The Science of Learning with Heather Berlin

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

Chuck, always good to have you as my co-host there.

Thanks for being here.

Always good to be here, man.

And we’re going to talk about the neuroscience of learning, and neither you nor I have any such expertise.

So, we got to go to our go-to person in this, Dr.

Heather Berlin.

Heather, welcome back to StarTalk.

It’s always a pleasure to be here with you.

And this is StarTalk at the Science is Cool virtual unconference.

And who knows how many countries are represented here.

And I’m delighted.

It’s a reminder that it is one world, and education is a thing that we all care about.

And so, education…

Or at least most of us care about.

And so…

I mean, it’s a little hyperbolic to say we all care.

Let’s remember, we are beaming out from America.

But we have teachers care, and teachers are the primary audience here.

So for sure, we got 100% of those who care.

And Heather, let me just finish your bio here.

So you’re a neuroscientist and clinical psychologist and assistant professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

Yes, indeed.

Did I get that right?

That’s me in a nutshell.

Sorry, that’s all.

That’s all it is.

That’s it.

All right.

So Heather, let me just start off by saying, when we learn something new, what happens in our brains to either learn it first, you know, to climb the wall or the barrier to learn it and then to retain it?

What change happens in our brain for that to take place?

So learning is actually a physical change in the brain.

And the best way to remember this is there’s a saying we have in neuroscience, cells that fire together wire together.

I like that.

Look at that.

Look at the brain going on.

Having happy hours and just.

But you know, that’s what it is.

So once you sort of you make a connection, the more you rehearse it, that’s what studying is about.

The more you go over something over and over again, you’re actually teaching these neurons to fire together and then they regrow.

They grow new receptors so that the next time it’s stimulated, it’s easier to make that connection.

So you’re actually developing new neural pathways that are firing quicker in your brain.

That’s what learning is.

But some people will remember something forever upon learning at once and others have to keep being reminded of it.

So what’s the difference there?

Is it brain chemicals?

I believe the difference is one of them is stupid.

See, Neil, there’s smart people and then there’s not so smart people.

Okay, Chuck, you are reminding us why we have an actual neuroscientist on the show to give us that, to tell us what actually what’s really going on.

I mean, okay, there are the very, very rare people that have, you know, what they say is like a, you know, they can see something immediately, remember it.

But for the average person, that can happen usually when it’s tied to something either personally significant to them or when they learn it, it’s involved with a lot of emotions are being stimulated at that time.

Emotions, tag memories.

And if you think about it, what is learning?

Learning is really forming a memory, right?

Learning is intimately linked to memory.

And so emotions tag memories as important.

So we call those flashbulb memories.

So we’ll remember, you know, Heather, no one knows what a flashbulb is.

No one under 30.

So please tell us what a flashbulb is.

Oh, there are these old fashioned cameras.

Good evening, Mr.

and Mrs.

America and all the ships at sea.

And you see them in these, you know, period pieces where they would flash a light bulb really quickly.

And the light bulb would actually then go out because it was so bright.

And that’s timed with the photograph they’re taking.

So the instant the flash occurs, the exposure in the camera opens up so that the scene is lit up for the film, because the film was not sensitive enough to light to just use ambient light and you needed the flash.

Okay, so there we go.

There you go.

But it’s this idea of taking a very momentary imprint and that it just kind of stays permanently.

And usually when there’s an emotion involved that tells the brain, hey, this is something pretty important, you should remember it.

So that’s experiential.

But when you’re learning, if things are tied to emotion, if they’re personally significant, they sort of get ingrained into your neural network in a different kind of way.

And that’s why they say to learn things better, you should tag them to things that you already know.

So wait a minute.

So on StarTalk, we have Chuck, who is occasionally funny.

Yes.

Like an eclipse.

I’m funny like an eclipse.

No, Chuck, we have Chuck because our intuitions tell us that if you laugh while you’re learning, that’s an important associated emotion.

The joy that gets attached to this bit of knowledge that you just acquired.

And we tell ourselves, but you can affirm this or deny it, that that enhances people’s not only appreciation for what they’ve learned, but the longevity of its duration in your head thereafter.

Well, the thing about humor is that it activates the reward system in the brain and releases this neurochemical dopamine.

And dopamine actually enhances both your motivation and long-term memory.

So as long as you can activate, it has to be the right kind of humor though.

Studies show that if it’s inappropriate humor or maybe just not that funny, it doesn’t work as well for learning.

I was feeling so good.

I’m like, Chuck Nice is part of the dopaminergic system.

And then you got to qualify it like, oh, but it’s got to be the right kind of humor.

Not just any old Chuck style humor.

You can’t just…

But yeah, I mean, so in a sense, if you can stimulate those neurochemicals in the brain, people remember better.

Also, humor tends to tie things to imagery, to stories.

And again, you’re activating the larger neural network.

And instead of just learning rote facts, you have a context in which you can embed that information.

And then you’ll remember better.

Is this similar to when people say the smell immediately brought back an entire graphic memory of some trip they took?

That smell being sort of a sensory feeder to your capacity to remember?

Absolutely.

I mean, smells are…

It’s one of our primary senses because it’s the only sense actually that goes straight to the cortex.

The other senses go through something called the thalamus, which is like a relay station in the brain, and then it sends it to the cortex.

I didn’t know that.

But smell is very direct.

It’s a very primitive primary sense, and most of it is happening unconsciously.

So can you…

What’s the difference between learning something that’s already known and creativity in sort of creating something that no one has thought to do or think before?

So this is something I’m really interested in on creativity.

So how I define it is kind of is making novel associations between ideas, making connections that other people haven’t seen before.

But in order to do that, you need to first take in all of the facts, all of the information.

So if you look at someone, say like Darwin’s theory of evolution, he had to take in all the information, did all the research, and then based on that basic information or data came up with a new way to connect it all in this kind of theory that, well, maybe Lamarque, but other people didn’t think of before in that way.

And so that, I think, is creativity, is coming up with novel ideas based on what everybody else knows but no one thought of before.

And by the way, usually when somebody comes up with it, everyone goes, oh, yeah, of course, that’s so obvious.

But yet nobody else thought of it.

So this is a common definition of genius where they say a genius is the person that sees what everyone else has seen but thinks what no one else has thought.

And so that’s an interesting way.

But then if that’s the source of our creativity, that argues for learning as much as you can so that you have the…

so at least you have the capacity…

Reference points…

.

to connect, to restitch it together.

Because without it, you’ve got no foundations for being a genius.

Is that a fair way to put it?

I think all sort of geniuses are when they say they have these flashes of insight.

You know, it doesn’t come out of nowhere.

They’ve actually put in the work.

They’ve put in the time.

They’ve collected all the information.

And then usually most of what happens is happening unconsciously outside of awareness, which is why sleep is very important for coming up with new ideas because the brain is consolidating the information.

But you have to put in the work.

Take in the information.

Let your brain mull it over and then come up with these great insights.

And the next story, when I was in college, and I, well, in calculus, probably most kids out there who are listening haven’t had calculus yet, but you will if you, well, you should.

Calculus is a brilliant branch of mathematics, very advanced.

But there’s a rule in calculus called Lehapital’s Rule.

Lehapital, and it’s almost spelled like hospital, but it’s Lehapital.

Lehapital’s Rule, and it’s invoked in calculus.

It’s a very simple rule.

It’s deceptively simple.

And I’d never heard of this guy, Lehapital, before.

And I’m in the depths of my college’s library, the math library.

And then I’m just meandering, and I come upon a shelf.

And the shelf must have been two meters wide, and it was the collected works of Lehapital.

And I thought to myself, I don’t know any of the rest of this work, but I know this one simple rule that applies to all of what we do in calculus.

So then I thought to myself, did it really take that much life’s investment in thinking about this problem to come up with one of the simplest rules that calculus knows?

I mean, I think the answer is yes, right?

But, you know, even if you want to explain something in the simplest way, usually that’s the hardest part to do, right?

The easiest part, in a sense, is collecting all the information, being able to simplify it and unify it.

That’s a whole other thing.

It’s another another.

Is there anything that you can do, mechanisms that you can use for the teachers that are listening, to rules of simplification, like that make learning easier?

What you just said about making things, culling it down to where it’s something that’s so digestible, are there any rules that make our brains receive information more easily?

I would say yes, but maybe in a slightly different way.

I think, so I was talking about dopamine and how dopamine is motivating, right?

One thing that we know is that curiosity activates these reward networks.

If you could motivate kids to just get them curious about the topic or the information, that will drive them.

Why did Neil go and start looking through the books in the library?

He was motivated by something, maybe he was curious.

That’s what drives, you want the motivation to be coming internally to learn, not, oh, you need to learn this, or you can, you know, go ahead or yes, or yes, or yes.

Or else, right?

You want that drive to come internally.

That dovetails beautifully with, I think, an important question here, especially for this conference.

What do we know about all that’s been said about different types of learners, right?

There are people who need to experience it to learn it or to read it or to, what is known about this?

Because there’s so much written.

But what does a neuroscientist say?

Well, this is actually a myth that’s been perpetrated for many years and it’s very hard to break.

So although there are different types of, these idea of different intelligences, some people are more visual and or auditory or they have more kinesthetic ability.

Kinesthetic would be movement or physical body engagement.

Hence, my kinesthetic, okay.

Yes, there are individual differences in terms of those abilities.

However, when you do a meta-analysis, which is basically looking across a whole group of many studies and seeing what the kind of final results are, teaching styles did not make a difference and did not, in terms of trying to tailor a teaching style to a specific ability, didn’t change how the students learned.

So, the idea that tailoring a teaching method toward a student’s particular abilities isn’t necessarily going to make them learn the information better, which is interesting.

However, there are certain individual differences that do matter.

Some people are better learning independently.

They want to be kind of left alone.

Just give me the books and I’ll do it on my own.

Others need a more structured approach and they need more scaffolding or help along the way.

So, those different learning styles, yes, but not the ones that in that kind of traditional sense of like, oh, he’s a visual learner, she’s an auditor.

But wait, when I think of science museums, some of them are very focused on sort of kinetic exhibits, where there are levers and buttons and you sort of set the class loose into the exhibit floor and there they go.

And, you know, if that’s a different experience than setting them loose in a room of books, okay?

I’m thinking if I’m going to learn something, I’m going to go to the museum floor first and that might excite me and maybe later I’ll open a book.

But so I’m it doesn’t ring true what you’re saying.

It sounds to me like they are the connective tissue of the learning process.

Like what Neil is talking about is what leads to the curiosity that you were talking about that creates this internal drive to learn.

So you start off pulling levers and pushing buttons.

But what that does is it incites you internally so that when you’re in the room of books, you now want to know even more.

Okay, I’m with that.

I’ll go with that.

Heather, what do you think of that?

Yeah.

So what I was going to say is different than the idea of different learning styles.

I think across the board, having experiential learning is always best.

If you can do something hands-on and get somebody involved in a real-world scenario, situation, tie the information, you know that often kids say, oh, what does this have to do with the real world?

You know, why do I have to learn this calculus nonsense, right?

But if you have a real-world problem, whether it’s hands-on or trying to figure something out that you’re dealing with in your everyday life, that opens up, like Chuck said, the doors of curiosity.

But then to Chuck’s point, what we’re really saying, and I remember I work in a museum, so I think about this a lot.

And I don’t always embrace the concept in every exhibit, or at least the intent.

So not to get into the weeds here, but there are many exhibits where, you know, there are official educators, and they’re there, and they’re analyzing it, and they say, well, what is the principle of this exhibit?

And what idea do you want to convey?

And then they test the person before and after the exhibit to see what they’ve learned.

And I’m saying, people, they’re spending four minutes in front of this exhibit, whereas they spend hours and hours, days and days, weeks and weeks, months and months in your classroom.

So what burden are you putting upon the exhibit design for it to do your teaching?

Maybe instead, because if you fail at that, then the exhibit’s got nothing going for it.

But if instead get it to Chuck’s point, if the exhibit just simply excited you, and even if you got no learned testable knowledge from it, if you say, oh my gosh, these colors are amazing, now let me go learn more.

Yes.

I think that that is going to entail a restructuring of the entire education system, so.

Sit out there.

But if instead, oh, so I’ll give an, can I just give an example?

And you were talking about emotions, all right.

Again, I have a museum outlook on this, but of course, museum trips are common for schools.

So, but you get to hear this at least firsthand.

People who visited, for example, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and I said, did you go as a kid?

Yeah, and I’ll say, what was your favorite exhibit there?

Okay, and I’ll write down in advance what I already know will have been their favorite exhibit.

The X.

But wait, I want to keep you in suspense just briefly.

There’s another museum in Philadelphia here in the United States, the Franklin Institute named for Benjamin Franklin, a famous scientist who on the side was one of the founding fathers of the United States.

I say, what was your favorite exhibit there as a kid?

I will write it down and I get the right answer 100% of the time.

Okay, people go to the the Exploratorium in San Francisco and I’ll say, what was your favorite exhibit?

I’ll write it down.

Every time I’ve done this experiment, I get the right answer because all right, you know what they were.

So Museum of Science and Industry.

It was the coal mine exhibit where you go into a shaft and it’s that at the at the Franklin Institute.

It’s the living heart.

Again, I don’t know if these exhibits are still there.

Chuck, you’re from Philadelphia.

And the heart is the bomb.

Okay.

And it’s Exploratorium, a whole room of exhibits, but I know which one people remembered.

It’s the one where they create a tornado that’s the size of the room.

Okay.

And in each one of those cases, you’re not coming away saying, I now know the thermodynamics and the fluid mechanics of a tornado.

No, but you want to know about tornadoes.

All right.

And the same with the coal mine and the same with the heart.

So these are things that are bigger than you are.

All right.

Is it true they had to shut down the coal mine exhibit because little kids kept getting black lung?

Again, these are old memories and I haven’t checked on them lately, but Heather, I’m just putting in your lap the idea that these are exhibits that I don’t think the goal was to give someone an exam to see what they learned after the exhibit.

But they created an indelible memory in everyone who’s experienced it.

So I think one of the reasons why is that we are all born natural scientists, right?

And that is how we naturally evolved to learn and by experiencing things in the world.

This whole school system was set up after the fact, right?

But the way our brains work is to have experiences in the world and be naturally curious and learn from them.

And we are driven by, we get like a high reward by getting an answer to a question.

So Neil, to be very meta here, the way you just set up that whole scenario.

And then I knew the best, you know, exhibit here and here and here.

And we are on breathing breath, waiting for like, what’s the answer, right?

But that’s what learning is.

It’s like set it up, set it up.

And we are natural curiosity will come through.

We want to have answers to questions.

We find ourselves in this world around us.

We’re trying to make sense of it when a lot of it is chaotic.

You know, before we understood weather patterns, people were trying to find connections to try to predict when the rain was going to come.

And that’s how we naturally experience the world from the day we’re born.

Wait, Chuck, you agreed with me as a native of Philadelphia that that’s your most memorable experience.

Oh, absolutely.

Listen, without a doubt, I mean, the heart in the Franklin Institute and the Franklin Institute was a place that I went many, many, many times as a kid.

And it’s a shame because I know that now there are school systems that don’t fund field trips because they don’t have the money.

And I know that that’s something that happens now throughout the nation where they have they have stripped this ability for schools to get in a bus and go somewhere with the kids and take them out of the classroom and put them in an immersive environment where they are stimulated on every single sense in every single way.

And Heather, I read this and I was like, yes, this is true that as adults, we remember school trips long after they have occurred.

You remember school trips even when you don’t even remember the name of the teacher who took you on the school trip.

There’s something about leaving the school environment and then absorbing an entire other world out there and then returning.

This would happen if you visited a planetarium, all right, because you can’t do that necessarily in a classroom.

So just to echo Chuck’s point.

So what about this, Heather, from a neurological standpoint, experientially, can we achieve at least a close facsimile to some of this stuff with like, what’s the oculus or whatever that thing?

Oh, virtual reality.

Thank you.

Virtual reality.

Neurologically, are we close to it?

Just to make a finer point on this, there are two types of memory and one is called semantic memory, which is the memory of knowledge of facts, just taking in the information.

And then there’s what’s called episodic memory, which is remembering your experiences.

And that’s going on the trip, remembering the bus ride, remembering.

And then along the way, you learn some facts, but they’re tied into your experience.

And those are two different memory systems.

That’s an important thing to know if you’re designing a school system.

Oh my gosh.

Well, to this point of virtual reality, just before we go to Q&A, but we are still kind of in a pandemic year where almost all learning had to now take place through a video screen, or through a computer screen.

And is that, there are people, I think, who have struggled with that.

Could you comment on the difference between learning from a human being or an image of a human being, even if it’s a live image, they’re not there in flesh and blood versus someone who’s sitting in the room with you?

Can you think about that difference in your field?

Absolutely.

You know, so a lot of it has to do with, again, how our brains evolve to communicate and socialize.

And when we’re in these kind of 2D Zoom worlds, first of all, we’re not making direct eye contact, right?

I’m sort of looking at you in my screen, but not looking at you as I’m looking into the camera, right?

So we’re not communicating in that way.

There’s something a little off.

Our brain recognizes that.

We’re not picking up on odors.

We’re not picking up on body motions.

All this information that’s coming in unconsciously is helping us learn, is helping us pay attention, right?

Because you’re in that virtual world.

But then I can look behind me and I’m in a whole different world over here.

And there’s a kind of separation between us.

We’re not embodied in the same space, which I think is meaningful.

But that being said, I think there are ways in which there are some advantages with the virtual learning.

You can create kind of video gamification.

You know, you can socialize learning in those ways.

If you use it in creative ways, it could be beneficial or at least supplement.

That’s a very important point, Heather.

What you’re saying, not to put words in your mouth, but actually I am.

You’re saying that the moment we all got pushed to Zoom classes, if you did that trying to do exactly what you previously did in real life, it’s bound to fail in some fundamental ways.

But if instead you say, here’s a different way of interacting with my students, how can I best exploit that, those tools, rather than try to mimic something that isn’t this at all?

Is that a fair way to say that?

Exactly.

You know, obviously with the pandemic, it happened so quickly that there was no time to kind of recalibrate, right?

But I think, you know, as we can now, maybe in retrospective, now that we have time on our hands a little bit more, we can start developing the online tools that we have in better ways.

For the next pandemic.

For the next pandemic, obviously, yes.

Of course.

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Well, let’s see what Dave is going to bring to us from the greater universe of the world.

Dave, come on on.

There you go.

I am back.

I tell you, there’s too many good questions.

Let’s dive into them.

There’s some really great ones.

And there’s a lot of questions about dopamine, and I’m going to rephrase it in an interesting way.

Because before we started, the group here was having a chat about classical music.

And I think it’s well known that Beethoven composed while he was walking.

Did the dopamine help him?

Or was the activity, or was there some connection with that?

Yeah, there are people who have habits that they associate with creative moments.

If you generalize that inquiry, that’s an interesting question.

Yeah, I mean, I think with exercise, number one, you’re getting more blood to the brain.

You’re getting more oxygen to the brain.

So it always helps with cognition and thinking.

But the other thing with, let’s say, going for a walk, getting outside.

No one ever really did anything great locked in a closet.

Is that what you’re saying?

Yes, that’s not the best place to come up with your creative ideas.

However, what I think is really important is that when you go out for a walk or go do something physical, in a way, you’re shutting off a certain network, but you’re kind of not thinking.

You’re letting your mind go.

You’re letting it kind of be free and unconstrained.

When you’re kind of thinking about trying to memorize something or taking information, you’re having that very convergent thinking.

You’re limited.

But when you kind of let go and let your mind go, that’s when, again, these novel associations between ideas can come and the inspiration and the thought.

So sometimes just literally getting out there and being physical forces you to not think.

Like when you have a writer’s block or you’re stuck, get up, go for a walk, go play tennis, go mountain climbing, and you might, it might unblock you in that way.

And so I think a lot of these great philosophers and musicians and creative people would go for, Nietzsche would go for walks all the time and he would come up with his ideas as well.

So I think there is something to that.

Dave, what else you got?

Yeah, there’s a really good related question.

This is from Wilder Pertl and he’s asking.

From where?

Where are these, I want to hear the world here.

I don’t know where he’s from.

I don’t know where he’s from.

Where are you from?

Let’s see if we can find the chat.

So there is this model.

He calls it ABK.

I’ve seen VARC where it’s visual, auditory, reading, writing and kinesthetic.

But he’s saying that maybe the different styles just mix it up and make the learning more interesting.

And that’s what we’re seeing.

So it cuts the monotony of whatever else you’d be doing.

Yeah, so today we’ll do visual, then later we’re going to do auditory, and then later we’re going to do hands-on.

What do you think of that, Heather?

I like that a lot because I think it has more to do with the novelty.

So the thing with dopamine that gets it going is change, novelty.

So if somebody’s just droning on that classic like Bueller.

Oh, yeah, from Ferris Bueller’s day off.

From Ferris Bueller’s day off, there’s this really drone, like foreign teacher, it’s like Bueller, Bueller, and it’s just mundane.

But that’s not a great way to learn.

But the changing it up, different activities.

Today we’re going to do this, tomorrow we’re doing something else.

Keeps it fresh, keeps it exciting.

By the way, that actor was a former actual former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, by the way.

His name is Ben Stein.

Ben Stein is actually an entertaining comedian.

Can I ask you this from Cynthia?

Oh, Chuck is checking out the questions too.

Oh my God.

Yeah, go for it, Chuck.

Go for it.

Changing it up.

How good is IQ at predicting your intelligence?

Can a medium IQ, provided it works hard, do the same thing as somebody with a 140 plus?

First of all, is IQ a real thing?

Not really.

IQ, what we do when I measure somebody’s abilities, we’re looking at different cognitive abilities.

Somebody might be really good in visual spatial processing.

Some might be good at memory, at verbal abilities.

There are all these different kinds of abilities.

Everybody has what we call a neurocognitive profile, like a thumbprint.

Different areas of better abilities than others.

This IQ score is taking all these different abilities and trying to average it all together into this one number, which I find is not very meaningful, unless it’s at the extremes.

When you have somebody who has severe mental disability and there are three standard deviations below the norm, then that is a good indicator that they might need special help or whatever it may be.

Again, if you have, say, three standard deviations above the norm, these people are going to need maybe more enriched teaching programs because their brains are working a little bit differently.

I think it’s okay for a kind of indicator at the extremes, but other than that, the difference between a 115 IQ and a 120, it’s kind of meaningless.

I take it with a grain of salt.

Can I add to that, Heather?

I’ve done a fair amount of thinking on this topic, not from a neuroscientist perspective, but just as a person who enjoys academics and learning.

In other words, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I’m kind of smart.

I’ve never looked at this from a neuroscientist standpoint, but speaking as one of the world’s most foremost science educators.

Here’s my point.

This is a true fact.

I’ve never had an IQ test in my life.

I attended public schools in New York City my whole life.

They do not administer IQ tests in public schools the way they often do in private schools.

And I thought about it, and I said, I’m glad I don’t know my IQ score, because if it were low, and I knew that early on, what would that have done to my ambitions?

What would I have said?

You know, I really like the universe.

No, but my IQ says I’ll never do it, so I’ll take up something else.

And then I thought, suppose it’s really high.

And then I said, yeah, I can do anything.

And then, like, how would that, what would that do to my relationship to other people and my attitudes towards them?

And it would turn me into an obnoxious, and so I just worried what force it would have on who and what I would become.

So I said, I don’t care.

I don’t care.

I will be where my ambitions take me.

And I can tell you this, that IQ does not code for ambition.

And for me, ambition is what drives this world.

And I can also tell you this, only smart people say they don’t care what their IQ is.

I just didn’t want any person, place, thing or number to get between me and what I wanted to become in life.

That’s all I’m saying.

And you know that people who have whatever challenges they do, they can have ambitions that can get them much farther than anyone would have said they would have gone.

And let me tell this, just while we’re here, I might have said this.

Have we done this five times already, Dave, or something?

If I said it before, I’m saying it again.

In my K through 12, kindergarten through high school, in all the teachers I’ve ever had, none of them would have pointed to me in their class and said, hey, he’ll go far.

Watch for him.

He’s going to…

None of them.

None of them.

Meanwhile, I’ve known since I was nine years old that I wanted to be an astrophysicist.

But none of them had these cues.

None of them saw my ambitions.

They didn’t know I was head of an astronomy club that I just created or that I bought a telescope by walking other people’s dogs and using that to then create a whole world that wasn’t showing up in the teacher’s classroom.

And that’s who I was and I knew I was that.

So I’m not going to let the teacher or the…

And you got me started here.

Okay, and I was going to tweet this, but I said no, it would be too controversial.

I won’t.

But I will tell you here and now, okay?

For every student who does not get an A on an exam, there’s a teacher telling them what they should not be when they grow up.

And I object to that mode of interaction between a system that’s trying to educate you and a person who’s trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up.

Okay, but isn’t there a balance there, Neil?

Let’s be for real because on the one hand, you don’t want to discourage anyone from being there or realizing their true potential in life.

But on the other hand, there are people who create unrealistic desires and expectations for children by not telling them certain things.

Like the mom who’s just like, look at you, baby, you can sing.

Don’t you listen to them.

And the kid is toned down, wouldn’t know a note if a note came up and punched it in the throat.

And it’s, ah, oh, don’t you worry, baby, you can sing.

So where is that balance?

Heather, say something.

Chuck, did your parents tell you you’re funny?

No, I’m going to tell you the truth, Dave.

You know what my parents told me more than anything?

All right, Heather, say something here.

Bail us out.

Yeah, it’s the nature and nurture kind of debate.

And I do think that there are certain, let’s say, genetic predispositions that people are born with.

There are studies that show that, for example, musical ability is one of them.

Some people are just born with perfect pitch or athletic abilities.

So I’m never going to be the best basketball player because I’m not a certain height, let’s say, perhaps.

But given that, within our sort of, I think the genetics is what creates our boundaries, perhaps the limitations of how high we can go or low.

But the motivation that you were talking about, Neil, is what pushes us to our greatest, to the height of where we can go within our genetic boundaries.

And so somebody might be born with a predisposition for a high IQ, but they never do anything with it.

They’re not motivated.

And somebody else who might have a lower IQ on paper is so motivated.

They’re at the top of their scale.

They’re doing way better than that.

That’s all I’m trying to say here.

Right.

But like Chuck’s point with the singing ability, that person may be practice, practice, practice, and they’ll get as good as they can get, but they just don’t have the vocal cords to get any further.

But I think the people who reach the highest heights are those who have a genetic ability plus the motivation to get to those high IQs.

But I would say for practically every truly successful person in life, in business and finance and politics, go to every single one of them and to a person.

There will be stories in their life about people telling them that they won’t succeed or that they should not pursue.

They all have these failure stories.

And so I just don’t want to presume that it’s a given that someone says, oh, you’ll never be good at that.

I’m going to use that as an excuse to be even better than you ever thought of.

And that happened to my father.

Didn’t I tell the story that happened to my father?

He was in high school and then in gym class.

And my father was a muscular, right?

And the teacher said to him, look at Cyril Tyson.

He has the body that will never be good at track because they were about to enter the track and field unit of the gym class.

And my father said to himself, no one is going to tell me what I can’t be in life.

He used that as motivation to take up track.

And within five years, he was world class and had the fifth fastest time in the world in the event that he specialized in.

So it’s examples like that.

The fact that that even exists at all as an example tells me, I don’t give a rat’s ass about what you think my genetic limits are because my ambitions, as far as I’m concerned, transcend it all.

Well, it sounds to me like you’re making a case for negative motivation.

As far as I’m concerned, if you’re a teacher, you should tell a kid that can’t do anything because then they will go on and achieve the highest heights of everything.

Dave, give me some more questions.

Can I say one thing?

I have to call out my high school guidance counselor in the context of this, who, because I was a very good student academically, but I tend occasionally cut class.

I’m just saying I was a little, you know, I cut class occasionally.

So my guidance counselor said, I said, I need the college applications.

At the time there was no online, the guidance counselor had to give them to you.

And he said, don’t even bother applying to college.

You’re never going to go anywhere anyway.

And didn’t give me the applications.

And I had to drive to the school myself, go to their offices, get the applications physically, fill them out myself, no help from the guidance counselor.

So I just want to call out my high school guidance counselor for giving me the motivation to excel.

Heather, is there something going on in your mind when you get that negative feedback that triggers dopamine or some reaction that makes some people…

A lot of people are like that.

Yeah, why do some people use the negative force as a positive driver and others absorb it and then it squashes their ambitions?

What’s the difference there?

That’d be useful to know if we can harness that.

That has a lot more to do with self-esteem, to be honest.

People who have a very high self-esteem take that criticism and say, no, thank you.

I’m going to show you because I know internally I’m better than that.

But if you don’t have that confidence, you absorb it and it can actually bring you down and make you less motivated.

I don’t think it works well for everybody, that sort of negative style in that sense.

It depends on how it interacts with your self-esteem and your confidence.

Can I ask a question for Cynthia Basin?

I know my times tables because I recited them while I walked to the bus a half mile from school each day, uphill, both ways.

In the snow.

In the snow.

However, the reason why I asked that question to her is because that’s a rote learning.

And then you have like, my kids, they don’t do that.

The teachers do not give them any…

Yes, it’s been falling out of favor over the years.

So what is, what’s going on there for both of those things?

And what are the merits of like rote learning versus other types of learning?

Well, I think there’s just something also with the physical activity and the rote learning.

Like sometimes people pace back and forth.

There are the motor cortex in the brain is close to other areas of the brain that instantiate, that sort of take in that information.

And so there’s something about the pace of moving and…

So motor cortex of the brain that specifically means what?

Motor cortex.

It’s the part of the brain that controls your body movement.

There’s like a strip of the brain that controls all the body movements.

And it’s right part of the pre…

Just in the sort of back part of the prefrontal cortex where a lot of the higher level learning takes place.

So they’re very intimately connected.

And so you stimulate one part of the brain and because they’re all connected, it starts to stimulate the other parts that you need to use for thinking.

So that’s one thing.

And in terms of memorization, look, I think there is something to that just practicing rote memory at some level, because it’s teaching your brain, it’s sort of gearing up those connections so that you can have a better memory in general.

So I’m not against rote memorization.

I just don’t…

I think that that can be a piece of learning, but not the entire…

There needs to be a richer context for that information to be absorbed.

There’s a really good related question.

This is way in the beginning, and it was from Eduardo Arrujo Pradera.

I hope I have that right.

He’s asking you specifically, is there any study about the impact of technology and learning on the brain?

And I just want to expand on it a little bit.

It’s like, you know how it’s sports, technology has transformed sports in many ways.

Has technology transformed learning?

Absolutely.

I mean, now, you know, in the classrooms, I mean, well, depending on the school, obviously what they have access to.

But, you know, they’re giving kids like iPads now to learn on.

And they’re trying to incorporate these techniques in the classroom.

Wait, Heather, let me make this more controversial.

There are entire educational philosophies that reject the infusion of technology into the classroom on the grounds that somehow it will disrupt what would be an authentic learning environment.

So, what would you say to these educational philosophies that are at odds with what role technology might or could play in this whole enterprise?

So, like anything else that sort of humans create, I think it’s in how we use it.

So, if we use it as a tool that is interactive with a real human, not a replacement for, because the best learning happens interactively with real humans, I think.

But you can supplement it with these tools.

And depending on how we use it, it could be, of course, for good or evil.

And so, the answer is kind of both.

Depending on how it’s used, it could be a detriment, or it could be something that bolsters up our education.

And I think we’re still in that early stage of trying to figure out how the best way to incorporate technology into the classroom.

Because all things considered, the technology is a relatively new thing in the history of education.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if it did take one or two generations to get the bugs out.

Well, and education adopts technology slowly, slower than consumers do.

So it’ll take even longer, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

So, you know, Pedro Silva says this, kids use too much video games, and these video games can be used to teach physics, used with some help from kids to understand more.

Wasn’t Angry Birds that test a lot of physics knowledge, I think?

Angry Birds.

I mean, there are some video games that use more cognitive abilities than others, I would think.

Right, Heather?

There are certain things kids can pick up from video games.

There’s like speed of processing speed and paying attention to multiple things.

But I think there are even better ways to use the technology in that sort of gamification way.

You know, like my daughter, it was using this thing with coding.

But you know, you code this like friendly robot to go through these adventures.

And so there’s like motivation there to learn the coding, you know, making it fun.

You’re actually learning a skill set, but you’re doing it while creating or playing this game.

And I think that kind of integration of technology is creative and can be really helpful rather than just sitting there playing, you know, I don’t know, Angry Birds.

But here’s a definite consequence of the video game era is that when I was growing up, to be accused of being all thumbs meant you were clumsy.

Now all thumbs meant you were quite dextrous on a video game.

You don’t hear I’m all thumbs anymore.

That’s just one.

We got time for just a couple more questions before we finish out the hour.

But you said earlier that, you know, actually doing something it helps cement things in your memory somehow.

But also, too, is that innate?

You know, I’ve seen things, like everybody knows you put a toddler on, you know, in their high chair, and the first thing they do is they throw their Cheerios on the floor.

And are they testing gravity?

Are they testing Newton’s law of gravitation?

I mean, are they experimenting?

And do we know that?

Could we know that, right?

Yes.

And, you know, I’m going to recommend a book called The Scientist in the Crib by a developmental psychologist, Alison Gottnick, which covers all this research.

Just that.

Saying these things that toddlers are doing are experimenting and learning physics.

Yes, they are learning about gravity.

They’re all of it.

And so, like, you know, I was saying before, if you can scale that up to the adult brain now and create a new interactive…

Obviously, we’ve picked up on a lot of the physics through our experience over time.

And now we need to create big, you know, large exhibitions or whatever it may be that make us continue to be curious about the world around us and explore.

What do you mean when you say scale up?

You mean just more…

scale up in terms of size and impact?

Well, not necessarily size, but creativity.

So maybe for an adult, it is…

The experience is, how do we figure out with all these pieces how to build this robot?

And you have to start to figure it out.

Whereas as a kid, you’re using Legos to understand how to build it.

Yeah, Dave, I think when she said scale up, she meant at some point, take the teenager out of the high chair.

Put them in another kind of environment.

And Heather, I just want to push back mildly on you.

If your toddler pushes the Cheerios to the floor and does not watch it fall, they’re not doing a science experiment.

They’re just saying F you.

They’re just making a mess.

When they throw it in your face.

That’s not physics.

That’s a whole other thing.

By the way, the best joke I ever heard about baby cognition was we were on a plane and a baby would not stop crying.

It just kept crying so violently.

And a guy said, God, that baby must be really annoying to that mother.

And then I said, No, what if that baby is crying?

Because he knows we’re on the wrong approach vector.

And he does not have language to tell us.

That’s a that would be a weird sci-fi storytelling right.

There.

They’re kind of like what adult brain is like on psychedelics.

In a way, they haven’t developed the filter system.

So everything is coming in.

It’s unstructured and everything feels new and interesting and exciting.

So people often describe that when they’re on these psychedelics.

It’s like, whoa, look at my hands or everything looks different.

So that’s why adults are not intrigued by someone dangling keys in front of them.

We got to land this plane to follow the analogy there.

But Heather, it’s always great to have you on StarTalk.

And thanks for giving your time not only to StarTalk, but for this virtual conference for teachers.

And it’s always great when we know exactly who our audience is, because that can fine tune all that we have to share with them.

Chuck, always good to have you, dude.

Always a pleasure.

And Dave, you’re in the driver’s seat from now on, dude.

Well, thank you very much.

That was fascinating.

We’re going to continue the conversation all day, I’m sure.

And I learned a lot of pilot notes here already.

I have a ton of questions.

We’ll have to do this again.

And I have to give my official sign off, which is I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, bidding you to keep looking up.