How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now

At birth, infants possess a rich set of core skills and knowledge. Object concepts, number sense, a knack for languages, knowledge of people and their intentions . . . so many brain modules are already present in young children, and these foundational skills will later be recycled in physics, mathematics, language, and philosophy classes.

while we sleep, our brain remains active; it runs a specific algorithm that replays the important events it recorded during the previous day and gradually transfers them into a more efficient compartment of our memory.

If, however, they see the same person pressing a button with her head for no particular reason, hands completely free and perfectly visible, then the babies seem to abandon all reasoning and blindly trust the adult—they faithfully imitate the action with a bow of the head, although this movement is meaningless.

Learning is faster and easier when students receive detailed error feedback that tells them precisely where they stumbled and what they should have done instead.

Well, our synapses are constantly changing, throughout our lives, and these changes reflect what we learn.

it. It is simply a matter of rewarding curiosity instead of punishing it: encouraging questions (however imperfect they may be), asking children to give presentations on subjects they love, rewarding them for taking initiative. . . . The neuroscience of motivation is extremely clear: the desire to do action X must be associated with an expected rew

Alerting, which indicates when to attend, and adapts our level of vigilance. Orienting, which signals what to attend to, and amplifies any object of interest. Executive attention, which decides how to process the attended information, selects the processes that are relevant to a given task, and controls their execution.

Set clear learning objectives. Students learn best when the purpose of learning is clearly stated to them and when they can see that everything at their disposal converges toward that purpose. Clearly explain what is expected of them, and stay focused on that goal.

Turing’s genius: he discovered that if two machines had been initialized in the same way, it introduced a slight bias in the distribution of letters, so that the two messages were slightly more likely to resemble each other.

Parents and teachers, always keep this crucial fact in mind: your attitude and your gaze mean everything for a child. Getting a child’s attention through visual and verbal contact ensures that she shares your attention and increases the chance that she will retain the information you are trying to convey.