Category: walking and learning

Walking and Learning

Seth Roberts3 Comments

A new study supports my idea that walking and learning are connected. Normally I found it boring to study Chinese flash cards. While walking, I found it pleasant. You could say walking made me more curious. Just standing on the treadmill didn’t have this effect.

The study divided men and women in their 60′s into two groups: (a) walking for 40 minutes/day and (b) stretching. At the end of the study, for persons in the walking group, part of the hippocampus — which is associated with learning — had grown. For persons in the other group, that part of the hippocampus got smaller. Several other parts of the brain, not associated with learning, did not differ between the groups.

Three Observations About Walking and Learning

Seth Roberts5 Comments

1. Studying Chinese-character flashcards while walking on a treadmill is as pleasant as drinking something when thirsty. Unlike actual thirst and drinking, the pleasure lasts a long time and the desire is under your control (to turn it on, you start walking; to turn it off, you stop).

2. What is the opposite of betrayal? There is no antonym. The opposite is so rare it isn’t even obvious what it is. Betrayal is when your friend becomes your enemy; the opposite is when your enemy becomes your friend. Living in China and not knowing Chinese was not exactly my enemy but it was certainly negative. This treadmill discovery turns it into a positive: Chinese becomes an inexhaustible source of dry knowledge that I can enjoy learning.

3. Learning is the central theme of experimental psychology and perhaps all academic psychology. Psychology professors have done more experiments about learning than anything else. Practically all of those experiments have been about efficiency of learning: The amount of learning (e.g., percent correct) in Condition A is compared with the amount of learning in Condition B, where A and B “cost” about the same. As a result, we know a great deal about what controls efficiency of learning, at least in laboratory tasks. I think many psychologists are surprised and disappointed that this research has had little effect outside academia. I have never heard a good answer to the question of why. If you’d asked me a month ago I would have said it’s because they haven’t discovered large non-obvious effects. That’s true, but says nothing about how to discover them.

My treadmill experience suggests a more helpful answer: Hedonics matter. Learning exactly the same material can be more or less pleasant. When Learning X is pleasant, it is learned easily; when Learning X is unpleasant, it is learned with difficulty or not at all. In the real world, hedonic differences matter more than efficiency differences. If they want to improve real-world learning, psychologists have been measuring the wrong thing. It is a hundred times easier and ten times more “objective” (= “scientific”) to study how much has been learned than to study how pleasant was the experience. But that doesn’t mean it is better to study.

Michel Cabanac, a physiologist, strikes me as someone on the right path. Cabanac has studied how the pleasantness of this or that experience goes up or down to help us properly self-regulate. A simple example is that cold water feels more pleasant when we feel hot than when we feel cold. A common example is that exactly the same food becomes less pleasant during a meal. The food doesn’t change; we change.

Walking and Learning in Rats

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Yesterday I blogged that walking on a treadmill made studying flashcards enjoyable. I also felt my retention was noticeably better than when I studied sitting or standing in one place.

Thanks to Matt Weber I learned of a rat experiment that supports the idea I was more retentive. Long-term potentiation (LTP) is a long-lasting (hours) change in synapse properties caused by a certain type of electrical stimulation from electrodes. Leung et al. measured the amount of LTP produced by the electrodes when rats were in one of four states: (a) walking, (b) immobilized, (c) short-wave sleep, (d) rapid-eye-movement sleep. They found clear LTP in all four states, but the LTP was much larger (50% larger?) when the rats were walking during the stimulation. During the other three states the LTP was about the same.

The walking and immobilization conditions must have differed in many ways. Perhaps immobilization was uncomfortable. Perhaps it required more handling. And so on. Comparing just those two states, you might wonder if (a) walking produces changes that cause things to be remembered better or (b) any of the other walking/immobilization differences made things worse (e.g., the shock of handling reduces learning). The fact that immobilization and the two sleep states produced similar results argues against the second sort of explanation.

Walking Creates A Thirst For Dry Knowledge

Seth Roberts12 Comments

A few weeks ago I got a treadmill for my Beijing apartment. Two days ago I was walking on it (I try to walk 1 hr/day) while watching Leverage to make the activity more palatable. But Leverage bored me. It was too simple. So I took out some Chinese flashcards (character on one side, English and pinyin on the other) and started studying them. I was astonished how pleasant it was. An hour of walking and studying went by . . . uh, in a flash. In my entire life I have never had such a pleasant hour studying. The next day it happened again! The experience appears infinitely repeatable. I’ve previously mentioned the man who memorized Paradise Lost while walking on a treadmill.

I’ve noticed before that treadmill walking (by itself boring) and Chinese-character learning (by itself boring) become pleasant when combined. So why was I astonished? Because the increase in enjoyment was larger. The whole activity was really pleasant, like drinking water when thirsty. When an hour was up, I could have kept going. I wanted to do it again. When I noticed it earlier, I was using Anki to learn Chinese characters. Now I am using flashcards in blocks of ten (study 10 until learned, get a new set of 10, study them until learned . . . ). The flashcards provide much more sense of accomplishment and completion, which I thinks makes the activity more pleasant.

My progress with Chinese characters has been so slow that during the latest attempt (putting them on my wall) I didn’t even try to learn both the pinyin and the meaning at the same time; I had retreated to just trying to learn the meaning. That was hard enough. I have had about 100 character cards on the walls of my apartment for a month but I’ve only learned the meaning of about half of them. No pinyin at all. In contrast, in two one-hour treadmill sessions I’ve gotten through 60 cards . . . including pinyin. For me, learning pinyin is much harder than learning meaning.

It’s like drinking water when you’re thirsty versus when you’re not thirsty. The walking turns a kind of switch that makes it pleasant to learn dry knowledge, just as lack of water creates thirst. Not only did studying dry materials become much more pleasant I suspect I also became more efficient — more retentive. I was surprised how fast I managed to reach a criterion of zero mistakes.

I had previously studied flashcards while walking around Tsinghua. This did not produce an oh-my-god experience. I can think of three reasons why the effect is now much stronger: 1. Ordinary walking is distracting. You have to watch where you’re going, there are other people, cars, trees, and so on. Distraction reduces learning. If the distractions are boring — and they usually are –Â the experience becomes less pleasant. 2. Ordinary walking provides more information than treadmill walking (which provides no information at all — you’re staring at a wall). The non-flashcard info reduces desire to learn what’s on the flashcards. 3. On these Tsinghua walks I had about 100 flashcards which I cycled through. Using sets of 10, as I said, provides more sense of accomplishment. I’ve also had about 20 Chinese-speaking lessons while walking around. The walking made the lessons more pleasant, yes, but it wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as the treadmill/flashcard combination. And because lessons with a tutor are intrinsically more enjoyable than studying flashcards, the increase in enjoyment was less dramatic.

As I said earlier I think there’s an evolutionary reason for this effect: The thirst for knowledge (= novelty) created by walking pushed us to explore and learn about our surroundings. One interesting feature of my discovery about treadmill and flashcards is that it may take better advantage of this mechanism than did ordinary Stone-Age life — better in the sense that more pleasure/minute can be derived. In the Stone Age, novelty, new dry knowledge, was hard to come by. You could only walk so fast. After a while, it was hard to walk far enough away to be in a new place. Whereas I can easily switch from flashcards I’ve learned to new ones. An example of a supranormal stimulus.

Boring + Boring = Pleasant!?

Seth Roberts23 Comments

Fact 1: For the last few weeks, I’ve been studying Chinese using a flashcard program called Anki. It’s an excellent program but boring. I’ve never liked studying — maybe no one does. Fact 2: I’ve had a treadmill for a very long time. Walking on a treadmill is boring so I always combine it with something pleasant — like watching American Idol. That makes it bearable. I don’t think listening to music would be enough.

Two days ago I discovered something that stunned me: Using Anki WHILE walking on my treadmill was enjoyable. I easily did it for an hour and the next day (yesterday) did it for an hour again. The time goes by quickly. Two boring activities, done together, became pleasant. Anki alone I can do maybe ten minutes. Treadmill alone I can do only a few minutes before I want to stop. In both cases I’d have to be pushed to do it at all. Yet the combination I want to do; 60 minutes feels like a good length of time.

I’ve noticed several related things: 1. I could easily study flashcards while walking. This was less mysterious because I coded walking as pleasant. 2. I can’ t bear to watch TV sitting down. Walking on a treadmill makes it bearable. This didn’t puzzle me because I coded TV watching as pleasant and sitting as unpleasant (although I sit by choice while doing many other things). 3. I have Pimsler Chinese lessons (audio). I can painlessly listen to them while walking. While stationary (sitting or standing), it’s hard to listen to them. 4. When writing (during which I sit), it’s very effective to work for 40 minutes and then walk on my treadmill watching something enjoyable for 20 minutes. I can repeat that cycle many times. 5. Allen Neuringer found he was better at memorization while moving than while stationary. 6. There’s some sort of movement/thinking connection — we move our arms when we talk, we may like to walk while we talk, maybe walking makes it easier to think, and so on.

You could say that walking causes a “thirst” for learning or learning causes a “thirst” for walking. Except that the “thirst” is so hidden I discovered it only by accident. Whereas actual thirst is obvious. The usual idea is that what’s pleasant shows what’s good for us — e.g., water is pleasant when we are thirsty. Yet if walking is good for us — a common idea — why isn’t it pleasant all by itself? And if Anki is good for us, why isn’t it pleasant all by itself? The Anki/treadmill symmetry is odd because lots of people think we need exercise to be healthy but I’ve never heard someone say we need to study to be healthy.

The evolutionary reason for this might be to push people to walk in new places (which provide something to learn) rather than old places (which don’t). To push them to explore. David Owen noticed it was much more fun for both him and his small daughter to walk in the city than in the country. He was surprised. When I drive somewhere, and am not listening to a book or something, I prefer a new route over a familiar one. If I am listening to a book I prefer the familiar route because it makes it easier to understand the book.

Maybe the practical lesson is that we enjoy learning dry stuff when walking but not when stationary. Pity the 99.9% of students who study stationary. Ideally you’d listen to a lecture while walking somewhere, perhaps around a track. Now and then I’ve interviewed people while walking; it worked much better than the usual interview format (seated). The old reason was I disliked sitting. Now I have a better reason.