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Re: [Phys-L] intuitive versus counter-intuitive



Thanks, John, for your comprehensive and educational reply. I'll try to
remember that. Bill
On Feb 13, 2015 12:58 AM, "John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org> wrote:

Of course there are always the exceptions such as people with possible
eidetic memories. This type of memory is erroneously called photographic
memory, because nobody can memorize with photograpic accuracy. Indeed
according to the Wikipedia researchers say that adults do not possess true
eidetic memories. The researchers claim that adults with phenomenal
memories use tricks to remember things. So it might depend on what tricks
they used viewing the demo. If they didn't recognize the importance of the
conclusion, it might escape their memorization techniques.

The ability to memorize things accurately is not correlated with
intelligence levels, so such a person might not be able to answer the
questions accurately if they are just slightly different. I met a waitress
who was able to remember what each customer ordered each week, but it did
not seem to benefit her in school. If it were a benefit, why was she a
waitress?

I have never encountered a student with this talent, so I can not say how
it
would affect the outcome. I have read some accounts of people with so
called photographic memories and they do forget things. One subject
pictured things as sheets of paper that could be peeled back to reveal
older
facts, and forgetting happened when they could not turn the page back. Of
course this is not connected memory, so being able to draw conclusions
using
the information is a different cogntive skill. Memorizing a poem or
equation does not confer the ability to understand what it means.

There is a Scientific American article
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-there-such-a-thing-as/ which
shows that there is no such thing as a photographic memory. Indeed all
memories of something seen are sketchy. You know some details and then you
mentally add in plausible details. But some of the plausible details can
be
and are sometimes wrong. The SA article agrees with the Wikipedia in that
only a few children have been shown to have true eidetic memories.

Then of course there is the problem of implanted or modified memories.
This
can be done by just having people pretend they saw something different from
what actually happened. I suspect that the people with so called
photographic memories have this happen to them also because remembered
items
are stored back after being recalled.

Now are there phonographic memories? Marty Feldman had one in the Young
Sherlock Holmes movie. As to cats, they often forget they have just been
fed, so I can't believe they have photographic memories. They will beg for
food even when it is already down.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


What about the people (and cats?) with photographic memories?
On Feb 11, 2015 6:51 PM, "John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org> wrote:

Nonsense!!! Mazur and Crouch showed that demos are better
remembered
if the student does a prediction just before seeing the
results. Then
if there is a discussion of why the results happened, not just a
lecture, the memory is reinforced. The demo must be shown
immediately
after the prediction as found by the creators of the ILDs.
This same
effect was found by Heather Brasell in her seminal experiments with
the sonic ranger.

It is natural for people to cling to their existign
paradigm and then
misremember results. It is not the demo, it is how the
demo is set up
with respect to the students. They must be part of it by
prediction
and discussion.

Of course the original post was how memory is malleable and can be
falsified. This happens every day to everyone. People
believe that
memory is like a recording device and is permanent, but it
is quite the opposite.
Whenever you recall a memory is stored back and in the
process it changes.
So if you embellish it just a little each time, it will change and
become quite different from the actual event.

Incidentally gee-whiz demos are often remembered clearly, but the
point of them is then totally lost.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX



On 02/11/2015 01:26 PM, Paul Nord wrote:
I blame the demos. We design too many physics demos to be
very clever
and give counter-intuitive results.

I agree ... and it's not just the demos. In many textbooks, the
section on relativity seems to revel in making it seem as
unfamiliar, weird, and counter-intuitive as possible ...
even though the vast majority of what relativity predicts is
perfectly familiar and non-weird.
https://www.av8n.com/physics/spacetime-welcome.htm

This is what I might call David Copperfield mode:
"Hey, pay me money and I'll show you this amazing and
unbelievable thing."
That makes for entertainment, but it doesn't make for
good pedagogy.

On the other hand ... this is not a clear-cut
black-and-white issue.
There are arguments both ways:
a) Students who have never seen the ordinary case need
to see that and become reasonably familiar with it
before moving on to the extraordinary case.
b) Step (a) must not be taken too far, because students
have a tendency to over-generalize. They leap to the
conclusion that the ordinary case is the universal case.
There is even a word that covers this: sophomoric.

In this department, as in so many others, teaching is
more of an art
than a science.
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http://www.phys-l.org/mailman/listinfo/phys-l

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http://www.phys-l.org/mailman/listinfo/phys-l