It’s All in Your Head:
How brain processes are tied to the heart
by Peter Perkins (peterp@globalearning.com)
Partner, Global Learning Partners, Inc.
I recently went to a presentation called How Brain Research Can Change Schools: A Holistic Perspective on Neuroscience, Teaching and Learning by Dr Samuel Crowell at St Michaels College in Burlington, Vermont. Below are some notes I gathered about how our brains process information and how the heart plays a critical role in learning!
All We Need is Love
Researchers have found that the chemical in the brain that gives us the feeling of love is what tends to shift neural circuitry in our brains. In other words,
it is the feeling of love that helps us change our mind, literally.
You might want to stop here and ponder this notion over a few cups of java.
Supporting work to this opening statement come from a man you may recall. Kurt Lewin suggested we include all Three Learning Domains – Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor in the learning process. Well, it turns out that
information is filtered through the part of the brain that holds our emotions, so fears, anxiety, pleasures, and other emotions, positive or negative, impact the brain directly. Thus, designing and facilitating things like safety and respect in a learning event works with the brain’s response and will impact learning according to emerging brain research.
The affective is a neurological response. The affective learning domain actually comes into play as the brain synapses are both
electrical and chemical. Information to the brain moves chemically or in other words it moves through the
hormones – the source of our emotions or affect. This suggests that our “hearts” (our affective experience) are in our brains. So maybe it is “all in your head” as some like to accuse us. The power of “affective learning” as Kurt so wisely professed many years ago, is now seen through formal brain research to be evident in brain processes.
Way to go Kurt!
How Does the Brain Process?
The latest research question on the function of the brain is – How does the brain process? There is now a recognition that
learning best occurs via the brain through the concrete rather than through the abstract. A person by the name of Francisco Varela was credited with lots of good work related to this. A tree is an abstract concept – what we experience as a tree (the trunk and leaves etc) is the concept made concrete. It is our task when we teach, to help students make the concepts (skills, knowledge or attitudes) concrete.
Kurt again comes in as a winner with his work around the Psychomotor Domain.
Application is essential to the brain’s (and affective) learning process.
Concepts must be “embedded” in the world, preferably one’s personal experience, to help a learner get it.
Context is essential to learning – a learner needs the real world context – an experience to connect a concept to in order to really learn it.
This reminds me of Jane Vella years ago comparing the critical notion of “context” in learning to “location” in property sales.
So What about Memory?
Short term memory only holds in the brain until there is an experience to attach it to or else it is lost. No learning occurs from it with out experience to relate it to. Our job as designers and facilitators of learning is to assure there are ways for all learners to attach these short term memories to experience. Our memories require a context for the new information if we are to remember it!
The word remember (re – member) suggests that we put it back together so that it is available later for us to draw on as learned knowledge or skill.
I hope these notes inspire further confidence and inquiry into this fascinating new research that is clearly consistent with Dialogue Education™ principles and the early work of Doctors Lewin and Vella.
A few resources relating to the above notes:
Caine, R., Caine, G., McClintic, C and Klimek, K. (2008) (2nd. Ed.). The 12 Brain/Mind Learning Principles in Action. Corwin Press.
Caine, G., Caine R., (2001). The Brain, Education and the Competitive Edge. Scarecrow Press.
Caine, G., Caine R., and Crowell, S. (Revised, 1999). Mindshifts. Zephyr Press.
Crowell, S., Caine, R. and Caine, G. (1998). The ReEnchantment of Learning. Zephyr Press.
Caine, R. and Caine, G. (1997). Unleashing the Power of Perceptual Change: The Promise of Brain Based Teaching. ASCD.
Caine, R. and Caine, G. (1997). Education on the Edge of Possibility. ASCD.
Caine, R., Caine, G. (Revised, 1994). Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain. Addison-Wesley Longman.
Francisco Valera, Neurophenomenology : A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem, Journal of Consciousness Studies, June 1996)
Vella, J. (1994) Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach: The Power of Dialogue in Educating Adults. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
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