Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded)

Create familiar settings
We know the importance of learning and retrieval taking place under the
same conditions, but we don’t have a solid definition of “same conditions.”

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There are many ways for you to explore this idea.
One suggestion is that bilingual families create a “Spanish Room.” This
would be a room with a rule: Only the Spanish language could be spoken in
it. The room could be filled with Hispanic artifacts and pictures of Spanish
words. All Spanish would be taught there, and no English. Anecdotally,
parents have told me this works.
When setting up their children’s playroom at home, parents could create
stations for science and stations for art—and not do science at the art
station. Students could make sure that an oral examination is studied for
orally, rather than by reviewing written material. Future car mechanics
could be taught about engine repair in the actual shop where the repairs will
occur.
At the moment of learning, environmental features—even ones
irrelevant to the learning goals—may become encoded into the memory,
right along with the goals. Environment then becomes part of elaborate
encoding, the equivalent of putting more handles on the door.
After encoding, working memory kicks in
What happens to declarative information after those first few moments of
encoding? We have the ability to hold it in our memory for a little while.
For many years, textbooks described this process using a metaphor
involving cranky dockworkers, a large bookstore, and a small loading dock.
An event to be processed into memory was likened to somebody dropping
off a load of books onto the dock. If a dockworker hauled the load into the
vast bookstore, it became stored for a lifetime. Because the loading dock
was small, only a few loads could be processed at any one time. If someone
dumped a new load of books on the dock before the previous ones were
removed, the cranky workers simply pushed the old ones over the side.
Nobody uses this metaphor anymore. Short-term memory, we now
know, is a much more active, much less sequential, far more complex
process than that. Short-term memory is a collection of temporary memory
capacities—busy work spaces where the brain processes newly acquired
information. Each work space specializes in processing a specific type of

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information: auditory information, visual information, stories—plus a
“central executive” to keep track of the activities of the others. These all
operate in parallel. To reflect this multifaceted talent, short-term memory is
now called working memory. The best way to explain working memory is
to watch it in action. I can think of no better illustration than the
professional chess world’s first real rock star: Miguel Najdorf.
Rarely was a man more at ease with his greatness than Najdorf. He was
a short, dapper fellow gifted with a truly enormous voice, and he had an
annoying tendency to poll members of his audience on how they thought he
was doing. Najdorf in 1939 traveled to a competition in Buenos Aires with
the national team. Two weeks later, Germany invaded Najdorf’s home
country of Poland. Unable to return, Najdorf rode out the Holocaust tucked
safely inside Argentina. He lost his parents, four brothers, and his wife to
the concentration camps. Partly in hopes that any remaining family might
read about it and contact him (and partly as a publicity stunt), he once
played 45 games of chess simultaneously. He won 39 of these games, drew
four, and lost two. While that is amazing in its own right, the truly
phenomenal part is that he played all 45 games in all 11 hours blindfolded.
You did not read that wrong. Najdorf never physically saw any of the
chessboards or pieces; he played each game in his mind.
Several components of working memory were operating simultaneously
in Najdorf’s brain to allow him to do this. Najdorf’s opponents verbally
declared their chess moves. The work space assigned to linguistic
information (called the phonological loop) allowed him to temporarily
retain this auditory information.
To make his own chess move, Najdorf would visualize what each board
looked like. The work space assigned to images and spatial input (called the
visuospatial sketch pad) kicked in and allowed him to temporarily retain
this visual information.
To separate one game from another, Najdorf’s brain used the work
space that keeps track of all activities throughout working memory (the
central executive).
All of these work spaces have two things in common: All have a limited
capacity, and all have a limited duration. Working memory is the bridge
between the first few seconds of encoding and the process of storing a

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memory for a longer time. If the information held in working memory is not
transformed into a more durable form, it will soon disappear.
What would happen if you lost the ability to convert short-term
information to long-term memories? A 9-year-old boy, knocked off his
bicycle, gave us an idea. Known to scientists as H.M., he is our second
famous mind. The accident left H.M. with severe epilepsy. The seizures
became so bad that, by his late 20s, H.M. was essentially a shut-in—a
danger to himself and others. His family turned to famed neurosurgeon
William Scoville in hopes of a cure. Scoville decided on drastic action: He
would remove part of H.M’s brain. The seizures were deemed to come from
H.M.’s temporal lobe; if parts of it were removed, the logic went, the
seizures should go away. The procedure, called a resection, is still in use
today.
The surgeon won the battle but lost the war. The epilepsy was gone, but
so was H.M.’s memory. He could meet you once and then meet you again
an hour or two later, with absolutely no recall of the first visit. Even more
dramatically, H.M. could no longer recognize his own face in the mirror. As
his face aged, some of his physical features changed. But, unlike the rest of
us, H.M. could not convert this new information into a longer-term form.
This left him more or less permanently locked into a single idea about his
appearance. When he looked in the mirror, he did not see this single idea,
and he could not identify the person in the image. H.M.’s brain could still
encode new information, but he had lost the ability to convert it.
The process of converting short-term memory traces to longer-term
forms is called consolidation. It is our next subject.
Long-term memory
At first, a memory trace is flexible, labile, subject to amendment, and at
great risk for extinction. Most of the inputs we encounter in a given day fall
into this category. But some memories stick with us. Initially fragile, these
memories strengthen with time and become remarkably persistent. They
eventually reach a state where they appear to be infinitely retrievable and
resistant to amendment. As we shall see, however, they’re not as stable as

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we think. Nonetheless, we call these forms long-term memories. Consider
the following story, which happened while I was watching a TV
documentary with my then 6-year-old son. It was about dog shows. When
the camera focused on a German shepherd with a black muzzle, an event
that occurred when 
I
was about his age came flooding back to my
awareness.
In 1960, our backyard neighbor owned a dog he neglected to feed (we
assumed) every Saturday. The dog bounded over our fence precisely at 8:00
a.m. every Saturday, ran toward our metal garbage cans, tipped out the
contents, and began a morning repast. My dad got sick of this dog and
decided one Friday night to electrify the can in such fashion that the dog
would get shocked if his wet nose so much as brushed against it. Next
morning, my dad awakened our entire family early to observe his “hot dog”
show. To Dad’s disappointment, the dog didn’t jump over the fence until
late in the morning, and he didn’t come to eat. Instead, he came to mark his
territory, which he did at several points around our backyard. As the dog
moved closer to the can, my dad started to smile, and when the dog lifted
his leg to mark our garbage can, my dad exclaimed, “Yes!” You don’t have
to know the concentration of electrolytes in mammalian urine to know that
when the dog marked his territory on our garbage can, he also completed a
mighty circuit. His cranial neurons ablaze, his reproductive future suddenly
in serious question, the dog howled, bounding back to his owner. The dog
never set foot in our backyard again; in fact, he never came within 100
yards of our house. Our neighbor’s dog was a German shepherd with a
distinct black muzzle, just like the one in the television show I was now
watching. I had not thought of the incident in years.
What happened to my dog memory when summoned back to
awareness? We used to think that consolidation, the mechanism that guides
a short-term memory into a long-term memory, affected only newly
acquired memories. Once the memory hardened, it never returned to its
initial fragile condition. We don’t think that anymore. There is increasing
evidence that when previously consolidated memories are recalled from
long-term storage into consciousness, they revert to short-term memories.
Acting as if newly minted into working memory, these memories may need
to become reprocessed if they are to remain in a durable form.

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That means my dog story is forced to start the consolidation process all
over again,