How a lot of the time, teaching isn't fine-tuned for our brains
Across the world, we have increasingly been making efforts to ensure all children go to school, to ensure their best potential has been harnessed. But have we been putting enough effort to ensure we design these educational platforms such that they bring out their best potential? Certainly not, because the methods we use to educate young minds has not been synchronised with functioning of our brains.
Firstly when we try to understand the functioning of the memory of brain, we must understand that the human brain is not a good storage device for massive databases. Ours brain has been adapted to store and process only particular types of information. In order to survive, ancient hunter-gatherers had to remember the shapes, qualities and behaviour patterns of thousands of plant and animal species. They had to remember that a wrinkled yellow mushroom growing in autumn under an elm tree is most probably poisonous, whereas a similar-looking mushroom growing in winter under an oak tree is a good stomach-ache remedy. Hunter-gatherers also had to bear in mind the opinions and relations of several dozen band members. If Lucy needed a band member’s help to get John to stop harassing her, it was important for her to remember that John had fallen out last week with Mary, who would thus be a likely and enthusiastic ally. Consequently, evolutionary pressures have adapted the human brain to store immense quantities of botanical, zoological, topographical and social information.
But when we started to move towards studying nature and the world around us using science and mathematical tools, we have been faced with the challenge, that is our brain was never built to store information as a mere collection of facts. We had exceptional memory capacity, only when there was a story or idea associated with a piece of data. So what does this mean for humanity? So Does this mean we have reached the peak capacity of human brains and for further progress of human race, we must completely rely on computers. This has been argued to be the case by many scientists and philosophers as human brain lacked the capacity to store enourmous data or Perform mathematical calculations. The human brain lacked these crucial tools required for the running of modern science, technology and economics.
However this doesn’t have to be the case. We can exploit the functionality of the human brain by changing the way we store and understand information in the brain. In fact, a primitive brain of a monkey has the ability to compute things in their environment far better any of the computers. For example, when monkeys see a researcher drop a ball down one of several chutes, they quickly look to the bottom of that chute and wait for the ball to reemerge. When some experimental trickery causes the ball to emerge from a different chute than the one in which it was deposited, the monkeys display surprise, presumably because their brains were constanly computing the outcome of how things might react with each other in nature. Human babies have similar responses to weird physics. For example, when babies are shown a video of a big red block smashing into a little yellow block, they react with indifference when the little yellow block instantly goes careening off the screen. But when the little yellow block hesitates for just a moment or two before careening away, babies stare like bystanders at a train wreck — as though the delayed careening had violated some prediction made by their Computing brains. Studies such as these tell us that monkey brains “know” about gravity (objects fall down, not sideways) and that baby human brains “know” about kinetics (moving objects transfer energy to stationary objects at precisely the moment they contact them and not a few seconds later). But more important, this shows how a brain constantly computes all the things in the immediate environment to predict the future.
If we are able to connect such ability of our brain to the concepts of the working of science or economics, this will surely enable us to exploit the capacity of our brain to the maximum.
But unfortunately, the current model of education encourages storing raw information rather than storing the knowledge in a more digestible form. For example, If building an engine must be taught (the case has only been used as a metaphor), the current method we use is-we first teach the person to memorize all the different tools available. We then make the person memorize all the different properties and functioning of these tools. Only after this we introduce the students in a further course how these tools can be deployed to make an engine. This system sounds reasonable, however our brains aren’t very good at storing all the several tools and their properties as would be stored in a database. It also hinders the ability of the mind to creatively put these tools to use at a later stage.
However we can overcome this by simply reversing the way we teach. By simply maping the data into a story, we can radically increase the outcome and understanding. When we begin by narrating the story of how engines evolved, then explain different processes in an engine, narrating how the energy can be played around with to cause an force, and then introducing how different tools can be deployed to achieve that.
The above model is simply an example for how such models must be developed and deployed in all fields of education, in order to be able to bring out the best of a person’s potential.
