The Role of Memory and Imagination in Learning Through Play

For several days in a row, the girl had positioned the ends of a plank of wood on car tires to make a balance beam upon which she played. She didn't object when other children wanted to try out her invention. Indeed, she welcomed them, giving tips and otherwise sharing the expertise she had developed over the course of her days of trial-and-error experimenting.

One day, a group of boy stacked three tires one atop another then abandoned it to do other robust things. The girl contemplated the tower of tires for a moment before moving one end of her plank to the top of the stack, while leaving the other end on a single tire. Then, using the skills and knowledge she had been developing over the course of the preceding days, she attempted to balance up the incline.

We can never know what is going on inside the head of another person, but it seemed as if she had asked herself, "What if I put one end on that stack of tires?" She had built this scenario based upon what she already knew about planks and tires: she knew something, then used her imagination to expand her knowledge.

We see young children do this all the time. They bring what they know from home into our home center where they play "What if . . . ?" games with housekeeping. They bring what they already know about shape and color to the art table where they play "What if . . .?" with new media and materials. They begin with what they've learned about relationships inside their family, then play "What if . . .?" with the people they find at preschool.

According to those who study brain function, the systems used for memory and imagining heavily overlap, especially in and around the hippocampus. In fact, research suggests that the cognitive process of remembering is almost identical to the process of imagining. In both cases, the brain is constructing a story: one about what did happen -- or, more accurately, what is likely to have happened -- and the other about what might happen. This fascinating insight helps explain why our memories tend to be so faulty. It also suggests that the purpose of memory isn't so much accuracy as it is to provide us with stories that make sense of the present.

When the girl was practicing with her balance beam, she was gathering information, which her brain stored in memory for future reference. She then used exactly the same parts of her brain to recall the pertinent information (as opposed to accurate information, although it might have been that) to construct a "What if . . . ?" scenario that she then carried out. This process creates new memories to serve as raw material for future imaginative play.

In other words, memory isn't just storage, as our test-taking school culture would have it, but rather a process of construction. When children engage in imaginative play, they practice assembling bits of experience into coherent stories, which is precisely what effective learning requires: connecting new information to prior knowledge. Imagination lets us simulate possibilities ("What if . . . ?"), which obviously stands at the heart of problem-solving and transfer of knowledge, the hallmarks of learning. The more vividly and meaningfully something is imagined, the more pathways the brain uses to encode it, and in contrast to the practice of rote memorization, imaginative play tends to carry emotional weight (joy, tension, curiosity) which strengthens memory formation.

In other words, imaginative experiences like those we see when children are free to play expand the brain systems required for future learning. So often schooling in our culture takes the form of direct instruction (lectures, worksheets, text books, testing) in the misguided notion that memory (or remembering) is simply a process of data recall. The constructive nature of memory is ignored entirely, which explains why so much of what we "learned" in school is lost within days of having passed the test. When children play, they imagine, and when we imagine we construct our own learning: they are, in truth, practicing how learning itself actually works.

The girl discovered that walking up her new, steep ramp was difficult, but that she could make it to the top by crawling or scooting, but she continued experimenting. After a time, the boys returned to discover what the girl had constructed from the beginnings of their own construction. And together, they asked, "What if . . . ?" An explosion of imagination that carried on for days.

Memory gives children something to think with. Imagination is how they learn to think with it.

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