Every organism living in this planet must have been related to any kinds activity of learning. Quite contradictory to many beliefs, learning is not a privilege to human being but an essential part of all living beings. But what actually an activity called learning implied to? Do we as human really understand what is learning? Or we just do an activity that we belief as learning, while depriving our self from the true potential of it.
Learning can be understood as a change in an organism's capacities or behavior brought about by experience. This rough definition encompasses many cases usually not considered examples of learning (e.g., an increase in muscular strength brought about through exercise). This definition covers many form of learning; associative learning, latent learning, motor learning, induction and many more.
Related to learning we also know the term of intelligence. What is the true intelligence? Is intelligence only limited to solving mathematical problem, or there are more to intelligence? In the past our perception about intelligence is very limited only to measurement by IQ. But the latest study, especially the one did by Howard Gardner reveals that there are more to intelligence. He defined a new term which he called multiple-intelligence. What he really implied is that intelligence is not only limited to mathematical capability, but also to many diverge aspects. They are:
1.Verbal-Linguistic (word smart)
2.Logical-Mathematical (logic smart)
3.Visual-Spatial (picture smart)
4.Bodily-Kinesthetic (body smart)
5.Musical-Rhythmic (music smart)
6.Interpersonal (people smart)
7.Intrapersonal (self smart)
8.Naturalist (environment smart)
9.Existential (pondering the questions of existence)
Animals must rely on its visual-spatial intelligence, mainly to survive in every day life. Intelligence in turns also related to memory. Memory helps learning in any organisms, which in turn increase their capability about something.
Roughly speaking memory is the capability of an organism to store and retrieve information. Memory can be classified into different categories (as already stated in my previous writing), they are:
- Sensory register
- Short-term memory (STM)
- Long-term memory (LTM)
Any stimuli perceived by senses pass to sensory register. In sensory register, the capability of an organism to store information is very short in duration. If by change these stimuli are regarded as important to the organism the next phase is the realm of short-term memory. This kind of memory is needed for organism to store information in short-term while maintaining certain activity. That's why they also name it as working memory. By rehearsing, any information from the short-term memory can be passed to the realm of long-term memory. In the long-term memory, the duration of storage can be much longer, and in some cases it's permanent.
Memory is very much important related to learning, either with humans or animals. By memorizing it, they don't have to repeat the whole learning process, making the whole process more efficient. In doing this sometimes organisms do activity, which seemed unrelated to the whole learning process. This activity is very important to crystallize the result of learning in the form of memory.
The latest study concerning this is coming from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The study concluded that rats learn to navigate new spaces by replaying memories in reverse order. After exploring an environment such as maze, rats typically pause to eat, groom or rub their whiskers. Researchers had ignored such behavior because it seemed unimportant-rats being rats. But a pair of investigators decided to see what the rat's brain is doing during these interludes.
To learn more about this phenomenon, the team placed electrodes into a rat's hippocampus to monitor so-called place neurons, which fire in specific sequence as a rat navigates a path. Surprisingly, when various rats paused on completion
of a run, the place neurons fired in reverse order from the firing that had occurred during navigation. This reverse replay occurred more frequently after walking through new mazes than familiar ones, implying that the technique plays a role in learning.
This result reveals to us as human how to increase the quality our learning process. There is wealth of data from experiments in many species, including humans, showing that if learning trials are spaced out in time, they are more effective, as explained by David J. Foster. Reverse replay may explain the reason behind this.
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
沒有留言:
張貼留言