sea slugs called nudibranchs.

It was here, in 1975, that a pair of psychologists from nearby Stirling University recruited a group of divers to participate in
an unusual learning experiment.

The psychologists, D. R. Godden and A. D. Baddeley, wanted to test a hypothesis that many learning theorists favored: that people remember more of what they studied when they return to that same study environment. This is a variation on the detective novel line, “Now, Mrs. Higgins, let’s return to the night of the murder. Tell me exactly what you saw and heard.” Like the detective, psychologists hypothesized that features of the study location—the lighting, the wallpaper, the background music—provide the brain “cues” to shake free more information. The difference is that Mrs. Higgins is trying to revisit a dramatic scene, an autobiographical memory, and the researchers were applying the same idea—
reinstatement
, they called it—to facts, to what the Estonian psychologist Endel Tulving called “semantic memories.”

The idea seems far-fetched. Who on earth remembers what was playing through the headphones when he or she learned the definition of an isosceles triangle, or an ionic bond, or the role of Viola in
Twelfth Night
? And when Godden and Baddeley dreamed up their experiment, the evidence for reinstatement was shabby at best. In one previous experiment, for example, participants tried to memorize word lists they heard through earphones while standing with their heads inside a box containing multicolored flashing lights (
two dropped out due to nausea). In another, subjects studied nonsense
syllables while strapped to a board, which tipped on an axis like a teeter-totter, as
in some cruel school yard prank.

The reinstatement seemed to facilitate better memory but Godden and Baddeley weren’t convinced. They wanted to test-drive reinstatement theory in an environment that was unusual but found in nature, not created by imaginative psychologists. So they had a group of eighteen scuba divers study a list of thirty-six words while submerged
twenty feet underwater. The researchers split the divers into two groups. An hour later, one group took a test on the words on dry land, while the others strapped on their equipment and took the test back down under, using a waterproof mike to communicate with those on land doing the scoring. The results indeed depended strongly on test location. The divers who took the test underwater did better than those who took it on land, remembering about 30 percent more words. That’s a lot, and the two psychologists concluded that, “recall is better if the environment of the
original learning is reinstated.”

Maybe the bubbles streaming past the diving mask acted as a cue, accentuating the vowels in the studied words. Maybe it was the rhythmic bellows of the breath in the mouthpiece, or the weight of the tank, plus the sight of swarming nudibranchs. Or the fact that those semantic memories became part of an episodic one (learning while diving). Perhaps all of the above. Reinstatement seemed to work, anyway—for underwater learning.

The Oban experiment lent comfort and encouragement to what would become a somewhat haphazard exploration of the influence of context on memory. The study materials in these experiments were almost always word lists, or word pairs, and the tests were usually on free recall. In one investigation, for example, people who studied a list of nonsense syllables on blue-gray cards remembered 20 percent more of them on a later test when the test cards were also blue-gray (
as opposed to, say, red). In another, students who got exam questions from the same instructor who taught the material did 10 percent better than getting them
from a neutral test proctor.

A psychologist named Steven M. Smith performed some of the most interesting experiments in this area, and it’s worth looking at one of his in detail to see how scientists measure and think about
so-called contextual cues. In 1985 Smith, at Texas A&M University, convened a group of fifty-four Psych 101 students—psychologists’ standard guinea pigs—and had them study a list of forty words. He divided the students into three groups. One group studied in silence. Another had a jazz number, Milt Jackson’s “People Make the World Go Around,” playing in the background. The third had Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number 24 in C Minor. The music was on when the subjects arrived in their assigned rooms, and they had no reason to believe it was relevant to the experiment. They spent ten minutes memorizing, and left.

The students returned to the study room two days later and, without warning, they were given a test to see how many words they could freely recall. This time, Smith changed the tune for many of them. He subdivided the three groups. Some who’d studied to jazz took the test with jazz again; others took it with the Mozart; and others in silence. Likewise for those who studied with Mozart or in silence: They tested either in the same condition, or one of the other two. Nothing else changed.

Nothing, that is, except their scores.

Smith found that those who studied with Milt Jackson playing and took the test with the same music recalled twenty-one words on average—twice as many as those who studied with Jackson and took the test to Mozart, or in silence. Similarly, those who studied with Mozart recalled nearly twice as many words with Mozart playing than in silence or with the jazz in the background.

The punch line: Of those who studied and tested in the same condition, the silence-silence
group did the worst. They recalled, on average, about half the words that the jazz-jazz or classical-classical groups did (eleven versus twenty). This is bizarre, and it raised an unexpected question: Could quiet somehow be
inhibiting
memory?
The answer was no. If it had, then those who’d studied with jazz would have done worse taking the test in silence than with Mozart (vice versa, for those who’d studied with classical). They hadn’t.

What to make of this, then? The higher test scores square with reinstatement theory: The background music weaves itself subconsciously into the fabric of stored memory. Cue up the same music, and more of those words are likely to resurface. The lower scores in the quiet room (after quiet study) are harder to explain. Smith argued that they may be due to an
absence
of cues to reinstate. The students “do not encode the absence of sound any more than they might encode the absence of any type of stimulus, such as pain or food,” he wrote. As a result the study environment is impoverished, compared to one with music in the background.

By themselves, experiments like Smith’s and the others don’t tell us how to study, of course. We can’t cue up our own personal soundtrack for an exam, and we certainly can’t retrofit the exam room with the same furniture, wallpaper, and ambience as where we studied. Even if we could, it’s not clear which cues are important or how strong they really are. Still, this research establishes a couple of points that are valuable in developing a study strategy. The first is that our assumptions about learning are suspect, if not wrong. Having
something
going on in the study environment, like music, is better than nothing (so much for sanctity of the quiet study room).

The second point is that the experience of studying has more dimensions than we notice, some of which can have an impact on retention. The contextual cues scientists describe—music, light, background colors—are annoyingly ephemeral, it’s true. They’re subconscious, usually untraceable. Nonetheless, it is possible to recognize them at work in our own lives. Think of an instance in which you
do
remember exactly where and when you learned something. I’m not talking about hearing you made the high school all-star team or got chosen prom queen, either. I mean a factual, academic,
semantic
memory, like who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, or how Socrates died and why.

For me, it’s a late night in 1982, when I was studying for a test in the university’s math building. The buildings were open all night back then, and you could walk in and take a classroom for yourself, spread out, use the blackboard, and no roommates bursting in with beer or other temptations. I did it all the time, and sometimes the only other person in the place was an old guy roaming the halls, disheveled but kindly, a former physics teacher. He would wander into my classroom occasionally and say something like, “Do you know why quartz is used in watches?” I would say no, and he would explain. He was legit, he knew his stuff, and one night he strolled in and asked whether I knew how to derive the Pythagorean theorem using geometric figures. I did not. The Pythagorean theorem, the most famous equation in math, states that adding the square of the two short sides of a right triangle equals the square of the longest side. It existed in my head as a
²
+ b
²
= c
²
, and I have no idea where I was when I learned that.

On that night, however, I learned a simple way to derive it—a beautiful thing it is, too—and I still can see what the guy was wearing (blue slacks, up to his chest), hear his voice (barely, he mumbled), and recall precisely where on the board he drew the figure (lower left corner):

The proof is done by calculating the area of the large square (c squared) and making it equal to the sum of the figures inside: four triangles (area: ½ b x c times 4) plus the area of the little box ((a—b) squared). Try it. Simplify the right side of that equation and watch what you get. I remember it any time I sit alone in some classroom or conference room under dimmed fluorescent lights, like if I’ve arrived first for a meeting. Those cues bring back the memory of that night and the proof itself (although it takes some futzing to get the triangles in place).