I read an interesting article about a theory that holds that when we learn things our brains subconsciously replay these events in reverse order as part of assimilating the new information.
They’ve done studies that have shown that the hippocampus in mice brains does this when the mice are being taught something–like how to run a maze–and the mouse hippocampus apparently works similarly to the human hippocampus, so they suspect the same thing is going on in us.
If I understand it correctly, the theory is that the final moves of a sequence are often the most important for getting a reward (or avoiding a punishment) and so our brains place the most emphasis on those, rather than earlier moves we may do before we get to crunch time.
As a result, our brains focus first on the moves we must perform last.
The article doesn’t mention this, but this may explain why the Pimsleur Method works for learning languages.
Paul Pimsleur discovered that his language students learned better if they memorized words syllable by syllable–backwards.
For example, the Hebrew word for "four" is arba. The way you’d memorize that via Pimsleur is you’d have the syllable –ba repeated for you several times, followed by the syllable ar- repeated for you. Then you’d have the whole arba repeated.
I’ve found in my own language study that doing this seems to help. If I memorize words from the front to the back, I often can’t remember how the word is supposed to end. But if I memorize the word from the back to the front, I don’t have as much trouble.
Like I’m doing with that nice Croatian couple in my Friday night square dance group, whom I’m forcing to teach me bits of Croatian. The Croatian term for "Goodbye," for example is (phonetic spelling only; I’m doing this all aurally) dov-ih-jain-ya. When they taught me that, I locked on to the last syllable, -ya, and made sure I had it firmly fixed in mind. I was then able to retain this word not just for the rest of the night (so that I could surprise them with it when they left) but also retain it through to the next week and on to now.
Relatedly, I’ve also noticed that good square dance teachers make very sure, when they’re teaching a move, to make clear up front where you’re going to end the move. If students don’t have a clear idea of that and try to do just the sequence of steps and arm movements then they frequently end up out of place. So special emphasis needs to be placed on the end of the move in order for students to do it successfully.
(In fact, just last night in round dace class I had a problem because the instructors failed to communicate specifically where a move ends and it was messing me up until I asked them to clarify the ending.)
The story as a whole is quite interesting, so be sure to
?Backwards things keep I why explain this does :first the be I’ll ,OK.
So, what happens when you try to memorize a palindrome? 😉
‘Do vijenya’, huh? Just like ‘do svidanya’…
Interesting sound shifts there.
*feeling the Slavic language love*
I often read newspaper articles backwards.
Backmasking?
Actually, it is closer to the Polish “do widzenia.”
The Polish w is pronounced like a v and the dz could be confused with a slurred j.
Cool! I’ll have to try this with my guitar practice too–Learn solos in reverse.
Please! No palindromes! I have AibophobiA!
🙂
OFF-TOPIC:
Jimmy, what do you make of Abp. Niederauer’s description of Brokeback Mountain as “very powerful… one of the lessons [of the film] is the destructiveness of not being honest with yourself and not honest with other people and not being faithful, trying to live a double life”?
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2006/feb/06021306.html
Americanpapist: that is an inherited disorder, you know.
This makes sense to me. When I was in seminary, we learned to memorize Scripture from a Jewish cantor who had memorized the Torah. His method was to memorize 3-4 verses at a time. He would say the first word three times, then the second word three times, then the two words together three times. He would continue building (1-2-12-3-23-123, etc.) until he finished the verse. Then he would do the whole thing over, starting with the last word and building to the first. The next night, he would do the same thing over again beginning with the last verse he did the night before. It sounded tedious, but his ability to start singing the text at any given starting point was pretty impressive. I have tried this method of memorization and found it sometimes very meditative and sometimes very dull.
My 2nd son started pronouncing English this way. He started with the vowel and the final consonant(s) of the last syllable (not the stressed syllable but the last one). For a while, he had five or six words that sounded like “hin”. I remember particuarly raisin and napkin because the raisins were directly over the napkins in the pantry.
Later he added the vowel from the penultimate syllable through the end of the word. It was months and months before he ever did initial consonants.
I may need to (re)learn a spoken foreign language soon, something I was horrible at 15 years ago. I’ll try this method. I certainly can’t do worse.
That explains why our band director in high school always started us out learning a new tune by playing the last two measures!
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