Mental Maps of the World (Lesson 468)

As the author said, everyone has a internal map of the world that is a spider web of connections in the brain. People remember the things through the mental map, and they give the thing a meaning just only through one section, actually people always recognize the things through various sections. There are pictures, sounds, feelings.

As the book says, an interconnected web is included thousands of clusters of sensations and memorise. At this point, I don’t think the best computer can match it. Human’s brain looks like natural and unreasonable. Anyway, human being just can’t remember things in isolation. Think about some abstract concepts in your past life. Those concepts aren’t related to your daily life. For example, can you tell me how many planets around the sun and their names? The answer I’m sure you learned in high school. Then now, I guess you can’t answer it. Don’t sad, it’s normal.

But let me assume the next situation. At that time, the teacher designed a program about planets. Then you and your classmates had to played a role someone of the planets. For the sake of vividness, you would around the “sun” in the program. In the end, you and your classmates happily finished the show. Yeah, that’s a amazing experience for you. And at that moment, I ask the above question again. I think you will remember the answer. Because you attended it, you not only remember the answer – the planets name, you remembered the experience, include the pictures, sounds, feeling, as the above said.

Obviously, people’s brain like the specific things. I think you can think of the brain as a palace or mansion, whatever just a zone. So we have to put something we need to remember as something is concrete. Because there are specific things, we can put them on the right situation, like put on the table or put in the box in this brain palace. And when we need to recall this thing, we could get into the palace, and find the thing.

Back to our language learning, because of the characteristic of the human brain – the mental maps, how can we use it to improve the learning efficiency. I think we should change the traditional classroom learning to the new learning style. Actually, a language learning is not only the textbook, but also the more daily situations. We should learned a language through attending some conversation situations. Increase the experiential sense of language learning. Then according to the memory mode of human brain, you would remember the connected things. Otherwise, if you just learned a language from textbook, the content are always isolated and bad for memory.

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