Associative Memory

OK, the basics first. Our brain is basically made of neurons, billions of them. And they are all interconnected, with hundreds of trillions of connections. These connections are called synapses. These synapses pass signals to other neurons with the help of very small particles called neurotransmitters. Through these synaptic connections, every neuron establishes associations with its surrounding neurons. Based on the amount of signals being passed from one neuron to another, the synapses between them strengthen and weaken.

This forms the basis of memory. We remember everything based on the associations we can make with what we already know. That is, we remember new things by strengthening and weakening certain synapses. We do this by first finding the neurons responsible for something related to the things we wish to learn, and then, by manipulating their synapses, we succeed to remember something new. Also important to know is that one can make multiple associations of a single piece of information. So we can remember one thing in multiple ways, in multiple parts of the brain.

Now that is quite a fancy biology lesson. But what I really want to convey is: how does all this relate to what you experience in day-to-day life? It does. It explains the basis of what we know as “intelligence”.

If I tell you to learn something and ask questions from you about it a week later, some people will answer more questions correctly than others. Why? Since we didn’t know the answer to this till now, we said, “Maybe one of them is simply more intelligent than the other”. But what does that mean? What makes some people intelligent and some not at all? Yes, you guessed it right: it is something related to associative memory. So if I tell you to learn something, you will go through the data, in whatever form it may be, and try to associate it with something you already know. It may be some emotion, some sensation, some physical object or if the data is theoretical then other theoretical stuff that you already know. It happens unconsciously, so you won’t be able to feel the stages as I have described here. And it doesn’t matter what the association is. What matters is: how many associations you can find.

As an example, I will take myself. Most of my school-mates would agree that I have a natural affinity for classical physics. I answered most of the difficult questions in class. So how did I do it? To get the answer we will have to go to my childhood. Till I was about two years old, I lived with my grandparents, in Ranchi. We had a simple house and a huge lawn. And like every kid I was curious, but unlike many kids, I was given the freedom to explore. By exploring things around me, I learned the nature of the physical world. My favorite pass-time was taking rice out of a jar and putting it into another jar. And my favorite toy was a cardboard box. And when I grew up and went to the physics class, it was suddenly all so intuitive to me, because I could immediately make associations with the knowledge of the physical world that I learned in my infancy. For every law that I learned, I could find many many examples of it, and hence many associations to enable me to learn it. And so whenever I see parents discouraging a curious kid by telling him to sit down and shut up, or when I see parents gifting infants extremely complicated toys with lights and sound in them, I speak. Because unknowingly, due to a lack of knowledge about the human brain, they are depriving their child of his/her full potential. About why such people are allowed to raise children is a matter which can be discussed later. But lets move on.

So as I have demonstrated, the reason some people learn faster than others is because they can make more associations with the thing they are learning. And the more information you acquire, the better you would be able to learn new things because success of learning new data depends on the data you already have. And this is primarily the reason why you should learn actively. Not passively, actively. You should always be finding new information to learn.

If the reader has ever taught, or given a talk or a presentation, I am sure he/she must have encountered a tip saying, “Explain things by going down to the listener’s level”. If you are a teacher and you haven’t heard this, then I’m sorry mate, you’re not a good teacher. Anyways, now you know why this tip is so important. Because it comes not from higher cognitive levels of human thought, but from the core neurological functions of the human brain. Because the listener won’t understand or remember anything you say unless they can relate it with something they already know.

And this, my friend, is how humans learn. This is how you can make people learn. This is why some people learn faster than others. And this is why we desperately need to make some dramatic changes to our education system. Because lets face it, we are not exactly letting our children explore their full potential.

And so, when Steve Jobs said “stay hungry, stay foolish”, I really wished that those who heard will follow.

The Human Brain

Ah, the human brain: the ever-elusive part of the human body, which countless of scientists are trying to understand, but have not been completely successful so far. As a student of science, I acknowledge the possibility that we may not be able to understand the human brain, for how can a machine understand its own workings. As Lyall Watson puts it:

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.
-Lyall Watson.

And although we may never be able to fully understand its function, we have learned, through research, some very interesting things about it, which have given us a pretty good insight on how it might be functioning.

Following this post will be series of three more, where I discuss three key mechanisms on which the brain functions:

1. Associative Memory: This post will relate to how the brain learns new things by forming or weakening synapses.
2. Mirror Neurons: Also dubbed as “empathy neurons”, these help us connect to other people and explains how we are able to relate to our environment.
3. Conditioning: The most important topic, which explains most of the behavior exhibited by humans.

All these posts will be strictly from a scientific perspective, based on scientific findings. No spiritual voodoo going on here. I’ll take concepts from neurology, behavioral psychology and sociology.

But first, a few basics(for those who didn’t care to read biology in schools). From Wikipedia: The brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. The cerebral cortex of the human brain contains roughly 15–33 billion neurons, perhaps more, linked with up to 10,000 synaptic connections each. The brain controls the other organ systems of the body, either by activating muscles or by causing secretion of chemicals such as hormones and neurotransmitters.

In short, it is probably the most complex and the most important organ in the human body. Without it, we would cease to function, to learn, to act, to react, to communicate, and to think.

Now what may be the purpose of this post? Why am I suddenly writing about the human brain? There has to a purpose, right? Yes, there is. The purpose is to educate. I always say that with knowledge comes understanding of the world around you. When we begin to understand how the brain functions, we understand why people behave the way they do. We understand our fellow human being. My sincere hope is that this understanding will help to create much needed understanding in the world. It will help us solve our quarrels. And ultimately, I hope that it plays a small part in building a better world for all, where one respects their fellow human not because of societal rules and norms, but because we have truly begun to understand each other. I would like to live in such a world, won’t you?

Also, in this introductory post, I would like to give a side-note for my more poetic friends. There is no ‘soul’ and your ‘heart’ doesn’t tell you stuff. There is no evidence to support any of these claims. Anything that feels like ‘soul’ or ‘heart’ is essentially emulated by your brain, nothing else. So stop getting brainwashed! Stop believing everything popular media tells you. Their main aim is to make as much money as they can, not to educate you. That’s the main reason they engage in lovey-dovey stuff – because it sells. If they started telling scientific truths, they wouldn’t be able to sell their movies. Believe it – that’s how sick our popular culture is.

Back to my upcoming posts. I hope they will play a small part in making people understand each other, see why discussion and active learning are better than debating and quarreling, and see themselves from a new standpoint. So, stay tuned, stay hungry and stay foolish (a slight modification of Steve Jobs’ statement).

EDIT: Updated the link to the first post. So you can click on it and get reading :)
EDIT 20110917: Updated the link for the 2nd post. Just one more to go :D