Actors have got to be some of the most underestimated bunch of talented people on earth. It’s a common misconception that actors aren’t as intelligent or mentally capable as say, accountants or computer programmers, to say the least. Maybe its because what they do seems to be too easy in contrast to the amount of money they earn. First off, not all actors earn tons of money. Those that do are just the top 5% or 1%. Most other actors do just fine while some are even struggling.
But that’s not the important misconception to correct. The misconception that actors aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed isn’t just baseless – it’s totally wrong! Being able to deliver lines, especially for live performances such as theater plays, doesn’t just require memorizing thousands of words but also learning how to properly express those words in terms of tone, body language and even timing!
Now I don’t know about you but that doesn’t sound like it’s a very menial task to me! Most people think that actors and actresses merely “memorize” all their lines by simply rehearsing them. In this case, most people are wrong.
According to psychologist Helga Noice, many actors don’t learn lines by trying to concentrate on their scripts’ actual words but on things that run deeper: the context of the scene, what is really meant and their characters’ persona and motivations. That isn’t to say that memorizing is worthless and should be thrown out as a learning technique.
No, it still has its place in terms of learning but in order to be able to really learn something much deeper, you can go deeper into what it is you’re trying to learn by explaining why it is the way it is. What do I mean by this? Let’s take the acting example from earlier. Suppose you’re playing the role of a hostage taker, who’s doing it because he feels he was given really poor cards to play life with.
He feels the government and society in general have conspired against him as within the last 3 months alone, he lost his job, his wife and his kids to retrenchment, divorce and court ruling, respectively. To be able to learn how to play the role exceedingly well, try explaining why thehostage taker is doing what he’s doing. To be able to do this, you’ll need to ask questions concerning what you’re trying to learn.
In this case, put yourself in his shoes and see how you’d feel if the same thing happened to you. If you can’t, recall an incident in the past where you felt like you were treated by life, fate or society in general unfairly. When you’re able to do that, you’ll be able to explain away why the hostage taker is really doing what he’s doing and in the process, put yourself in the best position to play the role.
You learn how to play the part as if you really were the hostage taker. This method of learning how to play roles isn’t just “showbiz” stuff – it’s actually based on a practical learning technique that can be used to learn just about anything – faster and better. This technique is referred to as elaborative processing or investigation. In this technique, you relate the information to other relevant and associated information and facts. In one study, a group of participants were instructed to learn some words by trying to explain or answer one of 3 questions.
The first 2 questions were about the word itself while the 3rd question related the word in question to another word or idea. Guess which answered question led to the most significant ability to recall words? You guessed it right (I guessing you did) – the 3rd question, which explained what the word is particularly by relating it to some other familiar idea or word, which was more meaning-based and elaborative compared to the 2 other questions.
There was another study where the participants were asked to learn sentences this time. In this experiment, they learned the sentences by either studying the sentence itself or by elaborating or expanding on it with an explanation or investigation as to why the sentence was so. For example, the sentence is “Luke Skywalker was distraught.” versus the sentence “Luke Skywalker was distraught because he found out who his true father was…Darth Vader!”, the latter type of sentence led to improved memory and higher sentence recall.
This seems to suggest that more cognitive effort can increase one’s ability to learn something really well. In yet another study, this time on the different ways of preparing for school tests, participants of the study were split into to groups. The first one were asked questions – the answers to which were the topics they’ll be reading – before studying a particular written material. The other group was merely asked tostudy the written material. The study’s results revealed that retention and recall of the studied texts improved significantly through elaborative processing or investigation, e.g., answering related questions prior to studying a certain topic.
Elaborative processing or investigation (explaining) is a good way to learn things to the extent that you’ll be able to learn a particular material whether or not you actually try. In another study, two groups of people were asked to apply elaborative processing or investigation on a piece of text – one group were required to learn it while the other was merely asked to apply the learning technique. The researchers who conducted the study discovered no significant difference in the learning results for both groups, i.e., learning intention plays a minimal role in learning effectively compared to learning method.
