Phi Beta Kappa Induction

Learning, Cognition and the Brain
Jamshed Bharucha
Provost & Senior Vice President
Tufts University
Oration at Phi Beta Kappa initiation ceremony, Delta of Massachusetts
April 22, 2007

Congratulations to the new Phi Beta Kappa inductees!

You have demonstrated the highest levels of academic achievement. You have excelled in the eyes of your professors, and are about to enter into the most elite of honors societies. Your Phi Beta Kappa membership will add a glow to your resumes for the rest of your lives. You, your families, and those who know you will be proud.

Today I would like to leave you with one overriding message. While this honor is a reward for your achievements, it comes with responsibility. I know you’re probably thinking: oh no, not another senior-year speech about responsibility; can’t I just celebrate getting this award, graduate, and move on?

Phi Beta Kappa is not just an award. It’s a society. As a society committed to excellence in learning, the responsibility I am asking you to accept is to keep learning (and re-learning) – every day of your life. I try to ask myself each day: what have I learned today? Or what have I re-learned that I had forgotten?

Today I would like to touch upon four aspects of learning – based on research in cognitive and brain science - that pose particular challenges for learning: forgetting, context, implicit learning, and cultural learning.

Forgetting

While in college, your learning is tested during the semester and at the end of the semester. In some systems of higher education, there may even be a comprehensive exam at the end of fours years of college. But few institutions test you after you graduate to see what is retained.

Alas, research in cognitive psychology makes clear that the ability to retrieve what you have learned (even what you have learned extremely well) is disastrous, unless you have been retrieving that knowledge periodically. This applies not just to facts, but to cognitive skills (such as reasoning) as well.

A fundamental principle of brain function is: use it or lose it. The good news is that you never really lose what you have learned. It’s in the brain, but what you lose is the ability to retrieve it.

When I meet alumni at reunions, I like to ask them what their favorite courses were and what they remember from them. They remember a favorite course easily, and the memory usually brings a smile to their faces. But when asked what they remember from the course, unless they have continued in that field, they start to wax incoherent.

One former student came up to me once and introduced himself: “Professor, remember me? I took your course on memory back in college. It was a great course – I’ll never forget it. You gave me an A. That was really cool.”

You can imagine his distress when I popped the question: “so what do you remember from that course?” What came out of his mouth was not a flattering representation of the hugely successful investment banker he had become: “You know, all that stuff about memory, like, how we remember, you know, stuff like that; oh yeah, I remember the movie you showed us – 12 Angry Men, with Henry Fonda - that was really cool”. As a professor whose life is devoted to teaching, you have two options at such moments: you can cry, or you can reassure yourself that somewhere buried in that brain is knowledge of the principles of memory learned some years ago, and that if only this person would live a life of continuous learning and re-learning, his education will not have been in vain.

The first time the tragedy of forgetting was driven home for me was while I was in college. I had taken organic chemistry and nailed it. What’s more, I took the course not because I needed to take it but purely out of interest, and I loved it. Six months later I was working in a lab and the lab director gave me an article to read. I saw a chemical formula that six months earlier I would have been able to decipher, but it was as if I had never seen formulas of this kind ever before. I went to the lab director to ask what this meant, and just as I was asking the question I remembered what it was.

In another instance of forgetting, I was asked to play the violin part of Schubert’s Trout quintet with some really good musicians. It wasn’t a performance – just a sight-reading session – and I had actually performed it once, so I decided I didn’t need to look at the music or listen to the recording: I thought I could just sit down, place the music on the stand in front of me, and I would wing it. But when the pianist launched into the first arpeggios in the Allegro Vivace, I knew I was in trouble. I felt as if I had never seen or heard the music before, and struggled to keep up as the memory started to come back – after the fact.

According to the work of cognitive psychologist Robert Bjork, there are two kinds of memory strength: encoding strength and retrieval strength. It doesn’t really matter how well you have something burned into your memory. It’s your ability to retrieve it that counts. And your ability to retrieve it depends upon how often (and in how many different situations) you retrieve it.

Context

This brings me to my second point: context. The more varied are the contexts in which you learn or retrieve something that you have learned, the better you will be at retrieving it in the future. That’s because the brain learns in very specific contexts.

This poses a real challenge for education, because our ultimate goal in liberal education is to teach general principles of critical reasoning. But the brain learns these principles in the specific contexts in which they are taught, including the kinds of examples used. All the stuff you have learned sitting in Tisch library, in classrooms in Anderson or labs in Barnum, will not be easy to retrieve when you are out in the world – unless you take every opportunity to keep learning and re-learning. Fortunately, there are many ways to do that. You just have to make the effort.

I realized years later that my struggle with the Trout quintet was a case of context-specific learning. When I had performed the piece a few years earlier, all rehearsals and the concert were in the same room with the same acoustics and feel, with the same people, with the same tempo and interpretation. Suddenly, years later, I was playing the piece for the first time in a different context: different setting, different acoustics, different people, playing tempos and interpretations that threw me off. Now that I have played the Trout a few more times with different sets of people in different contexts, I am much more confident of winging it in another new context.

Unfortunately, the design of most curricula or training regimes does not help us get beyond the context-specificity of learning. Learning is compartmentalized into subjects, courses, and often taught in sequences: you “master” one principle before going onto the next. Several studies in cognitive psychology demonstrate that although in the short term learning is better when you master one thing before going on to the next, in the long term learning is actually worse. Long term retention is best served by scrambling learning, even though it seems more chaotic while you are learning it.

In practicing tennis, for example, you are better off mixing up your back hands and forehands than doing a series of each, as long as you practice each stroke the same number of times. While learning this way may be frustrating, it better predicts future performance, regardless of what your coach might tell you.

Implicit learning

Implicit knowledge is knowledge of which we are not consciously aware. We utilize it fluently and automatically. Most knowledge is of this variety.

We cram so much into your heads, there isn’t enough time to practice what you have learned to the point where it becomes automatic. This applies to principles that are specific to a particular field of study as well as general principles of critical thought. Cognitive skills are implicit in nature – like riding a bike. They cannot be taught by talking at you and explaining things until you understand. Explicit knowledge and understanding is necessary but not sufficient if modes of reasoning are to become a part of your mental life. One needs to employ these principles of reasoning so often and in such a variety of contexts that they become automatic.

As the chief academic officer of the University, I am delighted that you all have done so well in your courses. But as a cognitive scientist, I must confess that I’m pretty sure that most of what you have learned will recede into the background of your minds unless you make the effort to keep bringing up the fundamental ideas you have learned, in different contexts, and doing this often enough that you find yourself incorporating what you have learned without effort.

Cultural learning

I’d like to close with the most challenging kind of implicit learning: learning about other cultures. This means learning other languages. But it also means learning about the history, politics, day-to-day life patterns, and gestures, of other cultures. At Tufts we are proud to be among the leading institutions that take an international education seriously. I often say that we fail to understand other cultures at our peril.

But as a cognitive neuroscientist I know that this is easier said than done. Recent studies using functional MRI show that pictures of faces of people of different races activate circuits in the brain that are associated with fear. A lifetime of exposure to stereotypes and expectations pervasive in our society get encoded by the brain, whether we like it or not. In spite of our conscious, explicit understanding of other cultures, our brains harbor unconscious, automatically triggered attitudes. There is no substitute for sustained experience being enmeshed in another culture.

So with cultural learning, as with all learning, your college education is just a beginning. As Phi Beta Kappa inductees, you have been the masters – the gold medal winners – of college education. Now you should lead the way in showing how your college education is just the beginning of a long life of learning and re-learning.