This is a scenario that may be familiar to you – you are doing a course or reading some text from your training materials, and you find yourself stuck on a page – you’ve gone through the content maybe two or three times, but still can’t make sense of it. Why won’t your brain just absorb it?
What we need to take a look at is the concept of ‘working memory’. This is the short timeframe in your mind in which it works with the new information and tries to make sense of it, in order for it to merge with your long-term memory and become part of your knowledge. But the working memory capacity is limited. According to Cowan (2001), young adults can keep in mind three to five chunks of meaningful items at a time. During this transitional stage, if this information is not framed in a way that organised and meaningful, there is a very low chance that it will be understood or even remembered over time.
One of the reasons for this is the lack of foundational knowledge in that concept. When something is examined in isolation, it is harder to make sense of it. That is because the brain does not keep information in separate categories and chunks, but in a neural network of connected memories, experiences and knowledge. Information is not remembered as its own copy, but integrated in relation to existing knowledge structures.
Forming new associations is fundamental to the process of increasing our knowledge system and skillset, which is why it is important that anything new that you wish to learn has a degree of ‘relevance’ to your network of prior knowledge. Without a basis to anchor down the new information, it may simply slip away. Think about what do you already know about this topic? What else does it also have a relationship with? For example, someone learning to bake a cake may also associates some of the steps with the process of making brownies. It also doesn’t have to be something tangible – it’s possible for a random titbit of information to be remembered due to an experience or emotion that occurred at the same time.
Additionally, the content should be relevant in terms of addressing needs in a timely manner. Because it is information that a learner seeks out, either as helpful information or a solution to their problem, they would be more interested and engaged in trying to understand the learning materials. Having that connection to a real-world application will make it easier to move the information from the temporary working memory to your long-term memory.
Therefore, if you are having trouble trying to remember new concepts, try to remember what you already know about the topic, or find some ways it can be relevant to your current needs.