I Am Not a Tape Recorder

I Am Not a Tape Recorder!

Dr. Robert Bjork, chairman of Dartmouth College's Department of Psychology, feels that one key reason people don't "realize their capabilities," is because we think of ourselves as some kind of recording device. When someone explains something to us or we sit passively in a classroom, we expect that we're going to record the information through some kind of human video camera.

"We don't work anything like a videotape recorder," says Dr. Bjork. "The way we learn something new is to relate it or fit it in to those things we already know, in contrast to a videotape, where the more you have on tape, the less room you have for something else."

Human beings have a phenomenal capacity to take in new information, providing that we have preexisting knowledge to interpret and store new ideas. Problems sometimes arise when we try to access things that we have learned. "The mistake everyone makes is that we spend way too much time on input and too little time on output," says Dr. Bjork. "A student will read a chapter three times, highlighting in three different colors until the only material that stands out is material that's not highlighted. That kind of process is nonproductive." Dr. Bjork suggests you take a three-step approach to learning new material:

1. Read the material through once.

2. At the end of the section, try to summarize the key points. Rephrase, in your own words, what you've just read.

3. Try to generate another example related to the material or make up your own "test" questions about what you've read.

"Reading something once and then summarizing it may produce twice the recall level of reading it twice," says Dr. Bjork. "It tends to reveal to us what we understand and what we don't understand. The act of retrieving the material from memory is in itself an important learning process—much more potent than simply having something presented to you."

A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.

—Alexander Smith,
Scottish poet