Session 04 – Martin Westwell, Director , Flinders University

The Future of the Mind: the science of learning in the 21st century

• About the way that technology changes the way young people think.
• Focus on the mind, not the brain. Our mind starts in our brains. We are born with almost all of the 100 billion brain cells that we will ever have.
• The brain grows after we are born because of the connections that it forms as we grow. Connections reflect the experiences that we have. Up to 150 trillion connections.
• Everything we do affects the way that our brain is wired. It makes us who we are. Personalisation of the brain. Informs our learning and informs our behaviour.

• My response to the images is different from yours – depends on our connections with the subject matter – emotional and cognitive responses.
• If the connection lasts for a long time, there is long term potentiation – basis for learning.
• Physical connections can change to conceptual connections. Repetition is the key – if you use the pathways over and over (rote learning), it makes it more likely to last and that you will do the thing in the same way.
• But there are more subtle results. Emotional context is crucially important. Some kids have trouble with “number” – and their stress response increases enormously – the brain chemicals change greatly. Connections are this prevented by stress. But if we put wellbeing in place, we promote the formation of connections.
• But rote learning is not enough. Must be able to transform the learning into knowledge, conceptual framework. So the more sophisticated the connections, the better the learning.
• The impact of ICT: to create environments that promote learning.
• Downloading essays from the internet “could not be controlled”. While internet gave us a powerful aid for learning, it gave rise to more chance of plagiarism. (Ken Boston, 2005)
• Coursework.info – over 300 pieces of coursework available. It tells us something about the assessment method that is currently being used in schools. If we want information, the students  will find a way to give it to us.
• So Ken Boston said that we should get rid of school-based assessment. Instead of finding ways to use what is available - a better alternative.
• The internet was originally about information. Learning was about knowing the answers. Used to be question rich and answer poor. Now we are question poor and answer rich. Need to assess the questions that kids ask, not the answers that they give.
• Then we moved into online societies – MySpace, FaceBook, bebo, siphs, LibraryThing, Care2. News Corporation bought MySpace for $850 million – young people moved away from MySpace because the messages that they were getting were synthetic, not authentic. So a lot moved to Facebook. FaceBook started to go commercial, got backlash, so stopped the move.
• Socialization rather than information is the main reason people now use the internet.
• Research is split on the benefits / disadvantages. On the positive side = more social, reinforces social links, extrovert, "happy". On the negative side = withdrawn, break social ties, isolated, depressed.
• It’s not technology that changes the way you think; it’s about you and how you use the technology.
• Access to extremes of technology.
• We use the technology in the ways that we use the real world, but more so. Usually referred by others. Kids who are naturally withdrawn end up with lots of negatives, rather than just fewer positives.
• Every time that we change the environment and bring in technology, we have effects.
• Gaming: violent media makes people more violent – especially for boys and especially for young people. Your brain changes the way that it is wired up so that it makes your more successful at surviving. OK in Dafur, but not in Australia.
• A group of young people played Doom for 20 minutes. Then the organisers used the Prisoner’s Dilemma on them. Those who played the violent version were 7 times more likely to exploit than to trust or withdraw. Even that short period of time caused rewiring of the brain.
• Laparoscopic surgeons – played a game called supermonkeyball 2 – took different surgeons with different skills. The game players produced 47% fewer errors  and were 39% faster than the non game player. The highest scorers had even fewer errors and were even faster.  Relative weight analysis – 3% experience; 2% sex; 2% cases performed; 31% video game skill; 10% video game experience. So you really want a high scoring game player for a surgeon for your operation.
• But need games with a strategizing environment.
• Showed a trailer for the war game called Medal of Honour. High energy and huge amounts of information coming to the player.
• Developed high attentional capacity. Can take in more information. Good if you are going to be a fighter pilot or a baggage searcher at an airport. Flip side is that these students have high attentional capacity – then we ask them to read a book – not a lot of information to be taken off the page – have all the extra attention that they use in being more easily distracted.
• So if we change the environment in  which they exist, we can change those characteristics or develop them:
  • sustain or appropriately switch attention = concentration.
  • inhibition of responses / impulses = resisting temptation = delayed gratification.
  • planning strategies of behaviour.
  • initiation of strategies.
  • error correction.
  • switching strategies = self-directed learning; interdependent learning.
  • working memory = problem solving.
  • coordination - thinking = creativity and innovation!
• Marshmallow Experiment – done with little kids. The time that they can delay eating them correlates highly with their educational outcomes at age 19.
  • The marshmallow experiment is a famous test of this concept conducted by Walter Mischel at Stanford University and discussed by Daniel Goleman in his popular work. In the 1960s a group of four-year olds were tested by being given a marshmallow and promised another, only if they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. Some children could wait and others could not. The researchers then followed the progress of each child into adolescence, and demonstrated that those with the ability to wait were better adjusted and more dependable (determined via surveys of their parents and teachers), and scored an average of 210 points higher on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.
• The environments that we create for the kids has real impact on their learning. The kids need opportunities to practise the things on the list above after the = signs. Brain activity occurs in the frontal part of the brain. These parts develop right through the school years. Executive functions do not work fully until our early 20s.
• The environment that is in the school years is vital for the development of the executive functions.
• So how can we set up the right environment for the younger years?
• There is no gene for anything complex in human behaviour.
• Used to be believed that intelligence was 80% genetic and 20% environment; now the other way around.
• Playing musical instruments is not genetic; it relates to the valuing of musical instruments in the family.
• But there is a gene for Huntington’s Disease. If you have the gene, you will get the disease. Experiment with mice – gave them two environments – enriched and isolated. As the mice got older, the ones in the enriched environment – hardly any showed the symptoms – so nurture trumped nature. Ones in the enriched environment had many more brain connections.
• Enriched environment = multi-sensory; relevant; emotional content; interpersonal interaction (interdependent learning; parental engagement; relationship with teacher); exercise; nutrition / hydration; blue light (natural light and late night TV).

• Neuromyths: everything above is already well-known, but as neuroscience makes comments, this happens –
• We hear that kids are visual, auditory or kinesthetic learners. Kids get labelled. There is no evidence for these learning styles. The auditory and kinesthetic ones are wrong – it does not matter how the information gets into the head; it’s about how it is processed when it gets there.
• Brain Gym – doing certain things that will increase the brain connections. No evidence for this.
• Teachers will say that these two things works. That is fine, but it is not for that scientific reason that it works.
• Neuroscience can never tell you what to do in the classroom. You need to take the evidence, plus the relationship with the teacher plus … to work out what to do in the classroom.
• Neuroscience comes in and bulldozes over the wise teacher’s knowledge.

• Over enrichment: small scale study. Year 2 children. Talking story – read to me or let me play. Shows how technology can be misused. Kids who played the let me play setting were not as good recall as those who did not interact but were more motivated to read. So the increased motivation did not produce better outcomes.

• Dealing with uncertainty: risk = making decisions under varying levels of probability. Ambiguity = making decisions with unknown probabilities or unknown outcomes. Make more of the second than the first. Technology puts us into the second one. That changes the way that we think.

• Emotional content – anxiety can stop us from learning. What goes on in the brain? – different regions – different behaviours – role of emotion. Have a “feeling” about things.  Natural impulse to avoid the ambiguity environment. People will sacrifice rewards for the sake of certainty. "Overcoming impulsive preferences for certainty [may be required] to exploit uncertain but potentially [beneficial] options."
• Showed the “gorilla in the bouncing ball” video clip. Watch the video clip at the site below, and count the number of times that the girl in the white shirt bounces the ball. Then ask the viewers what else happened in the clip. A minority of the viewers will see the other thing that happens during the clip. Shows inattention blindness. http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html