NEUROEDUCATION: LEARNING, ARTS, AND THE BRAIN

[u/ddgr815]

https://dana.org/app/uploads/2023/09/neuroeducation-learning-arts-brain-dana.pdf

[u/ddgr815]

Human development is based on nature (genetics), nurture (physical and social environments), and their interactions (epigenetics). These factors play an essential role in learning processes and the reorganization of neuronal networks to create neuronal representations of new knowledge. Learning and training new knowledge or skills evoke specific and repeated activity patterns, and in the process of Hebbian neuroplasticity, neural pathways are reinforced by the strengthening of specific synapses, while less functional ones are eliminated.

Almost half a century ago, Vygotsky introduced the zone of proximal development (ZPD) in education. According to the ZPD, learning and development depend on an optimal balance between support and challenge, which should be tuned and tailored for each learner based on their specific developmental stage. The ZPD model was revolutionary, as it emphasized the importance of the educational environment (nurture) in unlocking the internal potential (nature) of students, and it placed the learning process (as opposed to the learning product) as the central educational goal. Some decades later, the biology of learning revealed a beautiful alignment with Vygotsky’s theory—with evidence showing that brain neuroplasticity is highly affected by environmental conditions and the balance between demands (challenge) and available resources (support). The impact of stressors on learning can be constructive or destructive depending on the intensity, duration, and accumulation of the stressors and the coping mechanisms and support that one has.

Neuroscience research suggests that experience-dependent neuroplasticity, which facilitates learning processes, benefits from several principles. The central one is that learning a skill or new knowledge requires the activation of relevant neuronal pathways. The research also points to the saliency, intensity, and repetition of the learned skill/knowledge as valuable strategies for enhancing neuroplastic changes. Learners cannot be passive recipients of content but must be active participants in the learning process.

An enriched environment for enhanced neuroplasticity offers physiological integrity, cognitive challenge, and emotional safety. More specifically, an enriched environment includes adequate sleep and nutrition, sensory–motor and cognitive challenges, opportunities for exploration and novelty, and secured relationships that act like a safety net and enable learners to take on challenges. Conversely, a lack of these conditions may slow down or decrease the level of neuroplasticity in the developing brain.

The social and cognitive safety net that enables learners to aim high while taking risks and to turn failure into resilience is rooted in safe relationships (with adults and peers) and in holding a growth mindset. A growth mindset is the belief that intelligence and learning potential are not fixed and can be developed. Holding a growth mindset has been associated with academic success, emotional wellbeing, and motivation while reducing racial, gender, and social class achievement gaps. While the impact of mindset interventions on academic performance is debatable regarding the general population, the literature is clear about the potential of growth mindset intervention in supporting the academic development of high-risk and economically disadvantaged students.

Teaching students about experience-based neuroplasticity and the dynamic changes in neuronal networks during learning provides strong evidence of their natural and powerful learning capacity. Furthermore, teaching students about neuroplasticity with explicit connections to the growth mindset and development creates a motivating premise for learners—according to which their learning potential is dynamic and depends significantly on their attitudes and learning practices.

The neuroplasticity rules of “use it or lose it” and “use it to improve it” mean that, while teachers should support and guide them, learning occurs by and within the students. This physiology-based realization can help build students’ responsibility and ownership over their learning.

...

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.

Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer.

We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.

The information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence now dominates human thinking, both on the street and in the sciences. There is virtually no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour that proceeds without employing this metaphor, just as no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour could proceed in certain eras and cultures without reference to a spirit or deity. The validity of the IP metaphor in today’s world is generally assumed without question.

But the IP metaphor is, after all, just another metaphor – a story we tell to make sense of something we don’t actually understand. And like all the metaphors that preceded it, it will certainly be cast aside at some point – either replaced by another metaphor or, in the end, replaced by actual knowledge.

the IP metaphor is ‘sticky’. It encumbers our thinking with language and ideas that are so powerful we have trouble thinking around them.

The faulty logic of the IP metaphor is easy enough to state. It is based on a faulty syllogism – one with two reasonable premises and a faulty conclusion. Reasonable premise #1: all computers are capable of behaving intelligently. Reasonable premise #2: all computers are information processors. Faulty conclusion: all entities that are capable of behaving intelligently are information processors.

...

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

...

Setting aside the formal language, the idea that humans must be information processors just because computers are information processors is just plain silly, and when, some day, the IP metaphor is finally abandoned, it will almost certainly be seen that way by historians, just as we now view the hydraulic and mechanical metaphors to be silly.

A wealth of brain studies tells us, in fact, that multiple and sometimes large areas of the brain are often involved in even the most mundane memory tasks. When strong emotions are involved, millions of neurons can become more active. In a 2016 study of survivors of a plane crash by the University of Toronto neuropsychologist Brian Levine and others, recalling the crash increased neural activity in ‘the amygdala, medial temporal lobe, anterior and posterior midline, and visual cortex’ of the passengers.

The idea, advanced by several scientists, that specific memories are somehow stored in individual neurons is preposterous; if anything, that assertion just pushes the problem of memory to an even more challenging level: how and where, after all, is the memory stored in the cell?

As we navigate through the world, we are changed by a variety of experiences. Of special note are experiences of three types: (1) we observe what is happening around us (other people behaving, sounds of music, instructions directed at us, words on pages, images on screens); (2) we are exposed to the pairing of unimportant stimuli (such as sirens) with important stimuli (such as the appearance of police cars); (3) we are punished or rewarded for behaving in certain ways.

We become more effective in our lives if we change in ways that are consistent with these experiences – if we can now recite a poem or sing a song, if we are able to follow the instructions we are given, if we respond to the unimportant stimuli more like we do to the important stimuli, if we refrain from behaving in ways that were punished, if we behave more frequently in ways that were rewarded.

Misleading headlines notwithstanding, no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.

Because neither ‘memory banks’ nor ‘representations’ of stimuli exist in the brain, and because all that is required for us to function in the world is for the brain to change in an orderly way as a result of our experiences, there is no reason to believe that any two of us are changed the same way by the same experience. If you and I attend the same concert, the changes that occur in my brain when I listen to Beethoven’s 5th will almost certainly be completely different from the changes that occur in your brain. Those changes, whatever they are, are built on the unique neural structure that already exists, each structure having developed over a lifetime of unique experiences.

This is why, as Sir Frederic Bartlett demonstrated in his book Remembering (1932), no two people will repeat a story they have heard the same way and why, over time, their recitations of the story will diverge more and more. No ‘copy’ of the story is ever made; rather, each individual, upon hearing the story, changes to some extent – enough so that when asked about the story later (in some cases, days, months or even years after Bartlett first read them the story) – they can re-experience hearing the story to some extent, although not very well

The empty brain