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I'm working through Stanislas Dehaene's most recent book, "How we learn." It is interesting.  From this book:


"Did you know, for example, that the short-term memory of a literate person, the number of syllables she can repeat, is almost double that of an adult who never attended school and remained illiterate?"

His earlier book, Reading in the Brain, there was a slower response time for dyslexic students processing individual sounds.  (More technical and complex, but that was the gist that I remember.)

May be all related...

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Posted (edited)

Problems with this kind of memory (as defined in the article below) sum up life with two people in my house:

Quote

This type of memory is called incidental or implicit memory, and includes anything you didn't know you needed to remember when it happened. 

One of the people in my house that doesn't form these memories without intention is the dyslexic one, and the other presumably has some genes related to dyslexia because it didn't come from my side. I would say this sums up a lot of people related on that side of the family. Nothing is ever important enough to stick. Nothing at all. It has to be memorized explicitly (and this looks painful and like they don't really want to do it), be unusually fun (by their exclusive definition, which often involves "not fun" for others), or involve some kind of trauma/bad experience for it to stick. They EVENTUALLY start remembering Things I Need To Know To Stay Employed and stuff like that when they've been burned a few times, but everyday stuff that people pick up--it's a blank slate. It really interferes with interpersonal connections--remembering things that are important to others, building pro-social habits, etc. 

I kind of assumed this was an ADHD thing (though one person in my family with ADHD is not like this--he's as opposite as you can get and has very different ADHD features in general), and lots of dyslexic people have ADHD too. I wonder if they screened the subjects for ADHD with their dyslexia.

ETA: So, I am reading other sites, and implicit memory is not defined quite this way on other sites. It's defined on other sites as being more about remembering procedures or familiar things, which my family members do in one of two ways. 1. Lots of work because they don't readily retrieve what they know in the right place at the right time, or 2. They form poor habits readily in that they don't monitor their behavior while doing it/don't internalize the right context for the habit/don't learn to recognize how to monitor their behavior, etc.

Both do have a lot of trouble with just Not Learning things that other people pick up though, which is consistent with what the article says.

Edited by kbutton
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Posted

It's interesting, but I'm not sure that definition of implicit memory matches what it was like for DD14 to learn to read. Because her reading lessons were very intentional, so they would not meet the criteria of "anything you didn't know you needed to remember." She DID know that she needed to remember her letter sounds, and she had a lot of hard practice working on them, yet she still had trouble.

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Posted
5 hours ago, ElizabethB said:

Did you know, for example, that the short-term memory of a literate person, the number of syllables she can repeat, is almost double that of an adult who never attended school and remained illiterate?

Is there a control for intelligence here?  

Posted (edited)
15 hours ago, EKS said:

Is there a control for intelligence here?  

He didn't quote the study it came from, it was just a quick statement in explaining other things about how we learn and why it's important.  

In his article "Illiterate to literate: behavioural and cerebral changes induced by reading acquisition," there were a lot of interesting brain changes after learning to read.

Here is a link to his studies.

http://www.unicog.org/biblio/Author/DEHAENE-S.html

Edited by ElizabethB

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