Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Primal Brain in the Modern Classroom

Features | Evolution

Evolution biased the human mind to attend to some types of information over others?often the exact opposite of what teachers wish children would learn

Image: Michael Hitoshi Getty Images (forest background); Dori O'Connell Getty Images (child)

In Brief

  1. Understanding how the brain evolved can help us comprehend why children may struggle to learn in school.
  2. Natural selection biased human minds over thousands of generations to attend automatically to some features of the social and ecological environment before others.
  3. Only with effort can we override our automatic learning systems to tackle new challenges, such as those we face in school.

As children settle into their classrooms for the beginning of a new school year, parents steel themselves for the pending battle. Mothers and fathers know well that their youngsters would rather pay attention to one another than to the blackboard. But parents may not realize that the reasons children struggle with education lie deep in our evolutionary past.

Charles Darwin?s theory of natural selection provides a framework for organizing and understanding all living things. How we learn?and what we are interested in learning about?is also shaped by natural selection. Most demands of life are relatively mundane and change little across the millennia. Our minds have evolved to handle these predictable bits of information with ease. Dramatic variation, such as an outbreak of disease or war, brings unexpected challenges and can have a disproportionate influence on our survival. Those who can deftly solve problems to survive such fluctuating circumstances gain an edge.

In essence, we have two modes for dealing with information?autopilot and conscious engagement. Whereas automated processing handles the universal features of the social and ecological worlds, our conscious problem-solving abilities let us register nuances in our environments.

By understanding both mechanisms for learning, we achieve deep insight into how children think. We can begin to see why children pick up some skills effortlessly and others with substantial struggle. An evolutionary approach to teaching could help educators bridge the divide between children?s innate cognitive biases and the goals of contemporary schooling, potentially revealing more effective ways to educate future generations.

Anchors in a Sea of Sensations
Some of our learning biases are revealed early in life. From birth, babies attend longer to stimuli with the structure of a human face?two eyes above a nose?than to other equally complex stimuli. These critical features draw infants? attention, facilitating the development of parent-child attachment. Such elements of human survival that stay basically the same across thousands of lifetimes become hardwired as anchors of human cognition. They direct our attention to predictable aspects of life and allow us to automatically process information related to them. The bias for faces helps newborns anchor themselves in an otherwise overwhelmingly stimulating environment.

Infants must also differentiate their parents from other people, however, so these cognitive anchors are imbued with a certain amount of flexibility. But what makes humans unique is another level of plasticity that allows us to consciously solve problems. When conditions change rapidly, threatening our survival or reproductive prospects, our automatic systems can hold us back. Instead we need creative ways to address new situations. The combination of hardwired predilections and plastic problem solving determines how we handle new information?and, by extension, how we learn.

Theorists suggest that our ability to consciously solve problems very likely emerged from fluctuating climates, complex social dynamics or ecological demands such as hunting. Richard D. Alexander, an evolutionary biologist now retired from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has proposed one possible model for the evolution of the human mind. When our ancestors began building shelters, creating tools for hunting and using fire for cooking, they became better at extracting resources from their environments and fending off starvation and predation. With these threats reduced, early populations likely expanded, spurring competition over the best land, food and other desirable commodities.

The heart of this battle for existence then becomes a struggle among members of our own species for control of those key resources. Social competition is not unique to humans, but it becomes an especially potent selection pressure for species that dominate their ecosystems, as we do. Both our ecological supremacy and the accompanying social competition are undergirded by ?folk knowledge??the indigenous patterns of thought that help us process the psychology, biology and physics of life.


Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=7b52fb44568d51d9a0bc522f504b4e7a

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