I've been thinking a lot about the brain lately.

Our brains are amazing data processors which we carry with us everywhere we go, evolved over millions of years to help us avoid danger and optimise our lives, and they don't even contain a single silicon chip.

Our brains have the incredible ability to create a kind of internal map of the outside world and guide us through it, keeping us alive without us even being consciously aware of what’s going on.
Take for example the intricate adjustments in movement that are required to successfully cycle without falling off your bike, pass a soccer ball sneakily to your teammate between your the defender’s legs or to drive a car along a busy highway without veering off the road or into oncoming traffic.
Or even specialist skills like manually flying a plane or playing Chopin on the piano. To fly a plane manually, the brain must contain an internal map of the adjustable parameters of the plane and store deep information about the plane’s behaviour in the air. When playing piano, every minute movement and adjustment of the keys and endless combinations are locked into an incredibly rich internal kaleidoscope of sounds and harmonies in the musician’s brain.

These amazing feats are possible through a heavily repeated process of selected focus on isolated subskills, before the new patterns of movement are moved into long-term storage in the brain, readily available for recall without conscious thought in future.

Another amazing feature of the brain is that it disregards information which it doesn’t need to hold onto, or it deems unnecessary.

Think about how many decisions are made by your brain to walk through a busy intersection such as in the picture. Maybe we need to take a moment to thank our brains for not retaining every piece of information such that processed in these decisions, because they are unnecessary after crossing the street. They would clutter our brains when it needs to focus on other tasks.

All this means—we can train our brains with focussed attention to do the most amazing things, but, it discards information it is only fed once.
So what are the implications here for language learning?

• People beat themselves up for being forgetful (myself included), when forgetting things is actually what the brain is designed to do.
• These points support the usefulness of spaced repetition as a means to tell the brain which information to prioritise. See “the Forgetting Curve” on wiki.
• Students often over-prioritise slow self-recall over just looking something up and quickly reinforcing correct language. They want to feel proud of having got to it themselves. I don’t think this is necessary and I think it’s better to say the right things more frequently, regardless of where you got the answer, than to have actually found the correct answer yourself, because this supports future retention.
• We have an internal subconscious narrative that information or language ability is like software which stays at a certain level until it is upgraded to the “latest version”, when in actual fact the quality of information deteriorates over time.
• For accent development, the brain will intuitively want to use old patterns of movement from the first language, when we need to focus carefully on forming new pathways and acknowledge that this will go against our “intuition” and be “hard”.
  

 What have I missed out? What is most important point here for you? What are your thoughts?

This post was originally written as a LinkedIn post which can be found here.