The Perfection of Learning: Even Elephants Forget!
Imagine that you never forgot-- anything: facts, languages, places, experiences, skills… Would that be a good thing? Be careful, lest the King Midas curse come to haunt your learning and cognition! The brain has natural physical limitations that would eventually be reached. Perhaps your perception, emotion, and ability to speak and move would be spared, but recognizing new things—and making connections with previous knowledge—would not. Upon meeting someone new, you wouldn’t be able to learn the name or the face. You couldn’t learn the latest lingo, or even the latest dance!
Why must we forget? As an adaptive mechanism of mind & brain, forgetting allows for more rapid and flexible behavior: we can retrieve memories that are important more efficiently, and can generalize from our experience to new situations. Without a capacity for new learning, the motivating power and joy of novelty would fade. If we never forgot, the physical limits of the capacity of the brain to store memories would eventually be reached and individual leaning would halt in gloomy shadows of the past. Enlightened learning involves knowing and unknowing, making connections to past experience, and making decisions for the future based on information and assumptions in the present.
As educators, we need to balance the demands for improving memory—an ability that is so important for success in academics and the workplace—with tasks that exercise other skills like creativity, communication, and compassion. These essential skills, as critical to the 21st Century as they are, have always been the foundation of perfect learning.
Danny Franklin is Six Red Marbles’ resident neuroscience expert and the prime mover behind the Natural Learning Approach™. He has a theology degree from Harvard, has studied Buddhism, and is a former Math teacher.
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