On this week's installment of being annoyed by The Hidden Brain, it's...

Well, I can decide if I should title it:

Silos in Academia are Good for No One

Or:

I Have a PhD so I Don't Need to be Self-Aware

It's such a toss-up that I'm truly torn. Here's the story.

I'm in the barn mucking stalls this morning. The podcast I loved is no longer producing episodes and I am bereft because l finished the last episode. Wanting something to listen to I decide to go back to The Hidden Brain. Surely the episode which so annoyed me was an anomaly because the back episodes have been good. The current episode is about memory which is a topic right up my alley. Between my personal reading on memory because I'm interested and my reading to help H., I feel pretty familiar with the subject. I'm always happy to learn something new about a topic I'm interested in. 

The good news is that there is nothing in this episode that is cringy. (It's sad that cringy is now the low bar.) And much of the information was good. It was mainly focused on how students can become better at recalling material for exams. There were some good tips... 

- Being able to learn and recall information is a skill that can be learned and effective practice will help a person improve that skill. 

- You have to be willing to engage with the material by asking questions, by finding similarities, by synthesizing different sources into your own words. (Yes, the homeschoolers out there are probably thinking that this sounds just like Charlotte Mason's thinking. And they wouldn't be wrong.)

- That creating stories and characters around what needs to be learned can help recall.

It was about at this last point that I start to think, "This is the perfect seque to discussing memory palaces. I bet we here about that idea next."

Chirp. Chirp. Chirp. Chirp 

Did you here the crickets? No memory palaces. No mention of how oral societies encoded their culture and knowledge into stories with vivid characters. Nothing. You would his branch of academia discovered some of these things for the very first time. It was a fantastic display of ignorance of areas outside his narrow field and a disturbing Western-centric view of the world. 

Then the hosts asks about tips for learning seemingly unrelated pieces of information, say the US Presidents. Once again, I perk up. Now is when he will redeem himself. 

Chirp, Chir-- you get the idea.

Instead of the effective way of learning disparate information, he suggests using mnemonics. In fact, that's how he memorized the US Presidents. A teacher had taught his class a nonsense song using the first letters of the name of each president. As long as he can sing the song, he can repeat the names. 

Now, you have to know that I, too, have memorized the US Presidents when I taught a class and helped 8-10 grade school students to learn them. Yes, we used a memory palace. And stories. So at the end of the year, the students could name the presidents in order and tell you a little something about them, But wait, there's more, they could also tell you the number they were and none of this had to be done in order like the guest's little mnemonic trick. They weren't repeating a list, they actually knew the order of the presidents. So if I asked them who was the 20th president, they could easily say James Garfield and that he was assassinated. I still remember this several years later because we put James Garfield in the door going outside (every fifth object is a door or window to help keep track) and we told a story about Garfield the cat shooting the president. No, it doesn't make sense, but it creates a vivid picture and makes it memorable. If I were to spent less than a half hour reviewing the presidents I would still have them memorized because I can easily remember the places we put each of them and can walk through it in my head. Forgive me if I'm a little less than awed at the guest's answer. 

I know memory palaces seem a little archaic and not everyone knows about them, but if you're studying memory it seems as though you might have a vague awareness of them.

Having given up all hope on the memory palace count, I listened to the end of the interview. The host comments that the guest is known to make use of technology to help his memory. 

The guest then mentions that he is horrible about remembering upcoming events so uses a fairly extreme amount of alarms and calendars to help him. He then recounts how he only realized he was due to be on a flight taking him to a speaking engagement 95 minutes before the flight was due to leave. He hadn't packed and couldn't remember what he was supposed to be speaking on. 

Memory perhaps? Ah, the irony. 

Now this is the same man who spent twenty minutes discussing in detail about how memory is a skill, how it can be strengthen with work and practice, how you just can't think about remembering and expect it to happen. Perhaps a conversation with other neuroscientists about how brain real estate is in high demand; that if synapses aren't used, they will be taken over for other needs. Sometimes tools aren't as actually helpful as we think they are.