Try the following experiment: Multiply 73 by 59 in your head while someone nearby asks you questions or generally chats on and on as if he or she is attempting to use up a weekly word allotment. Not too easy to do, is it?
When we’re focused on a demanding task—such as mental math or learning how to hold altitude in a steep turn—our short-term, or working, memory quickly reaches its saturation point. Attending to something new when our short-term memory is saturated means that anything already resident in working memory is evicted. The result is that we lose our ability to focus or concentrate on the task at hand. Because short-term memory is the gateway to consciousness, anything that disrupts or saturates it interferes with our ability to learn.
In case you didn’t get the memo, you have a Stone Age brain. Yep, the Homo sapien brain hasn’t evolved much over the past 120,000 years. It’s a Fred Flintstone relic with an information input pipeline that makes two cans connected by a string look like AT&T in comparison.
In the 1950s, psychologist George Miller conducted a landmark study to determine the size of our short-term memory. He concluded that we’re able to hold about seven distinct items in our working memory at any one time. This number essentially represents the bandwidth of human consciousness. Yep, seven items is all that will flow through your mental pipe at any one time.
If you want to see this in action, the next time you’re strolling around with a friend, ask him to mentally multiply 73 by 59. As soon as he concentrates on the math, his working memory becomes saturated. Because it takes a small amount of consciousness to navigate the strolling path, he will most likely stop in his tracks as his lobes perform mental math. There’s simply no room left in his working memory to walk and calculate at the same time.
It’s true that our mighty brain allows us to learn almost any behavior, but only because we’re able to build strong habit patterns despite the restrictions of our working memory. Because habit patterns work independently of short-term memory, these automated routines free our conscious mind to learn additional things.
Now that we understand the limitations of short-term memory, how does this affect us as flight instructors? I hope it inspires us to look for every opportunity to avoid interfering with our student’s ability to learn. We need to get out of our student’s mind (his or her short-term memory) while he or she is attempting to learn.
For example, when introducing a student to steep turns, you shouldn’t overload him with too many individual components of the maneuver. No doubt you’ll demonstrate how to roll into the turn, how to identify the correct bank angle, and how to select an attitude reference that allows the airplane to hold its altitude. Then you’ll let the student practice these items.
As your student attempts the steep turn for the first time, you should be satisfied if he manages to maintain the desired bank angle and attitude reference. If, however, you begin asking questions and chatting on and on about coordination, throttle movement, and scanning for traffic, you can be sure that you’ll overload your student’s working memory. To the student, this is very similar to giving him double digits to mentally multiply while he’s walking. In an airplane, he might just stop in his tracks, meaning that he’ll likely lose attitude or bank control as he attempts to process the new information you’re providing.
Of course, after a few steep turns, your student will begin developing the habit patterns necessary to perform this maneuver. Now his working memory has a little more free space with which to absorb the additional information necessary to improve his skill level.
Effective flight training requires that you understand how consciousness is defined by working memory. If you interfere with your student’s working memory, you’ll distract his or her ability to learn. So be of the right mind and stay out of your student’s mind as he concentrates on the task at hand. This is what effective teachers do.
Related Articles
