Written by: Rachel Marie Paling, Senior Level Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
I am sitting at Milan Malpensa Airport waiting to go back home. It has been a whirlwind four days, revisiting Verona, after maybe six years. I honestly cannot remember the last time I was here! In these four days, I have unlocked deep subconscious memories of a life I began to live twenty years ago for a period of about seven years. It all started in 2003, after I qualified as a lawyer in the UK, I decided to combine my legal, language and desire for travel into “one” work dream. This took me to Germany, back to a Business Language School I had worked with in the year 2000, but at the same time, providence had it that I was also chosen to deliver a Legal English course at the Faculty of Law in Verona. And so began my double life.
Life in Germany and Life in Italy. And for seven years, I commuted to and from these two countries. Flying across Europe, to and fro crossing the Alps It began as a once every three months to then become an every week commute with the aeroplane. I know every airport from Venice to Milan – Treviso, Marco Polo, Verona, Verona Brescia, Milan Bergamo, Milan Malpensa, Milan Linate as well as Dusseldorf, Dortmund, Koln-Bonn, Eindhoven, Frankfurst Hahn, Dusseldorf Weeze. You name it, I flew it and I loved it. I would organise my trips six months in advance with the clockwork precision of times, dates, and locations to be able to take advantage of the low-cost airline offers and often, I would pay 25€ for a flight and three times more for the parking at the airport!
Somehow in the busyness of the past few years as an entrepreneur, I had buried this chapter of my life deep in my brain. But in these four days, I found the key. The amazing thing is that once I started to walk around Verona, visit places I used to live, and see the people I shared moments in time with, the memories started flooding back. Not only the memories but also the language. In fact, one of my dearest girlfriends here asked me the other night, “how come you are still so fluent in Italian?” and my answer was, “I found my Italian chip in the brain.” Curiously when I landed in Malpensa on Wednesday, I remember going to the car hire desk and finding that my mouth and tongue could not quite get into that Italian way and I was totally blocked and tongue-tied, but over these last days, I have managed to regain my Italian fluency.
And this leads me to the fascinating topic of pruning. We know from science that our brain goes into a pruning process of connections and information we no longer use. For example, I played the piano as a child but sitting in front of a piano today, I no longer can even manage to play “chopsticks”! Is it the same for languages? Actually, I am starting to think it isn’t. I have worked with many clients helping them to learn languages and through the Neurolanguage Coaching technique of provoking connections and associations, they have started to remember things they had learned in school. Quite amazingly, when we hit the right keys for the brain, the language knowledge was unlocked and flowing. This leads me to another strange phenomenon I was experimenting with a couple of months ago. Lying in bed feeling ill, I experimented with my subconscious to see if I could unlock memories from certain years when I was a child. I would pick a year at school, focusing on the teacher at that time, the girls with me, the classrooms we were in, or an event from that year and see how much I could associate and recall from that year. The results were incredible, it was almost like opening a floodgate. So, could it be that we just need to feel extremely relaxed, at ease, with no stress (in essence, alpha/theta brainwave predominance) and some key triggers to start to remember those locked-up memories and, in particular, to unlock languages we learned as a child at school?
Since 2016 we have the research from the University of Nijmegen (Kirsten Weber et al. fMRI Syntactic and Lexical Repetition Effects Reveal the Initial Stages of Learning a New Language. Journal of Neuroscience, June 2016) that demonstrates when we learn a new language, our brain goes to the native grammar structures to try to springboard and connect in with the new language. So in effect, the brain reuses the characteristics of the native language to, in fact, learn the new language. Now, if we can use that constant provocation to associate, together with constant triggers of any past learning we may have undergone, I truly believe we can retrieve and reactivate locked-up language knowledge from the past.
The hidden power of our brain may, in fact, just need us to understand what it needs to trigger its magnificence and allow the floodgates of buried knowledge to reveal themselves again.
Rachel Marie Paling, Senior Level Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Rachel Marie Paling is an International Game Changer in Education, in particular, the education of languages. She has created the method and approach Neurolanguage Coaching, which incorporates professional coaching and neuroscience principles into the learning process. She coaches and trains teachers worldwide, transforming them into certified and ICF accredited Neurolanguage coaches and has created the Neurolanguage Coach network with over 1000 NL Coaches in just over 100 countries worldwide and is now bringing the approach to schools and institutions over the world through her licensed trainers and in nine languages. Rachel started teaching language at 17 and has a BA Honours in Law and Spanish, MA in Human Rights. She is a qualified UK lawyer, MA in Applied Neuroscience, and a PCC ICF Life Coach. She is the author of the books Neurolanguage Coaching and Brain-friendly Grammar and has written numerous blog articles about learning, coaching, and neuroscience. She has spoken at many international conferences, and her company was awarded the Bronze Award at the Reimagine Education Awards 2019 in the Science in Education category. She is dedicated to the shift in education and is currently establishing an educational foundation to bring coaching, neuroscience, and heart science into educational processes.
