A new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience has identified a “memory molecule” in the brain called “CaMKII”. It turns out that in the area of the brain known as the hippocampus, you can artificially create and then biochemically erase short-term memories using the CaMKII protein molecule.
Bill Gates recently told Time Magazine that "Learning is mostly about creating a context for motivation". The Gates Foundation often provides funding for educational programs, and it's interesting to see his driving principles.
I agree that motivation is the key, since kids spend more time practicing things they're interested in ("time on task" leads to skill). But by reading between the lines, I can see that Gates is ignoring the politically sensitive issue that some kids have a harder time learning than others, because their motivations themselves are innately different. In other words, you can't teach the ability to be motivated, you can only exploit motivations that already exist in people, which have to come from within. Some people have the "right ones" for a successful schooling experience, and others don't.
I think Bill Gates is proposing the creation of temporary, motivational frameworks using technology and other means. In other words, teachers should find something (anything!) that motivates a child (and it may have to be customized for each child), and then use that motivation to keep them interested in the actual subject you want them to learn.
Anyway, this is what I imagine Bill Gates is talking about. If a child is motivated only by sports (but hates geography), the teacher would create a sports games that teaches him geography as a biproduct. Sounds like a nice approach at first glance.
But I believe the personalization and customization for each child would be prohibitively expensive, even for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, due to differences in human nature among students. Optimistically, Gates says in a recent Business Week article that "the setbacks don't mean they have squandered the $1 billion the foundation has spent so far." Still, we may need to wait until version 3.0 of the program to get it right.
An interesting article describes some of the latest research in how the brain forms memories. There appears to be a "replay" mechanism, where the higher brain (neocortex) can query the part of the brain responsible for short term memory (hippocampus).
In other words, there is a "dialogue between the hippocampus, where initial memories of the day’s events are formed, and the neocortex, the sheet of neurons on the outer surface of the brain that mediates conscious thought and contains long-term memories."
The repeated cycles of brain activity also happen during sleep, leading researchers to believe that "that part of the function of sleep is to let us process and stabilize the experiences we have during the day".
Also, researchers at the University of Alabama recently found that a previously unknown process of DNA methylation (a genetic change that doesn't alter the underlying DNA sequence itself) can occur in the neurons of adult brains in response to life experiences, allowing for memory formation based on learned behavior.
According to a recent article, social neuroscience offers a window into how the brain processes social information. Let's take a look at an example:
When a male cichlid fish loses its territory, that change in social status triggers dramatic changes in the fish’s brain. (At least fifty genes are triggered, which cause some of its hormone-releasing neurons in the brain to become eight times smaller, which then leads to the shrinking of its sexual organs.)
Clearly, it's a complex mental exercise to determine that you've lost your territory, especially for a creature as instinctive as a fish. How does a fish detect its change in social status? Is there a "social status detection center" in its brain? How is this detection hooked up to the genetic response in its "social brain"?
Should be some interesting research coming out in this area, over the next few years.
I have some more thoughts on the Expert Performance Movement (described in a recent NYT article). They are a "loose coalition of scholars" trying to understand why some people are more talented than others at tasks like playing soccer.
They claim, for example, that a majority of World Cup soccer players are born in the first three months of the year. This implies that talent cannot be genetic, because it would be absurd that "talent genes" are distributed unevenly to new babies over the course of the year.
Another claim they make is that anyone (regardless of their genes) can become an expert in memorizing numbers, if they spend enough time practicing. So that is another talent that's not innate, they say.
The problem with all of these claims is either: (1) the researchers create artificial situations in the lab (e.g. memorizing numbers) that nobody would want to practice in the real world, or (2) the researchers refuse to think deeply about alternative explanations to show how something could be innate.
For example, if it's true that world-class soccer players tend to be born in January through March, what could explain this? Certainly their mothers (from whom they receive half their genes) tend to conceive after the soccer season (in which their fathers may be competing). In other words, soccer-playing parents tend to have soccer-playing kids, due to the genes they pass on. With enough creative thinking, you can think of many other plausible genetic explanations for talent.
A recent New York Times article repeats a common fiction about human nature, which goes like this:
Can you spot the fallacy here? The article (which reviews a book called "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance") assumes that our "interests" themselves are not innate. But we have seen many times that this is incorrect -- our motivations and desires are certainly innate, and you can't teach motivation.
So let's re-state the argument correctly:
According to a recent New York Times article:
[R]esearchers found that average children (I.Q. scores 83 to 108) reached a peak of cortical [brain] thickness at age 7 or 8. Highly intelligent children (121 to 149 in I.Q.) reached a peak thickness much later, at 13, followed by a more dynamic pruning [thinning] process.
One interpretation ... is that the brains of highly intelligent children are more plastic or changeable, swinging through a higher trajectory of cortical thickening and thinning than occurs in average children. The scans show the "sculpturing or fine tuning of parts of the cortex which support higher level thought, and maybe this is happening more efficiently in the most intelligent children".
As we have seen, human genes have continued to evolve as recently as 5,000 years ago, a time which saw an explosion in human inventiveness and creativity. Let's review what humans invented 5,000 years ago in the Middle East:
So what changed in the human mind 5,000 years ago that allowed such creativity? And how did changes in our genes enable it to happen? I believe humans changed then in two fundamental ways:
An abstraction is a way of explaining many separate experiences or occurrences as if they had something in common. Writing "iii" to represent three animals, for example, is an abstraction. Abstractions allows you to make statements about similar concepts, instead of treating every situation as a unique occurrence. This is extremely powerful, since it allowed us to replace unwritten customs with written laws.
At some point, humans started having emotional relationships with their abstractions. The emotional connection superceded man's own sense of self-preservation, in some cases. Humans adhered to abstract laws and became incensed by injustice. Many became religious zealots, which gave them the motivation to spread faith in an abstract God and divine truth. Man's dignity invested him in abstractions, and he became willing to fight to the death for them. That allowed abstractions to flourish, and be transmitted to others.
Recent research has shown that we may remember certain concepts, ideas, or people (such as "Bill Clinton" or "Jennifer Aniston" or my "grandmother") using a single neuron in the brain. In other words, our memories are not holistically (or holigraphically) spread across the brain, but may be stored in very specific locations.
When we learn a new concept, it is temporarily stored as "short-term memory" by neurons in the center of the brain (in the hippocampus and related regions). For example, the first time you saw "Jennifer Aniston" on TV, your hippocampus stored the "Jennifer Aniston" concept in your short-term memory. Later, that memory was transferred to your higher brain (the cortex), which resembles an enormous switchboard of neurons. It seems that the memory gets further refined into a pure concept over time, represented by fewer and fewer neurons, until it is represented by a single neuron.
This research has implications for how our genes can affect our personality. If our mental concepts are stored all over the brain, it wouldn't be possible for our genes to exploit them. But if our memories are consolidated and categorized (e.g. keep all memories of pretty girls stored in the same place), a genetic signal (or a boost of testosterone?) could affect how we use those memories.
The limbic system--the centre of our brain--comprises several subcomponents, including the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, and the amygdala.
The amygdala screens input from the senses and attaches significance to them. The main thing to remember about the amygdala, so that there arises no reductionist debate about "little men" inside our brain, is that it can only recognise very vague patterns in our sensory input, and it can only react in very simplistic, stereotyped ways. Its power is in colouring the sheer number of daily sensory experiences we have, not in completely understanding any one of them.
The hippocampus acts as our short-term memory bank, keeping many items in its store until the amygdala can assess them and determine if they are worth remembering, and thus transfer them to the higher brain's long-term memory.
The hypothalamus is the enactor of emotion. It can signal the pituitary gland to secrete hormones, or it can itself induce pleasure, fear and other strong emotions. How does it do this? By helping the amygdala, in certain situations, to shut down or incite various parts of our brain (often our rational brain) so that more primal reactions can take over. For example, if the amygdala detects a situation for which it wants to induce the fear response, it signals the hypothalamus, which in turn signals for the release of adrenaline. Perhaps it also helps to shut down parts of the frontal cortex responsible for planning and rational behaviour. We may not feel like ourselves in this state, but the brain is operating quite normally, though more through the inner eye than the "higher" cortex, over which we have more conscious control.
Notice that the inner eye "knows" where the higher brain's capacities are stored. It knows that the brain's centre for rational planning is in the frontal cortex. It knows that the facial recognition centre is in the bottom of the brain. It knows because it put them there.
The inner eye is not only responsible for some of the brain's responses, but its development as well. It uses this knowledge to support and exploit abilities we can only gain through experience. So the inner eye can induce us to plan to hunt and kill an enemy, or it can cause us to be shamed by a parent's scowling face. But not everyone has the same reaction to the same stimulus, because everyone's inner eye is different.
