the April issue of Career Education Mews

I handed out the April issue of Career Education Mews of Osaka Prefectural Senyo Senior High School to our students last Thursday. The issue ran a feature on what it is to hang in there on studying. I quoted a famous phrase that perspiration multiplied by our time spent is our effort.

How can we remember new words efficiently?

J. L. Mclelland & D. E. Rumelhart, 'A Distributed Model of Human Learning and Memory', "Parallel Distributed Processing Volume 2", MIT Press, Cambridge, 1986 "We assume that the units are organized into modules." (p.174) "We would imagine that there would be thousands to millions of units per module and many hundred or perhaps many thousand partially redundant modules in anything close to a complete memory system." (p.174) "The state of each module represents a synthesis of the states of all of the modules it receives inputs from. Some of the inputs will be from relatively more sensory modules, closer to the sensory end-organs of one modality or another. Others will come from relatively more abstract modules, which themselves receives inputs from and send outputs to other modules placed at the end of several different modalities. Thus, each module combines a number of different sources of information." (p.174/175) It is very clear where "the sensory end-organs" are, and imaginable where "relatively more sensory modules" are when they are supposed to be "closer to the sensory end-organs." But I wonder where "relatively more abstract modules" are. Are they in the cerebral cortex? The more outer, the more abstract, then? "Memory traces as changes in the weights. Patterns of activation come and go, leaving traces behind when they have passed. What are the traces? They are changes in the strengths or weights of the connections between the units in the modules." (p.176) The traces can be connections themselves which have been left behind between units, can't they? Neurons are interconnected in a unit, units are interconnected in a module, and modules are interconnected in our brain. "Retrieval amounts to partial reinstatement of a mental state, using a cue which is a fragment of the original state." (p.176) So, when we memorize words, we must do it in the way we can build up new connections and change the strengths and weights of the connections. In addition, we have to acquire some appropriate cues so that we can retrieve words in any context.