Learning from your Cipher

In 2011 Caribou lodge finds itself with a very good problem to have. We have lots of work to do, with our five EAs, two applications to ballot and at least one application to read for the first time at the March Stated Meeting. This means lots of cipher work and lots of mentoring.

When it comes to learning ritual, I have been told that "Once you can read it in the cipher then you have it licked" and sure enough once I can read it in the cipher, I do almost have it learned. But getting to the point that I can read it can be a daunting task.

I have often thought that it would be nice to have the entire ritual written out within the lodge, as some States do. But then I am happy that we at least have ciphers to work with unlike other states. So I struggle with my cipher calling on brethren to assist with those pesky words, or giving a call to Marshal White the District Ritual Instructor who can look it up in his "book" if I am really stuck.

Well, I follow several blogs that are focused on Masonry and one of them brought my attention to an article in the BBC World News. No the article didn't talk about masonry directly but it did speak to the challenges of learning from a code or our ciphers. According to a study conducted at Princeton University and published in the International Journal of Cognition, using the code in our cipher may be more beneficial than each of us having our own "book" to use.

From the BBC News Article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11573666

Researchers found that, on average, those given the harder-to-read fonts actually recalled 14% more.

They believe that presenting information in a way that is hard to digest means a person has to concentrate more, and this leads to “deeper processing” and then “better retrieval” afterwards.

It is an example of the positive effects of what scientists call “disfluency”.

“Disfluency is just a subjective feeling of difficulty associated with any mental task,” explained psychology Prof Daniel Oppenheimer, one of the co-authors of the study.

“So if something is hard to see or hear, it feels disfluent… We’d found that disfluency led people to think harder about things. [...]

Students given the harder-to-read materials scored higher in their classroom assessments than those in the control group. This was the case across a range of subjects – from English, to Physics to History.

The Blog Address: http://masonictao.com/

I thought you might find this interesting and it might entice you to dig deep and learn a new lecture just for the fun of it.