What is a Chunk?

In this video, we’re going to answer the question. What is a chunk? When you first look at a brand new concept it sometimes doesn’t make much sense, as shown by the jumbled puzzle pieces here. Chunking is the mental leap that helps you unite bits of information together through meaning. The new logical whole makes the chunk easier to remember, and also makes it easier to fit the chunk into the larger picture of what you’re learning. Just memorizing a fact without understanding or context doesn’t help you understand what’s really going on or how the concept fits together with other concepts you’re learning. Notice there are no interlocking puzzle edges on the puzzle piece to help you fit it to other pieces. We talked earlier about working memory and how those four slots of working memory appear to hang out in the part of your brain right behind your forehead known as the prefrontal cortex. When you’re focusing your attention on something it’s almost as if you have an octopus. The octopus of attention that slips it’s tentacles through those four slots of working memory when necessary to help you make connections to information that you might have in various parts of your brain. Remember, this is different from the random connections of the diffuse mode. Focusing your attention to connect parts of the brain to tie together ideas is an important part of the focused mode of learning. It is also often what helps get you started in creating a chunk. Interestingly when you’re stressed your attentional octopus begins to lose the ability to make some of those connections. This is why your brain doesn’t seem to work right when you’re angry, stressed, or afraid. Chunks are pieces of information, neuroscientifically speaking, through bound together through meaning or use. You can take the letters P-O and P and bind them together into one conceptual easy to remember chunk, the word pop. It’s like converting a, a cumbersome computer file into a ZIP file. Underneath that single pop chunk is a symphony of neurons that have learned to sing in tune with one another. The complex neural activity that ties together our simplifying abstract chunks of thought. Whether those thoughts pertain to acronyms, ideas, or concepts are the basis of much of the science, literature, and art. Let’s say you want to learn how to speak Spanish. If you’re a child hanging around a Spanish speaking household, learning Spanish is as natural as breathing. Your mother says, mama. And you say, mama, right back to her. Your neurons fire and wire together in a shimmering mental loop cementing the relationship in your mind between the sound mama and your mother’s smiling face. That scintillating neural loop is one memory trace, which is connected of course to many other related memory traces. The best programs for learning language, such as those of the Defense Language Institute where I learned Russian, incorporate structured practice that includes repetition and rote focus mode learning of the language along with more diffuse-like free speech with native speakers. The goal is to embed the basic words and patterns so you can speak as freely and creatively in your new language as you do in your native language. As it turns out one of the first steps towards gaining expertise in academic topics is to create conceptual chunks, mental leaps that unite scattered bits of information through meaning. The concept of neural chunks also applies to sports, music, dance, really just about anything that humans can get good at. Basically, a chunk means a network of neurons that are used to firing together so you can think a thought or perform an action smoothly and effectively. Focused practice and repetition, the creation of strong memory traces, helps you to create chunks. The path to expertise is built little by little, small chunks can become larger, and all of the expertise serves to underpin more creative interpretations as you gradually become a master of the material. In other words, as you’ll see later, practice and repetition in building chunks aren’t all you need to become a truly creative master of the material you’re learning. Chunking helps your brain run more efficiently. Once you chunk an idea, a concept, or an action, you don’t know need to remember all the little underlying details. You’ve got the main idea, the chunk, and that’s enough. It’s like getting dressed in the morning. You just think one simple thought like, I’ll get dressed, but it’s amazing when you realize the complex swirl of underlying activities that take place with that one, simple chunk of thought. Next, we’ll talk about how you can form a chunk. I’m Barbara Oakley. Thanks for learning how to learn. [BLANK AUDIO]