Learning Is Not All in Your Head

Part 4 of a Four-Part Series

Last week we discussed how people learn. This week we will discuss how to design your classes to take into account how the whole body learns or how learning is not all in your head.

Learning is not all in your head. It takes place throughout your entire body. All of your senses are deeply involved in the process of learning. In fact, you cannot separate your senses from learning. After all, how would you learn anything if you were not using any of your senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, or taste. You would have no inputs to your learning process. So, how does the entire body learn?

The entire body, including the brain, learns through movement and repetition but learning can be altered by stress and emotions. Movement is needed to engage the brain while repetition is used to move the information into your long term memory. Stress needs to be minimized as you learn while your emotions need to be tuned to learning. Let’s see how.

Movement Influences Learning

Our body’s senses provide a continuous stream of data to the brain, which we use to make decisions about the environment around us. The thoughts we produce will be expressed back through the very same senses we used to collect information from in the first place: speaking, creating music, or typing on a computer to record your thoughts.

When your hands are active, your brain is more engaged. Therefore, “hands-on” learning —drawing, playing games, acting out an experience —activates the brain. The brain needs movement to keep it focused on the task of learning.

Repetition Supports Learning and Retention

A famous study on retention of textbook materials compared the percentage of material remembered after different intervals of time. The results:

Time Interval	% Remembered	% Forgotten
After 1 day	54%	46%
After 7 days	35%	65%
After 14 days	21%	79%
After 21 days	18%	82%
After 28 days	19%	81%
After 63 days	17%	83%

In another study on recall after listening to a lecture, students forgot more than 90% of the material after 14 days! Remembering what you have heard in lectures is even more difficult to recall because you are not able to slow down, pause, or reflect on what you’ve heard. Lecturing does not provide for effective training.

To overcome the natural “fading” effect of short-term memory you must recall and repeat what you want to remember. With each repetition, the brain moves the information into longer term portions of memory. The process of recalling over increasing intervals of time is called spaced repetition.

People with different IQs have similar spaced repetition recall patterns. For example, if you learn a foreign word, you will need to repeat it within 10 minutes, then 24 hours, and again within 5-7 days to ensure 95% retention. And then again, 25-30 days later and again within six months. After a few repetitions like this, you are on your way to storing information for recall for years.

The Role of Feedback

Feedback is critical to learning and is the main factor in creating controlled procedures. Our discussion of the learning loop and PDCA in last week’s article emphasized feedback as the primary driver of improvement.

People are more likely to continue what they are doing if they receive positive feedback. Conversely, too much negative feedback will cause people to stop. When learning a new task people need constant positive reinforcement to overcome the failures introduced along the path of learning.

Stress and Emotions Alter Learning

Stress caused by some type of physical or emotional trauma produces a hormone called cortisol that disrupts the connections between brain cells in the learning and memory part of the brain. Too much stress literally “shuts down” the brain and stops the learning process cold. Emotions are just as critical to learning. They influence our attention, meaning and memory.

If you are angry, sad, upset, worried, or silly, what do you think your learning performance would be? Now compare that to being happy, energetic, enthusiastic, or serious. People perform better when they are happier so performance in class discussions, tests, or exercises improves. Stress and emotions alter learning both positively or negatively depending on the level of stress or emotion encountered.

Optimum Learning Experience

What is the best course design? It should include movement and repetition and we can’t let stress or emotions run wild. The idea is to design your training units with 15 minutes of lecture followed by a 40 minute interactive exercise. Alternatively, you could have interactive lectures of up to 50 minutes provided they engage the audience with questions, discussions, and other interactive methods.

But remember, don’t let people sit motionless and stare at a PowerPoint presentation for an hour. The average adult attention span is about 15 minutes, after that it becomes hard to follow new material easily.

Breaks of 5-10 minutes should be taken after every unit followed by a review of what you just learned. If the training is over multiple days then review the past material each day the following morning. Review all of the important points at the end of the training program. Ideally we should review again after one week and then one month to ensure it sticks in long-term memory.

Training designed with these points in mind will keep the students involved, with information retained, and with increasing performance for years to come.

Now let’s review. Learning takes place throughout your entire body. All of your senses are deeply involved in the process of learning. The entire body learns through movement and repetition but can be altered by stress and emotions. Training units should be designed with highly interactive lectures, multiple breaks, and reviews at increasing time intervals.

Want to see how it works? Attend the next How to create well-defined processes or ISO 9000 Lead Auditor training classes to find out.

Part 1: Is Your Training Effective?
Part 2: How to Increase Your Training Performance
Part 3: How do People Learn?
Part 4: Learning is Not All in Your Head

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Posted on Wednesday, June 29th, 2005 under Quality Training

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.