On "Having What It Takes ... To Learn"

Biological psychologists have long been searching for the "learning engram," the raw materials of which memories made. The only thing we can be sure of at this time is that learning must result in some biological change in the body. Rather than waiting until that perplexing mystery is solved, I recommend that you take the following hypothesis to be true

The biochemical material for learning is produced more-or-less continuously by the brain; you use it or you lose it.

To understand this hypothesis, you might imagine that the material is analogous to audio-visual tape for a television camera. Imagine further that a factory can produce the tape at a fixed rate, that if the tape is used, a reasonably permanent recording is made for future play-back, but that if the tape is not used within a day or two, it goes bad and has to be purged as no longer usable.

The major weakness in the tape analogy is that the material of which memories are made includes not only sounds and sights, but also smells and tastes and touches, as well as emotional feelings that may have accompanied the scenes. That is to say, our memories are much richer in content than television, but the logic of the analogy applies. It has several very powerful implications.

1.

You cannot remember what you study if there is no fresh memory-matter available in your brain at the time. You can learn just so much of any one kind of subject in any one day. In particular, you cannot cram a semester's assignments into a few frantic days and nights of study. On a more positive note, when you have done a good day's work studying, you can really enjoy your leisure activity knowing that you have learned all you can learn in a day.

2.

Any day you let pass without spending some time at your studies wastes some of your potential for adding knowledge to your memory bank. The memory capacity is unbounded; the limit is only in the amount that you can add each day. Which is more, a memory bank gets richer every time the knowledge is used.

In sum, the bad news is that no amount of study now will ever make up for all the wasted opportunities to learn; we can never know as much as we could have known had we learned to our limit every day. The good news is that it is not too late to learn enough to become a well-educated person within the foreseeable future. It is even possible that the amount of memory-matter that is produced by the brain factory every day is greater when it is used on a regular basis.