association

When we first learn new information, we create shallow neural pathways in our brain that can quickly disappear. To retain information for the long-term requires reuse. Beyond the learning techniques referred to in Don’t Forget The Forgetting Curve (Part 1) (mnemonic devices, association, and multi-channel learning), re-engagement with the material is crucial in deepening the related neural pathways. Some aspects of re-engagement that play a big role in mitigating the effects of the forgetting curve are:

Repetition
Recall
The Halo Effect

Repetition is one form of engagement that is built into the Gokhale Method Foundations Course. Each technique is taught repeatedly in the course, and in multiple contexts. The most-repeated techniques in the course are:
Stretchsitting: we begin the course with this technique, repeat it whenever we prepare to watch slides, and use it to do our check-ins at the beginning of each lesson.
Shoulder roll: the simplest and easiest of our techniques, it is a part of stretchsitting, stacksitting, tallstanding, and glidewalking.

The shoulder roll is repeated throughout the Gokhale Method Foundations course

Butt-squeeze walking: Students learn this in Lesson 1, and return to it adding additional features in Lessons 3, 5, and 6.
Breathing into the back: This is a subtle but key concept that students meet in Lessons 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. In spite of the emphasis and importance placed on this technique, it seems to get forgotten easily.

Repetition is crucial for kinetic experiences, as it establishes muscle memory and gets you comfortable with new movements or body positions. It builds physical patterns as well as mental ones (think about how an annoying pop song that plays repeatedly on the radio can get stuck in your head!)
 

Recall, or conscious remembering, is a type of re-engagement that is superior to repetition for certain learning experiences. Rereading your textbook after class constitutes repetition; taking a booster quiz qualifies as recall. A booster quiz might use multiple choice questions that ask you to think situationally about the subject to choose a best answer, or it might include short-answer questions that require you to think critically and apply your understanding of the learned concepts. The effectiveness of recall quizzes as booster events for memory is demonstrated in the graph below.  

The graph shows the difference in the amount of material remembered between two groups, one of which took time to reread the material, and the other of which took the same amount of time to answer questions asking them to recall the material.
 

‘Booster events’ in the hours, days, and weeks following learning dramatically impact how much you can recall on the subject matter, and for how long. Repeat booster events give you a bigger return for each consecutive effort.

Each green line on the graph represents memory retention after a booster event. The rate of memory loss decreases with each successive event.
 

“If your goal is to produce long-term retention, and if your goal is to produce behavior change, then what you do after training is more important than what you do during training.” Art Kohn, Professor, Portland State Univ School of Business, on holding corporate training programs.

Now you might think that to retain all the information you learned in the Gokhale Method Foundations Course, you will have to recall every topic covered. Luckily, this isn’t the case due to something called the halo effect. The halo effect shows us that recalling just a few ideas improves retention of the whole learning experience. Seeing the nubs of a Stretchsit® cushion can help remind you to traction the back against the backrest, which will help recall a shoulder roll, more expansive breathing in the chest, and a general feeling of wellness and being in “good shape.”

In the Gokhale Method, each technique you learn connects with other techniques, body parts, feelings... For example, rib anchoring not only lengthens your lumbar spine, but sets up a natural spinal self-massage accompanying the breath, delivering an overall feeling of well-being. It may also cue you to elongate your neck, adjust your pelvis, and shape your feet whether standing, sitting, or laying down. Any of these hooks can serve up the halo effect and benefit your posture and your wellness.

The rib anchor is a key concept in primal posture. Recalling it can trigger the halo effect, bringing about length in the lumbar spine, a shift in breathing pattern, and a sense of well-being.
 

Towards the goal of providing our students with better booster events, the Gokhale Method Institute is building some additional services:

1. An online complement to the Gokhale Method Foundations course, including mini-quizzes, a way to track progress, recaps, etc. We will call this the Posture Oasis. If you are a graduate of the course, you will be able to work and play in the Posture Oasis retroactively.

2. Geographically-based Chapters that will allow graduates of the Gokhale Method Foundations course to connect with each other for in-person study groups, review and online discussion.

Of course, we will continue to send you these bi-weekly newsletters and encourage you to attend Alumni Workshops and sign up for our Online University for graduates. For those who haven’t taken the Foundations Course yet, that’s a great place to start! We look forward to a society that has better posture, less pain, and great function!

Pop quiz: What posture technique(s) does the poised Burkina woman below remind you to do?

 
Burkina woman drying her laundry

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Notes: For more information on the history of the concept of the forgetting curve, you can read more here on Wikipedia. These research articles, “Benefits of Testing Memory. Best Practices and Boundary Conditions,” and “The Power of Testing Memory,” go into more depth about the forgetting curve and how to overcome it.

As a posture teacher, I am very aware of my students’ tendencies to forget the finer points of the Gokhale Method. The longer students wait between classes or refreshers, the more they’ve forgotten. Although there’s always room to improve our teaching methods, forgetting is and will always be a natural phenomenon that accompanies any kind of memory acquisition.

According to nineteenth century psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus and his theory of the Forgetting Curve, people have a steady rate at which they forget material over time. After learning new material, we forget the majority of what we have learned within 24 hours; we forget even more in the following days.

The Forgetting Curve shows how much information we lose, on average, hours, days, and weeks after a learning event.
 

Normally, discarding much of what we learn throughout the day is an important task for our brains. Most of our memories are useful for the short term, but are not needed by the next day: it’s not crucial to remember what you wore to work last week or what time you walked the dog. To handle all the information you receive throughout the day, your brain purges most of its active memories in order to focus on crucial information. But your brain doesn’t always know how to distinguish the unimportant stuff from important material you want to keep a hold on.

From this article in Learning Solution Magazine on the forgetting curve, we learn that in training programs, “research shows that, on average, students forget 70 percent of what is taught within 24 hours of the training experience.” 90 percent is forgotten within a week. But we also learn that there are ways to let our brains know which information is important, and which isn’t.

Getting ahead of the curve

One method of priming information for long-term memory is through better presentation of material, including using mnemonic devices. Scientists and teachers alike have often found that presenting information using tools like rhyming, patterns, spatial or kinetic cues, or in otherwise relatable ways aids it in being more easily remembered. For example, when teaching tall standing, Gokhale Method teachers use the mnemonic device “three, three, and three.” The symmetry of remembering the steps in threes is a cue that groups related steps into very digestible amounts of information. This technique also helps trigger physical memory, since the three steps always follow in order and move sequentially. Can you recall the three sets of three steps for tall standing, in the feet, lower, and upper body? (Answer: kidney bean feet, feet facing out, weight mainly on heels; soft knees, soft groin, behind behind; ribs tucked, shoulders rolled back, neck tall.)

Many of us learned the mnemonic device ‘Every Good Boy Does Fine’ to remember the notes represented by lines on a music staff, and ‘FACE’ for the notes in the spaces.
 

Multi-channel learning or multimedia learning is another technique that often leads to better memory consolidation and recall. The redundancy principle teaches that presenting non-text images (like animations) at the same time as auditory text helps improve information absorption.

In the Gokhale Method Foundations Course, we present as much of our information as possible with accompanying images to demonstrate the concepts we discuss, and to link the auditory information with visual understanding. We are able to go further than is possible in most academic environments, and add in kinetic and social learning as well. The broad combination of input methods we take advantage of in the course—hands-on instruction, images of good and bad form, instructor demonstrations, repetitive practice, watching other students move and receive adjustment (which hones the eye), commenting on what we see and feel, using tools like a skeleton (sometimes) as well as posture aids like chairs and cushions, feeling our own bodies for physical cues, using anecdotes in addition to medical and historical support (to address the intellectual aspects of the course information)—creates a rich and layered foundation of knowledge to support comprehension and retention.

One reason this multi-channel learning is so powerful is the effect produced by associating newly learned information with previously stored information. This association enables and improves the process of moving information from short-term memory to long-term memory. When we connect something we learn to something we already know, we are actually building upon information retrieval pathways in our brains that we already have practice in accessing. This increases the likelihood that we will succeed in remembering this new information, because we can cue recall by accessing the previously stored information.

We love to take advantage of this association, both by providing the type of rich learning experience discussed above, which increases the chance that students can make personal connections between course info and fields they already have experience in, and by using familiar analogies to explain new concepts. When we talk about hip-hinging, we like to compare the movement to the drinking bird toy:

The drinking bird hinges at the hip without distorting his spine, just like we should! This image helps new students to understand the movement.
 

When we discuss stretchsitting, we often talk about hanging the back against the back support the way a picture hangs on the wall; in stretchlying on the back we liken our backs to a hammock that contacts the bed one segment at a time, lengthening all the while. Because these analogies are all based on memorable, simple images, they are very easy to both understand and to recall when a student returns to the subject to practice. They help trigger physical memory, because an association has been built between the physical and muscular sensation, and the already-stored image presented in the analogy.

In a future blog post, we will talk about a few more techniques that enable you to get a handle on the forgetting curve, and take charge of your own memory retention. We want you to get the most out of our offerings, so we continue to create tools and opportunities that help students engage with and  remember the techniques they learn.

Whether you have read the book, taken the course, or simply subscribe to this newsletter, what are some ways that help you remember to have good posture?