The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public. -George Jessel
The Warehouse of Your Head
There is a warehouse in your head unlike any other. This warehouse can never be filled up - it has no limit to what you can put in there. In fact the more you cram in the bigger it gets. And as it gets bigger and bigger the more efficient it becomes at capturing and retrieving new information.
To pull off this amazing feat your brain has highly tuned processes for gathering and indexing what it stores. When you learn something you can work with those processes - or you can fight against them (which we seem to be taught to do).
Working With Your Brain
The first thing you need to know is that your brain is that, despite having unlimited space, it is still kind of stingy with what it lets in. Nothing gets put directly into the warehouse without making it past a few gatekeepers - the first of which is your focus or attention.
Your Brain’s Day Shift
The happy fellow in the picture above represents your focus. And the two storage containers are for your short-term memories, one for your working knowledge in your prefrontal cortex and the other for your life experiences in your hippocampus.
Your focus has 2 primary duties for helping you learn.
1. Capture What Is Happening
Your focus’s first job, which may sound obvious, is to pay attention.
I don’t know where it comes from, but for some reason, we tend to believe that deep in the recesses of our minds, we have a perfect recording of everything that has ever happened right in front of us and that somehow - if we just think hard enough - we can unlock any memory.
We don’t and we can’t. Don’t believe me? Try the quick test in the video below:
You have to pay attention to what is happening around you to have any hope of capturing that into our long-term storage.
2. Create Context
The second responsibility for your focus is to tag incoming information with links to what you already know. Sometimes those context links may just pop into your head, other times you’ll have to work to create them.
For example, if I asked you to learn that veins are spongy and arteries are firm you might forget which is which. These are just random facts. But if I further explain that the arteries are responsible for carrying the high-pressure blood as it leaves the heart then it would follow that they would need to be harder to maintain the pressure and keep your blood flowing. When you add context your brain is better able to remember information going forward.
Your Brain’s Night Shift
When your focus is done for the day your subconscious night shift takes over. The night crew also has 2 main responsibilities to help you learn.
1. Clean Out Your Temporary Storage Containers
Your night shift’s first responsibility is to clean out the short-term storage containers. If the information seems useful or unusual then it goes into the long-term storage of your neocortex. The mundane details, like the color of the wall behind you, probably won’t make the second cut. These details are deleted from your memory forever. If you have to retrieve that memory then your brain will probably just add an acceptable default color in your head. Whatever isn’t relevant to the story in your head just gets wiped.
2. Index What Is Stored
Your night shift is also responsible for using the context tags created by your focus to build the neural pathways in your brain that connect the new information to what you already know.
Our consciousness uses those pathways to recall our memories. The more pathways you have to a piece of information, the more likely you’ll be to remember it.
Your Workers Are Unionized
Your day crew and night crew are both unionized.
For your focus that means you have between 20 to 90 minutes (depending on how much training he has received) before he must take a break. That means if you pass that point your focus goes on break, with or without your permission. Anything you try to learn on his break is pretty much a waste of time.
You can develop how long your focus can go without a break by stressing it. This is NOT done by multitasking as you might think. Multitasking is more like trying to build muscle by loading up with sugar and then bouncing from one exercise to another after just a single rep. It is just going to make things worse.
To strengthen your focus you have to force yourself to stay occupied with an activity or thought for longer than you want to. The longer you stay focused on something, especially if it is boring, the stronger your focus becomes.
A unionized night crew means they need a full 8-hour shift to do their job. The union has strict rules on how long everything should take and they don’t play catch up the next night if you cut their last shift short.
Since their first responsibility is to clean out the temporary storage a shortened shift may mean that all they get around to doing is wiping out your short-term memories without doing any real work towards putting information into your long-term warehouse.
The worst part is that it seems that union rules prevent you from criticizing the night crew. That means when your memory starts fading from lack of sleep you will blame yourself for being stupid and forgetful when the real problem is just that the nightcrew hasn’t been getting its job done.
Using Thos Processes
Thank you for reading Part 2: of our series on the Everyday Superpower of Learning.
This article was rewritten a couple of times, but I ended up using the analogy of an unusual warehouse and its union workers because it uses some tricks to help you remember what you read. In the next article, I’ll explain what those tricks are and you can use them to help you learn and remember anything.
This analogy makes sense. Looking forward to the next part!