THE BRAIN/MIND LEARNING PRINCIPLES
Table of Contents 1. The Brain is a Living System 2. The Brain/Mind is Social 3. The Search For Meaning is Innate 4.The Search For Meaning Occurs Through Patterning 5. Emotions are Critical to Patterning 6. Every Brain Simultaneously Perceives and Creates Parts and Wholes 7. Learning Involves Both Focused Attention and Peripheral Perception 8. Learning Always Involves Conscious and Unconscious Processes 9. We Have At Least Two Ways of Organizing Memory 10. Learning is Developmental 11. Complex Learning Is Enhanced by Challenge and Inhibited by Threat. Associated with a Sense of Helplessness or Fatigue 12. Every Brain Is Uniquely Organized
Geoffrey and Renata Caine http://www.cainelearning.com/pwheel/expand/
The Caine's goal has been to synthesize research from many disciplines into a set of brain/mind learning principles to serve as a foundation for thinking about learning. The Principles make room for continuous new information from such fields as the neurosciences, cognitive psychology, stress theory and creativity. The Principles also include perspectives from the new sciences as well as what we know of the best of practice and the broader human experience. They are updated in this edition.
The most critical point about these principles is not only the research that supports each, but what education will look like if educators act with them in mind. Educators who believe in these principles will think, act, and make decisions in profoundly different ways from educators trained and educated with a behavioral or Industrial Age perspective.
1. The Brain Is a Living System
A system is a collection of parts that functions as a whole. Examples include clouds, rivers, trees, all of which function as parts of ecosystems. The brain meets this criterion beautifully. For instance, the amygdala has a great deal to do with emotions and the hippocampus with memory; although each region has its own function, the brain still operates as a whole, purposeful and dynamic entity, with memory and emotion influencing each other.
A living system, in addition, has some specific properties that have a
great bearing on how infants and young children function.
* The system seeks to survive and protect itself, as do infants who need
food, comfort, shelter and support.
* The system grows and adapts to its environment, as do infants who learn,
change and develop, all within the constraints of the places where they
find themselves.
* Very small incidents can have vast and unexpected ramifications, as
occurs when a single encounter generates cascades of emotions and
responses, some of which can lead to consequences that last forever.
* The system is immensely resilient, and it can absorb relatively large
inputs from the environment without noticeable consequence, as we find in
those children who seem to rise beyond relatively troubled environments.
Other research shows that body, brain and mind interact profoundly. For
example, stress can weaken the immune system, and relaxation and laughter
can strengthen it. We also know that children who learn to play the piano
or sing in a choir improve their spatial reasoning and that learning to
read enhances student's ability to think in abstractions. Everything that
happens to us has both a direct and indirect effect due to the nature of
the interconnectedness of the brain.
Throughout our lives, the brain/minds changes in response to its engagement
with others, so much so that individuals must always be seen as integral
parts of larger social systems. Part of our identity depends on
establishing community and finding ways to belong. As Darling (1996)
notes, "For the first year or two of life outside the womb, our brains are
in the most pliable, impressionable, and receptive state they will ever be
in" (18). We begin to be shaped as the immensely receptive brain/mind
interacts with our early environment and interpersonal relationships.
Neuroscientists have been able to document brain changes in infants' brain
cells based upon very early interactions with adults. Daddy's smile and
Aunt Agatha's "coochi coo" all appear to result in changes in how neurons
communicate with each other (See Diamond and Hopson 1998). Even before
children are born they appear to be sensitive to mother's voice and
heartbeat, and once born, they can identify and prefer her voice to any
other female voice.
One capacity that is profoundly influenced by social interaction is
language. Although we are all born with a predisposition to speak, the
development of language is almost totally dependent on hearing others speak
first and joining in with ever more appropriate sounds and movements.
Every child is actually born with the potential to master every one of the
more than 5000 languages and dialects, but it has been shown that children
have begun to lose some of their flexibility and have even begun to acquire
an accent by the time they are one year old. Lev Vygotsky (1978 ) suggests
that even the ability for people to engage in internal dialogue - to think
in their minds - is learned after experiencing external dialogue.
3. The Search for Meaning Is Innate
In general terms, the search for meaning refers to making sense of our
experiences. Thus it involves our values and purposes and the questions
that drive us, such as "who am I?" and "why am I here?" The search for
meaning is survival oriented and basic to the human brain/mind. While the
ways in which we make sense of our experience change over time, the central
drive to do so is life long.
Every one of us is born with some basic biological equipment that allows us
to make sense of the world. In fact, Restak (1995) says that the main
purpose of the brain is to "make inner representations of reality" (3).
Anyone who has ever lived through the "why" questions of young children or
the seemingly endless curiosity of toddlers knows that children are born
with an innate need to touch, smell, observe, listen to, and generally
experience and figure out their world. The brain needs and automatically
registers the familiar while simultaneously searching for and responding to
novel stimuli. We are biologically programmed to make sense of our
experience. In other words, we are innately motivated to search for
meaning.
It seems as though there are two facets to this search for meaning. On the
one hand, we are born to function as scientists, discovering what our world
is about. On the other, we are born to function as artists, giving
expression and voice to meanings that we create as we engage with life.
An emerging field in cognitive science called theory theory deals with our
innate propensities to act as scientists. For example, Gopnick and
Melztoff (1997) argue convincingly that infants are born with the capacity
to develop theories and hypotheses about how the world works. Even before
they acquire language the their hypotheses and make predictions. Gopnick
and Melztoff give one example of very young infants watching a ball moving
along a trajectory, then disappearing behind a screen. By following the
infants' eye movements, the researchers note that the infants make
predictions about where the ball will emerge, and seem surprised and
confused when the ball emerges somewhere else. (Incidentally, this
experiment contributed to evidence that many of the capacities that Piaget
spoke about seem to be present at birth, or develop much earlier and in
different ways from the ways in which he described).
4. The Search for Meaning Occurs through Patterning
The human brain/mind is not a formal logic machine. It is much better at
making sense of life by finding patterns and order - something that science
and art have in common. At the heart of patterning is categorization -
finding similarities and differences and comparing and isolating features.
We are all born with the ability to interpret the world around us by
sorting its countless characteristics into categories. For example, we
observe and sort lines, edges, and curves; light and dark; up and down;
basic smells and tastes; and degrees of sound. Our brains are even
prewired with a basic number sense that gives very young infants a
rudimentary awareness of the relationship among the numbers one through
three. With experience, these abilities combine and gel into more complex
categories such as "trees" and "people". Over time, richer and richer
clusters of patterns take shape in our minds.
Of course, categories do not help much unless we can move around, and so we
are also innately equipped with the ability to develop maps of where we are
in space and time (see principle 9). In fact, we also build a life map or
story, which is how we maintain a sense of who we are.
Ultimately, the result of all this patterning is that humans construct
mental models of reality. Then we perceive, relate to, and act on the
world around us in terms of those categories, maps, and mental models. The
educational philosophy of constructivism is about the creation of such
perceptions and relationships.
Patterning is grounded in the physiology. Groups of brain cells combine
into neural networks that fire in the same ways consistently. Learning is
required when an entrenched pattern is challenged or disrupted and new
answers are needed. New experiences, meanings and understandings
reconfigure these automatic patterns. And such relearning often takes time
because the changes are not just mental; they are physiological.
5. Emotions Are Critical to Patterning
Scientists' conception of the role emotions play in learning has
vacillated. At times in the early part of the century, for example,
emotions were largely ignored because the inner workings of the mind tended
to be disregarded. Behaviorists were interested in observable,
quantifiable phenomena and emotion. Since then, at least in the field of
education, emotions have been treated as important but basically separate
from thinking. Separating emotion from thinking has been the education
profession's way of acknowledging both while not effectively addressing the
ways that they operate together.
In recent years, more and more researchers are seeing emotions as
important, even in higher order thinking. Researchers such as Joseph
LeDoux in The Emotional Brain (1996) argue that there are different
emotional circuits. He has done a great deal of work to trace the circuit
for fear and its impact on our thinking. Antonio Damasio (1994) now says
that thought and emotion can not be separated, and that body and brain,
including the emotions, form one indissociable unity. And another
researcher, Candace Pert, who wrote Molecules of Emotion (1997) has shown
that one reason for the unity of body and brain is that some of the
chemical signals and carriers of information between neurons
(neurotransmitters) are found throughout the body, not just in the neural
circuits above our shoulders.
The bottom line is that emotion and cognition interact, energize, and shape
each other. It is useful and appropriate, at times, to speak of them
separately, but they are inseparable in the brains and experiences of
learners. Thus Restack (1995) says that "almost every thought, no matter
how bland, is accompanied by an emotion, no matter how subtle" (21).
One reason patterns are so hard to change is because of our emotional
commitment to them. We are deeply invested in our assumptions and beliefs
about others, be they parents, teachers, siblings or friends. We are also
invested in our individual beliefs about how the universe, our spiritual
beliefs, and the world work. Changing these beliefs is not easy and can
involve significant emotionally volatility because they affect more than
facts; they affect our sense of who we are.
6. Every Brain Simultaneously Perceives and Creates Parts and Wholes
Ultimately, there are two separate but simultaneous tendencies in all of us
for organizing information. One is to reduce information to parts. The
other is to perceive and work with information as a whole or series of
wholes. These simultaneous tendencies spring from the organization of the
brain.
Some evidence for the capacity to deal with both parts and wholes stems
from split brain research. When the corpus callosum (the bundle of nerve
fibers that links the left and right hemispheres of the brain) is severed
in adults, it seems as though different capacities are housed in different
sides of the brain. The research indicates that the left brain tends to be
more verbal and analytical, while the right brain is more visual and
intuitive. This split-brain research suggests that people tend to be
analytical or intuitive. However, in people with an intact brain, both
hemispheres work together and communicate via the corpus callosum so that
our analytical and intuitive capacities are integrated.
The essential problem is that what constitutes a part and a whole is not
always immediately obvious. For example, throwing a ball to a child may be
a whole activity in one context, yet just part of a game in another. The
key is to realize that life seems to be organized according to some natural
wholes that the brain/mind recognizes very easily. These include stories,
projects, puzzles, games, social events, relationships, and concepts.
Thus, we perceive a whole puzzle even though we are focusing our attention
on only one individual piece, and conversely, we can look at an entire
puzzle and see the individual pieces that make it up.
Every event is processed in the brain as a complex experience that consists
of larger wholes in which the parts are embedded and integrated. The
brain/mind is designed to perceive both separateness and interconnectedness.
7. Learning Involves Both Focused Attention and Peripheral Perception
The core idea is that the brain/mind is immersed all the time in a field of
sensations, images, and input, and continuously has to select what to
attend to and what to ignore. Now attention itself is natural, and tends
to be driven by what is of most interest or relevance to the satisfaction
of wants and needs.
However, even while paying direct attention, children are also absorbing
information that lies beyond the immediate focus. This input ranges from
basic background sensations (sound, color, chatter, laughter) to the
behaviors and aspects of the environment that reflect the beliefs and
practices of a culture. This dual operation of attention and peripheral
perception occurs all the time in every context, including the home and the
classroom. It is particularly important for infants who are literally being
"programmed" by their context.
Much of this peripheral learning for older children and adults is seen in
implicit memory (Schacter 1996). Let us say that you are in a room full of
items. After leaving the room, you might not be able to recollect
consciously everything that was there, and you might even swear that some
named items were not there. And yet research shows that if experimenters
give you the option to identify different items from a list, you are likely
to choose those that were in the room, even if you never remember seeing
them! Commercials work in the same way. Even if you see something only
once or out of the corner of your eye, and argue vehemently that you did
not see the name of the product, given a number of choices in a store you
are likely to select or prefer the product you claim never to have seen.
The fact that we see peripherally has immense importance for education
because it means that children in a school and at home are actually being
profoundly influenced by the total environment. What are the colors saying
to them? What messages are being conveyed by buildings designed like
factories and prisons? How do they respond to bells? What of the impact of
adults? How are students influenced by the media? And what is the impact
of the content and emotional color of the actual conversations to which
they are exposed? It is clear, for example, that body language and facial
displays that signal respect or contempt, patience or impatience,
confidence or insecurity, ignorance or expertise have an impact on the
learner. That is why the design of the peripheral environment, and the
state of mind and very "beingness" of the people in a school and house, all
have an impact on how and what people actually learn.
8. Learning Always Involves Conscious and Unconscious Processes
Neuroscientists such as Joseph LeDoux (1996) are demonstrating that the
unconscious is real. The processes of the "cognitive unconscious span many
levels of mental complexity, all the way from the routine analysis of the
physical features of stimuli by our sensory systems to remembrance of past
events to speaking grammatically to imagining things that are not present,
to decision making, and beyond." (29). A great deal of the insights we
have and the patterns that we grasp are a consequence of ongoing
unconscious processing.
Psychologists have also known for a long time that understanding is largely
a consequence of deep processing. Thus, complex learning depends on a
person's capacity to take charge of the processing of experience which is a
matter of becoming aware of what is actually happening.
As we get older, we have the opportunity to develop mindfulness. In the
words of Thich Nhat Hanh (1976) "'mindfulness' refers to 'keeping one's
consciousness alive to the present reality'" (11). Ellen Langer (1989)
notes that being aware of what is actually happening is different from
mindlessly moving though life. When we are mindless we are locked into
what Langer calls "category traps," or static ways of thinking and
perceiving. We all experience this automaticity to some extent in the
routines that we get into, say, when we are driving, or in our
relationships with the same people over a long period of time, or in the
ways in which we are programmed as described in principle 7. We "squeeze"
reality - our actions and thoughts - into those fixed categories. Despite
all our intellectual learning, many of our underlying beliefs and
assumptions remain the same and are the invisible forces that keep us in a
box.
It is by bringing to conscious awareness our assumptions, beliefs, habits,
and practices that we begin to take charge of them and of our own learning
and performance. In young children, it is usually necessary for an adult
to mediate their experience so that they can become aware. An example
might be of a child who does not like being splashed by paint but who has
not registered that she has a choice to move away. As we grow older we
have the capacity to develop awareness and to engage in metacognitive
observation. The more we can observe in our thinking, the more we can
self-regulate and take charge of our own learning.
9. We Have at Least Two Ways of Organizing Memory
When we think of memory we automatically think of what we have "stored" and
can "retrieve". But it isn't that simple because memory is also naturally
working all the time in the present moment as we move around in the world
and try to make sense of our contexts and our experiences. Stored memories
would be useless if we could not call upon them as needed, and what
determines need is our moment-to-moment context. It is the context, that
is, the need of the moment, that determines when or why we pull a
particular name out of storage and when we need to bring to mind facts
about automobiles and finance.
O'Keefe and Nadel's (1978) model is the most useful and effective because
it deals with this core difference between static and dynamic memory. They
point out that we all have some systems in which static information is
stored. These include some of the systems that cognitive scientists have
identified, such as declarative memory (facts), semantic memory
(meanings), procedural memory (skills), and emotional memory (feelings).
All of these systems can be described as taxon systems (from taxonomies).
These systems can be programmed independently or programmed through
experience, which is why it is possible to learn by rote facts,
vocabulary, spelling words independent of a living context, and why
programmed, isolated emotional responses can become the basis of
"mindless" behaviors, or in extreme cases, phobic responses executed
independent of "rational" expectations.
On the other hand, each of us also has a locale (from location),
experiential
system that registers and organizes moment-to-moment events in life. The
regions of the brain that are most important for our locale system to
operate are the hippocampus and prefrontal lobes. According to
neuroscientists this system is designed to register where we are in space
and to register the unfolding story of what happens to us. Hence it is
essentially an ongoing autobiographical system that constructs
moment-to-moment, meaningful maps of the world. It calls to mind and
indexes the variety of things that we see, hear, feel, and experience at
any one time, while we simultaneously talk to people and go about our
business. Thus the locale system is referred to as a dynamic system.
Some taxon systems, particularly those that store emotional memories, are
fully functioning at birth. However, the locale memory system develops
over time, which is why very young children cannot fully integrate their
experiences; that is, in the early years, infants and babies can store
many impressions and routines, but the connections take time to develop.
"The emerging message is clear: The brain, with its complex architecture
and limitless potential, is a highly plastic, constantly changing entity
that is powerfully shaped by our experiences in childhood and throughout
life. "
~Marion Diamond and
Janet Hopson
Magic Trees of the Mind
Brain development and learning are two sides of the same coin. The
physical structure does not just grow because it is fed and sheltered. The
life experiences that a person has literally lead to new connections
between neurons and the secretion of chemicals that transmit signals.
There do seem to be stages in the physical development of the brain. In
the first three years after birth, for instance, the rate of growth is
prodigious as a great many new connections are made. Within this period,
the capacity to experience emotions is much more developed than the
capacity to think. Even up to puberty the brain shows tremendous fluidity
and capacity for change. This fluidity is one reason why "windows of
opportunity," or key times for learning, are so important. It is much
easier to learn a second language in the first few years of life, for
instance, than after puberty. We should add that brain growth and
development continue throughout life and that some capacities (such as
long-term planning) mature only in the second and third decades.
One key for educators is that all learning builds on what has gone before.
We build and expand on prior knowledge. We also interpret new experiences
and new ideas in terms of what we have previously experienced or come to
understand. For example, new categories are developed by building on those
that are already in place. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) point out that we are
born with the capacity to recognize up and down, and in and out, and by
using metaphors, much more complex ideas develop. We can talk about being
at the top or bottom of a hierarchy or belonging to the inner circle.
How much any infant or adult can learn is open to question. However, we do
know that, with the exception of those who get diseases that stop learning,
everyone can learn throughout life, and that we can all almost certainly
learn much more than we or most others think we can.
11. Complex Learning Is Enhanced by Challenge and Inhibited by Threat. Associated with a Sense of Helplessness or Fatigue
In The Emotional Brain,, Joseph LeDoux (1996) shows our response to fear by
explaining that we have two separate response systems. He calls them the
"high road" (a relatively slow system) and the "low road" ( a relatively
fast system). We simplify his discussion here in the interest of brevity.
He shows that sensory information comes into our thalamus where a very
crude impression of our experience. If fear is not triggered, information
goes primarily to the sensory cortex, which refines the sensory input and
clarifies what it is we are seeing, hearing or experiencing.
Simultaneously, the amygdala forms emotional responses in accordance with
what has happened. Such a response is LeDoux's high road. However, if the
first crude impression indicates something to fear, signals are sent
primarily to the amygdala without going via the sensory cortex, and the
fight or flight response is triggered immediately. LeDoux calls this the
low road. Using Hart's term, we call this low road response downshifting.
Although LeDoux deals directly with fear, there is evidence from many other
sources that downshifting is not caused just by fear by itself. The low
road is triggered by fear related to a sense of helplessness or to fatigue.
In these circumstances we revert to more primitive or early programmed
responses and lose access to higher brain functioning, just as LeDoux
describes.
Very young children are helpless and lack the capacity to take charge of
their responses or their experience. Consequently they can be programmed
very easily into a state of constant fear, which is why we must take such
care to avoid overstimulation and abandonment.
The alternative to downshifting is self-efficacy, or the exercise of
personal agency. We can foster self-efficacy simply by supporting and
encouraging the learning that students are already disposed to do (such as
learning to speak and walk). In addition, self-efficacy develops when
children have genuine opportunities to make decisions and choices within a
safe environment.
12. Every Brain Is Uniquely Organized
We all have the same set of systems, and yet we are all different. The
factors that make us the same are precisely those that allow us to be
different. For example, we are all born with about one hundred billion
neurons. But our genetic blueprint, coupled with unique experiences, means
that each of us will have wiring that differs in many ways from that of
everyone else. We all have the same senses, but by virtue of our different
environments and different makeup, the input for our senses differs to some
extent from that of everyone else who has ever lived or will ever live. In
addition, while we all have a social and cultural background, they vary
enormously and influence the perceptual filters that we develop. We all
perceive the world in different ways and act according to the way that we
perceive it. So we create realities that have much in common with the
realities of others, yet each is unique.
However, it is critical to see that every human being is also a unique
system. An educator or parent who has a grasp of systems features sees
that a style or even "disability" is always a part of a more complex, whole
person. We do not deal adequately with children if we focus simply on
specific styles or abilities. We have to understand how to treat the whole
child so that our students have opportunities to engage specific abilities.
Uniqueness is a fact of life. Race, color, creed, and culture all are
aspects of individuality, but even within a culture in which all people are
overtly similar, immense differences exist. Nature is diverse and in fact
thrives on diversity. The idea of only one kind of flower or tree or bird
is as ridiculous as one kind of human being.
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