How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine …

Amazingly, most teachers receive little or no professional training in the science of learning. My feeling is that we should urgently change this state of affairs, because we now possess considerable scientific knowledge about the brain’s learning algorithms and the pedagogies that are the most efficient.

According to learning theory, a grade is just a reward (or punishment!) signal. However, one of its obvious shortcomings is that it is totally lacking in precision. The grade of an exam is usually just a simple sum—and as such, it summarizes different sources of errors without distinguishing them. It is therefore insufficiently informative: by itse... See more

But Homo sapiens’ dependency on social communication and education is as much of a curse as it is a gift. On the flip side of the coin, it is education’s fault that religious myths and fake news propagate so easily in human societies. From the earliest age, our brains trustfully absorb the tales we are told, whether they are true or false. In a soc... See more

“The art of paying attention, the great art,” says the philosopher Alain (1868–1951), “supposes the art of not paying attention, which is the royal art.”

The auditory cortex seems to perform a simple calculation: it uses the recent past to predict the future. As soon as a note or a group of notes repeats, this region concludes that it will continue to do so in the future. This is useful because it keeps us from paying too much attention to boring, predictable signals. Any sound that repeats is squas... See more

Being active and engaged does not mean that the body must move. Active engagement takes place in our brains, not our feet. The brain learns efficiently only if it is attentive, focused, and active in generating mental models.

Pure discovery learning, the idea that children can teach themselves, is one of many educational myths that have been debunked but still remain curiously popular.

But we can also ask the opposite question: Are there regions that are more active among bad readers and whose activity decreases as one learns to read? The answer is positive: in illiterates, the brain’s responses to faces are more intense. The better we read, the more this activity decreases in the left hemisphere, at the exact place in the cortex... See more