Renshaw and Learning Breakthroughs
Reading Robert Heinlein's Gulf, I came across a reference to Samuel Renshaw. He's also mentioned in Stranger in a Strange Land. Renshaw was a psychologist who specialized in how we process sensory information. His biggest success was a program to help Navy soldiers identify enemy aircraft more quickly by flashing images of them on a screen and drilling them on them until they could identify them in as little as 1/100th of a second. He did other things with these flash images, but his aim wasn't speed learning, per se. It was getting people to pay attention better and faster so they could learn and understand better. Some of his stuff got applied to things like speed reading. Other of his ideas paved the way for better quality control for, get this, whiskey!
There's a nice article about Renshaw here. It's not directly applicable to language learning (though Heinlein's stories tended to use his work for speedlearning including the made-up SpeedTalk. Anyway, the other day I noted that the next breakthroughs in language learning would likely come not from language people but from learning specialists. And then I find this article which talks about, among other things, how to do some memory tricks through the astonishing trick of simply memorizing and forgetting about all those silly memory tricks.
A propos of that article from the other day, William had a nice comment including the following:
There's a nice article about Renshaw here. It's not directly applicable to language learning (though Heinlein's stories tended to use his work for speedlearning including the made-up SpeedTalk. Anyway, the other day I noted that the next breakthroughs in language learning would likely come not from language people but from learning specialists. And then I find this article which talks about, among other things, how to do some memory tricks through the astonishing trick of simply memorizing and forgetting about all those silly memory tricks.
A propos of that article from the other day, William had a nice comment including the following:
You point to books and say 'they haven't changed!' but that's the same as pointing to the same old needle and saying 'it doesn't work any different!' The needle had to be changed to get the job done, and books probably do, too. By that, I mean that a static bunch of information is nice as a reference, but as a learning tool, it's vastly inferior to truly interactive learning devices.I think he's right, but it will be curious to see whether delivery or content will provide the biggest breakthroughs. That is, if we can figure out how to learn faster, we'll still have to figure out what to learn in order to have our brains turn language data into actual language. My thinking on this is still a touch muddled (in case you didn't pick up on that already). More thoughts to come.
2 Comments:
That Renshaw story is absolutely fascinating. I'm so glad you provided that link. I will be using that information and try to increase my reading speed as well as fix my eye coordination problems. Thank you so much!
Keith,
I'm sorry to hear about your company. Hope the Japanese goes well and that you land on your feet with minimum difficulty.
Good luck with Renshaw's info. It's not a cure-all, but there's some real interesting possibilities with it. Just as you can "get" the magic eye pictures in a flash once you know the technique and not at all before, I think there's a lot we can do with our eyes and our brains. It's just a question of doing it once so we know we can and have experienced what it feels like when done right.
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