Learning and memory are highly individual experiences.
People have different learning styles. Some need a quiet atmosphere and clear desk. Others prefer to be plugged into loud music and sit in the midst of an open-book and scattered-paper uproar. In medicine, some physicians learn well by reading case histories. Most, however, learn best when immersed in the clinical context. In my own situation, reading about a disease in a book yielded a relatively low learning efficiency. Once I saw the disease in the context of a patient experience, however, I would never forget it. “If memory is to work well, the rememberer must pick up those aspects of the events or material to be remembered that make possible a well-defined personal experience. … It is the quality of the experience that counts, and that is never quite the same for each person,” explains Campbell. “The brain constructs and reconstructs information, creating a highly personal mental artifact and calling it a memory. … Each act of memory must be special, even unique, to each person.”21
Forgetting is as important as remembering.
As important as memory is for our day-to-day functioning, selective and appropriate forgetting is likewise important for our day-to-day emotional health. Unfortunately, we have no volitional control over forgetting. Every day our brains absorb large quantities of useless or harmful debris. Much of it lodges within our memory banks even though we have no desire to remember it and no functional need to recall it. When the ancient Greek Simonides offered to teach Themistocles the art of memory, he refused. “Teach me not the art of remembering,” he said, “but the art of forgetting, for I remember things I do not wish to remember, but I cannot forget things I wish to forget.”22
“In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as remembering,” said William James. “If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.”23 Forgetting, for example, is an important component of forgiveness. If someone has offended us, do we forgive and forget? Love, the Scriptures teach, “keeps no record of wrongs.”24
God, it seems, preserves for Himself the right and ability to forget. “I will forgive their wickedness,” He said, “and will remember their sins no more.”25 Would that we had such an ability, or that we even had the inclination toward such an ability. “A good memory is fine,” someone once said, “but the ability to forget is the true test of greatness.” And of godliness.
We should not leave a discussion of this remarkable human capacity for memory without mentioning God’s explicit and frequent command “to remember.” He gave us the gift of memory for many reasons, but chief among them is so that we might remember Him and His great deeds on our behalf.
For example, the recounting of the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5 explains that the Sabbath is set aside, in part, to remember: “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.”26
Just three chapters later, in five separate verses, Moses again exhorts the people of Israel to remember:
“Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years” (8:2).
“Be careful that you do not forget the LORD your God, failing to observe his commands” (8:11).
Otherwise, when you have fine houses, large herds, and much silver and gold, “your heart will become proud and you will forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt” (8:14).
“Remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth” (8:18).
“If you ever forget the LORD your God and follow other gods and worship and bow down to them, I testify against you today that you will surely be destroyed” (8:19).
Such memory is the source of gratitude and the guarantor of righteous behavior. On the other hand, such forgetting is the source of much misery.
If God created within us a remarkable brain and granted us the gift of memory so that we might bind ourselves in remembrance to Him, how great the injustice when we turn that capacity against Him in haughty arrogance. Instead, we ought to carefully use our memory for purposes of righteousness. “Look to the LORD and his strength; seek his face always,” wrote the psalmist. “Remember the wonders he has done, his miracles.”27
Language
Another remarkable function of the brain is language acquisition. This includes both the learning of language and the use of language as a social tool. The process begins very early. Although not intelligibly, babies babble and coo. Within a period of months, however, they intuitively begin to realize that the strange noises made by people around them are not babble at all but sounds connected to meaning. Once this understanding develops, babies begin a rapid acquisition of the language capacity.
By one year of age, infants are using one or more words with meaning. By eighteen months, their vocabulary consists of 20 words, and one-fourth of their speech is intelligible. By two years, their vocabulary grows to 300 words, and two-thirds of what they say is intelligible. By three years, the vocabulary has ballooned to 1,000 words, 90 percent of which are intelligible. By the time they enter school, the vocabulary has risen to 3,000 to 4,000 words. This trajectory of language and vocabulary acquisition continues in an upward climb (except perhaps for the adolescent years, when vocabulary regresses back to a few words such as “boring” and “whatever”). The average adult has an active or use vocabulary of 10,000 words and a passive or recognition vocabulary of 30,000 to 40,000 words. For comparison, Webster’s New International Dictionary defines 400,000 words, and the English language probably contains one million words—no one knows the exact number.
No other animal has the kind of language capacity God provides humans. Other animals share with us the abilities of walking, running, seeing, hearing, and smelling. But the gift of language is reserved for humans. Why did He single us out in this way? He could have created us without ears or vocal cords and forced us to depend on more primitive mechanisms for communication. If He had done so, I can guarantee none of us today would be postulating that God forgot something. If hearing, ears, and vocal cords did not exist and someone imaginatively postulated what it would be like to have this thing called language, that person would be laughed into submission, lumped into the same category as flakes who believe in UFOs.
But the fact remains, God did give us such equipment, and, I believe, for a specific reason—relationship, communication, and love. God is pro-relationship. It is on His heart constantly.
We spend ten to twelve cumulative years of our lives talking. And of course this talking is in the context of other people. Helen Keller maintained that the gift of hearing was far more important than the gift of sight—because hearing allows the gift of speech, and speech allows the nurturing of relationship. Language connects us to the hearts of others in a way that nothing else can.
The brain is capable of thinking at a rate of 800 words per minute,28 far exceeding the speed of caution. (As someone once warned: Be careful of your thoughts, for they might break into words at any moment.) When thinking is transferred into language, you automatically and simultaneously manage to “monitor your muscles, order your syntax, watch out for semantic catastrophes that would result from a slight change in word order, continuously adjust your tone of voice and expressive gestures, and say something meaningful when it would have been so easy to speak gibberish.”29 Language seems easy; it most definitely is not.
On the receptive side, the brain has recently been shown to have the amazing capacity to even understand speech that has been intentionally garbled. “Humans’ ability to understand speech is so deeply ingrained that people can even decipher sentences that have been recorded, chopped up into brief segments and played backwards,” explains Dr. Joseph M. Mercola.
Researchers sliced digitally recorded sentences into very short segments, reversed each snippet while leaving it in its proper place in the sentence, then
played the distorted speech to seven test subjects. The participants had no problem understanding the sentences. Their brains were apparently able to perceive the syllables as sounding nearly the same whether heard backwards or forwards.
The research demonstrates that many areas of the brain are used to handle complicated auditory signals. … Anyone who has gone to a party held in a crowded room filled with music and chattering people has tapped those skills to understand what others are saying. What this tells us is that speech is quite robust. We can perceive it even when a number of things have been done to distort or muddy the signal. Somehow the information is preserved or at least recoverable to us even when it’s played backwards.30
Yet as with all of God’s gifts, the gift of language can be corrupted. The same language ability that can be endearing and winsome is often instead used to condemn, control, gossip, and curse. “With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father,” explained James, “and with it we curse men, who have been made in God’s likeness.”31
Using language for the building of relationships is primarily helpful on the horizontal, earthly plane—we do not necessarily require the gift of language for divine communication. The language of heaven is surely more than words. It is not words, it is meaning. Those who worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and truth. We must communicate more than just words if we are to worship God, or our language will not survive the great device at the entrance of heaven that filters out emptiness. Our words are simply vessels for us to use, vessels that in themselves are empty. If we don’t fill the word vessels with true worship and prayer, they will never take wing to the Father’s ears.
Never let us think that we accomplished anything on a Sunday morning because we met and exchanged an hour’s worth of words. But rather let us consider this—did we use all our heart to fill those words with our thanksgiving and adoration? As the hymn says: “What language shall I borrow to thank thee, dearest Friend?”
Sleep
Sleep is yet another poorly understood human activity under the control of the remarkable brain. God could have created us without the need for sleep, but He didn’t. Fish don’t sleep—they don’t have eyelids. They just go to the bottom of the lake and stare at a rock all night. Giraffes sleep about ten minutes a day. Dolphins sleep with just half of their brain at a time so the other half can keep them swimming. Cows get three hours of sleep every twenty-four hours. God could have created us with negligible sleep needs, but for reasons only He fully knows, that would not have suited His deeper purposes.
Throughout the duration of our lives we will sleep a total of twenty-four years, one-third of our time on planet earth. Newborns require sixteen hours of sleep a day. That amount gradually tapers down to seven to eight hours during our adult and senior years. The optimal duration of sleep per night varies from person to person, but in general it is the amount of sleep that permits a person to feel wide awake and alert throughout the day.
In absence of light cues, humans tend to choose a long sleep-wake day of about twenty-five hours.32 In other words, if placed in a cave with no external signals, most of us would assume a sleep-wake cycle that is longer than the twenty-four-hour day our spinning earth gives us. Theologically, I have absolutely no idea why this should be so.
This leads to the somewhat related and often misunderstood issue of night owls versus early birds. It is important to understand that there are legitimate physiologic differences between the two. Without a gracious understanding of these differences we tend to unnecessarily criticize one another. The early bird thinks the night owl is lazy for not rising to meet the dawn, while the night owl thinks the early bird has no stamina for late night work. Personally, my productivity is greatly enhanced in the evening and even late night. Ninety percent of my writing occurs between 10:00 P.M. and 7:00 A.M. If I were to switch styles and get up early to write, it would be a complete waste of time.
There are two types of sleep: rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM. The non-REM sleep is further subdivided into four stages. Stage 1 sleep is twilighting, when we first drift across that magic line that divides wakefulness and sleep. If someone comes into the room when we are in Stage 1, he or she is likely to apologize for waking us, only to have us reply: “Oh, you didn’t wake me … I don’t think … what time is it anyway? Why is my book on the floor?” At the other end of the sleep spectrum is Stage 4, the deepest level, where we drool on ourselves. It is interesting to note that sleep is a dynamic event. Throughout the night we are drifting up and down through these various levels of sleep (oftentimes even rising to momentary wakefulness that we later do not remember) and also in and out of REM.
REM sleep is the domain of dreams. We spend 25 to 35 percent of our sleep budget in REM. Some have called REM a third state of consciousness, different from either wakefulness or non-REM sleep. While in REM, our mind is hyperalert but our muscles are paralyzed. A good thing, too, otherwise our dreams would have us running all over the neighborhood.
REM seems to serve the purpose of helping people organize their thoughts during sleep. Problems are often solved during REM; who hasn’t said, “Let me sleep on it”? Creativity is nourished. Perhaps that is why Einstein routinely got eleven hours of sleep a night. In addition, I believe God often speaks to us during sleep. “I will praise the LORD, who counsels me,” wrote David. “Even at night my heart instructs me.”33 In addition, many times in the Scriptures God appeared to people in a dream. Even if we don’t completely understand the role of dreams, God has a purpose in using them.
If people try to interfere with God’s natural plan for sleep, dysfunction follows. It is an experiment our entire nation has decided to pursue. In 1850 the average amount of sleep was nine and a half hours per night. By 1910, it was nine hours per night. By 1950, it was eight hours per night. And by 1990, the average amount of sleep per night was down to seven hours. In other words, the average American today gets two and a half fewer hours of sleep than 150 years ago. One-third of us sleep fewer than six hours per night during workdays, and fifty to seventy million Americans have sleep disorders. A staggering 27 percent of the general population admitted to falling asleep while driving in the last year.34
The longest recorded continuous period of wakefulness was 264 hours, accomplished in 1965 by a high school student named Randy Gardner who went without sleep for a science project.35 Personally, I can think of easier ways to get an “A.” Just reading about this science experiment makes me tired, and brings to mind the W. C. Fields comment, “The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.”
There is a reason God created sleep. Scripture teaches us that God grants sleep to those He loves.36 If we insist on calling sleep a waste of time, we will have to take it up with the Creator Himself.
Perhaps part of His reason for creating sleep is to teach us to trust His sovereignty. It takes an act of faith to quit at the end of a day without all our problems solved, our to-do list completed, or the world fixed. At that point, we must trust God to run the universe without our help. A daily reminder of Who is in charge.
The Brain and the Soul Catcher
The brain is so complex, wrote evolutionist Michael Denton in 1985, that even using the most sophisticated engineering techniques it “would take an eternity” for engineers to assemble an object remotely resembling it.37 Yet today British Telecommunications researchers are attempting to do precisely that. Engineers are building the Soul Catcher, a computer system designed to capture the nervous system’s electrical activity, which would preserve our thoughts and emotions.
The hardware for early versions of “virtual immortality” already exists. Tiny video cameras embedded in eyeglass frames document every activity of daily living and feed it into a hard disk worn in a pendant. But the Soul Catcher would eventually use a wearable supercomputer, perhaps in a wristwatch, with wireless links to microsensors under the scalp and in the nerves that carry all five sensory signals. At that point wearing a video camera would no longer be required.
Eventually, these efforts will coalesce into “organized, online archives of everything that happens,” predicts D. Raj Reddy, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. These signals could be preserved for the day when they can be transferred to silicon circuits to rejuvenate minds as immortal entities. “Researchers can only wonder what it will be like,” wrote Otis Port in Business Week, “to wake up one day and find yourself alive inside a machine.”38 Personally, I can envision a somewhat better and certainly more straightforward way to achieve immortality.
When God designed the brain, He became the original computer scientist. He built a unit of remarkable sophistication, complexity, and beauty. Despite the fact that the entire brain creates only about twenty watts of power, its performance is astounding. The brain’s curriculum vitae, according to brain expert Todd Siler, reveals it to function in more than 200 ways: alignment equipment, altitude and heading reference systems, data processing equipment, direction finders, closed-circuit television displays, distance measuring equipment, optical guidance systems, information retrieval systems, night vision equipment, noise measurement equipment, recording equipment, strategic acquisition and direction-finding systems, frequency synthesizers, velocity-measuring equipment, and so forth.39
It would appear to me that with an entry like the brain, God would be in the finalist competition for the Westinghouse Science Award.
More Than Meets the Eye Page 5