Book Byte #299 "How We Learn" by Stanislas Dehaene
Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now
📣 Curious Quotes from the Author
“Amazingly, most teachers receive little or no professional training in the science of learning. My feeling is that we should urgently change this state of affairs, because we now possess considerable scientific knowledge about the brain’s learning algorithms and the pedagogies that are the most efficient.”
“The moral here is that nature and nurture should not be opposed. Pure learning, in the absence of any innate constraints, simply does not exist.”
“Thanks to this predictive learning mechanism, arbitrary signals can become the bearers of reward and trigger a dopamine response. This secondary reward effect has been demonstrated with money in humans and with the mere sight of a syringe in drug addicts. In both cases, the brain anticipates future rewards. As we saw in the first chapter, such a predictive signal is extremely useful for learning, because it allows the system to criticize itself and to foresee the success or failure of an action without having to wait for external confirmation.”
“But we can also ask the opposite question: Are there regions that are more active among bad readers and whose activity decreases as one learns to read? The answer is positive: in illiterates, the brain’s responses to faces are more intense. The better we read, the more this activity decreases in the left hemisphere, at the exact place in the cortex where written words find their niche—the brain’s letter box area. It’s as if the brain needs to make room for letters in the cortex, so the acquisition of reading interferes with the prior function of this region, which is the recognition of faces and objects.”
“Whatever input a brain region cannot explain is therefore passed on to the next level, which then attempts to make sense of it. We may conceive of the cortex as a massive hierarchy of predictive systems, each of which tries to explain the inputs and exchanges the remaining error messages with the others, in the hope that they may do a better job.”
“So, does literacy lead to a knockout or a blockade of the cortex? Our experiments suggest the latter: learning to read blocks the growth of face-recognition areas in the left hemisphere.”
“Being active and engaged does not mean that the body must move. Active engagement takes place in our brains, not our feet. The brain learns efficiently only if it is attentive, focused, and active in generating mental models.”
“No surprise, no learning: this basic rule now seems to have been validated in all kinds of organisms—including young children. Remember that surprise is one of the basic indicators of babies’ early skills: they stare longer at any display that magically presents them with surprising events that violate the laws of physics, arithmetic, probability, or psychology (see figure on this page and figure 5 in the color insert). But children do not just stare every time they are surprised: they demonstrably learn.”
“Curiosity is therefore a force that encourages us to explore. From this perspective, it resembles the drive for food or sexual partners, except that it is motivated by an intangible value: the acquisition of information.”
📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea
By effectively processing little amounts of data to create intricate ideas and social relationships, human learning surpasses artificial intelligence. This natural ability is enhanced by education, especially when it is adapted to each student's cognitive level and is accompanied by a stimulating environment. Understanding students' minds is essential for effective teaching, which makes human pedagogy incredibly flexible and engaging.
Until Tomorrow,
Jason (Founder Club255)