Feeding a Learning Community

Notes from the Conference on Learning and the Brain, Cambridge Mass.

By Lynne Neitzschman, Ph.D

“Life is one big learning process.  We are always adapting or we are dying, from our earliest moments of trying to suckle,” began Dr. Gessner Geyer in introduction to his session on Creating Optimal Learners at the recent Learning and the Brain Conference in Cambridge.

Dr. Geyer says that our brains have not really changed in 50,000,000 years.  But we have continuously tapped into our biologically designed learning capacity.  We are all born to learn.  His mantra is “wear out not rust out!”  It’s all about feeling really alive.  Dr. Geyer says that people who use their brains tend to be happier.  Optimal learning requires curiosity, motivation, risk taking, perseverance, focus, self-awareness, and inspiration.  These words do not define people who are depressed.

Dr. Geyer believes that educators and parents must incorporate information gained by neuroscientists who are using the functional MRI and PET scans to study children’s brains and learning.  He showed scans to illustrate that brain activity in children slows down when children feel rejected and also stated that PET scans can demonstrate whether one is smiling or not.  Learning and experience definitely change the brain.  He cited the work of Dr. Marian Diamond who used mice from the same litter to study brain changes in two environments:  a small impoverished place and a sensory challenging environment.  After only four hours, the mice from the challenging environment ran faster and performed better on tasks than the other group.  Biopsies of the brains of these mice showed that the mice from the impoverished environment had fewer dendrites than the other group. He said that her studies in addition to many others have concluded that our brains thrive best on novelty and change, engaging and challenging activities, physical exercise, social interaction and a sense of autonomy.

Stressing that all human behavior has neurobiological correlates, Dr. Geyer said that “we exist and learn within the mind/brain/body environment.  We learn from continuous feedback loops filtered through biology, behavior and the environment.”  He named six ways that the brain best acquires knowledge:

1. The brain is an “association machine.”  Knowledge is acquired through neural networks.  We are always being reminded of something when we are thinking about something else.  When you are learning something new, you are trying to fit into some other construct previously learned.

2. The brain is a “pattern driven process.”  This is why learning in “chunks” is generally more effective.  We are always looking for structures and order.  Students want to know what to expect so they are ready to see the emerging patterns in the material.

3. The brain “runs on emotions.”  We cannot learn without the limbic system, the seat of emotions in the brain, being engaged.  Dr. Geyer showed a film clip from “Ferris Buhler’s Day Off” where the teacher is droning on some historical point in a most boring manner and the students have either fallen asleep or their eyes are totally glazed over to illustrate his point.

4. Learning often occurs beneath our level of awareness.  Nearly 85% of learning occurs at the level of the basal ganglia, which he calls “implicit learning mechanisms”.  So the learning is mostly unconscious.  This is why modeling behaviors that are desirable is so important.

5. The brain “uses the body to learn”.  The brain takes in information through the senses.  The central nervous system connects with all other systems, where there are neuropeptides, or vital message senders to the brain.  Whenever the body can be employed in learning, the brain will learn better.

6. The brain is “the ultimate meaning making organ”.  “What’s in it for me.”  We must find ways to engage children to learn in ways that make it make sense to them.  The making of meaning creates the optimal learner.

Dr. Geyer discuss cited Dr. Robert Sternberg’s theory on intelligence. The creative intelligence decides what problems to solve; the analytical intelligence solves the problem; and the practical intelligence makes the solution effective.

He went on to describe two types of learning:  informative and transformative.  The brain, he said , is the “ultimate transformative tool”.  We just don’t learn by plugging in information.  We need to have experiences to learn, ways to engage by doing.  Dewey said, “We learn by doing”; Piaget said that ‘Learning is the biological imperative.”

We need to develop learners who are not afraid to make mistakes; we need to encourage learning by learn by trial and error.

So, all learning is biological, and requires energy, movement, and enlists the entire organism.  Learning is making connections:  personal connections make for the most meaningful learning.  Emotional connections are essential to effective learning.  Playfulness and wrong answer optimize neural connections.  In fact, Dr. Geyer expanded, movement provides “fuel, focus and fun.” The brain runs on glucose and oxygen.  It is important to increase the amount of oxygen to the brain through exercises that promote deep breathing..  Dr. Geyer believes that schools should provide for at least 45 minutes of aerobic exercise within the school day, noting that deep breathing helps release seratonin which helps us to focus and dopamine which makes us feel good.

Dr. Geyer, showing his sense of humor, believes that we are a society that suffers from what he has coined as MAD:  Multitasking Addictive Disorder.  We are consistently asked to attend to too many things.  He named four different types of attention:  1)arousal, from something startling, like a scream, 2)vigilance, from something general that commands our attention, 3)selective vigilance, from something more specific, and 4)mental rotation, or problem solving.  Effective attention requires inhibiting distractions.  Furthermore, attention is affected by the context of the information:  sensory contrast, movement, touch, color, smell; emotional context; solicited feedback; novelty and ritual (surprise and anticipation).

His recommendations for classroom strategies include:  engage students in developing their personal questions on the topics; encourage students to engage in self-talk; provide opportunities to generate feedback from the students; give choices on assignments; make sure the assignments are relevant; provide for learning with the use of the body; ensure there is an emotional component; allow for cooperative learning.

Dr. Geyer ended with the four behavioral factors for optimal cognitive in the aging:  high mental activity, including music, puzzles, reading and learning a new foreign language; high aerobic activity; high anaerobic activity and a well developed internal locus of control.