How to Use Inculcation to Boost Your Learning

Learn a fancy word to embrace this simple concept

It was that time in high school that everyone dreads: preparing for the SATs. At the time, the test essentially tested math and language skills. Math always came easy to me. But verbal? As the son of two immigrants for whom English was a second language, the verbal section was a potential minefield.

But undaunted, my mom encouraged me to try and offered to help. We had a list of over 2000 vocabulary words that commonly appeared in this section. Learn the words, ace the test. Simple, right?

But where on earth did they find these words? They were long, difficult to pronounce, and uncommonly used. One in particular stood out.

Inculcate

For those of you fortunate enough never to have seen this vocabulary list or this word, inculcate means:

Teach (someone) an attitude, idea, or habit by persistent instruction

And that is exactly what we proceeded to do. To master the 2000 words, my mom would read a section of 100 at a time. I would respond with the definition. If I was right, next word. Wrong? She told me the definition, and the word got marked with an X next to it. This was Round 1.

Neurons that fire together wire together.

Round 2 consisted of repeating the same process with the subset of words with an X by them. Same deal: right & move on; wrong & the second X comes down.

We continued this process until I answered each word correctly at least once. At the end of 20 nights, we had completed the entire list. I could honestly say I had defined each word on that list properly at least once.

Was I done? No — we started all over again.

From aardvark.

The second time went by faster. By the end of the summer, I could claim mastery over the list. Why? Because of inculcation. The words had been drilled into me by persistent instruction.

A popular saying within neuroscience is “Neurons that fire together wire together.” Interestingly though, the converse is also important: neurons that should not fire need to retire. Pardon the groan-worthy rhyme, but it’s true: part of learning correctly is unlearning your intuitive first guess.

When I first heard the word inculcate, I had no idea what it meant. So I used context clues. The prefix in- often relates to opposites, such as independent meaning “not dependent.” The rest of the word “culcate” reminded me of the phrase cul de sac. So maybe the word meant removing a dead end?

To learn the correct meaning of inculcate (learning by repetition), I had to quiet the neurons that were making the erroneous guess. As I was learning all these new words, my brain was forming connections all over the place. Most of these synapses were correct, but some were misfires. Only by repetition and time could my brain essentially edit itself to ensure that the right pathways were reinforced and the wrong pathways removed.

Some may argue that inculcation is the only way to learn. As they say, practice makes perfect. To me, this is true but incomplete. Learning requires constructing a mental model that you can understand from first principles. Inculcation ensures that that learning sticks.

If you want to learn something well, repeat it. If you inculcate, you will learn anything better than before.

Thanks for reading! Follow me on Twitter for more reflections: @JayVillas2020.