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Honesty by Christian Miller
Erik Jahner, PhD
Erik Jahner, PhD

honestyAt first glance, honesty might seem like a straightforward, even mundane topic. When I picked up Honesty: the Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue, I wasn’t expecting much—the title suggested a dry, philosophical dive into a concept we all assume we understand. Isn’t honesty just common sense? But from the opening chapter, the author, Christian Miller, intrigued me and continually pulled me deeper. The complications and questions offered important challenge at the individual and societal level. The author masterfully introduces honesty not merely as telling the truth but as a profound and complex character trait—an enduring virtue that influences how we think, feel, and act. What starts as a critique of common assumptions grows into a refined and compelling argument, presenting honesty as an “honest disposition”—a trait defined by consistency across different contexts. Eventually settling in as honesty perhaps as a mixed trait. This nuanced perspective elevates the discussion, moving beyond surface-level ideas to explore the motivations, reasoning, and inner consistency required to truly embody honesty as a virtue.

The first half of the book dives into the philosophical and psychological underpinnings of honesty. One section raises compelling questions about whether acting against what one perceives as morally right could also be considered dishonest. Another challenges traditional models of practical wisdom, questioning its necessity as a distinct trait for other virtues. These discussions are enriched with insights into the motivations behind honest actions—such as friendship, caring, justice, and duty—demonstrating how honesty transcends mere self-interest.

Through this exploration of honesty, the book offers a detailed examination of vices of dishonesty. It highlights how dishonesty manifests in everyday life through behaviors like lying, cheating, stealing, promise-breaking, and self-deception. Each vice has a corresponding virtue, such as truthfulness and respectfulness, which collectively frame honesty as a higher-level virtue. A unifying theme emerges: honesty involves resisting the intentional distortion of facts as we perceive them. This definition evolves throughout the book, as the author refines their argument by presenting premises and challenging them with thought-provoking examples.

The second half of the book takes a more empirical turn, exploring psychological studies on lying, cheating, and related behaviors. While the author notes a surprising lack of research on some facets of honesty, such as promise-breaking and stealing, studies on lying and cheating offer valuable insights. These range from participants reflecting on their everyday dishonest behaviors to controlled experiments involving vignettes or games where cheating and misleading are possible. While these studies don’t provide a complete picture, they shed light on how honesty and dishonesty play out in different situations and how individual dispositions influence these behaviors.

One of the book’s most striking conclusions is that most people do not fully embody either virtue or vice but instead exhibit “mixed character” traits, existing somewhere between honesty and dishonesty. These mixed traits reflect a blend of beliefs and desires that lead to inconsistent yet predictable behavior across situations. For example, a person might believe cheating is wrong but still feel tempted to cheat to avoid failure. Such traits are neither wholly virtuous nor wholly vicious but lie on a spectrum, varying in degree and evolving over time. This perspective moves beyond traditional virtue/vice labels, offering a more realistic understanding of human character.

The book also addresses how external situations can either enhance or suppress the application of honesty as a character trait. It acknowledges the significant gap between our current character and the ideal, emphasizing the importance of aligning thoughts, feelings, motivations, and actions to avoid distorting reality. The author suggests practical ways to cultivate honesty, such as reducing the temptation to cheat, minimizing our inclination to present a dishonest image to others, and fostering self-reflection and honest self-assessment.

Additionally, the book grapples with the complexities of moral decision-making, recognizing that virtues do not always align seamlessly. Honesty can sometimes conflict with other moral priorities, and this tension—along with the acknowledgment of human imperfections—makes the book relatable and profoundly thought-provoking.

In today’s world, where the rapid spread of misinformation tests our commitment to honesty, this book’s insights feel especially timely. It challenges readers to think deeply about how they consume and deliver information, urging us to reflect on the broader implications of honesty in our lives.

Honesty offers a rich, multi-dimensional exploration of this often-overlooked virtue. By blending philosophy, psychology, and empirical research, it provides a compelling framework for understanding and cultivating honesty. Whether you’re interested in moral philosophy, psychology, or personal growth, this book is a thought-provoking and rewarding read that will leave you reflecting long after the final page.

Psych by Paul Bloom
Erik Jahner, PhD
Erik Jahner, PhD

bloomI should have known better! I was expecting just another in a long line of basic reiterations of Psychology 101. But this is Paul Bloom! ­— a talented storyteller and Psychology Professor at University of Toronto engaging a variety of audiences across genres from scientific publications to the New York Times while delivering other top sellers for the curious casual reader such as the Sweet Spot, Against Empathy, and How Pleasure Works. Now he brings us Psych: The Story of the Human Mind — a refreshed and captivating journey into the continually developing field of modern psychology. It transcends the genre of introductory texts by delivering a dynamic and engaging experience akin to enjoying a TED talk, feeding you savory narrative bits to share with friends and reengage your interest in forgotten figures.

While this book was the result of the authors copious lecture notes from years of teaching, this is no dry retelling of psychology, he knows what engaged his students.  He offers us deep understanding through human appeal and curiosity relegating your dry introductory psychology text to forgotten corners of dusty bookshelves.

This book serves as a compendium of psychological highlights reintroducing readers to the most influential figures in the field. From the groundbreaking insights of Anna Freud and B.F. Skinner to the revolutionary discoveries of Piaget, Kahneman, and Tversky. While hitting all the main branches and basics of the field, he also offers several often-neglected topics including a section on the controversial figure of Sigmund Freud, explaining why he is often omitted from Psychology courses and why it is important to notice him for his contributions to western culture and thought as well as his betrayals to science and humanity. Even very familiarly stories are filled with titillating narrative about famous individuals in the field. Including the social life and career of Phineas Gage: a famous case study who was impaled by a railroad spike, decimating parts of his frontal cortex. But he also brings an intriguing touch with his treatment of behaviorists such as John Watson, his marriage, and his impact on the American coffee break. This all topped off with discussions of fox-trotting pigs. And these are just some bits of juicy gossip from the first sections.

The book tackles a wide array of thought-provoking questions. From deciphering the intricate relationship between the brain and consciousness, to uncovering ethical controversies such as the Milgram experiments and the current replication crisis, the author leaves no stone unturned. The exploration extends to the origins of knowledge, the disparities between the minds of children and adults, the connection between language and thought, and the impact of biases on perception and memory. Moreover, the book thoughtfully delves into the rationality of human beings, the motivations that drive us, and the significance of emotions such as fear, disgust, and compassion. The author masterfully analyzes how we perceive others, including those from different social and ethnic backgrounds, while also addressing the complex interplay of personality, intelligence, and other traits. In addition, we are treated to his narrative rendition of both the causes and treatments for mental illnesses as well as the pursuit of happiness.

This book will feed your yearning to explore the depths of the human mind, leaving you with refreshed desire to unravel the mysteries of psychology.

I highly recommend this book to students of the mind as it contextualizes and updates much of what they are learning in the classroom and though our own exploration. It also becomes an essential companion for professors and instructors, reigniting their appreciation for the joy found in the history and storytelling of psychology. Even the most seasoned psychology instructor will discover new ways of presenting material and uncover juicy bits of social history that will captivate their students. This book unveils the identities of the remarkable individuals who shaped the field and the cultural movements they inspired, reminding us that psychology is not lists of facts about minds, its humans pushing the limits of our mind to make sense of ourselves.

A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley
Erik Jahner, PhD
Erik Jahner, PhD

A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) is an excellently constructed tour of the mind improving your approach to learning and problem-solving. While there are many learning strategy books out there, Barbara Oakley’s stands out due to its entertaining, educational, well-researched, and refreshed cognitive foundation. You are in for a real treat as each bite-sized chapter draws you in with engaging stories, enticing your curiosity with cognitive principles and historical tidbits asking you to constructively reflect on the machinery of your mind.

While this book says it is for Math and Science learning, the concepts addressed here can be applied to a wide array of subjects from language learning to time management, procrastination, and reading. Although it is filled with useful and updated information about how memory works, it is not simply a book about memory techniques. Throughout, there is a continual nod to social-emotional learning concepts and metacognitive awareness, including understanding how the ways you are learning may lead you to develop a false sense of confidence in your knowledge. Enabling you to understand your own learning profile, Oakley shares both what is effective and what is not effective, making it a great book for study skills classes or anyone who just wants to identify what learning practices are helpful and which ones are simply a waste of time.

Faithful to its inner teachings, the book is organized into very useful chunks of information that allow the reader to build their stores of knowledge in a systematic way. Each chapter is packed with great lessons followed by a “Pause and Recall” section and containing “Now you try” sections, encouraging us to pull away from the reading for a moment and relate the concepts to our lives and process them at more meaningful and deeper levels. We also get nice neat summaries pulling the chapters together integrating across chapters and allowing for a quick skim of some of the highlights. This structure naturally lends itself to classroom discussions. As an instructor, I have even used some of the “Now you try” sections with my college students who find them to be useful and revealing reflections.

Illuminating the intriguing history of psychology, we are treated to fascinating discussions of real people including arsenic eaters, a man who had an unnatural ability to remember details at some cost to other cognitive abilities, and an infamous neuroscientist who was put into jail for building a small cannon that destroyed a neighbor’s gate. These little bits of historical psychology are a gateway for the psychology novice to enter the field and engage students. These morsels from history led me to also jump on the internet and learn a bit more about these characters, demonstrating Oakley’s ability to open up new worlds.

I would be leaving out an important part of this book if I did not mention the memorable, fun, and useful visuals in this book. I’m particularly fond of the octopus representing attention mechanisms in the brain and pinball machines representing the semantic closeness of ideas. When discussing the removal of faint connections, we are offered illustrations of ‘metabolic vampires’ that suck the remaining life from neurons¬–images that really leave a lasting impression. The creative use of these and other metaphors throughout the book will help the novice student grasp the concept and act as useful teaching tools for the instructor to reframe the concept and make it accessible while staying true to the science. While the metaphors and illustrations are fun, they are not diminutive. The reader never feels talked down to, and the material is not oversimplified.

From mathematics to learning a new hobby and managing your life, Oakley enhances the learning experience and makes you the game-maker in your learning adventure. She makes learning fun and you will walk away with a growth mindset and new tools opening your mind to try or try again to learn concepts you thought were out of your reach–’even if you flunked algebra.’

CHATTER BY ETHAN KROSS
Erik Jahner, PhD
Erik Jahner, PhD

The founder and director of the Emotional and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan, Ethan Kross has been a leading voice in a field that is helping us understand the workings of the conscious mind and how understanding its mechanisms can enable us to live happier and more fulfilled lives. While much of our daily life is spent mind wandering and listening to our inner voice, we do not always think about the dynamic ways it is directly linked to our daily experiences. The chatter of our internal voice can seem to be a distracting and destructive cacophony of internal thought. In Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It, Kross synthesizes his and others’ research in the field concentrating on this inner voice from a scientific perspective, a book sorely needed to help us understand and take advantage of this all too human condition.

The rich narratives of research, mini-bios, and the wonderings and personal experiences of the author give the reader the sense that they are sitting down and having an intriguing dinner conversation with Kross. We hear about chatter through various anecdotes that we can all relate to and then how individuals overcome the debilitating chatter and move toward a constructive internal discourse. Among these great relatable narratives are a distracted baseball player, a neuroscientist who experienced a stroke losing her inner voice, and an anxious applicant for a job at the NSA among many others. While still theoretically laden and packed tight with empirical research, this book reads much more like a friendly storytelling ­­– always a refreshing approach to science.

This is not just a book explaining what the inner voice is, it is a book about our conversations with ourselves and those around us. How are those conversations affecting that inner voice, and how is our inner voice affecting those conversations? It also demonstrates the intrinsic connectivity between chatter and the environment suggesting ways we can improve our ability to manage chatter by changing our surroundings and some of our basic daily habits. These little nudges to our daily practice are summarized at the end of the book in a set of concrete tools but the real joys of these are in the narrative support the author gives throughout the text.

Beyond the rich, relatable, and entertaining stories, this is also an exceptional example of translational research bringing together neuroscience, psychology, psychobiology, and sociology in a truly interdisciplinary translational endeavor. The artful interweaving of the book’s main ideas across conceptual levels demonstrates the importance of this type of interdisciplinary work.

But this book also hit me in a personal way enriching my own conversations. I could not help but send an uncontrolled stream of texts to friends as I read the book. It captured the essence of many conversations about self-improvement, but it reframes the discussion, grounding it in research but also asking us to consider experimenting in our own lives. It was immediately accessible and curiosity-inducing to family, friends, and colleagues. And there is something authentic for every reader from advice for the psychotherapist to how best to support yourself and your friends. Our internal voice is so visible and yet our ability to reflect on it is limited. Kross gives us some window into those relationships we can improve with ourselves and those around us and it clearly sends the message that chatter is socially embedded and not an individual endeavor.

This short book could easily be read in an afternoon of cerebral escapism tickling your curiosity about your own mind and filling your stores of knowledge with fun and personal narratives easily shared with friends. But it’s a must-read for anyone listening to their inner crickets.

Physics and Engineering: My New Year’s Resolution
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

 

Over on Twitter, @DylanWilliam wrote:

“[P]hysics tells you about the properties of materials but it’s the engineer who designs the bridge. Similarly, psychology tells us about how our brains work, but it’s teachers who craft instruction.”

In other words, teachers should learn a great deal about psychology from psychologists.

(And should learn some things about neuroscience from neuroscientists.)

But the study of psychology doesn’t — and can’t — tell us exactly how to teach. We have to combine the underlying psychological principles (that’s “physics” in William’s analogy) with the day-to-day gritty demands of the environment (“engineering”).

And so, my clarifying New Year’s resolution:

Study physics to be a better engineer.

I hope you’ll join me this year, and share your wisdom!

Brain Research in Translation
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Science relies on skepticism, so let’s ask a skeptical question:

“Does it really benefit teachers to understand brain research? Isn’t good teaching good teaching?”

If you’re reading this blog, you doubtless already see the value that brain research offers teachers.

The more we know about — say — motivation, or “the spacing effect,” or the benefits of interleaving, or the perils of “catastrophic failure,” the better our work can be.

But, I think there’s more.

The more time I spend in this field, the more I see benefits for school communities and even international collaboration.

Uniting Schools with Common Language

I once spent the day working at a K-12 school in Texas. At the lunch break, a teacher approached me and said:

“I’m so impressed you know all our names! I’ve worked here for years, and I don’t know the names of the high-school teachers. After all, I teach in the lower school.”

This confession speaks a larger truth: we can all-too-easily fall in the habit of talking only with our nearest peers.

3rd grade teachers confer with other 3rd grade teachers. High-school English teachers huddle up with high-school English teachers. (I should know; I’m a high-school English teacher.)

This habit makes some sense. I don’t really know how my lesson-plan for Their Eyes Were Watching God would translate to, say, a first grade classroom. What teaching topics might cross so wide a curricular gulf?

The answer: brain research.

A strategy I use to manage working memory overload for 10th graders might transfer quite easily to a 3rd grade classroom. At a minimum, the benefits of that strategy will be immediately clear to anyone who understands the importance of working memory.

When all teachers in a school know the languages of neuroscience and psychology, we can talk about our work more deeply, meaningfully, and effectively with colleagues in other grades and other disciplines.

Uniting Countries with Common Language

I spent the last two weeks in Japan, working with Fukuoka International School and the American School in Japan. In Fukuoka, I worked with teachers from about a dozen countries: the US, Canada, and Japan — and also China, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia … even Myanmar.

As you can imagine, these countries have dramatically different educational systems, philosophies, cultural expectations, and curricula. What shared language might these teachers find?

Here again, these teachers were amazed to see how quickly they could share teaching strategies — once they could describe them in this new way.

A game for retrieval practice, for instance, might be used with different topics in different countries. Heck, it might take place in various languages with incompatible alphabets.

But the core psychological practice remains the same, no matter the curricular or linguistic translations.

In two sentences…

I joined the Mind, Brain, & Education movement because I thought it would help make me a better teacher. Every day I see more clearly: it can make all of us — schools, districts, even international communities — a better education system.

Look Here Not There: The Limits of Psychology
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Limits of PsychologyHow much psychology should teachers learn? And, what kind?

We might be tempted to learn as much as possible.

After all, psychologists study minds in action. It’s hard to think of a topic that might interest teachers more.

Teachers spend all day shaping active minds. Why would we leave any of the discipline out?

Look Here Not There

The invaluable Daniel Willingham has typically thoughtful and practical answers to that question.

He starts by dividing the field into 3 chunks:

Empirical Observations

Theories

Epistemic Assumptions

He argues, in effect, that 2 of those 3 chunks don’t really help teachers do our jobs.

We need to know what empirical observations tell us about learning — especially those well-established empirical observations that are consistently applicable to learners and learning. For example: the limitations of working memory, or the difficulties of transfer.

This information can offer teachers essential guidance on the best ways to help our students learn.

If we overwhelm our students’ working memory capacity, for example, learning simply comes to a halt.

The Limits of Psychology

Although these well-established observations — Willingham calls them “Empirical Generalizations” — help teachers, the other two categories really don’t.

In fact, they might distract and mislead us.

At best, they’re likely to overwhelm our own working memory resources.

For instance: psychological theories not only organize lots of empirical observations. They also make as-of-yet untested predictions about what might happen in other circumstances.

That is, in fact, part of the job of a theory.

However, those untested predictions don’t help teachers. Either we’re aware they’re untested, in which case they don’t tell us what to do (or not to do).

Or we’re NOT aware they’re untested, in which case they might prompt us to try unsupported teaching experiments.

And, epistemic assumptions are typically too broad to be useful.

As Willingham argues, the assertion that “learning is social” leads to differing specific recommendations if you’re a behaviorist or a constructivist.

Beyond the Limits of Psychology: Mental Models

Willingham suggests that teachers need fewer theories and more models: representations of the connections between and among all the empirical findings.

For instance: the image accompanying this article is my own model to represent the relationships among working memory, long-term memory, emotion, motivation, and attention.

That image doesn’t attempt to make predictions, as theories do. Instead, it shows that each of these five topics interacts with all of the others. It suggests that working memory stands “between” the experiential world and long-term memory. It emphasizes the overlap between emotion and motivation as concepts.

Its strives, in other words, to help teachers remember key points about these topics, and to understand the connections among them.

(To be clear, this image draws on the work of many previous scholars — including Willingham.)

A Final Note

Although I agree with Willingham’s broad argument, I do think there’s an important exception. As schools increasingly rely on neuroscience and psychology research to inform our practice, we should have an on-site expert in these disciplines.

Although most teachers should indeed focus on empirical findings, we’ll all benefit if at least one of our colleagues has a rich knowledge of the theories and epistemological assumptions that inform and shape those findings.

As you’ve read here so many times before, our reliance on research brings with it a need for informed and curious skepticism.

 

Can You Resist the Seductive Allure of Neuroscience?
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

The seductive allure of neuroscience often blinds us.

seductive allure of neuroscience

In fact, the image on the right shows the part of the brain — the focal geniculative nucleus — that lights up when we’re taken in by false neuroscience information.

Ok, no it doesn’t.

I’ve just grabbed a random picture of a brain with some color highlights.

And: as far as I know, the “focal geniculative nucleus” doesn’t exist. I just made that up.

(By the way: brain regions don’t really “light up.” That’s a way of describing what happens in an fMRI image. You’re really looking at changes in blood flow, indicated by different colors. Brains aren’t Christmas trees or smokers; they don’t light up.)

And yet, for some reason, a picture of a brain with some bits highlighted in color just makes us go wild with credulity.

The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience: Today’s Research

We’ve known for a while that people believe general psychology research more readily when it includes a picture of a brain.

Is that also true for research in educational psychology? That is, does this problem include research in teaching?

Soo-hyun Im investigated this question with quite a straightforward method. He explained educational research findings to several hundred people.

Some of those findings included extraneous neuroscience information. (“This process takes place in the focal geniculative nucleus.”)

Some also included a meaningless graph.

And some also included an irrelevant brain image (like the one above).

Sure enough: people believed the claims with the irrelevant brain image more than they did the same claim without that image.

In fact, as discussed in this earlier post, even teachers with neuroscience training can be taken in by misleading science claims.

Teaching Implications

If you’re reading this blog, if you’re attending Learning and the Brain conferences, you are almost certainly really interested in brains.

You want to know more about synapses and neurotransmitters and the occipital cortex. You probably wish that the focal geniculative nucleus really did exist. (Sorry, it doesn’t.)

On the one hand, this fascination offers teachers real benefits. For a number of reasons, I think it helps (some) teachers to know more about the process of synapse formation, or to recognize parts of the brain that participate in error detection.

At the same time, this interest confers upon us special responsibilities.

If we’re going to rely on brain explanations to support our teaching methods, then we should get in the habit of asking tough-minded questions.

Why are you showing me this brain image? Is the claim credible without the image?

What does that highlighted brain region have to do with learning?

Who says so? Can you cite some articles?

If the person presenting the information can’t — or won’t — answer these questions, then put down the fMRI image and step away from the research.

The teaching method itself might be sound, but the brain claims behind it are simply relying on the seductive allure of neuroscience.

Like Odysseus, you might be tempted — but do not give in to these neuro-Sirens.

Uniquely Human: How Animals Differ From People
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

What separates humans from other animals? What makes us uniquely human?

uniquely humanThis question can be fun to debate. The most common answers — “tool use” and “language” — have their champions. However, lots of animals communicate with sounds. Several species use tools.

These abilities are rare among animals; however, they’re not uniquely human. So: what might be the key distinction?

M&Ms and Pencils

Imagine this scenario.

A young girl comes into your office with her father. You show her a box full of M&Ms. The father then leaves the room, and you — quite conspicuously — pour out the M&Ms and replace them with pencils.

When the father comes back into the room, you ask the young girl “What does your father think is in the box?”

A five-year-old answers this question quite easily. Even though she watched you put pencils in the box, she also knows that her father wasn’t there when that happened. As a result, his knowledge differs from hers. He (falsely) believes that the box contains M&Ms, although she (correctly) knows that it contains pencils.

A three-year-old, however, can’t manage this duality. If she knows there are pencils in the box, then she thinks everyone knows there are pencils in the box. She simply can’t process the idea that others have false factual beliefs.

This ability to distinguish between what I know and what you know goes by the awkward name “theory of mind.”

Most 5-year-olds have theory of mind; they know that you and I have different ideas in our heads. Most 3-year-olds don’t have theory of mind. They believe that everything they know is known by everyone else.

Uniquely Human: Candidate #1

In The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Michael Tomasello argues that theory of mind is the uniquely human cognitive trait.

Because humans think about what other humans are thinking, we have been able to develop our environment (think, skyscrapers) and our cognitive capabilities (think, calculus) with astonishing rapidity.

Each generation can hang onto the ideas developed by previous generations, and so progress beyond them.

Here’s a very basic example:

I might say to you: “A platypus is in the elevator.”

Or I might say: “The platypus is in the elevator.”

This tiny linguistic difference (“a” vs. “the”) shows that I’m considering what you already know. In the first sentence, you don’t know about the platypus — even though I do. In the second sentence, we both know about it.

Tomasello connects theory of mind to human culture and development with remarkable dexterity and clarity; I highly recommend his book. (He’s also a lively speaker, if you ever have the opportunity to hear him.)

Uniquely Human: Candidate #2

Only recently I stumbled across another possibility: the ability to remember sequences.

Stefano Ghirlanda and colleagues looked at research considering the ability to learn sequences among a variety of species: various birds, macaques, even dolphins.

It turns out that humans can pick up complex sequences quite quickly.

In one study, for example, humans listened to a sequence of sounds, and were able to remember them with 90+% accuracy after 6-8 trials. Zebra finches, however, took between 300 and 800 trials to achieve the same level of accuracy — even though the sounds were zebra finch song syllables.

In another study, rats could learn what to do after individual signals with relative ease. To learn a series of signals, however, took on the order of 10,000 trials. You read that right: ten thousand.

(Imagine being the graduate student whose job it was to do all 10,000 trials.)

Ghirlanda and colleagues argue that sequence processing underlies all sorts of complex human cognition: episodic memory (this happened before that), planning (step one, then step two, then step three), even music (this series of notes isn’t that series of notes).

Without our ability to process those sequences, we would hardly be human.

Limitations

Like all studies, this one has limitations.

First, Ghirlanda and colleagues note that other species are good at remembering sequences that have to do with evolutionarily important processes: the steps required to capture food, for instance, or to attract a mate.

However, in addition, humans are good at remembering arbitrary sequences. Music helps in finding a mate, but it isn’t required. So too: math might be sexy, but it isn’t required for wooing.

Second, although Ghilranda did find research with other mammals, they did not find research with apes. It’s possible that they have the ability to learn arbitrary sequences.

Perhaps, in other words, this ability helps make us human, but isn’t uniquely human. Until we study more species, we can’t know for sure.

[For other thoughts on evolution and learning, click here.]

Getting the Best Advice about Learning
Andrew Watson
Andrew Watson

Occasionally I try to persuade people that neuroscience is fantastically complicated. In other words: we shouldn’t beat ourselves up if we don’t master it all.

Today I spotted a headline that makes my point for me:

 

Hippocampus-driven feed-forward inhibition of the prefrontal cortex mediates relapse of extinguished fear

Got that?

What’s the Bigger Point?

Neuroscience is simply fascinating. As teachers, we really want to know how neurons work. And synapses. And brain regions — like the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.

However, specific teaching advice almost always comes from psychology. How do teachers help students connect neurons to create memories? Psychology. What classroom strategies support executive function in the prefrontal cortex? Psychology.

At a LatB Conference, you’ll enjoy the neuroscience talks because they show you what’s going on underneath the hood. At the psychology talks, you’ll get specific classroom suggestions.

The best conference experience, in my opinion, combines both.