The Art of Changing the Brain

Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning

James E. Zull

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642672022
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Neuroscience tells us that the products of the mind--thought, emotions, artistic creation--are the result of the interactions of the biological brain with our senses and the physical world: in short, that thinking and learning are the products of a biological process.This realization, that learning actually alters the brain by changing the number and strength of synapses, offers a powerful foundation for rethinking teaching practice and one's philosophy of teaching.James Zull invites teachers in higher education or any other setting to accompany him in his exploration of what scientists can tell us about the brain and to discover how this knowledge can influence the practice of teaching. He describes the brain in clear non-technical language and an engaging conversational tone, highlighting its functions and parts and how they interact, and always relating them to the real world of the classroom and his own evolution as a teacher. "The Art of Changing the Brain" is grounded in the practicalities and challenges of creating effective opportunities for deep and lasting learning, and of dealing with students as unique learners.

1

THE SWEET EDGE

LEARNING IS PHYSICAL—WE CAN UNDERSTAND!

If you stand right fronting and face to face with a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a scimitar, and you will feel its sweet edge dividing you through your heart and marrow. Be it life or death, we crave only reality.

—Henry David Thoreau

Our students were demanding better teaching. Tuition was growing every year and they wanted their money’s worth.

But most of us were just scholars and researchers. No one had ever explained teaching and learning to us, so we just mimicked the way we had been taught. This wasn’t good enough any more.

Our solution was to create a “teaching center.” This center would organize seminars and discussions about teaching and help individual teachers who wanted to improve. Our center needed a director and, for reasons that are forgotten now, that task fell to me. Explaining teaching became my job.

It wasn’t long before I began to feel frustrated. Teaching how to teach was trickier than I had imagined. I was beginning to wonder if it could be done at all.

Then came my brilliant idea. We would videotape our best teachers and find out what they do. Then we could extract their secrets and explain them to all the faculty.

Some teachers were flattered to be taped and put on a performance. Others were self-conscious and tightened up. But most interesting of all, some teachers refused to be taped.

My friend John was typical of these. He was not camera-shy. In fact he was a bit of a ham and liked the attention. But, like the aborigines, John feared that the machine would take away his soul. Well, not his soul but the soul of his teaching. Whatever was out there producing that magic in the classroom would just refuse to show up. The teaching gods were real, and they were stubborn. No video cameras!

* * *

Teaching is a mysterious process. Whether it is John in his class or our third grader with her homework, we are not sure how it works. We explain things, but even our best explanations may not help. Then, out of the blue and for no apparent reason, learning just happens.

So it is easy to understand why John felt as he did. Good teaching is fragile. It might not be a good idea to immobilize it on a piece of magnetic videotape, trapped like a firefly in a bottle. The light might fade for lack of air.

You may feel the same about this book. Won’t the crude facts of science contaminate the magic in teaching and learning? Rather than helping, won’t they just drain away its life and light?

But even if you tend to agree with John and are worried about losing the magic, I suspect you also understand what Thoreau is saying in his lucid and poetic claim for the power of simple facts. Part of our nature wants to understand, wants to put the mysterious on a firmer, factual footing. And we know that, far from destroying the light, facts give us light. That is why we crave them, why their edge is sweet.

On Facts

It might sound quaint to begin with Thoreau and talk about facts. It is the twenty-first century, and we have learned to distrust absolutes. Rather than speak of facts, or reality, we talk about our metaphors. We explain what “happened,” but we don’t blame anyone.

Some call this more relative view of things postmodernism. As the name suggests, it implies that we have moved beyond the day of “modern” science, with its beliefs in absolute facts, and have come to a more sophisticated time where we recognize how relative our facts can be and how their meaning depends on our individual experience.

There is no doubt that this perspective has value. For example, it helps us recognize our differences. We each see the world through our own metaphors, and we all have our unique reference points for learning.

But in our common speech, we still talk about facts and reality. Science keeps moving ahead, discovering new facts. Facts and realities haven’t disappeared. We still need them to understand each other. For example, we aren’t talking about ultimate reality when we say “there is an oak tree in my yard.” All we mean is every time we look out our window we see the tree, and if we accidentally run into that tree, we will be knocked flat on our backs. These things never change, and that is enough for us to call them facts. No matter how deeply we understand postmodernism, we still try not to run into trees.

This is what I mean when I talk about facts. I am going to build on things that come from repeated experiments and have been shown to be dependable. It is this reliability that make our facts so sweet and that makes us crave them.

A Bridge Too Far?

As I proceeded with this project, I became more and more aware of its difficulties. It is one thing to point out facts about the brain and another to translate them into facts about learning. An even greater challenge is to move from any facts that we may agree on about learning and convert those into facts about teaching. As John Bruer has argued, this may not be possible with our present knowledge. It may be “a bridge too far.”¹

But no one wants teachers to ignore biology. Ultimately, we will still have to reconcile everything with nature. If we find our theories about teaching to be in disagreement with biology, we must reconsider them. So, if it is too early to build bridges between biology and pedagogy, someone should still watch over our growing understanding of the brain. It is never the wrong time to look for ideas about how to help people learn—even if those ideas come from biology.

Getting, and Keeping, the Courage

We all have our beliefs about learning, and most of us will express them at any opportunity. The same can be said for teaching. We have all been to school, and so we all have our opinions about teaching. The difficulty is that these beliefs and opinions are both strong and different! So it was inevitable that if I took on this project, I would step on some toes, no matter what I said.

I also knew that not everyone would appreciate my point of view. But, along the way I drew courage from people like Edelman and Lakoff, who have argued powerfully for a biological understanding of cognition and learning.² I heard them affirm what I believe, which is that all the products of the mind come from the brain and its interactions with the body and the world. As a biologist, I think I understand Edelman better, and I was especially compelled by his insistence that we must recognize the biological origins of the brain in evolution and in development, if we are to understand the human mind and heart. As he says, “there must be ways to put the mind back into nature that are concordant with how it got there in the first place.”

So, trusting these greater minds than mine and clinging tightly to my faith that better understanding always opens up new paths for action, I managed to persist. Facts about how the brain works were bound to have applications in teaching. Eventually, teaching would become the applied science of the brain.

How I Worked

How did I go about this risky project?

I was not trained as a neuroscientist, but for many years my work was directly related to one of the important questions neuroscientists ask: How do cells send signals to each other? As a result I knew something about cells and how they communicate, which is an important part in understanding the brain.

Beginning with this part of neuroscience, I began to pry open the other doors. And I do mean pry. Bit by bit I got myself through these doors, exploring what I found, learning about the anatomy of the brain, about brain imaging, about behavior, about the emotional brain, about sensory and motor systems, and so on to this day. Indeed, as I write I am still prying away!

But through all my prying, I understood my limits well. What I was finding was not “real knowledge” but “book knowledge.” I would never understand the brain the way practicing neuroscientists do. My contributions would not come from new understandings about the brain.

But teaching was a different matter. There were possibilities for a contribution there, and that is where I focused. I just kept asking about teaching. Whenever I pried open another door, I looked around and asked, “Is there anything here for the teacher?”

And it seemed that I kept getting answers. Over and over I stumbled onto ideas that I had not known before. True, these were still just ideas, but at least they came from what I believed to be facts. And, they were what kept me going.

The Art of Changing the Brain

I had always believed that the brain operates by physical and chemical laws, and thus, that learning is physical. But I had never been challenged to put that belief into any practical use. Now, I was trying to use the concept, and that forced me to be much more concrete. Whatever it meant to say “learning is physical,” I had to apply to teaching as well. Inevitably I realized that if a teacher has any success at all, she has produced physical change in her student’s brain. Teaching is the art of changing the brain.

I don’t mean controlling the brain, or rearranging it according to some “brain manual.” I mean, creating conditions that lead to change in a learner’s brain. We can’t get inside and rewire a brain, but we can arrange things so that it gets rewired. If we are skilled, we can set up conditions that favor this rewiring, and we can create an environment that nurtures it.

An art, indeed!

The Power of the Physical

When we don’t understand, we are tempted to invoke some mystical authority, a teaching god or a wicked witch of the west. But ultimately true power lies in the mundane physical nature of the real world. Ultimately, even the spiritual is physical.

I came to understand this in a deeper way as I pursued my quest for the teaching secrets I hoped were buried in the physical structure and function of the brain. In fact, I came to think that physical experiences and images are required in order to understand anything at all.

Again, I am being quite literal. It seemed that I could only understand things when they were described in physical terms. My digging up facts about the brain began to help me see why. This seems to be an innate characteristic of the brain itself. All that the brain knows comes from the physical world, the things in its environment, the physical body that holds the brain inside itself, or the womb that holds that body as it develops.³ A physical brain means a physical mind; meaning itself is physical. This is why we need metaphors. Without reference to physical objects and events, there is no meaning.

Education and Physical Models

As I followed this path, I realized that we also have physical models for teaching and learning. For example, some teachers believe that the student is a physical recipient of knowledge. She is a “blank slate” or a “vessel.” Others believe that learners construct their understandings like a carpenter builds a house or an artist paints a picture.

So I began thinking about metaphors for the future of teaching. I imagined that we would begin to invent tools to create learning and to help us repair mistakes—tools for changing the brain. We will use that wonderful tool-building instinct that was an essential part of our survival throughout evolution. Just as we invented the hammer to drive a nail, we would invent tools to facilitate learning.

Again, let me remind you that I am not talking about inventing a “learning hammer” for driving knowledge into the brain. And I don’t mean some new chemical that we can inject to improve learning. What I mean is that we will understand what conditions, what environments, and what practices make learning work better.

Biology, Philosophy, and Education

The last step along this path came as I thought more broadly about what these ideas mean for the way we help people learn. Ultimately, h...