Memory and comprehension: a controversy about the methods and purposes of learning

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Alfonso A. Gracia Gómez

The idea that things are better learned when they are “understood” has become a commonplace. Nowadays, this argument is being used to discredit traditional teaching and to introduce all kinds of innovations of pedagogical origin, many of which, since we may consider the catastrophic results obtanined, can be understood as not having contributed to improve learning, as it would have been expected, but rather have greatly hindered the capacity for effective learning of our students.

The pedagogical positions that emphasize the importance of comprehension in learning share the idea that simple memorization is not enough to achieve deep knowledge. Constructivism, proposed by authors such as Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, maintains that learning is an active process in which the individual builds his knowledge by integrating new information with his previous experiences and concepts. Cognitivist authors, such as Jerome Bruner, also emphasize the relevance of mental processes in learning, and highlight that understanding is essential to organize, interpret and retain information effectively. According to David Ausubel‘s theory of meaningful learning, the student must relate new information in a coherent manner with previous knowledge, since only in this way can learning be truly lasting.

These pedagogical currents agree that understanding transforms knowledge into a useful and applicable tool, which allows students to use what they have learned in real and diverse contexts. According to this, “rote” learning, on the other hand, makes it difficult to retain information, because what is not understood cannot be recovered when needed. Meaningless things can be memorized, but in an apparently trivial and useless way. The only way to achieve solid rote associations would be to understand what is being studied, so that understanding would be the foundation of memory, and not the other way around.

This belief has its origin in several circumstances: the first of all, possibly, our own daily experience. We have the impression that information that we don’t understand is impossible to retain. However, if we reflect on some of our most firmly established memories, we will see that this is not the case. Everyone can remember very long sequences of words, events, numbers or whatever, without the need for comprehension. What’s more, there is even a study technique known as “memory castles” that plays on this fact. Let’s see what it consists of.

The memory castles technique, also known as the method of loci, is based on visualizing a familiar place to organize information. First, a familiar space is chosen and divided into different areas or rooms, which should later serve as reference points. Each of these points is then associated with a mental image, which represents the content that is to be memorized. For example, if you are trying to remember a shopping list, you can imagine a bottle of milk in the entrance, a loaf of bread floating in the living room or tomatoes exploding in the kitchen. In this way, by mentally exploring the space created by our imagination, the images associated with each place allow us to easily evoke the stored information.

This technique uses the structure of space to organize content so that its retrieval is easier and more orderly. From its example we can draw some very important conclusions about how both memory and comprehension work. To begin with, comprehension and memory are not opposed: comprehension must be understood as the ability to retrieve information that has been previously recorded, and this ability can be developed equally endogenously, which is what we usually do, or exogenously, which is what happens in the castle of memory.

The basis of this study technique is to achieve associative links between the data to be remembered, which in turn can be easily retrieved. To do this, it establishes an exogenous association procedure, alien to the internal logic of its elements. In this way, we see that comprehension is nothing other than, strictly speaking, an internalized “rule.” In other words: we understand when we develop the ability to retrieve information in situations in which it may be required of us.

This is one of the main reasons why teachers are required to intervene in an educational process, especially when it comes to basic levels of education: they are the ones in charge of setting the standards from which the information to be memorized can be required. Every explanation, and in particular that of the teacher, consists of establishing a process of organizing the information in a logical and recoverable order. This is, precisely, the second of the reasons why we have the impression that, when we memorize a relatively complex event or formula, it is understanding that takes the lead: the apparent logical connection between the facts that are memorized. However, such rationality is not inherent to the facts, which can always be interpreted in different ways. What must be understood as having produced such an appearance of sense or logic is nothing other than a work of memory instigated by some “other” external to the facts, who constructs and facilitates a version at the same time as teaching the rules by which their different relevant aspects can be recovered from certain associative connections. There is no effective memorization, therefore, that does not include understanding, this is true, but only because the action of “understanding” refers exclusively to the ability to recover information in an organized way. Nothing more.

In addition to this, if we are to assume that one of the two actions is prior to and more important than the other, the “castles of memory” teach us that it is understanding that is subordinated to memorization, and not the other way around. To explain this we can use the linguistic distinction between the signifier and the signified, of Saussurean tradition and which had an important impact on psychoanalysis following the formulations of Jacques Lacan.

Contrary to what is presumed from cognitivist and constructivist positions, it is highly improbable that there exists something like a “biological structure” of language, from which it would make sense to state that new data is memorized as it is “understood,” that is, as it comes to coincide with our previous cognitive structure. Wittgenstein said that the limits of my language are the limits of my world. If what I can think were conditioned by a biologically determined grammar, then we would have a basis on which to affirm that understanding would come before memorization, and not the other way around.

However, since researchers have not yet discovered the longed-for organ of language, and so not being then able to explain its functioning at a neurological level, there is no reason to suppose that we speak thanks to some evolutionarily inherited genetic conditioning. This is an absolutely dispensable approach according to the data we have, and the famous “Occam’s razor” – “all things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the most probable” – invites us to ignore it, at least for the moment.

If we assume, however, that this linguistic structure exists, but that it is learned, then our vision changes radically, not only of learning, but of the human being in general. In this case, the acquisition of language becomes a kind of second birth; specifically, the birth of every individual into the culture in which he becomes a subject. Becoming human, according to this, would mean nothing other than the task of acquiring a series of “previous” significant structures, which are those that, on the one hand, allow us to give order to any subsequent mnemonic fixation and, on the other, make possible what we call “understanding.” In fact, this task of acquiring previous significant structures is what gives its raison d’être to learning as a vital process, as a phenomenon that should not only be understood from merely utilitarian and functionalist assumptions, but also anthropological ones. It is not necessary that what is learned should be useful, because learning has no more important purpose than that of making us human.

Such significant structures, fixed in a memoristic way (without the support of understanding), are what Freud called “memory traces” and Lacan “signifiers”. They make up what for both was the “unconscious”, which constituted the material condition of consciousness and, with it, of understanding. Without the unconscious there is no consciousness, just as without the signifier there is no signified. When we learn new content, what we do is introduce new signifiers into a previous significant framework. Hence the constructivist conviction that all learning must presuppose prior knowledge, as if prior knowledge did not always exist from the very moment someone is willing to learn. This universal condition of learning is known, at least, since Plato: in the advance towards knowledge, one never starts from nothing, what is learned is determined by the very existence of what allows one to know, and which psychoanalysts find in these “previous significant networks” that we call “traces” or “signifiers”.

This is why it seems that, in teaching, the teacher cannot “skip” certain steps, and hence the unquestionable importance that every education professional must confer on didactics. But, at the same time, it must be understood that such “steps” are in reality nothing more than mere abstractions, created a posteriori by the teaching practice itself. Any sequential ordering of the phenomena that make up our reality, which is how current subjects are constituted, is in reality the product of centuries of effort in the cultural development of the human being. Didactics cannot be understood as an a priori science for the simple fact that there is no universal rule of the order in which things should be learned (just as there is no universal grammar with a biological foundation). Therefore, any student can learn things in a different way. In fact, each student learns things as best he can. The one who knows more, learns better, and vice versa. Hence the great importance, in our opinion, of a demanding basic education, but that would lead us to another debate…

The question now is that significant networks are essentially signifiers, but, from them, the subject has the impression that he understands. So, what do we mean by the term “understanding”? Let us return to Wittgenstein: this “understanding” means nothing other than the ability to follow a rule. If the student is able to reproduce what the teacher expects of him, then he has understood. If he believes himself capable of reproducing what the teacher has explained to him, then he will think that he has understood.

Could there be, however, a situation in which the student believes that he has understood but actually not having understood? Of course, because comprehension, understood as the rule of the signified over the signifier, is an essentially alienating moment of human communication, that is, it describes a process in which we submit to a law that is essentially “by another.” Understanding does not precisely indicate a liberating or authentic moment. On the contrary, the one who understands assumes, internalizes, the law, which is the law of culture and of knowledge to which the human being is “born” in a non-biological sense.

From what we have seen, it follows that understanding can be expected to be anything unless “autonomous” the lighter the significant networks (signifiers) of the student are. It is this type of individual that becomes highly manipulable, due to the willingness to submit to the reasons given by the other (their signifieds) and to the difficulty to counterpose a response elaborated from a relatively “own” frame of reference. In a few words: if the student does not have an adequate amount of memorized data – organized as best he can, but sufficiently relevant and well fixed – he will be condemned to remain in an alienated existence, incapable of rebelling against the authoritarian word of any other “comprehensive” one. Such subjects are not only ignorant, but also incapable of any criticism. From which it can be concluded that putting understanding before memory, as the supposed basis of learning, can not only be counterproductive for didactics, but also contains obvious dangers from an ethical point of view.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons