People live their lives using their abilities and ideas in their environments, and they think of new ideas in the process. The ideas they think of and learn over the course of their lives affect how they see the world.
What does education psychology tell us about that? Teachers use principles of learning in school to make ideas memorable. How do those principles play out with ideas that we learn outside of school, and how does that affect how we remember them?
ACT I
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We’ve been talking about conflicts between worldviews. People live their lives by using their abilities and their ideas in their environments and that makes them think of new ideas. When people find combinations of ideas that they feel they can use to do everything they need to do in life, they remember them, and believe in them, and teach them to their children.
This leads us back to the Principles of Learning, which means, factors that affect how people remember ideas.
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Readiness means that when people are curious about something they’re more receptive to learning about it than when they aren’t.
Primacy means the ideas that people hear first are easier to remember than conflicting ideas they hear later.
Recency means ideas that people have heard most recently are easier to remember than ideas they heard about longer ago.
Intensity means that ideas that are presented in ways that engage your senses more are easier to learn than ones that engage them less.
Effect means that ideas that have the most powerful emotional effect on you are easier to remember than ones that don’t have as much emotional effect.
Exercise means that ideas that you use are easier to remember than ideas you don’t use.
Freedom means ideas that you wanted to learn about are easier to learn than ideas someone tries to force you to learn.
Requirements means ideas are easier to learn when they can be built up from ideas you already know, and with learning materials you have.
ACT II
Scene 1
None of these things that make ideas memorable depend explicitly and exclusively on the five steps of science.
Readiness and Freedom are curiosity.
Primacy and Recency only have to do with when you heard about the ideas.
Intensity is the engagement of your senses, and Effect is the engagement of your emotions.
Requirements is preparation.
Exercise is practice. Exercise favors science to some extent, even though it doesn’t depend on science, because reliable information is what produces reliable results.
This means that to tell a memorable story of the world, you don’t need to get people to learn anything new.
You could find out what they want to hear and tell them a story about that, to get Readiness and Freedom on your side.
If you build upon ideas they already believe, that helps you get Primacy and Requirements.
If you repeat your story frequently you get Recency.
If you tie your story into ideas they already have strong feelings about you get Effect.
If you can surround your story with different types of sensory input you get Intensity.
If they can use it for something they feel is important, that puts Exercise on your side.
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That insane line of reasoning from the last episode that started with boys learning to drive tractors when they were 10 and ended with people being afraid that Michael Jackson’s music could turn people into homosexuals had all the pieces of this puzzle.
In this hypothetical town (like the one where I grew up), men worked in dangerous jobs and people felt it was wrong that a few men didn’t want those jobs, because that set a bad example. They also knew that gay men liked to have sex with men, which means they acted like women in a way. These men who didn’t want to work in dangerous jobs seemed to act like women too.
Connecting ideas in their minds on their own (or at least, feeling like they’re making the connections on their own) is Freedom.
Feeling like they’ve found answers to questions they asked is Readiness.
Building upon ideas they already knew about is Requirements.
The first explanation they think of is Primacy.
When some charismatic guy tells them that men who don’t want to do dangerous jobs are homosexuals, and that homosexuality is a highly contagious incurable disease, and he connects those ideas to as many other negative ideas as he can, that gives him Effect.
If he tells them that in a church, a town hall, a TV show, or anywhere else that was specially prepared for public speakers, that gives him visibility, acoustics, sound engineering, and other added sensory input to make an impression on his audience, which means Intensity.
If people keep repeating what he says, they all keep hearing it, which is Recency.
If people believing that and repeating it all the time creates such a hostile environment that all the homosexuals in town move away, and it keeps any more from moving in, that’s Exercise, because the people seemed to do something and succeed at their goals, even though hardly anything they believed about homosexuals was true.
This is the kind of thing that people connecting their feelings without facts can lead to. This is why we need a story of the world that is built up from facts.
ACT III
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Believing in science is something you learn how to do. It could be a skill, personal history, or cultural background. Once you learn why reliable information is better than unreliable information, you can filter out unreliable information as explanations.
Learning to recognize and use the five steps of science is a Requirement for understanding science.
Once you do that, you can focus the curiosity of Readiness and Freedom on explanations that follow the five steps of science, and ignore ones that don’t.
You can get Effect on your side by feeling that reliable information is leading you in the right direction and by ignoring unreliable information.
You can get Intensity on your side by knowing which kinds of sensory input you’re looking for and tuning out irrelevant sensory input.
By continuing to do this you get Exercise.
You can’t always control what you hear and when, but you can get Primacy on your side by looking for reliable information first.
You can get Recency on your side by looking for it all the time, so that the most recent, or one of the most recent, explanations you heard for something will be a reliable one.
You probably don’t consciously take all of these steps one at a time. These are just things that happen when you learn how to distinguish reliable information from unreliable information, and learn why reliable information is more valuable.
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Theatre uses all but one of these directly in communicating ideas to people, and uses the other one indirectly.
Requirements are minimal. All you have to do is to go to the theatre, give them your ticket, and sit in your seat.
Readiness and Freedom are easy too. All you really need is to be interested in the play you decided to watch. It often helps if you know something about the play ahead of time.
Artists use Primacy by building the story up from the very beginning. The first thing you see on stage when the lights come up contributes something to the ending of the play by telling you something about the characters and setting.
They use Recency by making every single thing that happens onstage contribute to the ending. Every single thing the audience sees or hears onstage is an opportunity for the artists to add more to the story, and professional artists take advantage of them all.
Artists use Intensity by surrounding the story of the play with sensory input. That includes lights, sound, scenery, props, costumes, and in some showsmusic, video, dance choreography, fight choreography, and pyrotechnics.
They use Effect by weaving together the script, the actors’ performances, and all the rest of the sensory input to tell a coherent story the audience can feel. The audience empathizing with the characters in the play is a big part of that.
The only Principle of Learning artists can’t use directly to help make a story memorable is Exercise, because there’s no good way to teach the audience a skill and let them practice it during a play. But if you do open their eyes to ideas they hadn’t thought of before, and they remember those ideas and use them in real life after the show, and they feel that makes something in their lives better, that is Exercise.
ACT IV
Scene 1
Now with all this in mind, how do you help tell the unified story of Being Human on Planet Earth?
One obvious thing you can do is to learn all you can about science and communication. As uncertain as the future is, you can be certain that there’s going to be a lot of need for those two things.
What about right now, where you are?
If you’re in high school, you’re in a very good position to help tell the story.
The purpose of the story is to make education easier and better for both students and teachers. There are probably a lot of students and teachers in your school who would want that.
An easy way to get that started is to start talking about how people always make
[-2 bpm]
the best decisions
they can think of
in the situation
they’re in
for themselves
and the people
and things
they care about.
That’s the underlying theme that connects all your classes that deal with human behavior to theatre and biology. Theatre connects to all the other fields of art, and biology connects to all the other fields of science, and math.
The rest of this series is about different ways to get that conversation going and ways the story of Being Human on Planet Earth connects to real life.
Many problems among people are caused by people on one or both sides misinterpreting something. If we can just talk to each other about how we’re all making
the best decisions
we can think of
in the situations
we’re in
for ourselves
and the people
and things
we care about,
we have a starting point for putting all of our ideas together and making better decisions.