Learning Brain

In the 1950s, a Connecticut man named Henry Molaison became an unfortunate but invaluable source of information about how learning is implemented in the human brain after an experimental brain surgery led to profound amnesia. Studies of how he could (and couldn't) learn - and what those studies uncover about how the rest of us learn - are detailed in this revealing lecture.

Discover why we can remember visual information better than verbal information, and that we remember vivid images better than ordinary ones. Examine why how much you already know about a topic can have a profound influence on how easy it is to learn new information about it. These examples demonstrate conscious "explicit learning."

Learn that much of what we remember is often a plausible reconstruction of what might have happened, rather than an accurate memory of what actually happened. We also discover just how susceptible eyewitness memories are to distortion, and how being asked seemingly innocuous questions can lead to substantial errors in our memory. Married couples, enter at your own risk.

How do you know the distance to the Earth from the Sun? With no first-hand experience, we use "semantic memory" - impersonal, fact-based memory - for world knowledge. Semantic memory also includes our grouping or categorizing of information - but how do our brains do that? Professor Polk makes short, easy work of the subject.

Take a fantastic voyage into your brain to uncover the physical mechanisms involved in forming explicit memories. The voyage begins in the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped structure in each temporal lobe, where explicit learning begins. It continues out to the cerebral cortex - the grey matter on the outside of the brain - where memories become consolidated and integrated with other memories.

Set your highlighters and pens down and stop re-reading your material! These are actually two of the least-effective study techniques. Professor Polk explains why these old techniques don't really work and offers four different and more efficient, approaches to studying, which have been scientifically demonstrated to work more effectively.

To wrap up the course's section on conscious, explicit learning, Professor Polk delivers an enticing "myth-busting" talk about controversial topics in the field. Do people repress traumatic memories and can such repressed memories later re-emerge? Professor Polk cuts through the hype and lays out the actual scientific findings related to each of these controversies.

In this lecture, The Learning Brain switches gears from explicit to implicit learning, that is, learning that is unconscious and hard to verbalize. Discover non-associative learning, like learning to ignore a fan blowing in a room, as well as associative learning, such as conditioning, through which positive and negative reinforcement can shape behaviors over time.

Compare the first time you tried to tie your shoes to your present-day, shoelace-tying mastery. How did you come such a long way? Practice alone doesn't begin to cover the intricate process of your brain learning a skill. See which stages are involved in acquiring skill-based knowledge and how you put them all together, with this insightful discussion.