There is a long history of translating basic knowledge into applied science. One perspective maintains that science should produce a body of knowledge with the hope that some of it will eventually be useful for society’s needs. An alternative approach, coined by Donald Stokes as Pasteur’s quadrant, consists in finding a niche where basic and applied research meet.
In Stokes’s taxonomy, scientific knowledge is classified according to whether it searches for fundamental understanding or has immediate use for society. The atomic model by Niels Bohr, for example, is a case in which science chases after pure knowledge. On the other hand, Thomas Edison’s light bulb is an example that takes usage into account. Pasteur’s research on vaccination, according to Stokes, deals with both dimensions; in addition to resolving fundamental principles of microbiology, it gave a concrete solution to one of the most urgent medical problems of the age.
In this chapter we will try to navigate the waters of neuroscience, cognitive science and education along Pasteur’s quadrant, exploring fundamental aspects of brain function in the hope of contributing to the quality and efficacy of educational practice.
The sound of the letters
When we learn to read we discover that the shapes p, p, P,p, p and P are the same letter. We understand that the precise combination of a line segment and a curve, of the ‘| + ⊃’, makes up the P. The curve can be smaller, the line can be tilted and the curve can slightly cross it, but we know that these forms, which are never identical, represent the same letter. This is the visual part of reading, whose process we have already looked at. But there is another, more complicated action, which entails learning to pronounce it. Understanding that this visual object ‘p’ corresponds to an auditory object, the phoneme /p/.
Consonants are difficult to pronounce because we never hear them isolated; they are always accompanied by a vowel. That’s why the consonant ‘p’ is called ‘pee’. Naming it without the ‘ee’ that follows feels strange. Additionally, some consonants require complex morphologies of the vocal apparatus like the explosive union of the lips to produce the /p/ or the palate juncture needed to produce the /j/. Syllables, especially when they are comprised of a consonant and a vowel, like ‘pa’, are much easier to pronounce.*
In Spanish or Italian there is a precise correspondence between phonemes and letters, which makes decoding them fairly transparent. But in English and in French that doesn’t happen, and those who are learning to read have to decipher a less straightforward code that forces them to scan a few letters before they can know how to pronounce them.
The importance of the expressive component of reading is usually underestimated, in part, perhaps, because we can read in silence. But even if we are reading in a whisper, we advance more slowly when the words are harder to pronounce. Which is to say, we internally pronounce the text we are reading even when we produce no sound.
Therefore, those who are learning to read are also discovering how to speak and how to listen. When pronouncing the word ‘Paris’ we produce a continuous stream of sound.* Asking someone who doesn’t know how to read to divide the word into /p/ /a/ /r/ /i/ /s/ is like trying to separate a ball of used, mixed Play-Doh into its pure original colours. Impossible. The syllables, and not the phonemes, are the natural building blocks of the sounds of words. As such, without having learned to read it is very hard to answer the question of what happens if we take the ‘P’ off the word ‘Paris’. This ability to break up the sound of a word into the phonemes that comprise it is called phonological awareness and is not innate but rather acquired along with reading.
Reading trains phonological awareness because in order to recognize a phoneme as a building block of speech it has to have a label, a name that distinguishes it and turns it into an object within that stream of sound. These labels are precisely what make up the letters that a phoneme represents. Therefore, an essential part of reading is discovering phonemes. In fact, most reading difficulties are not visual but auditory and phonological. Ignoring the phonological aspect of reading is one of the most frequent misperceptions in teaching.
Word-tied
Dyslexia is perhaps the most paradigmatic example of how neuroscience can be useful to education. First of all, research on the brain has helped us to understand that dyslexia has little to do with motivation and intelligence, but rather is the result of a specific difficulty in the cerebral regions that connect vision with phonology. The fact that dyslexia has a biological component doesn’t mean that it cannot be improved or reversed. It is not a stigma. Quite the opposite: it allows us to understand an inherent difficulty that a child may have when learning to read.
Another typical error is thinking that the problem of dyslexia is in the eyes, when the greatest difficulty is usually in recognizing and pronouncing the phonemes; in other words, in the world of sounds. This discovery opens the door to simple and effective activities for improving dyslexia. The way to help dyslexic children is often not by working with their vision but rather by helping them to develop phonological awareness. Having them listen to and pick up on the differences between ‘paris, aris, paris, aris …’ for example. In fact, this game of deleting a phoneme from a word is an excellent reading exercise: ‘Starling, staring, string, sting, sing-sin-in-I.’
Neuroscience can also help to recognize dyslexia before it is too late. Sometimes it only becomes obvious that a child is having a specific difficulty with reading after valuable months or years of his or her educational experience have already passed. With dyslexia, as in many other realms of medicine, early detection can radically change the prognosis. But the same medical analogy works to warn of the obvious, that this is a very delicate subject which requires special care and prudence. There is a clear advantage to early diagnosis, but the risk of stigmatization and self-fulfilling prophecy is also evident.
This decision becomes particularly hard because dyslexia cannot be predicted with certainty; we can only infer a predisposition to it. Let’s look for a moment at a more concise example, congenital deafness. Without mediating science, deafness is diagnosed later because during the first few months of a baby’s life the fact that they don’t respond to sounds goes unnoticed. With early detection, however, the baby’s parents can start to use a gestural, symbolic language and essentially a deaf baby will grow up better able to communicate. That child’s world will be less wide and strange. In fact, medical practice has already radically changed to recognize this awareness of the importance of early diagnosis. Soon after birth, babies are given an acoustic test that indicates whether they have an auditory dysfunction. With an early diagnosis of possible deafness, parents can be attentive to those aspects and improve their children’s social development. Something similar happens with dyslexia: the cerebral response to phonemes–at one year old–is indicative of the difficulties babies might encounter almost four years later, when they begin learning to read.
The subject is so sensitive and delicate that it is tempting simply to turn a blind eye to it. But ignoring this information is also a way of deciding. Decisions made by default–by not doing anything–might feel easier to make but do not side-step the need to take responsibility. One thing is for sure, a near future in which we will be able to estimate the likelihood that a child will develop dyslexia is imminent. What we must decide–at all levels of society, from parents, to teachers and head teachers, to policy makers–is how to act on this information. And this of course is a decision that goes beyond the scope of science.
My opinion is that information about the likelihood of dyslexia can be used carefully and respectfully, without stigmatizing children. It is good for parents and educators to know if a child has a significant probability of having difficulties in reading. This will allow them to give the child the opportunity to do some phonological exercises (which are completely innocuous and even entertaining) that might help in overcoming that initial disadvantage, in order to learn how to read, so that they have better prospects when starting the first year of school
, with the same possibilities as the rest of their classmates.
To sum up:
(1) Phonological awareness, which has to do with sound and not sight, is a fundamental building block of reading.
(2) There is much initial variation in that ability–before starting to read, many children already have a configuration of their auditory system that naturally separates phonemes, while others have them more mixed up. Children who have low resolution in their phonological systems show a predisposition for dyslexia.
(3) With harmless and fun activities, like simple word games, the phonological awareness system can be stimulated before reading begins, at two or three years old, so that those children don’t start to learn to read facing a disadvantage.
The study of reading development is one of the most prominent cases of the way in which investigation of the human brain can be useful to educational practice. It is at the core of this book’s intention to explore how this reflective exercise on the part of science can help us to understand ourselves and communicate better.
What we have to unlearn
Socrates questioned what common sense suggests, that learning consists of acquiring new knowledge. Instead, he proposed that it involved reorganizing and recalling knowledge we already have. I now put forth an even more radical hypothesis of learning understood as a process of editing, as opposed to writing. Sometimes, learning is losing knowledge. Learning is also forgetting. Erasing things that take up space uselessly and others that, even worse, are a hindrance to effective thought.
Young children usually write some backwards letters. Sometimes they even write a word or an entire sentence as if in a mirror. Compared to other ‘mistakes’ that children make when learning, this one is often overlooked, like some sort of endearing temporary clumsiness. But actually it is an extraordinary feat. First of all, because the children were never taught to write backwards. They learned it on their own. Secondly, because mirror writing is very difficult. In fact, just try to write an entire sentence backwards, the way kids do naturally.
Why does the development of writing have this peculiar trajectory? What does this teach us about how our brain works? The visual system converts light and shadow into objects. But since objects turn and rotate, the visual system is not very interested in their particular orientation. A coffee mug is the same turned backwards. Almost the only exceptions to this rule are certain cultural inventions: letters. The mirror reflection of ‘p’ is no longer a ‘p’ but a ‘q.’ And if we reflect it upside down it becomes a ‘d’ and then left to right again it turns into a ‘b’. Four mirrors, four different letters. Alphabets inherit the same fragments and segments of the visual world, but their symmetry is an exception. The reflection of a letter is not the same letter. That is atypical and unnatural for our visual system.
In fact, we have a very poor memory for the particular configurations of objects. For example, almost everyone remembers that the Statue of Liberty is in New York, that it is somewhat greenish, that it has a crown and one hand raised with a torch. But is the torch hand the left or the right? Most people can’t remember which it is, and those who think they do are often wrong. And which way is the Mona Lisa’s gaze directed?
It makes sense that we forget those particular details, since our visual system has to actively ignore these differences in order to identify that all the rotations, reflections and shifts of an object are still the same object.* The human visual system developed a function that distinguishes us from Funes the Memorious and makes us understand that a dog seen in profile and a dog seen head on are the same dog. This highly effective circuit is ancestral. It worked in the brain long before schools and alphabets existed. It was later in the history of humanity that alphabets appeared, imposing a cultural convention that goes against the grain of our visual system’s natural functioning. According to this convention, ‘p’ and ‘q’ are two different things.
Those who are learning to read still function with a default setting in their visual systems, in which the ‘p’ is equal to the ‘q’. Therefore they are naturally confused both in reading and in writing. And part of the process of learning implies uprooting a predisposition, eradicating a vice. We have already seen that the brain is not a tabula rasa where new knowledge is written. And as we just saw in the case of reading, some spontaneous forms of functioning can result in idiosyncratic difficulties in learning.
The framework of thought
From the day we are born the brain already forms sophisticated conceptual constructions, like the notion of numerosity, and even morality. We root our reconstruction of reality in those conceptual boxes. When we listen to a story, we don’t record it word by word but rather we reconstruct it in the language of our own thoughts. That is why people emerge from the same cinema with different stories. We are the scriptwriters, directors and editors of the plot of our own reality.
This is highly pertinent in the educational environment. The same thing that happens with a film occurs with a class; each student reconstructs it in their own language. Our learning process is a sort of convergence point between what is presented to us and our predisposition for assimilating it. The brain is not a blank page on which things are written, but rather a rough surface on which some shapes fit well and others don’t. That is a better metaphor of learning. A problem of congruity, of matching.
One of the most exquisite examples is the representation of the world itself. The Greek cognitive psychologist Stella Vosniadou studied thousands and thousands of drawings in detail to reveal how children’s representations of the world change. At some point in their educational history, children are presented with an absurd idea: the world is round. The idea is ridiculous, of course, because all factual evidence accumulated over the course of their lives points to the opposite.*
In order to understand that the world is round one must unlearn something very natural based on sensory experience: the world is clearly flat. And when we understand that the world is round, other problems begin. Why don’t people in China, on the other side of the world, fall off? Here gravity starts to do its job, keeping everybody stuck to the earth. But this in turn brings new problems; why doesn’t the world fall if it is just floating in space?
The conceptual revolutions we experience throughout our life emulate, to a certain extent, the development of culture in history. The children who are shocked when they hear that the world is round are replicating the conceptual struggle of Queen Isabella when Columbus suggested his voyage to her.* So the problem of the earth floating in the middle of nothing is resolved in young infancy as it was so many times in the long history of human culture, resorting to giant turtles or elephants that hold it up. Beyond the fable, what is interesting is how each individual has to find solutions to resolve a construction of reality according to the conceptual framework in which they find themselves. An expert physicist can understand that the world is spinning, that it has inertia, that in reality it is in an orbital motion, but an eight-year-old cannot solve the dilemma of why the world doesn’t fall with the arguments in a child’s arsenal.
For classroom teachers, parents or friends, it is very useful to know that those who are learning assimilate information in a very different conceptual framework from their own. Pedagogy becomes much more effective when that is understood. It is not about just speaking more simply but rather about translating what you know into another language, another way of thinking. That is why, paradoxically, sometimes teaching improves when the teacher is another student who shares the same conceptual framework. At other times, the best translators are the students themselves.
The mathematicians Fernando Chorny, Pablo Coll and Laura Pezzatti and I did an extremely simple test, but which may have important consequences for educational practice. We put a mathematical problem to hundreds of students who were preparing for an exam in an entry-level course after dividing them into two groups. The first group was simply asked to solve the problem, just as with any other test. The second group was asked
first to rewrite the formulation of the question in their own words and only then to solve the problem.
From one perspective, the extra task for the second group was a distraction that meant they had less time and concentration. But from the perspective that we sketched out here, it pushed them to do something key to learning: translating that formulation into their own language before solving it.* The change was spectacular; the performance of those who rewrote the problem improved almost 100 per cent over those who directly solved the problem as we had put it forth.
Parallelawhat?
Now we will look at the world of geometry from the perspective of a child in order to discover that the process of rewriting concepts in one’s own language goes far beyond the world of words. In fact, it is enough to read the definition of parallelism to understand that geometry doesn’t get along well with words: ‘Equidistant from another line or plane, so that no matter how long they extend, they cannot intersect.’ The definition is filled with abstract terms: line, plane, equidistant (often the concept of infinity is used to define it as well). The word itself–‘parallel’–is complex to pronounce. Who would take to something like that? Yet, when we see two lines that are not parallel among several that are, they immediately pop out at us. Our visual system establishes intuitions that allow us to recognize geometric concepts long before they are put into words.
The Secret Life of the Mind Page 22
