Memory Training with a World Record Holder: Part 1
Date Posted:
February 25, 2019
Date Recorded:
January 29, 2019
Speaker(s):
Dr. Boris Nikolai Konrad, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior
Description:
Boris Konrad, one of the world's top memory competitors and a PhD in Neuroscience, offered a unique workshop that transforms your memory in one day. During this five hour workshop, Boris takes you through classic "Method of Loci" memory training step by step until you have built up enough mental infrastructure to memorize, by yourself, fifty random items.
Boris Nikolai Konrad is a unique memory expert: A neuroscientist at Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, himself a World class memory athlete who set four Guinness World Records for memory as well as one of the best memory trainers in the world, known for his interactive keynotes and fascinating workshops he frequently gives for universities, companies and associations around the world. - https://linktr.ee/borisnikolaikonrad
ROBERT AJEMIAN: All right, I want to welcome everyone to this Memory Symposium IAP event. And a little history as to how it came into existence is that Boris and Martin Dresler, who was his PhD supervisor at the Donders Institute, they work on memory. They published an important paper in Neuron recently on the cognitive effects and the neurophysiological signatures of memory training in a group of experts, people who trained, and naives-- all three categories, right?
And they invited me to a conference out in Berlin. We spoke. It was great. It was a conference that was totally focused on memory training, which is unfortunately a small community.
But after or the day after he gave this workshop-- so I actually attended this five-hour workshop in Berlin. And it was outstanding. And I immediately said you've got to come and do this here. So I've invited him.
And I also invited Martin, who is not here. He's at the Media Lab right now. But tomorrow, for those who are interested, they're going to be giving their more academic talks at 10:30-- I can't remember-- 10:30 in the morning, 10:30 to 12:00, I think.
But today, I wanted him to show you guys memory in a hands-on fashion. So he's going to basically teach you-- and it works, trust me, because I just did it. Take you from like seven items to 50 in one afternoon.
Now, I know some of you can't stay the whole time. You can go in. You can come back out. That's fine. But for anyone who completes it, you will be up to 50 by the end of the day. Whether or not you want to stay there is up to you. You have to decide whether you want to put the work in.
And our teacher here is actually uniquely qualified to present this type of workshop because he is the only human being on the planet, at least to our knowledge, who both has a PhD in neuroscience and who is a World Memory Champion. I don't know if you finished first, but you're up there--
BORIS KONRAD: With a team. Yeah, with a team, I won it, so.
ROBERT AJEMIAN: With a team you won it. And you've been ranked as high as what, 2 or 3 or 4?
BORIS KONRAD: 4 was highest ranking, individually.
ROBERT AJEMIAN: And you just finished sixth in the world, recently. That was done in Vienna. So really, a unique character. So I'm going to turn over to him in one second.
But I just want to make a couple of other comments. And one is we couldn't have a workshop telling you guys, oh, we're going to improve your eyesight 500%. Or we're going to improve your reaction time 500%, regardless of your age. It would be wonderful if we could, right? We can't. We can't do that. But we can promise to improve your memory by 500%.
So that's kind of interesting, right? Why is it that we can improve your memory so much, and we can't improve the other things? What does that say about memory? And in truth, this shouldn't be that surprising because we do have great memory capacity for certain things, right?
An expert golfer like Tiger Woods, he may not have a PhD, but he walks off the course, he can tell you every shot he hit on the golf course because that's his domain of expertise. For narrative, for stories, for autobiographical information something vivid happens to you. You won't forget it.
So we do have great ability to retain memory for certain information, but it's information that somehow is made relevant or important to us. And that gets to the essence of these techniques, which date back at least 3,000, 2,500 years to ancient Greece, where you make information which otherwise has a neutral valence into something that has some sort of resonance with you. And if you can pull that off, you find that, wow, your memory capacity swells to a ridiculous extent.
So the final thing I want to leave you with is, well, if this is such a big deal, why is nobody studying it, or very few people studying it? That's a good question. And that's why having this workshop and some events, because I can guarantee you that outside of Boris and I, this will be a neuroscientist-free zone. Because in general, they do not believe in memory training, with the exception of a few back there-- Kartik, Puya, an aspiring graduate student, Amanda, Diego, and Fred. So with that, I want to turn it over to Boris. And you are going to be in for a very interesting and entertaining workshop.
[APPLAUSE]
BORIS KONRAD: Thank you, Robert. For a moment, I started to believe you were going to give the workshop now, but let's go. So who if you thinks he or she has a really good memory by a show of hands? OK, sure. Right, at this moment, after this introduction, I get it. No one dares to raise their hand.
And I still find it quite interesting, regardless of where I come and how I'm introduced, that very few people would say, yeah, my memory is really good. Most people might say, well, it's OK. Many even think, well, it seems to be quite bad. Seems to be getting worse and worse.
More and more people have their own partner's names tattooed on their bodies. Yeah, out of love, I hope, or is it fear, sometimes? You never know, right? It can go wrong, though. Might not be the best solution. You can see that here. I tend to think there should be better solutions than that one.
My own journey into memory sports started when I was still in high school. I heard about memory techniques. And I thought, hey, that should be useful, being a student, and later at university. But I also heard about this memory sport-- that there's competitive memory. And yeah, I find it quite interesting.
Interestingly, also, it's not super well-known. It's changing a little bit, at least in some parts of Asia over the last years. Let me give you a small anecdote.
At the World Memory Championships, it's an annual event. It's once a year. But at the World Championships five years ago, Mongolia-- Mongolia, a country with just two million people in Asia, for the first time ever, had a whole team competing. And they immediately achieved rank number three in the nations table, in like the medals table.
As a country, they got third. And to honor that achievement, when they flew home, they were welcomed in Mongolia at the airport by the Mongolian prime minister in person. The captain, the head of the memory sports team, as a memory athlete, was Sportsman of the Year of Mongolia and is a judge at MGT, like Mongolia's Got Talent, or something like that.
The Philippines got second. When they flew home, they were welcomed by national television. They were later invited to the national parliament, and the best of them have full-time scholarships to be professional memory athletes.
My team, Germany, we won-- number one, yes. That is title-defending team. I was picked up at the airport by my mom. Local news wrote such a long article, but sadly misspelled my name. Yeah. Well, I don't want to complain too much. I have the chance nowadays quite often in different countries, actually, to show what my sport, memory, is actually all about.
Before I teach you a lot, I wanted to give you a little demonstration at least. And for that, I brought this deck of cards. It's 52 playing cards-- typical poker deck. Can you shuffle cards? Will you shuffle for them for me please?
AUDIENCE: Sure.
BORIS KONRAD: At every single memory competition, the very last-- usually the final one, the tenth one, will be to memorize the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards as fast as you can. So it's 52 playing cards, a typical poker deck. You have to memorize the order of all the cards, which are in random order.
Shuffled a bit? Do you want to give it another quick shuffle? So what do you think? How long do I need to memorize these, for those who don't know what's possible at least? Thanks. No one dares? Well.
AUDIENCE: Five minutes?
BORIS KONRAD: Yeah, five minutes? OK.
AUDIENCE: One minute.
BORIS KONRAD: One minute, OK. And [INAUDIBLE] two minutes, OK. I like that answer. Can someone time me, please? Someone who can take their smartphone or watch or whatever and time it for me? Over here in the middle, what's your name?
AUDIENCE: Emmy.
BORIS KONRAD: Emmy. Can you give me a ready, get set, go, and then time me?
AUDIENCE: Ready, get set, go.
BORIS KONRAD: Stop.
AUDIENCE: One minute, 16.
BORIS KONRAD: One minute, 16 seconds, OK. 1:16. Let's see if it's actually worked. Maybe I can give you the cards? Can you please-- don't drop them, now. That would be-- I'll try to name the cards from memory, top to bottom. So I'll try to begin at the top. And so after I say it, can you show the card around, please?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, sure.
BORIS KONRAD: So I'll start with this card. This would be four of diamonds. Four of diamonds. Can you see it in the back, or is it too small? OK, cool. OK, four of diamonds. And then we have the seven of clubs.
Then it's a five of clubs. It's five of hearts, it's jack of clubs, it's ace of hearts, it's king of spades, king of hearts, ace of hearts, nine of spades, six of clubs, Jack of hearts, eight of clubs, Jack of spades.
Can you put that one to the side? I don't remember the next one right now. So put it to the side. But afterwards-- so now, the next one should be the six of diamonds, right? OK.
And then it's ace of clubs, it's four of clubs, seven of diamonds, five of diamonds, three of diamonds, two of hearts, six of hearts, two of spades, two of diamonds, seven of hearts, ace of spades, eight of hearts, 10 of hearts, ace of diamonds, two of clubs, four of hearts, Jack of diamonds, 10 of clubs, nine of hearts, 10 of spades, six of spades, four of spades, king of clubs, queen of clubs.
Can you put the next one to the side as well, please? Then it's the king of diamonds, five of spades, three of hearts, 10 of diamonds, three of clubs, nine of clubs, queen of spades, eight of diamonds, three of spades, ace of spades, and nine of diamonds.
[APPLAUSE]
OK, thank you. Let's see if I can find the other two back. Of the first I left out, is it a diamonds card? Is it diamonds? Is it the queen of diamonds? OK.
And the second one-- king of clubs, queen of clubs. Can you tell me just which symbol it is? Which symbol is it-- diamonds, hearts, clubs?
AUDIENCE: Spades.
BORIS KONRAD: Spades. Seven of spades.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you. OK, nice-- one, minute 16-- that was OK. My best in competition actually was 30 seconds.
So in competition, the mode is a little bit different. You actually get a second deck of cards, which is preordered. And then you have to put it in the order like you memorized. So if you have like six, seven gaps, you see which cards you're missing. So it's way easier to fill in gaps, so you can go a bit faster. And I wouldn't repeat. So this time, I repeat it to make sure I have it already set out.
Actually, 30 seconds is pretty good. The world record by now is even less than half of that. So it's under 15 seconds by now by a Mongolian student. The American record is something like 16 seconds by a medical student from somewhere in the Midwest, here. So that's a task, of course, we like to demonstrate because it shows what you can achieve with memory.
It's also interesting that many people seem to assume there is a number of people around who can do this really fast, and we just show it off. But of course, that's nowhere near to be true. It's really important to know that this can be trained. This can be achieved. Well, not everyone can achieve a world record. But everyone-- and I'm really sure, everyone can learn to memorize a deck of cards in five minutes in a couple of days.
Like I taught at the workshop with Robert and Martin, you mentioned, who did the research with me, he never really practiced it before himself. And he joined the workshop. And it's Christmas break, he sent me an email, I now did it in five minutes. And he had never done it before. And he's also a few years older than me [INAUDIBLE] So that's just one of these examples.
Before I go on, I would like to ask every one of you to quickly ask yourself two questions. To ask yourself the question, what is something where I feel my memory is doing well? What are kind of contents, what kind of material can I remember well?
And then think of something where you think, oh, that's hard to remember. I tend to forget, even though I would want to remember it. It's something I would like if I could improve my memory for. So this is two questions-- something you remember well and something where you really hope today maybe to learn some techniques to improve on.
So we see some things coming back on both sides. That's interesting. So some people find faces easy, or actually not so much, or how to find a place. But there's also things coming like always on the good side, like imagery, stories. At least no one complained about forgetting gossip. So there's some clusters here and there. That's quite interesting. The names seem to be really hard for most people. All those things like numbers tend to be named way more often to be difficult to remember. And facts and also all that study book material.
In this place, I don't want to talk too much about the brain because on the one hand, I think most people know a lot about it. And also, we have a session about it tomorrow, if you're interested in the science. What I wanted to briefly mention for those who are totally not from the field is that many people still have the idea that memory is a place in our brain.
Like they're thinking computer metaphors and think, well, the computer has a hard drive. The computer has some RAM-- Random Access Memory-- and a processor. And then you try to find those things back in your brain. Even if you look in a dictionary, like I took these definitions here from Merriam-Webster. It gives two definitions, and one of the things it says it's a store of things. Like defining memory like a place in your brain.
And it's quite important to know that doesn't exist. So memory is not a place in your brain. Maybe even our field, neuroscience, was a bit guilty in making people think that because 20 years ago, when ephemera started to be a thing, we published all those papers with some blobs in some places of the brain, and saying, here, I found somewhere to remember names, years. They remembered numbers.
And people got the idea it's really like this place which, again, is not true. It's always more or less your whole brain that's involved in these processes. And yes, of course, different parts of the brain might have different priorities and functions. But learning is really a process. Memory is really a process. It's not a location of your brain. And that's quite important.
I briefly had shown this when in one of my courses at the Radboud University in the Netherlands. Medical students take a course with me on memory and the brain. And at the beginning of the course, I made them give me a definition of memory. It's all so you have this stored information, information itself that is being named, but also the place where. And again, this is not true. This is a little better definition. So again, in the dictionary, maybe the first one fits better than the second.
What's more interesting and maybe even less known for some neuroscientists is how can we distinct memory? There's a whole field, memory research, and you can get different answers. And one level is the time level.
And here, we heard it back already. In common talk, you can go here, people on the street talk about short-term memory and long-term memory. There's one more level, though. First level would be sensory memory. And the duration of sensory memory is like under a second.
You might say, Boris, well, how is that even memory if I forget it in a second? Well, if you look back it our definition, just the ability, the process, to take up some information and then do something with it, it's still a form of memory. It's typically tested [INAUDIBLE] with a task like the following.
So probably, you're sitting too far away from the screen. But if you would sit really in front of my computer, and I show you a screen full of numbers, like this. And I ask you to just look at it. And if I now click again, one of the fields will be randomly selected and marked in the color red.
One of the fields was randomly selected in the color red. You should tell me which number was at this location. Well, try it. Maybe you're sitting too far away, but let's try. So which number was at the field that's not turning red?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
BORIS KONRAD: So I'm guessing. It was number eight. If you really sit in front of the computer and look at the screen, people tend to be able to do that. Even if I put a little delay in, a tenth of a second, 2/10 of a second, people tend to be able to know it because you kind of still see it in front of your inner eye.
If I make it a delay of a second, which is a bit more like what you have here, less than a second because of the distance and of the noise around it, you're not able to do that anymore. But it shows that we have this sensory storage for original information. And it turns out, we have it for all senses. There is equal tasks they do for auditory senses, even for feeling, smelling, where you can show this kind of memory exists.
But let's be honest. If I say, I have this amazing program for you today. We'll, as Robert said, improve it by 500%. So we get it to 5 seconds. That's not useful at all. So it's just useful to know it exists, but it's nothing we can train on. It's already way more interesting when we talk about short-term memory.
Short-term memory, as we see it in science, is quite different to what most people who are not from the fields would say. Because as you see here, I said short-term memory, so it's still under two minutes. So really short, indeed.
In science, of course, we can debate what is it, actually? Often, you will hear concepts about working memory. So not for the science, but for today, I'll use these terms equally. So short-term memory for me is what you would also call working memory.
And besides the short duration, it's also pretty interesting how the capacity is for short-term memory. And I want to test you a little bit on that. So now, it's your turn. If you have something to write with you, that's perfect, if you could take it out of your bag, take it into your hand. Otherwise, try to do it mentally, but it works best if you can type it or write it. Which medium you use, I don't care.
The task will be the following. I'll give you strings of numbers, strings of digits, to be precise. And right after-- right after-- I name the last digit, you're allowed to write or type it in. OK? So I'll start with four digits. The first string will be only four digits long. After the fourth digit, write it down or type it in, OK?
Then I'll give you another string, which will be five, and then six. So I gradually increase it, one per line. So we will see how far we can go, OK? So let's start.
The first one is 4, 8, 9, 1. Write it down. Next one-- 2, 8, 5, 8, 3. 1, 2, 6, 7, 0, 4. 6, 7, 3, 6, 9, 7, 1. Next one-- 9, 3, 1, 4, 5, 3, 6, 8. One more-- 4, 5, 3, 8, 0, 0.
OK, I'll leave it at this one. Anyone still confident in the last one, 9 digits? Maybe? Maybe not? Everyone hopefully was confident with four digits. Did anyone think four digits was too much? No. So four seemed to have been easy. Anyone who wants to name them, just to check it?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
BORIS KONRAD: Yeah. With five digits, anyone? Yeah, I just-- can somebody volunteer five digits?
AUDIENCE: 2, 8, 5, 8, 3.
BORIS KONRAD: Yeah, that's good. Everyone, five digits was still possible? Yeah, OK. Good. Six, it might start to get interesting already. What do you have for the six digits?
AUDIENCE: 1, 2, 6, 7, 0, 4.
BORIS KONRAD: Yeah, 1, 2, 6, 7, 0, 4. OK, for the seven digits? Over here, do you have someone with seven digits?
AUDIENCE: 6, 7, 3, 6, 9, 7, 1.
BORIS KONRAD: Yeah, that's good. 6, 7, 3, 6, 9, 7, 1. Eight digits? Getting more fun.
AUDIENCE: 4, 5, 3, 7, 8.
BORIS KONRAD: I didn't hear you really well, but people around are nodding, so I guess it was good. Can you say it a bit louder?
AUDIENCE: 9, 3, 1, 4, 4, 5, 3, 6, 8.
BORIS KONRAD: Yeah, that's good. Well done. That's already quite difficult. Anyone with nine, thinking that it could have worked or should have worked?
AUDIENCE: I don't know if I got it, but 3, 3, 4, 3, 6 0, 7, 3, 5 0.
BORIS KONRAD: Not completely, no.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
One after each other. So what do you have?
AUDIENCE: I think I got 4, 5, 3, 8, 0, 7, 8, 5, 0.
BORIS KONRAD: Yeah, very good. Awesome. So there's three or four people getting excited. So some people managed to do it. But we see the graduation. So four is quite easy. Five might start to feel, OK, I have to really focus, but it works. And nine is already super hard.
Interestingly, this is something that has been tested already quite extensively in the 1950s by an American psychologist named Miller. And this psychologist Miller already back then did something nowadays we start to teach all the graduate students, but for quite a while, was not so popular-- to be quite good at doing PR for your science.
Because his official paper, his official publication, which is one of the most cited publications in psychology ever, like tens of thousands of citations, is called "The Magical Number Seven." Because he finds if he gives this task to a lot of people, on average, people can do seven. The task is done a little different than we did it here, so I did it a little more difficult than he would have done it. So if you didn't get seven, don't be disappointed about that one. But on average, people can do seven.
But of course, our brain does not work on digits or numbers. If I gave a you letters-- a, f, k, p-- you can also do on average seven. And if I give you words-- bread, house, mill, pipe-- you can also do an average of seven because our brain in short-term memory doesn't have the exact material. It's more like pointing to the actual information. So that's coming from computer science. It's not exactly, of course, the same thing, but it's a bit like a pointer-- you don't actually store the information-- but to some place where it actually is.
Interesting thing is, of course, he calls it "chunks." It's called chunks, then. If you start grouping your information a little different, you can already start to improve your capacity for short-term memory. Maybe those who did it really well with nine digits already did it because they heard about it or intuitively. But in your head, you don't repeat 9, 6, 3, 5, but you make it 69, 53, and regroup it a bit together.
Let's do one more. I'll give you one more row, which will make it more clear afterwards. So listen carefully. It's one more, one more. It's another long one. It's nine digits again. So listen carefully. It's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. You don't have to write it down.
Everyone could do nine. I made all of you geniuses. We're done for today. Amazing. Maybe not, but it's shows-- OK, suddenly I hear, well, it's 1 to 9. It's one information. I could have added four more random numbers, and everyone could have done 13.
So by chunking, by making it one information, it's a string of 1 to 9, it gets easy. And for any of you, for the four numbers, I picked your birth date, and you noticed, it's only just one information because it gets one chunk of information. And this is what you can do immediately to improve your short-term memory.
But of course, when you're sitting here, talking about what you actually want to improve, it's really more long-term memory. You don't want improve what I can remember in two minutes, but in two days, weeks, months, years of time.
Interestingly, if I do the same task, one digit per second-- a tiny bit slower than I did it-- one digit per second, it's actually one of the tests of the Memory Championships. At the Memory Championships, we have one of these tests called Spoken Numbers, where they read out a string of one digit per second. Afterwards, you have to write it down, no gaps allowed. So it's really hard scoring up to the first mistake.
How many do you think the best can do? Can everyone raise their hand? Everyone, raise their hand, please. Everyone, raise your hand. I'll give you limits. If you say that's too much, take your hand down.
If you think is 10 still possible? OK, sure, keep your hands up. 20? 30? 40? 50? 60? 80? 100? 200? 300? 400? 500? So one optimist, that's nice. One person went too far because it's 556-- sorry, 456 at the moment, not 500. 456-- one per second.
Does this mean this person has a short-term memory capacity of 456 digits? No, not at all. But he manages to do the task, like all the memory athletes do, directly in long-term memory. If I now ask you again about the four digits, probably it's already pretty hard. You already lost it. It's not there anymore because that's short-term memory. It's gone after two minutes.
If this guy memorized-- if I do them, I didn't do 400 in a competition yet, but I had like-- my best in competition was like 180 in this task. I would still know all the 180 numbers the next day and probably also two or three days afterwards. I don't know that I know anymore. If there would have been a reason for me to remember them until today, I would have done so. But without doing anything else, I would still remember them a day or two days afterwards because it didn't go in my short-term memory. It went right into long-term memory.
Of course, long-term memory, again, isn't one thing. It's not one storage for whatever. But you can split it by material. This is some of the terms that came back at the beginning. If you look at the psychology textbook, Psychology 101 or something, in the memory section, you might have this picture-- that we split memory in explicit and implicit, often of the term "declarative" for explicit one. So the explicit one is all of the stuff you know that you know, and also that you are able to name, to declare. That's declarative memory.
And there's also implicit memory. A big part of this is procedural memory. Maybe you learned to ride a bike. But if you now meet an adult who cannot ride a bike, and you tell them, well, it's easy. Just like you step on it, and then you use the pedals. It's not going to help them very much because there's way more to it, which you can't declare, but you've just learned by repetition to do. There's, of course, more to procedural memory, just one of the examples.
Episodic memory is all the things-- yeah, stored in episodes. A lot of it is your autobiographical memory-- things that happened to you. Events, as you said, you attended, things you experienced. These are stored like episodes. It's also, again, not just this, but it's a big part of it.
Semantic memory-- it's a bit like we had this trivia or quiz show knowledge. It's certainly an example for semantic memory. If I ask you-- I'm German-- do you know the capital city of Germany, which one is it?
AUDIENCE: Berlin.
BORIS KONRAD: Berlin. So I give you a cue, capital city of Germany. Your memory gives you back one answer. It's a kind of direct pairing. Capital city of Germany-- Berlin.
Interestingly, there's usually the way that memory comes in wider episodes. If I ask you, what's the capital city of Madagascar?
AUDIENCE: Antananarivo.
BORIS KONRAD: OK, one person has that. Good one-- Antananarivo. so I guess most people didn't know it. Most people didn't know it. But now you heard it today, that the capital city of Madagascar is Antananarivo.
So if you happen to watch a quiz show tonight, and they ask for the capital city of Madagascar, chances are, you will know now the answer. Oh, today I heard it. One of the other people in the course said it. It's Antananarivo. So you still remember the episode as well. So you know the fact, but also the episode.
Again, most likely, you will forget it. You will not retain this information because you've just heard it once or twice now. But if you happen to remember it in half a year, and in half a year, you see this quiz show, and they ask this question, you just know, yeah, it's Antananarivo.
But you don't remember anymore how you learned it. As right now, you probably have no idea anymore when did you learn the first time that Berlin is the capital city of Germany, but you did learn it in an episode. So our memory is really good at extracting information this direction.
Where we now go to memory techniques to improve memory, we are working a big part on these things. Luckily, it's all the things you mentioned are hard to remember that fall in there, like names. So foreign languages is often named as an example, facts, that's often sitting here.
And we can also help episodic memory with memory techniques quite a bit. It's much harder to help procedural memory with memory techniques. Not impossible, but I will not get 500% on that one.
Now, if I want to remember a new dance, steps of dancing, or a song, these techniques are much less helpful. I will not have this massive improvement, as I can have with the techniques on other material. [INAUDIBLE] theory block up, so it's important to look at the memory process. It's not just one thing. We have encoding. We learn something. That's obvious for most.
But then we also have consolidation. And for those not thinking about memory often, they forget that there is this thing. Our brain, even when we're not focused, when we do not attend to the information, that's still happening so much in our brain. Big parts of that is also while we sleep.
My lab in the Netherlands, it's also one of the things we focus on in our research-- memory and sleep. How does it belong together? What's happening during sleep that will make a memory durable or be forgotten?
And also, just to be clear in that, sometimes you read an article-- so we never forget something we once learned, or we just can't find it back-- not true, period. We forget things. Yes, we do. And a lot of that is really gone if we don't find it back, just as a side note.
But of course, a memory is then interesting if you can also recall it. So even if it's still there somewhere, but you can't retrieve it, you cannot recall it, it's ultimately really useful.
So when we now look at memory techniques, we start by focusing on how to get stuff in there in a way. And I like to use this image. And it's a bit of my model to guide you through the day. So I like to picture it as a house, as a palace. This term will come back.
And on the roof, I have the word "memory." It's a memory I'd like to support. I'd like to have techniques that help my memory, that support my memory. And these techniques here will be these pillars-- different pillars. One is the method of loci, which we will look at closely. But there are different methods also for digits and names, so we will look into all of these.
Before we get there, I'd like you to look at the bottom. All of these techniques are built on the same principle, on the same idea, visual thinking. The word I've stressed is "visual." The sense of seeing something, visualizing, of course, is a bit more.
You can also visualize as our senses, in a way. You can also picture hearing something. It's a bit weird how we use these terms, but I guess it's clear what I mean with that. So if I visualize something happening, I can also think, what do I hear there or feel or experience? And that's more the way I mean it. It's about what you make up in your mind.
And I know some people are saying, well, yeah, but I don't see much. Does it work for me, then? I remember quite well one of the very first courses of memory training I ever gave quite a while Ago on the very first seat in the front, there was an elderly man sitting there. And I started giving a task where you have to picture something in your mind.
And I saw him, that he has troubles with this instruction. So I gave him a hint. I said, maybe close your eyes. If you close your eyes now, maybe that helps you. He then closed his eyes and said, no. Now, I'm seeing black.
And I said OK, this will be interesting. But then I learned that's not so special eyes. Some people have a very strong visualization skill. They will see it in their head, and others don't. But for what's happening in your brain, it does not matter. How good is that?
And we find it back in our research, there are memory athletes who describe their visualization as well. I don't see much of it-- actually see it-- but I still know I think about it. And that's good enough to get this different brain activation, get different connections in your brain. And it's all about connections when we talk about learning. So it still works really well.
All these techniques combined are usually called mnemonics, mnemonic techniques. It's spelled like this. I think in English, it's usually-- in America, it's pronounced often "neumonics." You don't hear the m anymore. English people often still say "neumonics." You still hear it a bit.
It comes from the Greek. It is spelled this way. So I get to do interviews quite often, sometimes by email, and the journalist writing will be like, Boris, you put an extra m in there, or an extra n. And no, no, it's correct. It's like this. That's a term used to describe all of these techniques.
And I want to start demonstrating to use it, just to make sense, by another task. So I'll release my slide set once again and give you another task. So the question was, does it only work for things like numbers or lists of words, where something is really random and so order is very important? Or is it also helpful for things where order is not so relevant, like learning a new language? And the answer is yeah, it's definitely still relevant.
So it has its most massive effects, the biggest difference, when someone's trained or untrained, where the order plays a role. Like in things like numbers, if you were to practice the method I'm showing you today, you could easily within a few weeks, if you just spend a few minutes a day, improve your memory for numbers, for a string of numbers, from a few to 100. So the gap is massive, massive, massive. But for learning a language, you can still easily be two or three times as fast as without. So I will show you, quite soon, actually, how I use it for language learning.
And the same is true for classes. So it helped me a big deal being a student, also, for all the class material. I didn't finish five times faster than anyone else, but I still managed to do two quite challenging master's degrees in the time of one. And in computer science, I had like perfect score in every single course I attended, and still had time to travel the world to do memory competitions.
And I'm totally crediting it to the memory techniques I used for it. So yes, for order, you have the strongest effects. But it still works for a lot of things.
One more task for you. On the following slides, you're going to see pictures, images, one per slide. And I click through them quite fast-- really fast, actually. So, extremely fast. Better don't blink, OK? So your task is, just in general, say, to remember these images. Are you ready? OK, ready, get set, go.
That was 20 images. Can you remember them? How many can you remember? Let's think about it.
AUDIENCE: Seven.
BORIS KONRAD: Maybe seven, yeah? Could be short-term memory capacity.
AUDIENCE: In order?
BORIS KONRAD: No, order is not so important. Usually, people tend to primacy recency effect, remember the first and last item. But in the middle, it starts to get blurry.
I actually claim that all of you remember all, or nearly all, of these images-- not in a way that you can recall them right now. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you images again. On the next slides, you'll see two images at a time, two images next to each other.
And I want everyone to join in. So everyone-- no one is getting out. Everyone join in. And show me with your finger, which one did you see before? Which one did you see before, left or right? And also, say it loud-- left or right. So which one did you see before?
AUDIENCE: Left.
BORIS KONRAD: Left.
AUDIENCE: Right. Right. Left. Left. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left. Left. Right. Right. Left.
BORIS KONRAD: Sorry, that's off. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Left. Left.
BORIS KONRAD: This one again?
AUDIENCE: Left. Left. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Left. Right. Right.
BORIS KONRAD: Yeah, good job. There was one image, maybe I went really fast on that one, where people were not agreeing. But all the others, I just heard a chorus giving the same correct answer nearly all the times. And if I had more time, I could have shown you way more images.
Actually, there's a set of studies already from the '70s, where there were similar tasks like this. And they started with groups where they just did like 20 or 100 images. And they did a series of examinations of experiments.
And in the longest one, in the longest one, they had volunteers come in five days in a row, a week, for a few hours per day, to look at 10,000 images-- three seconds per image, 10,000 images. The next Monday, they brought them back, showed them 100 image pairs like this. And they had to say which one did they see. And people still saw it 89% correct-- 89% correct.
That's how good your memory for images is. And, one moment-- they did it in different sets. Like when they did sets of thousands, they did really close images like I had here. But it's the same item, like a bottle we see closed or open, like a shoe turned left or right, the same shoe. And still, people had like 86% in this most extreme condition.
If you do words, people still get over 50% of those correct. If you do words, it's not a chance. But people were between 60% and 70%. So, way less than for images, showing a preference for this kind of material.
Still, of course, we also saw the effect that it's a different thing to be able to freely recall it, like name it yourself, or recognize it back. So of course, there's still a difference in that. But I'll show you how you can actually use imagery to improve your memory. But there was the question first.
AUDIENCE: Does that not say that the magical number seven does not really work as a concept, as a theory?
BORIS KONRAD: No, because--
AUDIENCE: The fact that you can remember that many items.
BORIS KONRAD: Yes.
AUDIENCE: And I don't think people were necessarily chunking or doing anything like that. So does that not show that the magical number seven doesn't really work?
BORIS KONRAD: No, it shows that your brain is working on different levels. This is not really working memory anymore. As I said, the people watched the images for a whole week and came back next Monday. That's not short-term memory. Clearly, there's a whole weekend in between, so it's not short-term memory anymore.
AUDIENCE: --different from the numbers that we heard, one after the next?
BORIS KONRAD: Because numbers, like little digits, is like just a variation of 10 of them. So if you really want to have the order of the string, you would use this short-term memory capacity, which is really limited in capacity, really highly focused, really fast. So it has a lot of advantages, but it's clearly gone after a few minutes, while this is more like an activation. You activate a specific pattern to see an image which activates something in your brain.
Then if you see it back, you have the same activation coming back. And then you recognize I had that before. But then, this is happening in long-term, not in your short-term memory. Robert has a comment?
ROBERT AJEMIAN: --point is, is that for short-term memory and random items without any practice ever, five to seven is the most. But there's nothing, as you were suggesting, magical about if you do any practice at all. But yes, if the number was more for generating publicity, as it did successfully, selling 50 thousand citations, than it is an absolute, which the author himself said.
BORIS KONRAD: Of course, yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
BORIS KONRAD: Yeah. Thank you. For him, it was magical because it came back for different kinds of material, and because it was a good claim to put on the paper to get attention. OK, let's do the following. Let's get really into the practice of improving your memory, finally.
And for that purpose, I will tell you a little story. So your task for now is really simple. Try to listen to my story. And if possible, try to see it in your head. Try to see it happening, what I'm telling you now. So try to follow the story. Experience it.
And I'll start with a pretty short example. So it's a pretty easy one. And the task or the story is the following. So here's my story for you. And really try to picture, try to see it happen.
So what you actually see is still my image here. And so I'm going to change. But in your head, try to see it moving away. And you suddenly see a domain name like of an internet address. An internet domain name is showing on the screen-- an internet domain name.
And it's probably saying something like www.king.com, because suddenly the door opens, and a king walks in. And you see it, at his clothes, that it's a king. And the king comes here in the front and says, hi, my name is Phil. I'm Phil. I'm King Phil. And I am here to teach you a class. I want to give a class.
But King Phil is a bit bossy because he starts his class by giving a lot of orders. Maybe he orders all the people to sit as a table and not so far in the back. And he also orders specifically a family that's sitting here at the front, a family of people that's sitting in the front, to join him. There's a whole family, and they have to join him.
And then he goes to the family and said, well, I heard one of you is a genius. He said, right, one of you is a genius. But be specific-- who of you is it? I want to know who of you is it. Be specific.
Short story. Let's repeat that. A domain name pops up. A king walks in, telling you, my name is Phil. He came to teach a class which he starts by giving lots of orders. And he orders a family to join him. Then he said, I heard one of you is a genius. But please be specific. Who of you is it?
That's my story for you. It's a short one to begin with. Well, could you follow the story? You probably heard I overstressed some of the words. And now, I will give you the story again, but leave out all the words I just overstressed. And I want to hear them from you, so I want you to shout it back to me. So what did pop up on the screen?
AUDIENCE: Domain name. Website.
BORIS KONRAD: Domain name, or website. The door opens. Who walks in? It's a?
AUDIENCE: A king.
BORIS KONRAD: His name is?
AUDIENCE: Phil.
BORIS KONRAD: He came here to teach what, a?
AUDIENCE: Class.
BORIS KONRAD: Which he starts by giving?
AUDIENCE: Orders.
BORIS KONRAD: Orders. And he orders someone to the front. Who is it?
AUDIENCE: Family.
BORIS KONRAD: And one of them is a?
AUDIENCE: Genius.
BORIS KONRAD: But they need to be?
AUDIENCE: Specific.
BORIS KONRAD: It was easy, right? So it's still a set of random words, which was already over seven, or eight words. With some folks, it might still work. But with the story, it was super easy. And, you notice, it's not just short-term memory, I hope. If you check here in an hour, you'll still easily remember the story. But it wasn't just random words, either.
Congratulations, you just memorized the correct order of the eight taxonomy ranks in biology, which go from domain, for kingdom, phylum, for Phil, class, order, family, genus, for genius, and species for specific. And that's just a little example of how you can use some imagery or a story to improve your memory. So that was one example of that.
And because this principle, what we used here, is quite important, I want you to focus on that now. So the words I used in my story, sometimes they were matching, like family is families. That's easy. And class is class.
But there was also a word like phylum, which you now remember because of the name Phil. And you hear in the story genius, but you remember, OK, genus is the actual term. You have specific, but species is the actual term. And these words that remind you of what you actually wanted to remember are usually called key words.
And this is an extremely important point because this technique shows that these key words make it useful for tons of material. If you want to remember something useful, it might be pretty hard to have an exact image. If you study neurobiology, there's lots of terms which you probably don't have an image for. But you just have to find a keyword to remind you of it. Maybe you hear a name. It's difficult to remember. But if you find a key word for it, that's good enough to remind you for it.
And this is often called keyword method, in particular if people look at language learning. So the keyword method is something that comes back a lot in the context of language learning. So this is typically what people see if they want to learn words in a new language.
You have a word that you want to study, like maybe in Spanish, cordero. And then it just gives a meaning in your textbook, in your app, whatever tool you're using to learn the words. You have the actual word, and then the meaning. Cordero means the lamp.
Here's the idea if you want to use keywords for that. So the idea is not even to look at the meaning, but only to focus on the to-be-remembered words. And now, it gets Dutch, which was not the purpose. Sorry for that. Wrong slide set, I guess.
But then you have to look here for a keyword. You try to find a word that reminds you of that. And for a cordero, for me, my keyword would be cord, like a cord jacket, a corduroy jacket. And now I have to combine it, the actual meaning with the keyword. So my image is a lamp wearing a corduroy jacket. Now, I picture it in my head. And suddenly I link my keyword in an image with the actual meaning. And that helps me to translate the words easily.
Here's one more example. If I have iglesia, which means church, I might look at the word and see that the beginning of the work, igle, that comes back in English, for example, as the word igloo. So my image would be maybe an igloo which is actually a church-- an igloo church because iglesia means the church. That's the keyword method.
It doesn't only help with language learning in this way, like this one-on-one pairing. Well, luckily, you can use it for more things. If you want to remember the capital city of Madagascar is Antananarivo, you can use it on both sides. And then for Madagascar, maybe you did an image. Maybe you know the movie, then maybe the animals from the movie are an image for you. But if you don't know that, you look maybe for keywords lingually.
So we maybe have mad, and at the end is car, or maybe a mad and gas car, a gas-run car. So it's Mad, and he's driving his or her car, Mad car, and sticking an antenna out of the window to maybe get some signal, but ends up in a river. Antenna and river for ant and then arivo. That's my keywords for the name.
Important is, of course, the moment I want to remember it, I also focus on the actual term. I understand it's Antananarivo. And then I have antenna and river as my images. If I know think back over antenna and river, it will activate the sound because I heard it before-- Antananarivo. So, for example, for this kind of material, it works really well just to link these images.
If you make some more examples from Spanish-- if you speak Spanish, OK, it might be easy now. But otherwise, go through it with me. If you have manzana, I want everyone to think for themselves what could be one or two key words for manzana. Find something for yourself. You have manzana. What could be a keyword for manzana?
Maybe you make it just easier. Maybe you would think of man and sun. So maybe a man is laying in the sun outside and eating some apples for lunch. So manzana is apple.
Perro. Perro? Can you say it? Diego probably can say it better than me. But how do you say perro?
AUDIENCE: Perro.
BORIS KONRAD: Perro. It just doesn't roll like it should be, but perro. What could be an image for that?
AUDIENCE: A pear.
BORIS KONRAD: Like a pear? OK, so it would be two flat, so it's similar, so it could be good. So it's this thing is a pear? So you're no, no, it's an apple. No, that's wrong. It's a dog. So it will take me-- so it's a pear, and maybe you feed it to a dog. That could be your image for that. So again, you have to link it afterwards with pear. Good example, good one.
Montaña-- maybe you say it sounds like mountain enough for me to remember. And then that's perfect. Then you don't take an image. So that's very important.
When I use this technique to learn languages, I didn't make an image for every single word I learned. For those where it was obvious for me, it sticks the first time, I don't need any extra effort.
But for the 30%, 40% of the words where it doesn't, I put in my image. So for montaña, because that's how I say it, montaña, a mountain, you might pick an image, or you say, well, it sounds like mountain enough.
El hueso, hueso-- bone. Try to find a keyword for hueso. Hugh?
AUDIENCE: The color.
BORIS KONRAD: The color? And cerebro means brain, of course. If you know some of the terms, it's probably easy. If you think of different parts of the brain where you have Latin words coming back, so it's easy.
But maybe jugar? Take this example, jugar. Can you give me a keyword for jugar? Like juggling? Yeah, so juggling playfully. Yeah, jugar.
AUDIENCE: It could be like, who was in the garden? Maybe they're playing.
BORIS KONRAD: Who in garden? Who was in the garden playing there? It's my garden. Are they even allowed in there? Who and gar. Who's in the garden? Yeah, OK, good.
Yeah, but you see, it can be totally different things because that's what's working for you. And it's totally different. For jugar, I've heard things like yo gar, jaguar. So, really different things, but all of them work if it's your image. And then you link it with the actual meaning.
And so blue and azul, just for making you attentive, are switching sides. Of course, it's not blue that means azul, but the other way around. But can you find a word for azul?
AUDIENCE: Azure.
BORIS KONRAD: Maybe azure. And then what could be an image for azure, then? So you can translate it, even if you have something like you a gar, it was jugar, right? Because you have your image, it still reminds you of that. You may be not sure if you see it the first time, but you can guess.
OK, probably, there was a form of the word I had talking about playing. So the dog plays with one. So the sight helps you, at least, to directly translate from a foreign language into your own language. Going the other direction, that's true, is a bit more tricky. So at the beginning, it really helps you to understand a lot of a language.
When I was in school, I remember this quite well. When I was in high school, before I started to do memory training, I was really bad in languages. I always did quite OK in maths and the sciences, but in English, I always was like either failing or just not failing the class.
And my teacher told me I just don't have a talent for languages. You're good in the sciences, but not so much in the languages. So it helped my English by now, even though if I cannot pronounce th correctly, it's good enough to teach a class at MIT. So, wonder what he says now?
And besides English, I'm also now fluent in Dutch. I speak some decent Spanish, and also some decent Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin Chinese, it's also a language where people think, well, how does it help here? I see it helps for Spanish. But how is it in a more difficult language?
Let me give you an example from this app. It's called Zizzle. So the story behind Zizzle is quite interesting because it was actually founded by two students from Munich. And one of them was a volunteer in my training study.
So he learned memory techniques in my study as a participant. And he liked it a lot. It helped him a lot. And his friend was a year in China to study and to learn the language. And when he came back that year, he used these techniques to learn Chinese.
What they say is, of course, if you want to study Chinese, as a Westerner, there's a little more that you have to remember than just the meaning. Typically, you have all these aspects. So you have a character. Then you have some meaning. You have some pronunciation, so you have to be able to say it.
And you also have a tone. So Chinese is a tonal language. And some people here can explain it better than me, of course, but it means if you say the same word and change the tone, it can change meaning. Like if you have "ma," it means mother. But if you have "mah," it means horse. So it changes meaning by the way you say it.
In English, we have it. But if I say ma, or mom? She gets I have a question. If I say, mom! she gets I am like angry. If I say mom! It makes it clear. But it's all just changing the tone.
In Chinese, changing the tone can change the meaning or just change the meaning. Like ma is mother, but mah means horse. And so you also should be able to remember that. So in an easy example, you might have this character. The first thing is you have a character.
And then you hear the meaning. It's mouth. So your first step is make an image for that. Maybe for you, it looks like a mouth in a square. Then you have a pronunciation, and it's pronounced "ko." Ko. So you choose a keyword. Maybe your keyword is cold. So cold sounds a bit like ko at the beginning.
And then you have the tone, and for the surtone, which goes down and up again, they have the dragon as a character. So you put it all together and have a character with its mouth open because it's cold outside here in Boston. And so you remember it's ko, surtone, and this character means mouth. In their app Zizzle, what they do is they have tons of these examples prepared to help you learn Chinese.
And of course, not all characters are extremely simple. So some are, but then you have a lot of characters that are combined. This first one here means women. It's "nu." It means women. So maybe your picture looks like women with a dress, like maybe dancing. So in Zizzle, they have an image of a woman dancing with a dress. It's like this.
This one means child. So maybe you picture a child, and the clothes on his hands are sticking out. So this one means child, for example. But then you have a totally different character, which is this one, where you find [INAUDIBLE] except it's these two parts combined. But it's a new character. But you find it's these two coming together.
This one, for example, means good. Something is good. And then you make a story. If the woman is with her child, she probably finds that good. So you know good is woman and child.
Then you have different other characters. Maybe you have this one. And maybe you have this one. And, for example, see again, this is again this character for women.
And this is one which is often, for learners, translated as roof. It doesn't mean anything by itself, but it looks like a roof. So maybe if you have in this story, a woman under the roof. And it actually means peace or safety. So it's peace or safety. So it's the woman. This is a house. Probably, she feels safe.
Or you have this character for kids, child, and under the roof. And this just means character itself, like a Chinese character. So maybe you picture all the Chinese kids have to sit at home, practicing all these 10,000 characters here all the time. I don't know if you can confirm or not, but I heard it's not so wrong, actually.
So you make these stories out of it. And they get funny and creative. And then, of course, you have, again, all the words for that. So this is "nu," which maybe sounds a bit now, like maybe someone now wants to dance. This is like a "zzz." So maybe it sounds like a bee flying around a child.
This one, for example, means on. So maybe you picture the woman, when she comes home, first thing, she turns the light on because it sounds a bit like on. And then you can build up characters and words quite quickly.
AUDIENCE: Are these methods supposed to be a scaffold while you're consolidating things? Or are they supposed to become your longer memories forever to bring these home?
BORIS KONRAD: Very important question. So, more like the first thing. So this should help me improve encoding by a lot. So I can learn a lot of new information way faster. But that doesn't mean I will remember them forever.
On the other hand, it works now in Chinese. If I speak Chinese now, I'm nowhere fluent. I don't want to claim I'm fluent. But we, for example, had some small talk in Chinese before. And I had the impression you were understanding what I said. You can either confirm or not.
I don't have to think about all my images for all the words. But sometimes, I had to pause because I didn't know a word. And then I can try to find my images back. And quite often, it helps. So usually, the images stick way longer than the information itself.
But like all these easy words like I used here, I know it right away. I don't need the image anymore. It's not meant to replace learning, just to add another layer, by making so many more connections in your brain, that even if you lose some of them, you'll still find it back. And also, to have the means to find it back because, oh, wait, I don't remember, but I should have an image for that. And it's way easier to find the image, the story back, than the actual information. Yes?
AUDIENCE: How do [AUDIO OUT] we accept the elements of the image? Like, maybe you'll get to this, but like that first example, I think I would forget whether the word means mouth or dragon or cold. Which parts of the image [INAUDIBLE]?
BORIS KONRAD: Yeah. So I think first thing is I think that happens way less than you might, say, know that you've confused it because like the images you recognized back in the test I gave you before, you recognized these images back. And at the moment of learning, you know what they stand for. So I hardly ever have a feeling that I confuse them. I can still forget images and stories, of course. I'll come to that, how to avoid that. But that I confuse them is usually not happening.
In the Zizzle example, all these characters, they are clearly for the tone. So by the order where it comes into my story, instead of I'll confuse it. And the character itself is a cue. So it looks like a mouth to give me the meaning. So usually, because there's an order also in the story, actually, it's quite obvious. So did I confuse it is nearly never a problem. Yeah?
AUDIENCE: I would argue that it's kind of like recognition memory, when you come up with an entire image in your head, and you have to tell a story again, you're much more likely to get that story correct than you are at starting from scratch. So that's the way-- it doesn't happen very much. We don't get confused very often. It may be surprisingly, but it's at least similar to recognition memory.
BORIS KONRAD: Yeah, exactly. OK, do we have more questions right now?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
BORIS KONRAD: Yes, please, Arthur.
AUDIENCE: So my mom's trying to learn English. She's most of the time trying to label the English word using some Chinese. Maybe Chinese, maybe some of the others. But I thought what's easier for her?
So whenever she was trying to talk to me, in her mind, she always tries to remind herself there is the Chinese for whatever the thing is, and then go back to the English word. Basically, she has one more step to remember the English word. So for me, I'm not sure it is really helpful for her to really get at the point of learning the language because when we learn our native language, we don't really have the extra layer. So I'm wondering what is your opinion of how to deal with these outcomes.
BORIS KONRAD: So, important questions. So if we have this extra layer, isn't it just like preventing the actual learning? Like, one more step? When we learn our own language, we also don't have this extra layer.
So as I said before, when I learned to speak Chinese, or any other language I learned, usually, I don't need this extra layer. Sometimes I do. But the idea, of course, is when reaching fluency, when doing it a few times, that I know the information directly-- that I don't need the extra layer anymore.
But if I don't know it directly, I have the extra layer as a fallback option. So I make more images. I use my mind in a way it has all the capacity, so it's just way easier to get some material in and then just to naturalize it. So that's why I think it's useful.
Also, in the natural language learning, to give a quote which is not by me, but in Nijmegen, we also have the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, so a whole institute just studying how language learning happens, basically. And I have a quote. He's not even doing memory training in any way, but the director of this institute often is also invited to give public talks.
And there's often this question, like, when you learn a foreign language, why can't I learn it like a child, like I learned my first language? Because many people have the idea like, as a child, you learn a language very easily, very simply. And he often acts, I'll say it, a bit ironically, saying, well, so you want to learn a language like you learned it as a child?
So you want to spend five to six years doing nearly nothing else? And then you have the lingual level of an elementary school kid? Is that what you mean? And then people start to say, no, no, no, no, that's not what I actually meant.
But that's what it is. We as adults can learn a new language way faster and better than we learned language as a child, with the one exception of pronunciation. Because our brain, when we're born, is meant to learn all the ways to pronounce all those tones and loses it. So pronunciation is really hard.
But the actual learning of languages, of the words, even of the grammar, we are way faster as adults, even as older adults, than as children. If you see the hours, the time children have to put into learning the language just to achieve a basic level, that's actually not that impressive as yet. And therefore, this extra layer, as I said it, helps me to get some material in, but it's not the idea to keep it.
So maybe your mom will see words because she doesn't practice English often enough, doesn't use it often enough. She's not getting this one step further, where she can get rid of the extra layer. But I would still recommend using this extra layer of Chinese associations in her case to get the words in, and then try to produce English language to get rid of this extra layer. Alexandra?
AUDIENCE: Quick question, but when it comes to a child, and especially if they're raised in a bilingual family, and the language that they speak within the family from when he was born is not English, and then they go to kindergarten. And then in a month or two, they're not being taught six or eight hours in the day only the alphabet and English words in particular. All they do is just listen to their nannies or kids speak.
And then in that two months, they only want just to speak English. So in that way, that's their second language that they're building up. But it's not particularly similar to what their first language is. And they're still kids, but how do you explain that? Because they're not putting that much time in.
BORIS KONRAD: I'm disagreeing on one of the points you said. It's how much time they put in, and only because there's some research about it. This only happens if they really hear English at least 40% of all the language they hear. So underneath it, they still struggle a lot picking up the language.
So if they really have to attend kindergarten on a daily basis, where they have to pick up, and it needs to be a few hours a day. If it's just like a nanny two hours in the morning, it's not happening. So the threshold isn't that low as you might think. So it's actually quite a bit of a threshold on how much input it is.
Also, to really see this progress in just a couple of months, usually it means that while they never spoke it at home, they still grew up in an environment where they heard the language. That happens before you're even born. You're still in the womb. The sounds come in then, but it already builds up your ability to pick up the language later.
Kids who move maybe age three or four or five already need quite a bit more time to achieve that level. But of course, they still pick it up really fast-- in particular, the pronunciation, these kind of things, it's this brain levels, brain that this moment. I don't know if anyone here studies developmental brains. It's not my area of expertise, so I can't really go into details of that.
The brain is saying, of course, we demand also to do not much else than learn-- not to apply, but just to take in to learn. But again, maybe the message might be the threshold might not be that low than you think. So it's actually a couple of hours a days they need to hear it to actually achieve that.
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