Draw It and You Will Remember It

Source: pxhere

Myra Fernandes, Jeffrey Wammes, and and Melissa Meade have published an article titled "The Surprisingly Powerful Influence of Drawing on Memory" in Current Directions in Psychological Science.  The scholars write, 

"The colloquialism 'a picture is worth a thousand words' has reverberated through the decades, yet there is very little basic cognitive research assessing the merit of drawing as a mnemonic strategy. In our recent research, we explored whether drawing to-be-learned information enhanced memory and found it to be a reliable, replicable means of boosting performance."   

How do the scholars explain this powerful effect on our ability to remember concepts? They argue that you have to elaborate on the meaning of a concept in order to create a visual representation of it.  Mroeover, you use your motor skills to craft the drawing, and you use visual processing abilities to examine the picture and determine whether it has accurately depicted what you intended to represent.  Together, engaging these different mechanisms of our brains helps us remember the concept more effectively than if we simply tried to write out notes or visualize the concept.  

The research clearly has implications for education.  I hope to draw on these lessons as I work with students moving forward.  However, the research also has lessons for how leaders work with their teams to craft and implement strategy.   Sketching out strategies and goals may be a good way to both develop a plan as a team and for people to remember key elements of it.   Asking people to synthesize and summarize what they have discussed for an action plan at the end of the meeting can be helpful, but perhaps sketching it out on the whiteboard might be a better way to move forward from a meeting to the implementation process.  

Varied Practice: Key to Learning New Skills

Charlie Sorrel writes about some fascinating new research on skill development in an article at Fast Company this week.  Sorrel describes research by Johns Hopkins University professor Pablo Celnik.   His studies focus on how people develop new skills.  Celnik has found that how you practice new skills affects the speed with which you acquire and develop those capabilities.    Celnik summarizes his findings:  "What we found is if you practice a slightly modified version of a task you want to master, you actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practicing the exact same thing multiple times in a row."   

Most athletes instinctively understand this finding.  No good coach directs his or her players to engage in the very same practice drills over and over.   Instead, the best coaches vary the routine a bit, while working on the same fundamental skills.   Consider a softball coach working on fielding ground balls.  He or she doesn't just keep pounding grounders at players and asking them to throw the ball to first base.   The coach finds a variety of ways to work on the key skills required to field grounders effectively.  

What's going on when we vary our practice routine a bit?   Celnik describes the process as "reconsolidation."  Natalie Tronson and Jane Taylor have conducted research on the neuroscience of memory.  Consolidation refers to the process by which memories stabilize and solidify over some period of time.   Tronson and Taylor describe reconsolidation as a "distinct process that serves to maintain, strengthen or modify memories."   People retrieve a memory and actively consolidate it again, and in so doing, they strengthen the existing memory.   

Interestingly, Celnik found that reconsolidation works best when you change the task being practiced slightly.   Too much change inhibits the reconsolidation process.   He explains, "If you make the altered task too different, people do not get the gain we observed during reconsolidation. The modification between sessions needs to be subtle."

How The Brain Works

Belle Beth Cooper has a terrific column at Fast Company today, focusing on 10 surprising findings from research on how the brain works.   I highly recommend reading the entire article.  Let's focus on a few highlights here.  Cooper cites some interesting research on multi-tasking. She writes:

Multitasking is something we’ve long been encouraged to practice, but it turns out multitasking is actually impossible. When we think we’re multitasking, we’re actually context-switching. That is, we’re quickly switching back and forth between different tasks, rather than doing them at the same time.  The book Brain Rules explains how detrimental “multitasking” can be:  "Research shows your error rate goes up 50%, and it takes you twice as long to do things."

Cooper also writes that, "Our vision trumps all other senses."  She excerpts from the book, Brain Rules again:  

Hear a piece of information, and three days later you’ll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65%.  Pictures beat text as well, in part because reading is so inefficient for us. Our brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures, and we have to identify certain features in the letters to be able to read them. That takes time.

I found these two findings particularly interesting, because leaders often fail to adhere to these principles.  They find themselves multitasking very frequently.  Often they complain about how many meetings they attend, how little time they have to think, how many emails they respond to, etc.  However, they never confront the fact that multitasking may not be increasing their efficiency at all.  Instead, it may be harming their effectiveness.  Similarly, leaders often forget to communicate visually.  They give speeches, send emails, and the like... but they don't offer a good visual to tell their story.  I'm not suggesting the use of more Powerpoint!  I am thinking about the use of pictures, storyboards, and other mechanisms to communicate a vision or a strategy.