.5 Reinforcing the Brain

Then one of the things that I have been saying since before I read Jensen's book, and I feel very good about this so I congratulate myself on this one, is the role of emotions in learning. Jensen equates this with reinforcement. Have you ever heard me mention the benefit of reinforcement? Just about 150 time (if not go back and read the lessons J). Learning must be reinforced in your dependent modality. Each of us has a dependent modality. Some of us like visual learning better, some like auditory learning better, some like kinetic learning better, and reinforcement must be customized to your own dependent modality. If you are a visual learner and you don't get any visual stimulus, you don't learn as well.

The frequency and the duration of the feedback produces something known as felt meaning. If you just learned something, like the meaning of the word tropistic, you now have a fact, but if you feel tropistic, i.e. when you understand what a fad is and have experienced going through one, then you have "felt" the meaning. That felt meaning will last a lot longer than the memorized meaning.

There is a guy who developed a special way of teaching foreign languages and he got absolutely phenomenal results. He could teach 500 vocabulary words, A DAY. Weeks later his students had 90% retention. 500 new foreign language words in one day, and weeks latter are able to remember 90% of them. What kid in Spanish one wouldn't die for that ability? It turns out, that if we just understood the process of learning a little better, it is within all of our brainpower to learn like that. We are just using a minuscule part of our brain.

The unit of knowledge is a fact, but the pattern of knowledge is what produces meaning. The unit of knowledge doesn't mean anything till you put them all together in a pattern. That produces real meaning. The kind of learning we have in school tends to be this piece meal, one fact at a time learning instead of putting it together for whole patterns.

The bottom line is that we need to create something called the receptive mind. This underlines the power of visual stimulation, music, and stories. Boy, I felt good when I saw that brain research supports the use of stories. You know how much I love stories. I think stories are one of the neatest ways to learn, and I've done that intuitively, and now brain research is telling me I'm right.



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