Brain Based Learning

Training & Development, July, 2000 by Ruth Palombo Weiss

A lot of recent memory research involves pattern-making abilities. One study that has been replicated several times involves reading a long list of words to a subject. When the subject is asked to remember certain words on the list, an interesting thing happens. Let's say the list has 25 words strung together, including cake, cookie, sugar, train, candy, tree, car, dog. If asked whether the word sweet is on the list (it wasn't), most subjects say yes because of the words cake, cookies, and sugar. Interestingly, the same area of the brain that registered other words on the list lights up on an MRI.

That clearly illustrates the economy of brain-processing mechanisms. The brain makes a connection and generalizes even though the generalization might be wrong. One conclusion is that detail isn't efficient and generalization is, though not always correct. The brain doesn't have values; it's an information organ. It isn't an arbiter of values, of right and wrong. What we do have is a system that puts related events together in hierarchies and categories.

Geoffrey Caine states: "The brain-mind naturally organizes information into categories. We can generically call that 'patterning.' These patterns always involve interpreting information in context. There's a great deal of research to show that we learn from focused attention as well as from peripheral perception. When people are forming patterns, a lot of the information that brings the pattern together is peripheral or contextual information."

Emotion

The amygdala, an almond-shaped structure in the brain's center, seems most involved with emotions. According to Jensen, it has 12 to 15 distinct emotive regions and often exerts a tremendous influence on the cortex. "Information flows both ways between the amygdala and the cortex, but many other areas are involved in subtle emotions," he says.

"Making daily decisions based on emotions is not an exception; it's the rule," says professor Antonio Damasio, a neurologist at the University of Iowa, in his book Descartes's Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. "While extremes of emotion are usually harmful to our best thinking, a middle ground makes sense. Appropriate emotions speed up decision making enormously."

Brain research shows that emotions and thought are deeply interconnected. In Molecules of Emotion, Candace Pert wrote that on the surface of every cell in the body are receptors that respond to molecules such as various peptides and neurotransmitters. Scientists used to think that those neurotransmitters were found only in neurons in the brain, but it turns out they're in every part of the body. When we have a thought, many of the peptides and neurotransmitters interact with cells throughout the body, and those interactions trigger what we call "the experience of emotions."

"Good learning engages feelings. Rather than viewing them as an add-on, emotions are a form of learning. Emotions also engage meaning and predict future learning because they involve our goals, beliefs, biases, and expectancies. Emotions drive the threesome of attention, meaning, and memory," says Renate Caine.