Learning by Neural Nets, Connectionism, Our Brain

To understand how people learn, we need to understand the biopsychological basis for learning that was built into our brains by natural selection. To do this, we need to delve into neuroscience. The biological brain is made of neurons, and other structural tissue. The brain's neurons are interconnected in amazing patterns of networks, neural nets. Cognitive scientists work with artificial neural nets in order to better understand the workings of biological neural nets, brains.

We are fortunate to have a good guide to the topic of learning and neural nets, in our friend Chris Chatham at Develintel blog. Chris has recently posted a large number of articles dealing with connectionist models of learning, including those here, here, and here. Besides providing glimpses into selected subjects of interest on his blog, Chris also surveys the blogosphere periodically, for good articles about the brain from other bloggers. To top it off, Chris replies promptly and thoughtfully to comments.

The best book I have found to introduce the topic of learning and neural nets, is Manfred Spitzer's The Mind Within the Net, 1999, MIT Press. Online materials from two university courses on neural nets are available here and here.

For more information on neural nets, consult the sidebar links under cognitive science and machine intelligence, follow the wikipedia links from the neural nets article, or follow this link and scroll down to the neural nets links. PCAI magazine currently is offering a free issue dealing with neural nets and fuzzy logic. This short online primer(pdf) on neural nets has some nice graphics.

Although the study of neural nets is still quite recent, a lot has been learned that can be transferred to the science of education. Much more will become relevant to the teaching of children very soon. There appears to be a total disconnect between the fossilized industry of education in North America, and the vibrant research into cognitive science and learning taking place in the research community.