I did it again this morning. I forgot my wedding ring. There was nothing intentional or sinister in this. I’m simply a victim of the drill.
I don’t like to wear jewelry. I won’t even wear a watch except for strictly utilitarian reasons. I never wore rings of any kind, not even a class ring, before I got married.
My wedding ring is a simple, smooth gold band. When I first put it on, I had it in my mind that I would never take it off. But after awhile, I did. When it comes right down to it, I don’t like wearing my ring because I don’t like how it feels on my finger.
Now I only wear my ring when I leave the house for work or shopping or school functions. Every day before I head out the door, I go through my ritual. I open the drawer in my rolltop desk and get my stuff: my wallet, my car keys, my breath mints, some loose change, and my wedding ring. That’s the drill, five things—my hand knows it has to do five things.
But this morning while poking around for change, I couldn’t find any pennies, and I needed some, so my hand had to do some extra searching. But then my hand thought it was finished. That extra poking around was the fifth thing, so it told my brain via some channel unmonitored by my conscious mind that I was finished with the drawer. It wasn’t until I was engaged in my “drive to work” drill that my left hand, sensing something amiss, nagged my conscious mind to find out what it was. Then I noticed that I hadn’t put on the ring.
It’s a nuisance to be so habituated that a minor disruption can result in forgetfulness. But isn’t it incredibly cool that, most of the time, something as thoughtless as my hand is capable of getting my stuff with my conscious mind needing to exert such little control?
We drill for this kind of reflexivity in sports, and musicians train until their fingers know what to do even if their brains forget. Indeed, the whole human mind/brain/sensorimotor system is capable of some rather incredible things.
We’re all familiar with stories of autistic savants, able to multiply huge numbers faster than you can do it with a calculator, or able to tell you instantly what day of the week Christmas fell on in 1834. The average person can actually acquire this latter talent. A graduate student working on savant syndrome was asked to memorize calendars. At the end of the experiment, he was able to tell you what day it was on any given date within the period covered by the calendars he studied. But what is most fascinating is that he didn’t have to calculate or remember to get the right answer—he just knew it. His brain took the information in and arranged it in a way to make it easy to get at.
I’ve some experience with this sort of thing myself. When I did inventory control at a hospital, one of my daily chores was to visit each supply location in the nursing areas and inventory the items on hand by keying the quantities into a handheld data unit. Back at the desk, I’d download the data into my computer and generate pick tickets for the clerks to use for restocking.
One day after my rounds, the data unit would not talk to the computer. So I dug out the back-up manual sheets and prepared to go do the inventory all over again. But when I glanced at the sheets, I realized I could fill in many of the quantities from memory—there in my mind were images of the items I’d inventoried that day. I went down the sheets and found I could fill in the needed quantities with no trouble at all and no doubt in my mind. Without even trying to develop the ability, via simple repetition, my brain had built up a cognitive map that was routinely filled up each time I went around to inventory, same as the handheld unit.
What could I have done if I’d worked at it?
Back in my September 2006 column, I lamented some problems on the American education scene, specifically with mathematics, fearing we are headed into a Dark Age. Now I’d like to mention one method that, if employed, would help fix some of the problems, perhaps even usher in a Golden Age, and it comes from a uniquely American source.
You see, the ability I developed with the handheld is a mere shadow of the sort of ability once deliberately inculcated for use in one particular job market. The story can be found in Mark Twain’s wonderful book Life on the Mississippi. Twain spent his pre-writer years as a riverboat pilot, and he eloquently describes just what sort of procedure he had to go through to become one.
Piloting a steamboat on a river is not at all like taking a motorboat across a lake. Rivers change shape, both along the banks and underneath the surface. A riverboat pilot had to be able to read the surface of the river and know which ripples and waves indicated a problem and which didn’t, which submerged obstructions were their last trip, and which were not. He had to know every landmark, every sandbar and bend. He had to know every one of those ripples and waves and landmarks and bends along thousands of miles of river.
He had to know them in the dark.
Twain got his training from a pilot named Bixby. Here are some bits and pieces from Chapter VIII, “Perplexing Lessons”:
Twain says: “At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack my head full of islands, towns, bars, ‘points,’ and bends; and a curiously inanimate mass of lumber it was, too. However, inasmuch as I could shut my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names without leaving out more than ten miles of river in every fifty, I began to feel that I could take a boat down to New Orleans if I could make her skip those little gaps.”
This wasn’t good enough for Mr. Bixby. As Bixby points out: “My boy, you’ve got to know the shape of the river perfectly. It is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else is blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn’t the same shape in the night that it has in the daytime.”
To this assertion, Twain asks: “Do you mean to say that I’ve got to know all the million trifling variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I know the shape of the front hall at home?”
“On my honor (replied Bixby), you’ve got to know them better than any man ever did know the shapes of the halls in his own house.”
After an extensive explanation from Bixby of the myriad ways in which a river “has a different shape at night than in the daytime,” Twain whines: “Have I got to learn the shape of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways?”
“No! You only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that’s in your head, and never mind the one that’s before your eyes.”
Twain was never skeptical that such a thing could be done, only that he would ever be able to do it. Today, most wouldn’t even think it was possible. In this era when ever-more-fancy equipment is substituted for acquired skill, few would consider that what Bixby could do, and what he demanded of Twain, was anything other than unrealistic and ridiculous.
But this is what Twain says in chapter XIII, “A Pilot’s Needs”:
“Give a man a tolerably fair memory to start with, and piloting will develop it into a very colossus of capability. But only in the matters it is daily drilled in. A time would come when the man’s faculties could not help noticing landmarks and soundings, and his memory could not help holding on to them with the grip of a vise . . . Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.”
The modern American classroom burns up a lot of time and money in the interest of “making learning fun.” Twain tells us that learning to be a pilot was anything but fun. His self-esteem was the first thing to go, often replaced by despair. How could he possibly have learned via the drill method? Drill is the antithesis of fun. And learning should be fun, right?
Nope. If what must be learned is necessary and valuable, learning it need not be fun at all. Sometimes it cannot be fun. It can be extremely tedious, boring, and emotionally unfulfilling. And as every student of physics soon learns, it can sometimes be almost incomprehensibly difficult.
If American education is to be fixed, I say we must re-institute extensive drilling as a teaching method. Our kids use drills to become proficient at sports. They use drills to become adept at playing musical instruments. They get damn good at video games via routine repetition. So why do we lack the courage to declare that history has shown us things that are worth knowing, and that is reason enough for teachers to drill students in them?
I’m not talking about sheets of simple arithmetic problems where you can expect to get 96 out of a 100 right, and in less than five minutes. If you relentlessly force, say, your senior class math students to do physics problems every day for weeks, believe me, in a month or two, taking derivatives and integrating functions will become second nature to them. And that will unleash them to really master the “tough subjects,” for lack of facility with the math is by far the biggest impediment to succeeding in engineering or the hard sciences.
The students will hate it; they’ll bitch and complain. But that’s just too damn bad—the future is at stake. And the ends will more than compensate for the means.
In Twain’s day, the rewards for sweating it out and learning the ropes of riverboat piloting were worth the grief. Sure, pilots made a lot of money, but the rewards were much greater than that. I’ll let Twain finish out this column, with this description from chapter XIV, “Rank and Dignity of Piloting”:
“The moment that the boat was under way in the river, she was under the sole and unquestioned control of the pilot. He could do with her exactly as he pleased, run her when and whither he chose, and tie her up to the bank whenever his judgment said that that course was the best. His movements were entirely free; he consulted no one, he received commands from nobody, he promptly resented even the merest suggestions. Indeed, the law of the United States forbade him to listen to commands or suggestions, rightly considering that the pilot necessarily knew better how to handle the boat than anybody could tell him. So here was the novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute in sober truth and not by a fiction or words.”
