Season 2, Ep. 4 – The Teaching Interpreter: Memory Reconsolidation

Watch in ASL

Hi! Welcome to season 2 of the Amanda’s Musings podcast – this season is entitled “the Teaching Interpreter” where we will explore the various ways in which interpreters are taught, mentored, coached, and influenced in their growth and development as an interpreter.

I’m Amanda Smith an interpreter, educator, coach, and creative. I love to discuss the puzzles of interpreting, the complexities of human interaction, and the power we have within ourselves to make a difference.

You can find the show notes at arsmithstudios.com and click the “podcast” button in the upper right navigation bar.

I want you to think about the following reflective prompts as you listen/watch:

1. What, if anything, is sparking your care for the profession, those you influence in the profession, and yourself as a leader?
2. Do you feel moved to take any action? If so, what? When?
3. What questions arise?
4. What insights & connections do you see to yourself?

Amanda, Hi. Welcome to Season Two of the Amanda’s musings podcast. This season is entitled The teaching interpreter, where we will explore the various ways in which interpreters are taught, mentored, coached, and influenced in their growth and development as interpreters, I’m Amanda Smith, an interpreter, educator, coach and creative. I love to discuss the puzzles of interpreting the complexities of human interaction and the power we have within ourselves to make a difference in shaping each of these podcast episodes, I like to frame them with some reflective prompts for you to listen through. So the four basic questions to have in mind is, what, if anything is sparking your care for the profession, those you influence in the profession, and yourself as a leader. Two, do you feel moved to take any action? If so, what and when will you do it? Three, what questions arise for you? And four, what insights and connections do you see to yourself, enjoy. Hi. This episode is going to be a little different than what you might be expecting, because last week I talked about this week being about student attitude, and I’m going to push that off till next week. I just had a coach training that I had some real thoughts about. And I thought, why not process them with you? So I’m taking a coach training around multiple things, but one of the aspects of it is the neuro, neuroscience and neuroscience of change kind of idea. And so I just finished two sessions with a trainer named Dr Amanda Blake, and she’s a neuroscientist who looks at the neuroscience of coaching, neuroscience of change kinds of things. So I’m going to share a little bit about what she shared in our training, and then talk about how I think that applies to teaching, interpreting, and specifically some connections that I have made to the DCS, demand control, schema, dialogic, work analysis, case conferencing kind of approach. So in our brains, there are two types of memory. There is explicit memory and there is implicit memory. Explicit memory is something that Dr Blake explains as quote, unquote, coming online at about three or four years of age. It might be two to four years of age. Some it’s young, but not at birth. And explicit memory is those things that we explicitly know, things that there it might be procedural. Actually, no, I think that’s implicit. Explicit is things we remember. So if I asked you, what did you get on your 10th birthday as a birthday present, and you actively take your brain back and you remember getting a Barbie doll? That’s explicit memory. It’s a narrative. It’s a story. It’s your explicitly remembering something, overtly remembering something, implicit memory is sometimes called procedural memory, thus I misspoke earlier. So sometimes called procedural memory. And implicit memory is memory that you don’t actively tap. It’s a memorized habit or a memorized state of being, a memorized feeling, a memorized anything like that, that it just is in your body, it is in your experience, and it is online, quote, unquote, from birth. So even though you don’t have explicit memories of birth through two to three years of age, your body has been storing implicit memories. So implicit memories can be things like simple things like how to ride a bike, which was at one point explicit, probably for you, but it but is now implicit for you. Your body just knows how to get on a bike and do it. You don’t actively have to think about getting on the bike, pushing the pedals, steering, balancing, any of those kinds of things. Your body knows how to do that. It is implicit in your body. It bypasses language. So sometimes there are things that happen in our implicit memory, or implicit memories that get activated that we don’t have language for, because it’s not a linguistic activity. It’s not it’s a, I’m going to keep you see the word implicit, even though you shouldn’t use the definition the word in the definition of the word, but it is something experienced in your body. Yeah. It’s also so procedurally, how to ride a bike, how to drive a car, how to play a musical instrument, and this is an example I think I can give of the difference between explicit and implicit. So I played the flute growing up for about eight or nine years, and at the time, I could tell you the names of the notes on the page. I could tell you all of those kinds of things, right? So that was explicit memory that I had access to and language for. I have not played the flute with any regularity at all in probably about 20 years. And yet, if I look at a piece of sheet music and I have my flute in my hand, my fingers will do what that note says it’s supposed to do, but I can’t tell you the name of the note anymore. So implicitly, my body remembers how to play the flute even with the stimuli of the notes on the page. But explicitly, I no longer know the names of the notes on the page. I could probably relearn them, but I don’t actually know them anymore, but my body still remembers how to play the flute, if that makes sense, not good. Let me just clarify that. But there is a response of my fingers on the instrument when I see a note on a page, right? So that would be implicit. It just happens, because it has has become ingrained. It is a memorized way of moving in response to those notes. So those are procedural examples, but there are also feeling examples, or states of being, states of feeling that are implicit memories. So whenever I’m approached with X scenario, my quote, unquote, natural response is a right, whatever that is that’s a memorized state or a memorized feeling in which I respond to that scenario, right? And the way that that, actually, I’m going to hold that thought for just a second, it also so procedural emotional states. It’s also very implicit. Memories are also very much tied to our nervous system. And if you think about safety as the main concern of our nervous system, this concept of fight, flight, freeze, fawn, those, those would be memorized states in our bodies as well. So when a threat occurs, what is our kind of go to our default response that would be an implicit memory. And as I’m saying this, I’m recognizing that I’m talking about things in the past, and oftentimes memory is related to things in the past, but our explicit and implicit memory is still forming until we die. So we are adding to our explicit memory and to our implicit memory every second of every day, as we are continuing to to live our lives, have experiences, respond to stimuli in the environment, all of those kinds of things. So even though we think of memory as a long time ago, it is something that is still happening, and that is how our brain categorizes and makes sense of things, right? So if you are learning something new right now, that’s going to be explicit memory, right? And you are also, at the same time, building implicit memories, as you are confronted with, and I don’t mean that in a provocative way, but confronted with new experiences in your world and having to figure out a way to respond. Now, our brain is very concerned with conserving energy, and so oftentimes, even if we’re confronted with a new scenario, our body will our body and our mind will look for some similarities to something in the past and then draw on that implicit memory response. And so that’s kind of how that works, in a very crude explanation of my understanding, right? So,

okay, so now I want to talk about how those memories get made, which then will link us to adult learning, learning in general, adult or otherwise, but learning in general, and then, and then I’ll talk about how I think that relates to DCs, specifically case conferencing. So one of the ways that we’re actually the way, the way that things are put into our brain. Doing to make sense of things is experiential. So we have an experience and an experience like an event that we went to right, like a thing that happened to us, external to us, but we also then have an internal experience and that activates. I’m not going to use the correct neuroscience words, I’m sure here, but this is my understanding of it. So I will put some references to Amanda Blake in the the show notes, so that you can look this up yourself. Because I think I’m a little over, not oversimplifying, but I’m used. I’m going to use the word synapses. And I think that there are different actual like, there are different kinds of synapses that interact with each other. So anyway, so what happens when we have an experience is that a synapse fires, it kind of opens up, like, if you think of the palm of your hand, or your hand kind of opening and extending all of your fingers, it activates a synapse, which then finds us in another synapse that it’s not connected to nearby, and kind of draws it in. And those, if you think of your other hand expanding, and your fingers kind of headed towards each other, so the synapses from the experience kind of get those fingers to connect and interweave together, so those synapses are talking to each other. And that would be a, you know, kind of confirming experience, for lack of a better term, that then solidifies that experience and that memorized kind of body state together, right? So it consolidates them in your brain together. It puts them in the same bucket in your brain, so that when that experience happens again in the future, that memorized state will come along with it, right? So, so we have these connected experience and response, experience and response, or stimuli and response. Maybe that’s a better way to say that. Yeah,

um that happens in our in our bodies, if we are wanting to learn something new or change something that has been in us for a really long time, that process that I just explained to you is called memory consolidation. And then there’s memory reconsolidation, which is kind of the reinforcing of that again and again and again. So if you imagine that those synapses kind of come together when you have the initial stimulus and response, right? Every time I have the stimulus and I have that same response, it gets thicker and thicker and thicker and thicker like that, that relationship gets really deeply, kind of embedded in there, right? It becomes a stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger connection. I don’t know why this is the example that just came to my mind, but I think maybe a little bit like french braiding. So when you start the braid, the the hair strands are pretty thin, but every time you cross over and you grab more hair, and you grab more hair, and you grab more hair, every time you cross over in the braid, by the end, the strands are pretty thick, right? Because you’ve repeated the pattern and drawn in the next layer and the next layer and the next layer. I don’t know if that’s a good analogy, but it’s the one that came to my head. I thought I’d share. Okay, so if we want to learn something or learn something new, we have to our brain embarks on memory reconsolidation. And what Amanda Blake would argue is that the way that the brain does memory reconsolidation is the learning process. Thus any learning theory that you have out there, or any coaching theory that you have out there about transformation, or anything like that, will map on to these neuro, neurobiological phenomena, phenomenons. I don’t think they’re phenomenons, functions, I’ll say functions. So what you need to do for learning is a three step process, or what are not what you need to do, what our brain does it. This isn’t even like a should. This is just how the brain works to. Learn and to relearn or to unlearn and then learn something new to change. This is what happens, is memory reconsolidation. So the three steps or the street, three ways that this happens which are not necessarily linear, and yet they are. I’m still a little bit confused about that part. But just to put that out there, so the first thing is to reactivate that experience of the stimuli and to reactivate getting the body and mind back into that state of what has been the habitual response, right? So I’m wondering if I could use my flute analogy for this. Let’s see how it goes. So for me, if I wanted to relearn how to play the flute and then hone my skills and get better over time, right, I would need to reactivate I might start by having a flute instructor with me, a sheet of music, and my flute and I would play the piece of music, but then, so then that would get me back into the state of working with the music, right? So that would be the reactivation kind of state. And I realized that this example is a little bit more procedural, but maybe that’ll help us to then apply it to something less procedural. Hopefully we’ll see how this works out. So the second state, or the second thing that happens in memory reconsolidation, is that we either confirm or disconfirm that experience that we’ve reactivated. So if we want to change, if we want to learn something new, then we want to disconfirm that experience that we just had. So our brains learn from disconfirming information, so kind of like filtering information and disconfirming things, dis identifying with whatever that experience is. So now here’s where the flute is going to fall apart, actually, now that I think about it, because I’m not disconfirming anything, I need the flute teacher to confirm that the fingers on the instrument are playing the correct notes, and then tell me what those notes are, so that I can relearn and put those things together again, right? So I need the flute teacher to actually confirm what my experience with the flute is, and then potentially correct anything that I’ve gotten wrong, right? So it could be that I miss a flat or a sharp, or I miss something like that, and they say, Oh, actually, your finger should be in this position, not that position, right? So that would be disconfirming. I’ve activated being a flute player, right? And now they’re telling me, actually, it’s this, not this, right. And then we go into the third part of it, if learning is reconsolidation, which means that we then practice the new way of being right. So then I would go from there to practicing the new way like actually, probably accessing my explicit memory to remember and be intentional about playing this particular way, not that particular way. I’m not sure the flute example really landed, but hopefully some of it, hopefully you followed some of it.

So again, if we think about the learning process, or learning how to respond in a novel environment, or how to respond differently in an environment, right? So if we’ve been rather passive and we want to be active, we would reactivate that experience in our bodies. It doesn’t mean that I so again, the procedural example I gave you is me actually playing the flute. But the reactivating of the experience can be a memory or an imagination. Our brain doesn’t actually know the difference between imagination and reality, so as long as we’re activating the experience and harkening back to bringing it front of mind. Then our body is in that experiential state again. Then we introduce disconfirming information, an alternative response, an alternative way of being, and then reconsolidate it through giving giving your brain an alternative, giving your brain a different thing to do. This memory reconsolidation can be something that happens instantly, and it can also be something that takes time, and it can be both of those things at the same time. So it’s a little bit more complicated than I’m going to be able to get into here. Okay, so hopefully that’s enough rambling if you made it this far. And now I want to talk about I kind of woke up yesterday thinking like, ooh. This, this concept from Dr Blake about this could be any, any learning theory, any coaching theory, anything she hypothesized, could be mapped onto. This three step process, because it is just factually the way that our brain makes meaning and makes sense of and learns. I guess that’s the simplest way to say that. So I kind of woke up yesterday thinking like, Oh, that’s interesting. Case conferencing, DCS based case conferencing really kind of follows this three step process, right? So I’m going to kind of explore that. I haven’t fully thought it out. I’m an external processor, as if you didn’t realize that by now, but I think that so if we think about demand control schema, and if you’re unfamiliar with it, I’ll put some links in the show notes as well. This isn’t meant to be a teaching on DCS, so I’m kind of going to assume you have some generic information about DCS. But essentially, interpreting is there are demands of the job, controls that the interpreter brings to the job, and that interaction then plays out in a sequence, a sequence of events and overlapping kinds of decisions, all those kinds of things. But if we think about the case conferencing element of DCs and and of, you know, supervision or reflective practices, if we think about the four demand categories of environmental, interpersonal, paralinguistic and intra personal, and that we start a case conference by asking an interpreter to share a case with us where we explore the environmental, interpersonal, paralinguistic and intrapersonal demands that they experienced on that job. That’s reactivating their experience right their body and their mind has gone back to that experience, and it is in that state again, right? And then we go to an A so we end up with a constellation of demands, right? And then we talk about how we can be helpful to the to the case giver, in terms of kind of narrowing in on a demand that we might want to explore in the constellation and outside of the constellation, right? And when we’ve explored that demand, we then get into brainstorming potential control options, right? Well, that’s disconfirming, right? That’s that, because as soon as I’ve brainstormed beyond what the interpreter actually did in the moment, I’m now providing alternatives. I’m providing other options. I’m providing new ways of thinking. And I don’t mean I as the leader, I mean like the group, right? But in this scenario, I’m now providing disconfirming information as well as confirming information, right? But in the in that stage of the process, we’re disconfirming, and then I’m not sure where consequences would go as we kind of explore the consequences, but the kind of narrowing of controls that we Want to explore further. I think kind of leads is kind of like the bridge between disconfirming and reconsolidation, where we then now are taking these as viable options and exploring them further. Of what would it actually look like if I employed this and maybe even trying some of them on, whether that’s in a role play, or just linguistically, or any of those kinds of things, right? But I’ve taken my if I was the case giver, I’ve taken my body on this journey and my mind on this journey of I’ve reactivated what I experienced. I have disconfirming and confirming, dis identifying experiences and options given to me, and then into reconsolidation, where I’m focusing on what else I might want to do in the future for things that are similar to this, right? What? How are some new ways that I might want to engage with this in the future, and then as I go forward to practice them, I then reconsolidate that into my brain, giving making that connection between the synapses looser and more fluid to be able to pick some different synapses to connect with in the future, if at if similar stimuli come up in The future. And then as we continue on to that, and we talk about, you know, potential resulting demands or potential resolution that continues in that reconsolidation kind of pattern, I don’t think reconsolidation finishes during during case conferencing, just because, I mean, maybe it could, like, it could be one of those instantaneous things, if all of a sudden, like an aha, light bulb kind of came up and you were like, Oh, I know exactly what I would do, or I know exactly how that would feel, or I know exactly what I you know, whatever I think it could happen. But I think largely the reconsolidation kind of element of it would continue as you then put something into practice. Practice, and you lived it in the real world, in in real time, as opposed to from the reactivated state of being. So I think that’s interesting. And I’ve continued kind of pondering some other adult learning theories. One of my not an adult Well, one of my favorites is backwards design from Wiggins and McTighe. I have no idea if I’m pronouncing their names correctly. I’ll put them in the show notes too. And so I haven’t, I haven’t, I haven’t compared those as overtly as I just did DCS and the case conferencing process. But I do think that it would, it would map pretty well, because if I think about backwards design and starting with the end in mind, well, I want them to get to this reconsolidation state, which means I need to get them activated into a place where they can have disconfirming information to get to the reconsolidated place, right? So I think it would map. And again, I think it would map because that’s the learning process, like, that’s literally what our brain does. So any of these theorists who talk about adult learning hopefully noticed these patterns about how our brain actually works, whether or not neuroscience had discovered it by the time they came up with their learning theory. And thus it should map pretty closely. I found it to be really helpful. Simplistic way of thinking about how learning happens. And then I think creativity can happen within each of those three stages, and kind of reinforcing some of the tools that I’ve used and why I like them, so like a free write at the beginning to activate people’s thinking around a topic, or, you know, any of those kinds of things. Well, it’s because I’m trying to activate and get them into a space where they’ll be receptive to whatever I’m going to present to them. Well, that is exactly reactivation and then confirming or disconfirming information then to get them into reconsolidation, right? So that’s memory reconsolidation. Again, memory is not about the past, it is about the past and it is about the present, because our brain is continuing to do this memory consolidation and reconsolidation constantly. Our implicit and our explicit memory are constantly in action and constantly being added to so I’d be curious what your thoughts are on this, if it made any sense at all, and I’m going to continue exploring it as well, so you’ll probably hear more about it.

Conclusion

And again, I want to, I want you to think about anything that might have sparked your care if you feel moved to action questions that arise, what insights and connections you’re making. I’d love to hear from you about those insights ahas and questions. So feel free to reach out to me at arsmithstudios@gmail.com and you can also sign up for my very intermittent newsletter at arsmithstudios.com and click on the newsletter button in the upper right hand corner. So let me go back and answer some of these questions.