Why We Remember by Charan Ranganath

I requested a preview copy of WHY WE REMEMBER by Charan Ranganath after reading his guest essay which explains the difference between little “f” forgetting (fairly common retrieval failure) and capital “F” Forgetting (lost or completely gone memories) in The New York Times. Ranganath has spent decades studying memory mechanisms and is currently a Professor at the Center for Neuroscience and Department of Psychology and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California at Davis. His new book is subtitled “Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters” and he writes in detail about how the brain works and the various experiments in his research. The content is fascinating (e.g., how false memories are built), but complex at times. Ranganath emphasizes that “your remembering self is constantly - and profoundly - shaping your future by influencing just about every decision you make.” He includes extensive notes (roughly fifteen percent of the text) and bibliographic references (another twenty percent) in support of his arguments. This text also made me think about a much older book from Joshua Foer called Moonwalking with Einstein which first introduced me to the method of loci or creating a “memory palace.” Although sometimes academic in tone, WHY WE REMEMBER received a starred review from Publishers Weekly (“Approachable and enlightening, this is worth seeking out.”).

How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene

HOW WE LEARN by Stanislas Dehaene is subtitled “Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now.”  Dehaene, a professor of experimental cognitive psychology at the Collège de France, has clearly taken steps to make his material approachable and memorable, including providing several colored diagrams and images which illustrate brain and neural development. However, HOW WE LEARN is not a light and easy read. Dehane begins on a more theoretical level with Part One (What is Learning?) and offers seven definitions; continuing to Part Two (How Our Brain Learns) where he devotes an entire chapter to the role of nurturing.

As an educator and librarian, I struggled with finding a target audience for this text amongst my peers, primarily due to its scholarly nature and somewhat limited practical applications. For example, I do think they would be interested in his comments on grades; he says: “Grades alone, when not accompanied by detailed and constructive assessments, are therefore a poor source of error feedback.” Other colleagues would likely disagree with his clear favoritism for explicit teaching over constructivism (or discovery learning) with further comments like, “The most efficient teaching strategies are those that induce students to be actively engaged while providing them with a thoughtful pedagogical progression that is closely channeled by the teacher.”  These ideas are developed in Part Three, the Four Pillars of Learning: Attention, Active Engagement, Error Feedback and Consolidation. Overall, I am pleased to see so many positive reviews and hope that Dehane (and the many other scholars he cites) will next turn attention to how one makes remote learning more effective, especially in these uncertain times. As Dehane notes, “Numerous studies, both in humans and animals, confirm that stress and anxiety can dramatically hinder the ability to learn.” For those seeking more detail, HOW WE LEARN contains over 50 pages of notes and bibliography, plus an index.