Children Cannot Be Taught, But They Can Learn

Children are not taught, they learn. How well and how much they will learn depends upon the skills that they master, long before they are aware that they are learning. Whether or not they have the chance to master those skills depends upon their caretakers.

Even the best of us is limited in what we can learn and what we can conceive. Such limitations applied to Albert Einstein and they apply to you, and your dangerous child. But all of us can learn ways to push against our limits, if we wish. Most people never come close.


The video above, "Cognitive Limits," is a useful introduction to the cognitive science of attention, memory, and learning.

Concepts of "Attention and Memory" are key to understanding how a relatively inexperienced and ignorant human infant can develop into a skilled walking and talking toddler who is into everything he can reach, learning and remembering as he goes.

Everyone is limited in what he can hold in his short-term working memory -- some more limited than others. Likewise, each person is limited as to how many active thinking processes he can maintain simultaneously -- how many dynamic activities he can keep track of.

Brief intro. to Cognitive Load Theory:

In essence, cognitive load theory proposes that since working memory is limited, learners may be bombarded by information and, if the complexity of their instructional materials is not properly managed, this will result in a cognitive overload. This cognitive overload impairs schema acquisition, later resulting in a lower performance (Sweller, 1988). Cognitive load theory had a theoretical precedence in the educational and psychological literature, well before Sweller’s 1988 article (e.g. Beatty, 1977; Marsh, 1978). Even Baddeley and Hitch (1974) considered “concurrent memory load” but Sweller’s cognitive load theory was among the first to consider working memory, as it related to learning and the design of instruction...

...Schema acquisition is the ultimate goal of cognitive load theory. Anderson’s ACT framework proposes initial schema acquisition occurs by the development of schema-based production rules, but these production rules may be developed by one of two methods (Anderson, Fincham, & Douglass, 1997), either by developing these rules during practice or by studying examples. The second method (studying examples) is the most cognitively efficient method of instruction (Sweller & Chandler, 1985; Cooper and Sweller, 1987; Paas and van Merriënboer, 1993). This realization became one of the central tenets of cognitive load theory.

Once learners have acquired a schema, those patterns of behavior (schemas) may be practiced to promote skill automation (Anderson, 1982; Kalyuga, Ayres, Chandler, and Sweller, 2003; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977; Sweller, 1993) but expertise occurs much later in the process, and is when a learner automates complex cognitive skills (Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977), usually via problem solving. _Cognitive Load Theory

Reference examples for the deeply interested who have a research bent:

Cognitive Bottleneck in Multitasking (PDF)

Dynamic Competition and the Cognitive Bottleneck (PDF)

Advanced educators not only try to introduce useful "schemas" to the learner -- they also try to choose conceptual schemas that will be useful in multiple contexts:

Students do not automatically connect, apply, or extrapolate what they know to other learning contexts. So what foundations can we put in place to ensure we are dong the best we can to nurture conceptual understanding and seek its transfer to new contexts? Here is my attempt to map out a few strategies that work for me:

1. Make transfer the big goal of conceptual teaching and learning – always have ideas in mind about how students can transfer their conceptual understandings and skills to new contexts.
2. Concepts over content – think big picture not activities. The exploration of concepts during collaborative teacher planning sessions will lead to a multitude of activities that can be applied in the classroom – the activities will always take care of themselves!
3. Less is more – working with fewer conceptual understandings means that you can use and extend the knowledge and skills students present in a meaningful, formative way – be mindful.
4. Prior knowledge – Take the time to nurture student’s interest and avenues into the concepts you are teaching.
5. Authentic assessment – map out the formative and summative assessment opportunities that are likely to arise through the teaching and learning experiences. Through these opportunities, challenge student’s misconceptions, stereotypes and tendencies toward rigid thinking.
6. Levels of transfer – transfer can happen on a “near” level where contexts can be very similar, or transfer can happen on a “far” level where the context is more abstract and removed from the original learning, some learners are natural abstract thinkers, others are not.
7. Think discriminatively – be measured about when opportunities arise for students to apply transfer, be mindful about when you can make it happen authentically, create opportunities for success and not failure.
8. Value thinking, nurture it and make it visible – train and engage students in a variety of daily thinking routines, use Socratic questioning in discussions to connect new ideas with existing knowledge. Metacognition, metacognition, metacognition!!
9. Nurture the potential of transfer in younger students – (EY- G1) value and reflect upon the meaning of children’s connections in collaboration with others. Make children’s connections visible and a part of discussion for other learners.
10. Homework – getting students to apply what they are learning in class and explore the meaning of concepts to their own lives can provide rich and diverse opportunities for transfer. Infinitely more valuable than completing worksheets!

_Conceptual Learning in Classroom

In terms of modern classroom educational practise, many of these ideas are more useful than a lot of what one sees -- if they are ever applied in anything but the rare, ideal classroom setting, which is unlikely.

More commonly, the best of theoretical intentions go badly awry when the rubber meets the road. This is particularly true when the masses of teachers attempt to implement the conceptual ideas and schemas of theorists, most of which they themselves only vaguely comprehend.

Remember: The teacher does not teach. Instead, the learner learns. If the learner's mind is not structured and ready to learn the concept for the day, it will not matter how well the teacher has prepared his lesson.

The learning mind must be "empowered" from the earliest age, and continuously reinforced -- until it is the child himself who is doing the reinforcing. This self-reinforcement occurs at different ages for different children -- even under the most ideal conditions. Young Mozart, for example, required much less external reinforcement to achieve a given level of mastery than did young Salieri.

So far, we have skipped around one of the central issues: how to learn difficult concepts which do not come naturally to most children. We know that boosting self-esteem doesn't work for that. We know that paying a cash reward doesn't work. Even the promise of sensory pleasure and euphoric mind states are limited in how well they will expand the learner's conceptual grasp, within apparently innate cognitive and conceptual limits.

But we must learn to walk before we learn to run a marathon up a mountain. This is a blog, not a textbook. Our approach will necessarily seem a bit scattered and of variable depth. Readers may choose to stop reading and abandon the quest at any time, without penalty.

That is not necessarily the case for those who work at the Al Fin Dangerous Child Institute.

MIT Neuroscientists Make Important Alzheimer's Discovery

The number of Alzheimer’s victims worldwide is expected to double every 20 years... MIT neuroscientists have shown that an enzyme overproduced in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients creates a blockade that shuts off genes necessary to form new memories. Furthermore, by inhibiting that enzyme in mice, the researchers were able to reverse Alzheimer’s symptoms.

The finding suggests that drugs targeting the enzyme, known as HDAC2, could be a promising new approach to treating the disease, which affects 5.4 million Americans.

Histone deacetylases (HDACs) are a family of 11 enzymes that control gene regulation by modifying histones — proteins around which DNA is spooled, forming a structure called chromatin. When HDACs alter a histone through a process called deacetylation, chromatin becomes more tightly packaged, making genes in that region less likely to be expressed.

HDAC inhibitors can reverse this effect, opening up the DNA and allowing it to be transcribed.

In previous studies, Tsai had shown that HDAC2 is a key regulator of learning and memory. In the new study, her team discovered that inhibiting HDAC2 can reverse Alzheimer’s symptoms in mice._MIT

As the populations of the developed and emerging nations grow progressively older, the number of Alzheimer's sufferers -- and sufferers of other debilitating diseases of old age -- threaten to cripple these societies. Affordable means of preventing and treating dementias and other disabling diseases of senescence could make the difference between prosperity or poverty for many nations. The recent MIT discovery may be an important step forward in this regard.

... the team subsequently showed that using RNAi to reduce HDAC2 build up in the hippocampus of a mouse neurodegenerative disease model removed this repression, reinstated neuronal structural and synaptic plasticity, and eradicated neurodegeneration-associated memory deficits. Li-Huei Tsai, Ph.D., and colleagues report their findings in Nature in a paper titled “an epigenetic blockade of cognitive functions in the neurodegenerating brain.”

Epigenetic modifications in the nervous system that are mediated by histone acetylation have been unequivocally associated with facilitating learning and memory, the researchers state. Multiple studies have in addition reported that reduced histone acetylation is associated with cognitive decline in animal models of neurodegeneration including AD.

To further investigate the role of HDAC2 in neurodegeneration-related cognition, the team looked at levels of the enzyme in CK-p25 mice. These animals can be induced to overexpress p25, in the forebrain. p25 is a truncated version of p35 and is implicated in a range of neurodegenerative diseases. Their studies showed that animals induced to overexpress p25 demosntrated significant increases in HDAC2 in neuronal nuclei, specifically hippocampal area CA1 but not CA3 or the dentate gyrus, and also in the prefrontal cortex. In contrast, levels of the HDAC1 and HDAC3, were not changed.

The researchers then moved on to carry out chromatin immunopreciptation studies to assess the functional consequences of HDAC2 elevation, primarily in a range of known HDAC2 targets that have been shown to be downregulated in human AD brains, including learning- and memory-related genes, and those involved in synaptic plasticity. They found elevated HDAC2 enrichment at the majority of these genes induced CK-p25 hippocampus, whereas again, HDAC1 and HDAC3 binding wasn’t affected. “Interestingly, in agreement with previous reports showing that HDAC2 can also bind to a gene’s coding region, we also found HDAC2 more abundantly bound to the coding sequence of the same genes,” they note. _GenengNews

The MIT researchers have utilised a number of different advances in cell and molecular biology to make these discoveries. As scientists close in on the discovery of meaningful interventions in destructive pathological processes, the importance of pre-existing replicated "off the shelf" research grows.

The researchers found that in mice with Alzheimer’s symptoms, HDAC2 (but not other HDACs) is overly abundant in the hippocampus, where new memories are formed. HDAC2 was most commonly found clinging to genes involved in synaptic plasticity — the brain’s ability to strengthen and weaken connections between neurons in response to new information, which is critical to forming memories. In the affected mice, those genes also had much lower levels of acetylation and expression.

“It’s not just one or two genes, it’s a group of genes that work in concert to control different phases of memory formation,” Tsai says. “With such a blockade, the brain really loses the ability to quickly respond to stimulation. You can imagine that this creates a huge problem in terms of learning and memory functions, and perhaps other cognitive functions.”

The researchers then shut off HDAC2 in the hippocampi of mice with Alzheimer’s symptoms, using a molecule called short hairpin RNA, which can be designed to bind to messenger RNA — the molecule that carries genetic instructions from DNA to the rest of the cell.

With HDAC2 activity reduced, histone acetylation resumed, allowing genes required for synaptic plasticity and other learning and memory processes to be expressed. In treated mice, synaptic density was greatly increased and the mice regained normal cognitive function. _MIT

This is good news for all mice who suffer from Alzheimer's. Now, scientists must confront the immense government-made mine field and obstacle course which obstruct modern efforts to affordably develop life saving interventions in the biomedical fields. In this sense -- as in many others -- government is the greatest enemy of the future.

Cross-posted to Al Fin Longevity

"What's Too Painful to Remember We Simply Choose to Forget"

Misty Water-Colored Memories.... Image Credit: Wired
Every now and then, most of us are stunned by powerful memories of our past. Particular memories may even have the power to bring us to our knees, unexpectedly, repeatedly. If you could erase those memories, would you "simply choose" to do so?

1. Select Memory 2. Intense Recall 3. Nuke Memory 4. Spotless Mind
Scientists are beginning to learn enough about human memories to consider the possibility of developing routine procedures which would allow the selective forgetting of painful memories. In the case of persons with disabling PTSD, or the inability to grow out of a deep grief state, such a procedure might make sense. But what about forgetting a painful divorce or child custody battle? Would you simply choose to forget the time you got drunk at a party and pissed all over your boss's rose garden?

Because memories are mental constructs involving several areas of the brain, they contain a "target of opportunity" for anyone who is looking to obliterate a memory.

When we experience a traumatic event, it gets remembered in two separate ways. The first memory is the event itself, that cinematic scene we can replay at will. The second memory, however, consists entirely of the emotion, the negative feelings triggered by what happened. Every memory is actually kept in many different parts of the brain. Memories of negative emotions, for instance, are stored in the amygdala, an almond-shaped area in the center of the brain. (Patients who have suffered damage to the amygdala are incapable of remembering fear.) By contrast, all the relevant details that comprise the scene are kept in various sensory areas—visual elements in the visual cortex, auditory elements in the auditory cortex, and so on. That filing system means that different aspects can be influenced independently by reconsolidation.

The larger lesson is that because our memories are formed by the act of remembering them, controlling the conditions under which they are recalled can actually change their content. _Jonah Lehrer

Interfering with specific mechanisms involved in putting memories back together again during recall, can actually prevent the memory from re-forming in consciousness.

The current procedures are quite crude, and not always easily replicable -- even in the lab. But the theory is sound, and enough good results have been published to show that there is a way forward if we choose to pursue it.

But would you choose? And if so, what?

Bonus: A brief video primer on how the brain creates and deciphers mood.

One might see a common theme where the brain assembles moods, memories, thoughts, and perceptions using input from several brain regions at once. If one could sit back and observe all of this happening -- in oneself and in others -- the simple understanding of the dynamic medley of neural processes might well allow a deeper acceptance of human flaws and shortcomings.

On the other hand, for would-be dictators, understanding how the brain works provides powerful tools of manipulation and control.

Dictators and would-be dictators are dangerous people. We simply need to be sure that we and those we care about are even more so.

Brain Waves and the Limits of Short Term Memory

Capacity of short-term memory impacts the effects of reasoning -- the greater the capacity, the better the effects. Currently researchers conduct studies on developing the most effective ways of training short-term memory.

...In 1995 researchers from Brandeis University in Waltham suggested that the capacity of short-term memory could depend on two bands of brain's electric activity: theta and gamma waves..."The hypothesis formulated by Lisman and Idiart in 1995 assumes that we are able to memorise as many 'bites' of information, as there are gamma cycles for one theta cycle. Research to date provided only indirect support for this hypothesis," say psychologist Jan Kamiński, PhD student from the Nencki Institute... _SD

Most neurocognitivists are slowly coming around to the idea that the "language of mind" is carried via modulated brain waves. The interaction of gamma waves (30Hz and above) and theta waves (4 to 7 Hz) is a particularly intense focus of research into neurocognition.

Recent research at the Nencki Institute in Warsaw suggests that a person's crucial short term memory capacity may be limited by the number of gamma cycles which fall on each theta cycle.

A 'bite' of information refers to its portion in memory. A 'bite' may be a number, letter, idea, situation, picture or smell. "Designing experiments on the capacity of memory one needs to be very careful not to make it too easy for the subject to group many 'bites' into one," stresses Kamiński and as an example gives the following sequence of letters: 2, 0, 1, 1. "Such four 'bites' of information are easy to group into the number corresponding to current year. Instead of four bites of information we are left with just one."

Interpreting the length of theta and gamma waves from EEG recording is not easy either. These waves are not directly visible in the EEG signal. Kamiński proposed a new method of determining them. Researchers recorded brain's electric activity in seventeen volunteers resting with closed eyes for five minutes. Next they filtered the signals and analysed not the cycles themselves but their correlations. Only based on discovered correlations the ratio of the length of theta wave to gamma wave was determined and the likely capacity of verbal short-term memory was determined.

Following the EEG recording, the volunteers, were subjected to classic short-term memory capacity test. It consisted of repeated display of longer and longer sequences of numbers. Each number was presented for one second. Then volunteers had to reconstruct the sequence from memory. At first the sequence consisted of three numbers but at the end of the exam of as many as nine. "We have observed that the longer the theta cycles, the more information 'bites' the subject was able to remember; the longer the gamma cycle, the less the subject remembered. Next we determined the correlation between the results of the tests and estimates from the EEG measurements. Just as expected the correlation turned out to be very high and it confirmed the hypothesis of Lisman and Idiart," says Kamiński._SD

Article abstract...Neurobiology of Learning and Memory

A look at Beta band oscillations and alertness, by the same authors... International Journal of Psychophysiology

And then there is this research into a "master control gene" of memory which may control as many as hundreds of other genes in the brain -- particularly the hippocampus -- which provides a much lower-level glimpse into the machinery of learning and behaviour. All levels of brain function, from the molecular to the behavioural, are important -- although it can be difficult to focus on all of them at the same time.

Our unconscious minds -- including the underpinnings of our short term memories -- function on a parallel basis. Our conscious minds tend to function on a serial -- one thing at a time -- basis. Better educational methods might take those differences into account.