Brain Facts:
Learning

Art

Since art is undeniably one of the most complex and meaningful activities our brains have ever invented. It’s also a mother lode of rich questions to ask about how and why our minds do what they do.

Caricatures

In a widely quoted 1999 paper Ramachandran and his colleague William Hirstein predicted that brains would respond even more strongly to caricatures, drawings such as a political cartoon, which hugely exaggerated the features of a face. Recent research h has confirmed that idea.

Connections

A piece of information is really defined only by what it’s related to, and how it’s related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.

Media   Presentation Rules

Mayer has isolated a number of rules for multimedia presentations, linking what we know about working memory with his own empirical finding on how multimedia exposure affects human learning.

1. Multimedia principle: Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
2. Temporal contiguity principles: student’s leaner better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
3. Spatial contiguity principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near to each other rather than far from each on the page or screen.
4. Coherence principle: Students learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.
5. Modality principle: Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text.

Multiple Cues

There is no question that multiple cues, dished up via different senses, enhance learning. They speed up responses, increase accuracy, improve stimulation detection, and enrich encoding at moment of learning.

Multiple Senses

Our senses evolve to work together—vision influencing hearing, for example—which means that we learn best if we stimulate several senses at once.

Multisensory Environments

Groups in multisensory environments always do better than the groups in the unisensory environments. They have more accurate recall. Their recall has better resolution and lasts longer, evident even 20 years later. Problem-solving improves. In one study, the group given multisensory presentations generated more than 50 percent more creative solutions on a problem-solving test than students who saw unisensory presentations. In another study the improvement was more than 75 percents!

The benefits of multisensory inputs are physical as well. Our muscles react more quickly, our threshold for detecting stimuli improves, and our eyes react to visual stimuli more quickly. It’s not just combination of sight and sound. When touch is combined with visual information, recognition learning leaps forward by almost 30 percent, compared with touch alone. These improvements are greater than you’d predict by simply additing up the unisensory data. This is sometimes called supra-additive integration. In other words, the positive contributions of multisensory presentation are greater than the sum of their parts.

Multisensory Experience

It is the extra cognitive processing of information that helps the learner to integrate the new material with prior information. Multisensory experiences are more elaborate.

Novelty Aids Learning

Exposure to new experiences improves memory, according to research by UCL psychologists and medical doctors that could hold major implications for the treatment of memory problems. The study, published in ‘Neuron’ on 3 August, concludes that introducing completely new facts when learning, significantly improves memory performance.

Researchers have long suspected that the human brain is particularly attracted to new information and that this might be important for learning. They are now a step closer to understanding why.

A region in the midbrain (substantia nigra/ventral tegmental), which is responsible for regulating our motivation and reward-processing, responds better to novelty than to the familiar. This system also regulates levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain, and could aid learning. This link between memory, novelty, motivation and reward could help patients with memory problems.

Dr Emrah Düzel, UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said: “We hope that these findings will have an impact on behavioral treatments for patients with poor memory. Current practice by behavioral psychologists aims to improve memory through repeatedly exposing a person to information – just as we do when we revise for an exam. This study shows that revising is more effective if you mix new facts in with the old. You actually learn better, even though your brain is also tied up with new information.

“It is a well-known fact amongst scientists that the midbrain region regulates our levels of motivation and our ability to predict rewards by releasing dopamine in the frontal and temporal regions of the brain. We have now shown that novelty activates this brain area. We believe that experiencing novelty might, in itself, have an impact on our dopamine levels. Our next project will be to test the role of dopamine in learning. These findings could have implications for drug development.”

Subjects took part in a series of tests. The first experiment assessed whether the brain prefers novel stimuli over familiar stimuli even when the familiar images are made significant because they are either rare or depict emotionally negative content. Subjects were shown images of indoor and outdoor scenes and faces, while their brain activity was analyzed using an fMRI scanner. Some images rarely popped up and some were emotionally negative, such as an angry face or a car accident. Even the rare and emotional images did not activate the midbrain. It responded only to new images.

The second experiment, using fMRI, made some of the images more or less familiar to test how this relativity affected brain activity. It did not – only completely new images produced activity in the midbrain area.

Dr Düzel said: “We thought that less familiar information would stand out as being significant when mixed with well-learnt, very familiar information and so activate the midbrain region just as strongly as absolutely new information. That was not the case. Only completely new things cause strong activity in the midbrain area.”

Separate behavioral experiments were also conducted without the use of a scanner to test the subjects’ memory. Their memory of the novel, familiar and very familiar images they had studied was tested after 20 minutes and then a day later. Subjects performed best in these tests when new information was combined with familiar information during learning. After a 20 minute delay, subjects’ memory for slightly familiar information was boosted by 19 per cent if it had been mixed with new facts during learning sessions.

Past Experiences

The brain seems to rely partly on past experience in deciding how to combine these signals, so to people can perceive the same event very differently.

Pictorial Superiority Effect

The more visual the input becomes, the more likely it is to be recognized—and recalled. The phenomenon is so pervasive; it has been given its own name: the pictorial superiority effect, or PSE.

Text and oral presentations are not just less efficient than pictures for retaining certain types of information; they are way less efficient. If information is presented orally, people remember about 10 percent, tested 72 hours after exposure. That figure goes up to 65 percent if you add pictures.

Rapport
—Posture

Merely matching postures matters surprisingly in the ingredients of rapport. For instance, one study tracked postural shifts among student in a classroom. The more similar their postures were to their teacher’s, the more strongly they felt rapport and the greater their overall level of involvement. In fact, posture matching may offer a quick reading of classroom atmosphere.

Rehearse an Action

When we mentally rehearse an action—making a dry run of a talk we have to give, or envisioning the fine points of our golf swing—the same neurons activate in the premotor cortex as if we had uttered those words or made the swing. Simulating an act is, in the brain, the same as performing it, except that the actual execution is somehow blocked.

Senses

We absorb information about an event through our senses, translate it into electrical signals (some for sight, others from sound, etc) disperse those signals to separate parts of the brain, then reconstruct what happened, eventually perceiving the event as a whole.

Workings

The more you learn about how your brain works the better your chances of using it most efficiently, optimizing your intellectual capabilities, and accomplishing even more in life than many people who may score higher than you on standardized intelligence tests.

Richard Restak
Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot
p. 17