I teach a once-weekly “User’s Guide to the Brain” for grade 6. The purpose of the course is to help students understand, and become more curious about, how human brains work–which in turn can help them learn more efficiently and deeply.
We recently started our study of memory. One robust finding is that the human brain stores visual images with special ease. Many mnemonic methods (tricks for keeping more information in memory) rely on this fact.
In a classic demonstration of this “picture superiority effect,” a group is split randomly, with one half receiving a list of easy-to-visualize words and the other half receiving an equally long list of abstract words. When their memory for the words is tested a short time later, the usual finding is better memory for the list of concrete words.
I tried this demonstration with the grade 6 class. Imagine my surprise when the group given the abstract words (e.g., justice and truth) performed better! Part of me was embarrassed: my demo did not work the way it was supposed to. But another (better?) part of me was curious, so I asked students a few questions.
I now have a plausible hypothesis to explain the surprising results–an explanation that thrills me. Because Crossroads students are immersed in discussions and demos of Core Virtues, they think a lot about abstract concepts like justice and truth. And guess what? A major principle of memory, well summarized by psychologist Daniel Willingham, is that “memory is the residue of thought.” That is, we tend to remember what we think about.
Our students–your children–are bucking trends. Now that’s something to buzz about …
