May 27, 2024, by Roger F. Malina
At the end of this review, you will find my review of Dehaene’s 2020 book “How We Learn: The New Science of Education and the Brain”— written and published last year.
I finished reading Dehaene’s book “How We Learn: The New Science of Education and the Brain” this morning. Dehaene’s book “How We Learn: The New Science of Education and the Brain”. And kept realizing I had read the book before and had scribbled notes in the margin for me to focus on to write a review.
I am 73 years old and it seems to me that learning and forgetting evolve with experience. My work with Thom Kubli on “disremembering’ somehow connects. So, I did an online search on the science of forgetting and found:
“Instead, forgetting generates a novel brain state that’s different from either the one before the learning happened or the one that exists while the learned behavior is still remembered. In other words, what is forgotten doesn’t completely go away and can be reactivated with a kind of jump start.”
news.havard.edu
“After forgetting, we can often be reminded of what we learned before, and our brain is no longer in the naive state,” said Yun Zhang, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology and member of Harvard’s Center for Brain Science.”
Harvard’s Center for Brain Science
Perhaps we need to focus more time on the sciences of forgetting, not just of learning in schools (apparently Yun Zhang has found there is an in-between state between remembering and forgetting).
So let me refocus on a review of Stanislas Dehaene’s 2020 book “How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine for Now.” Don’t bother reading the last chapter on why brains learn better than any machine for now. It’s now 2024 and that chapter needs serious updating.
The first note that I wrote is “8 billion humans” next to the statement “our DNA contains six billion bits” which gets into the endless speculation about collective consciousness etc… The second is that we don’t understand why learning is widespread in the animal world; even fruit flies and earthworms “learn”.
Yeah- natural selection favored the emergence of learning so what? The book does re-emphasize that the use of ‘grades’ in teaching can be counterproductive to learning for most people. Dehaene first definition of learning: to learn is to form an internal model of the external world. As I make this list, inevitably I think of the art of “noticing’; many pages went by, and I noticed nothing.
Page 30: children hear between 500 and 1000 hours of speech per year. P38 Shared attention: a child can learn by following the mother’s gaze or finger. P80 I couldn’t interpret my note after several re-readings. P128 Alan Turing was wrong: the brain is not a blank slate.
None of the color illustrations got my attention. Why not?
P169 Cultural Ratchet: Sharing attention with others. Social sharing prevents a culture from regressing. (what I have been calling “leaving a trace’ where each member of the lab must document their work for the attention of others). P189 Mirth seems to be one of those uniquely human emotions that guide our learning.
P 203 Rescorla-Wagner theory: The key idea is that the first acquisition of a first association, blocks the second one. (If A is connected to B, then C, C becomes superfluous). P207: I prefer to eat with a fork and a camel…. generates an error signal that makes you forget. P214 Test Thyself to move memories to long-term memory. P 218 What is the most effective time interval between two repetitions of the same lesson? Doesn’t matter as long as deep sleep intervenes.
P 229 to be shared with Eric Fulbright: once you enter deep sleep, we spray your bedroom with the same fragrance that was in your classroom. This helps memory consolidation. P233 Disremembering 101: Galileo never dropped two spheres of different weights from the Tower of Pisa. He just imagined it.
P235 Delaying the start of school by 30 minutes leads to improved grades. P237 Reconciling Education with Neuroscience: this is my take-home message- let’s close down all schools and universities and re-invent learning contexts given recent brain science. P240 Expose children to at least a second language as soon as possible.
P44 Parent training should be a priority – a huge problem in education is the lack of training of parents given contemporary neurosciences. P311 the word “forgetting’ does not appear in the Index. Learning to forget is a form of misremembering.
As a parent and now a grandparent I recommend this book twice (even though the second recommendation you will forget). I hope you find my Hopscotsch notes… oops check them out.
And here is my review of Dehaene’s previous book
Roger F. Malina
Space Scientist and Astronomer
Roger F. Malina is a space scientist and astronomer, with a specialty in extreme and ultraviolet astronomy, space instrumentation, and optics. He served as director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence and was NASA’s Principal Investigator for the Extreme Ultraviolet Satellite project at the University of California, Berkeley.
He is also a publisher and editor in the new emerging research fields that connect the sciences and engineering to the arts, design, and humanities. Since 1982, he has served as Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press. He founded and serves on the board of two nonprofits, ISAST in San Francisco and OLATS in Paris, which advocate and document the work of artists involved in contemporary science and technology.
He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Art and Technology and Professor of Physics, at the University of Texas at Dallas and Directeur de Recherche for the CNRS in France. He serves as the Associate Director of ATEC and founded the ArtSciLab in the ATEC program fall of 2013.