Eli5: How is it that sometimes you can have a conversation with yourself and have yourself make sense of something you didn’t previously understand?
In: Chemistry
Not an expert, but here goes: The “self”, as an analogy, is both the reader of the book, and the book itself.
That is called “self-awareness” (the ability to read the book, while also being the book).
Humans have self-awareness, while not many other animal species on the planet do (and there is a test for it, which dolphins pass, and gorillas pass, and few others I am forgetting about).
So, why do you have “self-awareness”? Its like due to your prefrontal cortex.
In the Socratic method of instruction, the teacher doesn’t tell you anything but rather seeks to draw out of you things you already know, often by having you realize connections between different facts you already know.
Perhaps you are doing this with yourself?
One of the best ways to learn how to teach – record yourself and watch yourself back.
There are also things called learning styles, which most modern teachers are aware of and try to cater for. Children can learn in different ways, depending on all kinds of factors, e.g. by doing something themselves, by watching someone else do it, by reading about it, etc.. It’s a bit contrived and simplified, and most kids learn in lots of those ways, and it’s not a complete description. Some of those ways include: listening to someone give instructions on what to do, and by actually trying to teach someone else themselves.
If you try to teach, you have to break it down and give an explanation as you go, a kind of narration. If you do that in your head, subconsciously, when giving instruction to yourself at the same time (i.e. being the audience), there are two ways to “learn” right there.
There’s a literal theory in software development: When you’re stuck on a problem, explain your problem to a rubber duck. It employs the same technique – while learning how to express the problem in a way you can teach, you also break down the problem, AND feed that broken down problem back into your own mind.
(P.S. My brother and I – both work in schools, he’s a professional teacher and I dabble – once did a learning styles “quiz”. Very in-depth, professional looking, spoken about on courses, etc. etc. Turns out we both learn in ALL the ways equally. We literally maxed out their web graph. And, in its contrived way, it’s true. I don’t care how I learn something, I will learn it. And similarly, we can then *both* teach it in, say, a visual way, a practical way, an audio-only way, a theoretical way, etc. etc. etc.
I was given a bunch of kids one year who were borderline on their SATS in maths and needed help. I was asked if I could run a remedial class in lunchtime, just to push the borderline kids over the edge into whatever their next level would be. Instead of other paid work, they wanted me to do that, and I agreed. During that class, over a period of about 10 weeks, 10 hours total, they were astounded how I could flick between 20 kids, explain a bunch of random problems I’d never seen before, i.e. the homework for a bunch of mixed-age children from a whole range of year-groups and abilities, and literally switch how I taught the problem depending on what the child was able to understand. Sometimes really simple stuff… [i.e. subtraction for counting change… you can imagine that in your head, you can do it into your hand in about ten different ways, you can do it on paper etc. etc. Hell, some of the kids did better just by closing their eyes and seeing the “coins” that were actually sitting in front of them in their head], often far more complex.
Every. Single. Child. Went. Up. In the class where the teachers had done all they could possibly do for months and months on end and it was a desperation measure for when the test neared.
Education is just as much about learning how to learn as it is learning how to do a particular thing. And explaining to yourself will teach you how you learn best. And a good teacher will know how to teach YOU best, different to all the other kids. My teachers, before all this learning style stuff was popular, knew that they didn’t need to bother with me, they would focus on others instead. If I was asked to learn something, I learned it. Hell, as a child for two entire years I was asked to TEACH my own classes – the classes I was taking, I taught them to my peers while my teacher sat back and watched.
And what you learn when pressed into doing that is… that giving the class “to yourself” is the best way to learn the material yourself, and make the class understand it. I know lots of teachers now. Many of them literally learn a subject just one or two lessons ahead of their class. That’s how the really good teachers can do it, with no prior experience in the subject even. Because they do that by breaking it down as they would to teach their class, and on the way learn the material themselves)
This isn’t going to have an exact answer.
We just kind of barely understand how our brains work, having general ideas of what sections handle which actions. How certain pathways get used more often and grow and become more robust.
But how exactly that mix of electrical and chemical signals turns into our thoughts, feelings, emotions, we have no idea. That step is still a mystery to us. How the brain stores thoughts in information we can’t exactly explain, except that it does.
So the best answer that we can really give and that your brain is a giant complex and confounding library, and sometimes you just need to research that library or walk yourself back down that mental/neural pathway that leads to the information you couldn’t consciously recall Until you remembered it again.
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