Neuroscience frequently is oversold in talking about learning. For example, pretty much every instance of folks touting neuroscience prescriptions for learning have already been shown valuable by previous cognitive research. However, looking at the neural picture can give us a bit of insight into why certain things work. 

At core, our brain is a massive (10¹⁰) network of neurons, with even more cross connections (10¹⁴). What makes thinking is neurons en masse representing contexts and learnings interacting to trigger actions. However, the things we act on are concepts - a dog, a meal - that are represented by patterns of activation across those neurons. And that’s how we activate things, with words and images, at the cognitive level, Those are the tools we have, and so that’s the level at which we can think about impacting thinking. 

Then, what learning is is strengthening the connections between certain neurons, the synapses. Importantly, we can only strengthen a connection so much before the mechanism that does the strengthening fatigues and needs rest. A metaphor is useful here: you can only improve your conditioning so much on just one visit to the gym, and it takes multiple visits to change your health and strength. So, too, with the brain. And, just like working out, if you stop before the changes take hold, you go right back to your old unchanged self. 

Thus, we can see that while we do need the ‘event’ to jumpstart the learning process, providing initial concepts, examples, and practice, we need to come back over time and do more. Otherwise, learnings will extinguish, and this occurs rapidly: 50% of memory fades in a few days! This is costly in most instances, because bringing people back again and again includes time off-task, travel costs, and more. We need an alternative.

That’s what Elevator 9 is about, leveraging technology infrastructure to overcome that limitation. We can reactivate learning over time by bring learning back to life repeatedly yet minimally intrusive. That’s what we’re talking about!

This is the next in a series of posts that reflect the Liftology videos we also did on this topic. This post itself is a prompt, and the series of posts are a course in learning science. We invite you to follow along as we go through the background of effective learning experiences.