Tag Archives: Neuroscience

Our brain

How our brain is wired. This sounds interesting.

This one here about the brain.

Stress and memory

Functional areas of our brain

Learning How the Brain Learns – My response

In this post on Facebook: Ken posted Learning How the Brain Learns
Is emotional thought the platform for learning, memory, decision making & creativity?  Through experience, do we establish such beliefs?
About education: have you watched this?
Neuroscience research, cognition process, a person’s mind, school, education….these sound related, and seem interconnected.  But how did we conclude with those researches? More activities (physical, cognitive, thinking), more neurons in action, in connection, more learning?  That sounds great, based on our past life experience, with games providing rich learning experience, isn’t it?  But this comes with also great assumptions behind…
How could we “isolate” one factor in learning from another?  The emotions and cognitions are always part of the learning equation. Without emotions, the thinking would rely much on the pure analysis, and this would be similar to a machine or a computer program, which gives you the “perfect answer”, the (MCQ) MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTION type of answer.  Doesn’t it sound right in education?  May be for examination and tests.   But, what has or hasn’t been learnt?  When I was young, someone who “rolled” a pencil and got the right answer in MCQ could get the same results as me thinking through the questions and then answer.  What can I claim from such an experiment?  One who rolled the pencil didn’t learn, but I did.  However, it is the outcome that we seem to be interested, and we conclude that the one who rolled the pencil did learn (or performed as good as I did) because we got the same result. Right?  Wrong!
The marshmallow experiment did show the effect of the importance of self-control in leading to successful learning (or even a successful life), to some extent, I think, but what are the cause and effect of self-control to emotional intelligences and personal successes?  What were the assumptions behind that experiment?  How would the scientists conclude with those who exercise “self-controlled” did better?  Was that so simple?  Who exercises the control, or the self-control? At work, is self-control that easily isolated for study – in terms of EQ?
In summary, I think there are lots of great findings and new discoveries with these scientific researches.  However, have we identified the factors that have led to “effective” and “successful” learning as yet, based on the neuroscience research?  What assumptions have we (you) made in the claims? What are our experiences and perceptions on these findings, education and learning, in schools settings, and in social networked learning?  Are those findings reliable?
John