Dave’s Whiteboard

The tireless Don Clark links to a Scientific American interview with Marco Iacoboni, who studies mirror neurons. Iacoboni says, “Mirror neurons are the only brain cells we know of that seem specialized to code the actions of other people and also our own actions.”

He also says:

…the hype can backfire and mirror neurons may lose their specificity.

I think there are two key points to keep in mind. The first one is the one we started with: mirror neurons are brain cells specialized for actions. They are obviously critical cells for social interactions but they can’t explain non-social cognition.

The second point to keep in mind is that every brain cell and every neural system does not operate in a vacuum. Everything in the brain is interconnected, so that the activity of each cell reflects the dynamic interactions with other brain cells and other neural systems.

More on mirror neurons in a Brain Connection column by Robert Sylwester. Nice clear examples. For instance, if you stick your tongue out at a baby, even one who’s a day old, the baby will stick hers out. This isn’t a coincidence. “The infant’s observation of her parent’s projecting tongue fires the premotor neurons that represent her tongue and this priming activates the related motor cortex neurons that project her tongue out in mimicry.”

Faking, in sports, also depends on motor neurons. Here the idea is that you move in such a way that your opponent’s mirror neurons (which assess the movements of others) decide you’re going to go here. Of course, you try to go there.

…and then you think, well, he’s expecting a fake, so I’ll make a fake fake…

So why does so much formal training and formal learning seem to leave out modeling?  Blah blah, facts, key points, nobody actually doing the work.

Series: The brain rules!

For this final post based on John Medina’s Brain Rules, I’m looking at Rule 12. That says, “We are powerful and natural explorers.” What Medina highlights is the way in which we learn about the world. From infancy, we’re busy figuring out what things are and how they related to each other.

When my oldest child was turning two, I came across a phrase I’ve always used in place of “the terrible twos” — “first adolescence.” The idea was that two-year-olds, like their teenage counterparts, have just acquired a clutch of physical and mental skills. They can walk, they can talk, they can form ideas and set out to put them to work. But they’re constantly running into limitations and setbacks.

Here’s how Medina sees the world to the two-year-old:

You push the boundaries of people’s preferences, then stand back and see how they react. Then you repeat the experiment, pushing them to their limits over and over again to see how stable findings are, as if he were playing peekaboo. Slowly you begin to perceive the length and height and breadth of people’s desires, and how they differ from yours. Then, just to be sure the boundaries are still in place, you occasionally do the whole experiment over again.

One tool for the miniature experimenter: the mirror neuron. This class of brain cells, discovered within the last 15 years, apparently helps us monitor activities around us and helps us plan our own activity.

It seems clear these mirror neurons played a major role in our evolution. When we came down from the trees, says Medina, we didn’t say, “Give me a book in a lecture and a board of directors so I can spend 10 years learning how to survive in this place.”

Turning to education, Medina argues for expanding the medical school model. Med school, he says, has three components: a teaching hospital, faculty who work as well as teach, and research labs. What does this mean for the student?

• Consistent exposure to the real world — med students constantly move through the teaching hospital, encountering real-life medical problems.
• Consistent exposure to people working in the real world — students learn from not only the medical faculty but also dozens if not hundreds of working professionals.
• Consistent exposure to practical research programs — students discover that the best research is an ongoing activity, that by nature it’s tentative, and that it connects to problems worth solving.

Consider the implications of this model both for how adults learn to teach and how children learn to learn better.

Years ago, I served as a Teacher Corps intern in a rural high school. Corena, he master teacher who led our intern team was also the office education instructor at the school. One of her most successful programs placed office ed students in jobs with businesses in the three small towns that comprised our school district.

So Cindy, Carolyn, and their classmates at 16 or 17 were already learning what really happens in a workplace. Some had more positive experiences than others; as their teacher, Corena would work at trying to improve the experience, or at trying to turn it into an occasion for learning.

That was a small program with the limited but very practical goal. How many other school experiences could profit from a combination of real-life experiences, guidance from trained adults, and exposure to continuing attempts to learn more?

Baby investigator photo by coreyt / Corey Thompson.

Series: The brain rules!

In this second-to-last post about John Medina’s Brain Rules, I’m looking at rule 9, “Stimulate more of the senses.”

A good part of this chapter seems intuitively obvious; what caught my eye were things that had been less clear (at least to me).

I’d heard of synesthesia before — the odd sensory-crossing phenomenon in which a person experiences, say, the number 9 as having a flavor. Synesthetes “display unusually advanced memory ability,” Medina says. And they find their apparently odd perceptions to be pleasurable.

Synesthesia suggests that the sensory processes in the brain are designed to work together; the condition simply makes that more striking. But we evolved in a multisensory environment, and so our brains developed ways to effectively process the stimuli coming in from our senses.

Not only do the senses work together, but their combined effects can enhance their individual abilities. In one experiment, people had a hard time seeing a flickering light if its intensity was gradually decreased. Researchers coordinated a short burst of sound with the light flickering off. Subjects who had the sound as part of the experience could see the light beyond their normal threshhold.

Medina cites work by Richard E. Mayer of the University of California Santa Barbara. (He collaborated with Ruth Colvin Clark on E-learning and the Science of Instruction.)

Five of Mayer’s findings:

• The multimedia principle: Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
• The temporal contiguity principle: Students learn better when corresponding works and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
• The spacial contiguity principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near to each other rather than far from each other on the page or screen.
• The coherence principle: Students learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.
• The modality principle: Students learn better from animation and narration then from animation and on-screen text.

As Medina points out, these findings home deal with two senses — hearing and vision. Evidence exists that involving the other senses can also enhance learning. Certain types of memory are sensitive to smells, for example. One intriguing example suggests that the sense of smell can improve declarative memory during sleep.

Five senses photo by http://flickr.com/people/joaoloureiro/.

SharpBrains has an interview (Why Smart Brains Make Stupid Decisions) with Ori Brafman, co-author of Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior.

A striking example: a professor at the Harvard Business School had his class participate in an auction — for a $20 bill. The kicker was that the winner would get the $20, but the second-place bidder, while getting nothing, would have to honor his bid.

And yes, the bidding did pass $20.

Brafman says that awareness that we can be swayed might help prevent us from being swayed. He offers the example of a highly structured job interview, less likely to influence the interviewer than the informal, what’s-your-biggest-strength approach.

A comment on this post led me to In Bias, Meta is Max at Overcoming Bias. Robin Hanson writes about an article suggesting that “being more aware of biases makes us more willing to assume that others’ biases, and not ours, are responsible for our disagreement.”

These biases or distortions are connected to our faith in our own objectivity, which brings to mind Benjamin Franklin’s observation:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.

A depressing observation that Hanson quotes from the Science review:

People also behave more conflictually toward those whom they suspect will be biased by self-interest. Participants in one study were instructed to consider the perspective of their adversaries in a conflict over limited resources. That instruction had the ironic effect of leading them to expect that their adversaries would be biased by self-interest, which, in turn, led the participants themselves to act more competitively and selfishly.

(Hanson provides a link to the review, but the Science site requires a subscription.)

I found the Brafman interview thanks to the latest edition of Encephalon, the brain science blog carnival. If brain-related topics, or cleverly introduced collections, tweak either of your hemispheres, take a look at Encephalon 48, The Usual Suspects, at Neuroanthropology.

Distortion photo by Photochiel / Argos Panoptes.

Series: The brain rules!

John Medina’s brain rule 11 says, “Mail and female brains are different.” He’s examining gender differences, which can be genetic, neuroanatomic, or behavioral.

Genetically, all men are momma’s boys. Women inherit two sets of X chromosomes (one from mom, one from dad), and apparently individual cells choose, randomly, which inheritance to activate. But men receive the X chromosome only from their mothers. And many genes on the X chromosome create proteins involved in the manufacturing of the brain.

So what are some of the neuroanatomical differences?

• Difference in the size and thickness of the cortex.
• Differences in the limbic system, which influences emotions.
• Differences in the amygdala, which controls and remembers emotions.
• Differences in regulating serotonin, which regulates emotion and mood. (Men synthesize serotonin 50% faster than women.)

Do these differences mean anything? Medina says we don’t know. But we’re trying to find out.

You have probably heard the term left brain vs. right brain. You may have heard that this underscores creative vs. analytical people. That’s a folk tale, the equivalent of saying the left side of a luxury liner is responsible for keeping the ship afloat, and the right side is responsible for making it over through the water.

Both sides are involved in both processes. That doesn’t mean the hemispheres are equal, however. The right side of the brain tends to remember the gist of an experience, and the left brain tends to remember the details.

Behavioral differences

Males suffer more from mental retardation, and the X chromosome is often involved. (Remember, women have a backup set of X chromosomes; men don’t.)

Men are more severely afflicted by schizophrenia; women, by depression.

Most alcoholics and drug addicts are male; most anorexics are female.

Medina discusses the work Deborah Tannen has done in studying verbal behavior. His summary: “Women are better at it.”

How much is genetic and how much is socially influenced may be impossible to tell — but the differences are clear early in life in such areas as building relationships and negotiating status. Those patterns are reinforced and greatly influence our interpersonal verbal behavior as adults.

Some final thoughts from Medina on using this data in the real world:

Get the facts straight on emotions.

Emotions matter because they make the brain pay attention. Men and women process certain emotions differently. That means they pat attention in different ways.

Medina recounts an experiment dealing with how men and women reaction to emotional stress. The tendency is for men to activate the right side of the brain (the gist), and for women to activate the left (details).

Question gender arrangements.

Are single-sex classrooms better? We haven’t experimented enough to know. They may depend on age, on subject, and certainly on the techniques for fostering learning.

Notice gender in the workplace.

Here’s Medina, recounting a presentation at the Boeing Leadership Center:

I said, “Sometimes women are accused of being more emotional than men, from the home to the workplace. I think that women might not be any more emotional than anyone else.”

I explained that because women perceive their emotional landscape with more data points (that’s the detail) and see it in greater resolution, women may simply have more information to which they are capable of reacting. If men perceived the same number of data points, they might have the same number of reaction.

Take management training, Medina says. Often it involves various complex simulations. Have unisex teams and mixed-gender teams. Then give one team of each type some training related to these real gender differences and their implications.

So you’ve got uni-untrained, mixed-untrained, uni-trained, mixed-trained. Real-world outcomes (and maybe a master’s thesis).

Which side of your brain is firing right now?

Photo of the General Post Office in Dublin by informatique / William Murphy.
Detail of the GPO’s name in Irish by jaqian.