chapter. Sorry about that.
You’ve now learned the most important ingredients for improving conceptual thinking. Stress is only helpful to learning when it is positive, short term, and surprising. Long-term stress should be minimized by reinterpreting it. Students who are aware of what stress is, for example, have been shown to exhibit better coping techniques in response to stress and are thus less prone to tense up while learning.13
When are we best able to learn? When we are excited about it, of course. Facts are not that important. It’s the feelings that stick with us. Best is if the feeling is positive. Positive feelings should thus be conveyed at school, university, or in work environments by the teachers, lecturers, or team leaders to promote the best learning. This is much more crucial than the factual content that is taught. My best teacher (my chemistry teacher that I mentioned in the introduction) didn’t keep a stockpile of modern PowerPoint presentations on hand, but he was very enthusiastic about his discipline. And when someone is so passionate about the citric acid cycle, then there has to be something to it. That’s why I decided to study biochemistry. Not because I found the factual content to be so captivating (that came later), but because I was entranced by his excitement for the topic. It is only when something impacts us emotionally that we never forget it—even if it is a form of positive stress.
Learning is all well and good—but understanding is better. And in order to understand, we need a context. Even small children are able to comprehend the world at an incredible pace if given examples and concrete applications to figure out the “why” of things. This happens, not by dumping data and facts on their heads, but by allowing them to construct meaningful correlations for themselves. If you want students to learn new vocabulary, you could give them a list of words. Or you could encourage the children to come up with a personal story to incorporate the new words. Children will quickly gain the individual context that they need to remember the words. I have long forgotten every word I’ve ever been given on a vocabulary list. But there are other words that I have only heard once, such as when I lived in California, that I have immediately used and adopted into my vocabulary. At the same time, we should avoid getting drawn into the temptation of trying to compete with computer software and artificial intelligence. When it comes to speed, accuracy, and efficiency, we are definitely going to lose every time. It is much more valuable to remember our human weakness, er, I mean strength. Namely, that we are able, sometimes even at first glance, when we take regular breaks, to happily absorb useless knowledge. Yes, of course it is important that we make good use of computer science and modern technological media in school, as we are going to need these skills to function in the future world. But we shouldn’t attempt to think like an algorithm. Subjects such as history, natural science, languages, or philosophy, and a good general, well-rounded education are what empower us to establish ideas and conceptual correlations. If you are digging through Shakespeare’s masterpieces and chance across the line, “To be, or not to be? That is the question,” you could choose to learn it by heart, copy and paste it as a cool meme on Facebook, or save it onto your flash drive. The latter takes up 42 bytes but means nothing. Alternatively, you could go to the theatre and enjoy watching Hamlet—and the phrase will suddenly take on meaning.
In this chapter, we have been able to unpack how to build up much more effective categories of thought. By taking regular small breaks, for instance, one is able to produce a thought concept. Once the concept has been understood, it can then be applied to new situations. Only humans are able to do this. When a “deep learning” computer analyzes millions of images, it will, doubtless, be able to recognize that a chair is most likely an object with four legs, a flat surface, and a backrest. But for us, a chair is not so much an object with a particular shape as it is something to sit on. Once we have understood this, we suddenly see chairs everywhere and can even apply our knowledge to invent, develop, and design new chairs. For example, I recently had one of those bouncy yoga chairs at home. My little neighbor remarked, quite correctly: “A ball!” But when I went over and sat on it, he said: “Oh, chair!” Try teaching that to a computer.
3
MEMORY
Why a False Memory Is Better Than None at All
ON OCTOBER 14, 1994, Tom Rutherford’s world collapsed. He was forced to resign from his career as a minister in the Assemblies of God church because his daughter accused him of sexual assault. The twenty-one-year-old daughter credibly asserted that she had been abused multiple times between the ages of seven and fourteen. She claimed that she got pregnant and was forced by her father to have an abortion with a clothes hanger while her mother looked on. Just imagine! Rutherford lost his job, his friends shunned him, and he had to piece his life together with whatever jobs he could find. One year later a new truth was revealed: his daughter was a virgin. Her vivid memories of abuse only surfaced when she had begun visiting a talk therapist for the purpose of stress management. Over the course of more than sixty sessions and through a question and answer game, Beth Rutherford developed a false memory that had never before existed. The situation was not necessarily deliberate, but was undertaken with the best intentions to help the young woman work on past stress factors. However, at some point, she was unable to distinguish her rampant fantasy world from reality. It was only when a gynecological report left no doubt as to her virginity that Tom Rutherford’s daughter recanted her statements. She subsequently sued her therapist for a million dollars in order to raise public awareness of the danger of false memories.1
I’ll admit—the Rutherford situation is an extreme case. However, three-fourths of judicial errors can be traced back to false testimonies.2 People make claims of having become pregnant under satanic rituals, although they never were pregnant.3 An accused person can remain behind bars for decades due to witness claims that they were spotted at a murder scene until a DNA test finally shows that someone else was the perpetrator.4 These scenarios all represent a nightmare that is nonetheless reality, since most of the prosecution witnesses in question were not aware that their memories had gotten out of hand. A classic lying test would not have been able to detect such false memories because, for the witnesses, their statements did not feel false. This is one reason why eyewitness accounts should be handled with utmost caution.
Not only judges, but historians also have their jobs cut out for them in assessing the truth behind the claims of contemporary witnesses. There is still a raging debate about whether or not low-flying fighter planes shot at civilians during the bombing of Dresden, Germany, in 1945. Dozens of Dresdeners claim to remember such scenes from their youth. However, in the firestorm of the bombardment, low-flying maneuvers were hardly feasible over Dresden and were also not recorded in any military reports. The case pits living narratives against dry deployment reports. Who are you going to believe?
Evidently, we are prone to distorting our memories. “That wouldn’t happen to me!” you might say. “I am perfectly aware of what happened.” But it’s not that clear-cut. Take this example: Do you roughly remember the list from the previous chapter? Don’t flip back and cheat! Now, I am going to give you four words but only one of them was in the original list. Which was it?
Sleep
Phenoxyethanol
Blueberry
Submarine
Okay. We can rule out submarine. And phenoxyethanol. What about the other two words? Think about it, try to picture the list. Which one do you pick: sleep or blueberry?
You are naturally clever enough to realize that none of the words were in the original list. But most people would spend some time going back and forth between sleep and blueberry, or else decide with absolute certainty that it was blueberry. The word seems to be the best fit.
I’ll admit that I knowingly led you astray, as I falsely informed you, firstly by stating that one of the words was in the original list. On top of that, the original list had a few key words
