Why I Don't Believe in First Grade

The Terror of Critical Thinking, or Why I Don't Believe in First Grade

by John Medina

It may seem a bit odd that a scientist used to training graduate students, medical students and post-docs would write an article for educators and policymakers. I am simply a developmental molecular biologist, not even the most accomplished of molecular biologists, looking at the world of a few genes and how they interact with even fewer molecules. I've had a long standing interest in how tiny embryos grow into big babies, and for a long time now my focus has been on psychiatric disorders and how brain development in the womb and beyond can create them. I am also deeply involved in teaching and guiding the next set of researchers. Thus, my perspective on education really is as a research-oriented "brain watcher" and a consumer of the end-product of the American educational system.

Herewith some thoughts about what I would do with my observations on education were I some kind of policymaker and share in a concrete manner action steps possibly useful to educators given this perch. I will do so, though I freely admit that as a scientist I am considerably out of my depth in writing for educators and don't really know what "useful" really means. I tucked myself into my safe ivory tower, really a mixture of careers, a long time ago, and I did so for some very good reasons, mostly related to cowardice.

And not only am I a coward, I am also very wary of becoming just another voice in the cacophony of people who think they have the answer to all the questions of the American classroom. Unless you really have taught 30 kids, 25% of whom are on some kind of mind-altering drug and 50% of whom have parents in the middle of a divorce, I doubt that you have earned the right to be heard. And I have never taught 30 kids under the age of 9 in a classroom of any kind, so I will tell you flatly that I have not earned the right to be heard.

The teaching profession has been offered so many "solutions" for the things that ail our classes - and are so poorly paid as they listen to the increased responsibilities that are usually told to add to their job descriptions - I am convinced that even the most responsive and progressive members of the educational culture start to get jaded when one comes a long with an "I'm gonna fix what ails ya"attitude. Especially if that attitude doesn't include an income raise and a respectful countenance. Let me state from the beginning that I am not going to offer you any such solution from the world of science, nor do I propose a vaccination that hopes to cure everything, especially considering my lack of experience. I will simply fantasize.

And from such a fantasy perch, I will outline my perspective, for I am happy to inflict as many of my prejudices on you as I can. It is actually pretty straightforward, and I will give the summary before we get into anything. Here's the summary: in 2000, education is not about a fad. It is about learning how to input and then use information inside a living organ, the brain. Similarly, education in 3000 will not be about a fad, it will still be about learning how to input and then use information inside a living brain. We are learning how the organ works, and what is so frightening for me is to observe how irrelevant aspects of our educational systems are in considering how the brain acquires information. To enumerate parts of that last sentence, I would like to divide this article into three parts.

PART I) THE BRAIN AND THE POWER OF CRITICAL THINKING
PART II) THE DISTANCE BETWEEN A NEURON AND A CHALKBOARD.
PART III) MEDINA'S LEGISLATIVE FANTASY

PART I) THE BRAIN AND THE POWER OF CRITICAL THINKING

The human brain is an amazing organ, as you all know. It can send a signal to the big toe and back of an average sized adult 177,000 times a second. And it has to do that through an unbelievable thicket of neural cells. Consider that the average brain contains between 1012 and 1014 nerve cells. Laid end to end, to employ the overused science metaphor of bigness, that's enough nerve to circle the globe 20,000 times. The human cortex, that talented rind of gray matter that makes our beautiful symphonies and plans our horrible wars, is also quite complex. Take a cubic millimeter of the stuff, about the size of a small dot and begin unwinding it, you'd unravel about two miles worth of brain cells.

So there's a lot of material to work with. And that's fortunate, because the organ has a lot to do. One of the most important tasks it performs is that it inputs information and organizes the information once it has been received. And so we have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how it does all that. There are a number of unintended consequences that have come from extracting data in this effort.

We have found, for example, that specific groups and configurations of nerve cells in our heads hold specific pieces of information. And if we can figure out how those groups work together, we will go a long way towards unlocking the secrets those neurons hold. We are beginning to do just that. This can be illustrated in dramatic fashion by looking at an experiment not done on us, but on birds, specifically, young chicks and young quail.

As every farmer knows, young chickens have a crowing sound consisting of solitary and quite loud squeaks lasting about half a second. Young quail also emit sounds at birth, but these are much more complex, consisting of one or two introductory notes, followed by a complex trill. A while back, we discovered that the neurons that controlled this complex quail-sound were in a particular configuration in a particular region of their brains.

So how important was the configuration of the neurons? Researchers have actually transplanted the part of the brain of the quail that controlled their song into the brains of young chicks that could only emit their single crowing sound. Lo and behold, when the operation was done, these roosters in training could still crow, but now they did so with one or two introductory notes, followed by a more complicated trill.

In other words, the transplanted neurons, in their own specific configuration, were affecting the outward behavior of a chick. This was unknown, and quite unintentional. It was the first time we understood that we could transfer actual living thought from one creature to the next.

One can see this principle of specific neurons holding specific pieces of information in humans as well. Consider the following story, which was eventually written up in a research journal. An older man came into the ER with a stroke in a very interesting part of the brain. He had lost the ability to recognize nouns, and had a particularly hard time with animals. You might show him a picture of a rhinoceros and ask him what it was. He would respond "I don't know, it looks like uh, uh, well, it has this funny-looking nose . . . I don't know what it is." This was odd, because if you held up a flash card with the word R-H-I-N-O spelled out, and asked him what he was observing, he would respond instantly. "That's an animal living in parts of Africa," he might say "I think it's on the endangered list, right? Something about his horn."

It was clear that even though he could not recognize the picture, he could certainly recognize the word. If you asked him to draw a picture of rhino, he could actually do it, as long as it didn't take him more than about two minutes. If you then grabbed the piece of paper and held up the picture of the rhinoceros he just drew and asked him what it was, his reply would be extraordinary. He would say something like before "I don't know what it is, it looks like uh, uh, uh, well, . . . it has this funny . . . "

This stroke victim's lack of recognition pointed to something very interesting, and quite mysterious about the brain. We began to understand that this organ - like many personal computers - is capable of separating text from graphics, and stores concepts like 'Rhinoceros' in redundant areas of the brain. And that the specific neural cells that held the routing information connecting these concepts in this man's head were destroyed because of the stroke. You see? Discrete sets of neurons actually control discrete kinds of information. We have known for a long time that the brain follow the rules of chemistry and physics. We were beginning to understand it might follow the rules of information transfer as well.

We've gone much further now. We can literally grow neurons in a dish, stimulate them, watch them change, teach them things and look at how their genes are responding. We have even recently taken a tiny silicon chip and bored very small channels into its surface and then seeded the now-carved out chip with living neurons.

Lo and behold, the neurons grew, and followed the pattern of the channels we bored onto the chip initially. That gives us the power to deliberately create the 3-dimensional architecture of neurons on our own, and maybe one day in the future drive a deliberately constructed silicon semiconductor, with a just as deliberately constructed human thought.

Now, I did not give you those pieces of information so that you could run back to your subcommittees and draft legislation banning this stuff. Rather, I just wanted to use this to illustrate how amazing it can be when one employs scientific principles to understand something that is essentially physical in nature. Because the brain follows the rules of chemistry and physics, it is possible to bring the awesome power of natural philosophy into this infinite neural world and actually learn something.

Though we take the power of the scientific method for granted, we do so only because we are used to it. But it is rather delicate, and you only have to see how fragile it is by observing what has happened in our history when we haven't applied critical thinking skills. Which has been most of it. The history of humankind is filled with such follies and fads, and I would like to summarize a few of my favorites to underscore the contrast before moving on to our discussion of education issues.

Consider ancient physics for a moment. For hundreds of years, people wrote treatises trying to answer a single question Aristotle originally posed "Why does a big rock when dropped from the mast of ship, reach the deck of the ship before a little rock, when dropped at the same time?" Absolutely nobody was doing the experiments to see if that statement were true.

Human biology did not always fair any better. Consider the brain's ultimate achievement, the establishment and origin of human behavior. Its explanation hasn't always been well-thought through, even amongst our greatest minds. Consider, for example, how certain types of behavior we once viewed, in relationship to gender.

#1) The male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind . . . The lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them (women) as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master. -- Aristotle

To which Timothy Leary has replied: Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

#2) A woman preaching is like a dog walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all. --Samuel Johnson, English essayist, author and critic.

To which Charlotte Whitton, former mayor of Ottawa Canada, has replied: Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

#3) Nature doth paint (women) further to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish; and experience hath declared them to be inconstant, variable, cruel and lacking the spirit of council. --John Knox, Theologian and Presbyterian

To which an anonymous woman by the name of Jill, who signed some Graffiti in Kentish Town, UK, 1986, has responded . . . if they can send a man to the moon, why can't they send them all there?

So we haven't always used our heads to understand what was inside them. Such prejudices can die hard. Even when we began to apply the scientific method to new technologies, we had a hard time reconciling them with superstitions. Did you know that when anesthetics were first introduced in the early part of the 19th century, there were groups of people who thought they would not work on women during childbirth? The reason was because of a Biblical scripture which said that women would experience pain - in fact increased pain - during childbirth.

So then someone tried it on women during childbirth, and guess what? It worked just fine. So then some people actually tried to stop doctors from using the anesthetic on women during childbirth, in order to keep the scripture inviolate. You can imagine that most of the people who advocated this were not women.

After the Greek civilization flourished and then died, the West in effect stopped asking questions. And we became suspicious of anyone who did, often using capital punishment and torture as a form of theological cleansing.

The idea was that we could allow someone else to do our thinking for us because that someone else had so much more experience and were so much wiser, perhaps so divinely inspired that to question the prevailing wisdom was a reflection not of a stimulating exchange of ideas, but a reflection of the inquirer's spiritual degradation.

Fortunately, we began to wake-up, and the seeds of the good-morning actually occurred during the Renaissance my history colleagues tell me, and even earlier, as a result of the cultural mixing during The Crusades. We also started becoming braver because we started making inquiries.

And when we started asking questions, we started getting into real trouble. And the reason we started getting into real trouble is that we started getting real answers. Answers that were sometimes very different than what the prevailing wisdom had established.

For example: there was a Flemish physician named Vesalius. He found an extraordinary thing. Vesalius found out that men and women have the same number of ribs. The church had taught that men have one less rib than women because of what had occurred in the garden of Eden. Vesalius was made to give up his post, his books were banned and he was forced to work as physician, never again doing research, because of his radical beliefs.

Nonetheless there was a great change coming - critical thinking can be quite infectious, after all, and Galileo finally dropped two rocks from a building and found that, guess what, whether little or big, they fell to the ground at the same time (not taking into account wind resistance). Guess what? Aristotle was wrong.

Galileo also backed the Copernican idea of the sun being the center of the earth, rather than the Ptolemaic idea of the earth being the center. As you might recall, it has been only in the latter half of the 20th century that the church acknowledged this error and sought at least a paper restoration.

So natural philosophy in the form of the scientific method would not be stopped. One by one this kind of thinking began to take on a form of organization and compelling fascination that destroyed old ideas as fast as it came up with new ones.

Like some adolescent child discovering that their parents were fallible, we found out that our ancestors could be mistaken. That laws existed that could destroy the power of fads, and bring us to a certain sensibility. And as we staggered away from our older ways of thinking, like we had just been sucker-punched by rationality, we began to learn the terror of critical thinking.

PART II) THE DISTANCE BETWEEN A NEURON AND A CHALKBOARD.

The notion that the brain follows the rules of chemistry and physics has lots of unintended consequences, ones we could not have easily foreseen. But one of the greatest of these unintended consequences is a certain degree of liberation. As history progressed, critical thinking began to wind its way through every facet of biology, including neurobiology .This physical point of view greatly freed the researcher to do specific experiments on living brains or even groups of neurons, and know that the results would be falsifiable or reproducible or whatever, but that they could be scientific. And it has given we scientists a context upon which to hang our observations, and, most magic of all, give to us the great power of prediction.

Such interesting results have come by applying such a discipline to the workings of the brain that you'd think we might often run into the danger of over-interpretation of a given set of data. You are probably used to hearing this next sentence from a scientist: "Be careful, for this work is preliminary and more studies need to be done."

As I have talked to lay audiences over the years, I have actually found the opposite to be true. Over-interpretation is what the media does in the general populace. I have found the opposite to occur in the general populace. I have found they have no interpretation, and this is due to a single problem - a lack of the knowledge of the research. I would like to tell you a little bit about what we are learning about how neurons and brains acquire information, and then speculate on both the limits and strengths of applying such data to the classroom.

To start with, I must tell you I am happy to be consistent with the rest of my cautious colleagues. We really do have to be careful not to apply isolated facts from neurobiology onto some piece of legislation and think we have established some truth - when all we've really done is oversimplify an issue. But real work has been done, and it is to some of this stuff that I would like turn. I would like to give two points of view, looking from the inside of a cell outwardly to a behavior, and then going in the opposite direction, looking from the outside of a behavior and going into a cell.

We will start with the notion of something deeply relevant to education, the ability to store and recall data over time. The formal term, as I am sure many of you are aware, is called long-term memory. Believe it or not, we are actually beginning to understand some of the molecules involved in long-term memory, and that includes processes occurring in humans. To relate this accurately, I need to give a metaphor about trees, and then tell you something about what happened when I first started dating the person who would later become my wife.

We'll start with trees. As you undoubtedly know, there is a gap between neural connections called a synapse. Many people when they consider neurons tend to think of the easy thing, that one neuron connects to another neuron via a single synapse, like two wires not yet soldered together.

Nothing could be further from the truth, actually. A better analogy is this: pretend you are Paul Bunyan, 60 feet tall and have the ability to uproot trees with bare hands. You take one tree in one hand and uproot it, then take another tree in another hand and uproot it. Now turn each tree ninety degrees so that their roots are touching each other. Literally, thousands of roots from one tree are touching thousands of roots from another.

That's how two neurons interact. They look like trees with their roots touching, which means there can be thousands of connections between just two of them. Now here's a weird thing. There are different flavors of connections. Some of those connections are wild about being with each other, we call these excitatory, and they talk to each other like teenagers on a telephone. Some of those connections are like guests that have stayed too long in your house. They're localized together, but they aren't crazy about being in the same place and in fact refuse to talk to each other. We call these connections, these synapses inhibitory. The sum total of both of the stimulatory and inhibitory connections actually creates a language between two neurons. It's something like zeroes and ones in a computer. Which means the wire metaphor is pretty lousy. Better to think of the connections as a computer.

So what does this interesting computer have to do with learning? How we store stuff into long-term memory? To understand the full process, I now need to tell a little bit about our second metaphor, how my wife and I first met.

When I first met Kari, the woman who would later become my wife, I was dating someone else. And so was she. But I did not forget Kari, she is physically very beautiful, a talented Emmy-nominated composer and one of the nicest people I have ever met.

When both of us found ourselves "available" 6 months later, I immediately asked her out. We had a great time, and I began thinking about her more and more. Turns out she was feeling the same. I asked her out again, and soon we were seeing each other regularly. It got so that every time we met my heart would pound, my stomach would do flip-flops, sweat would appear on the back of my palms. I knew I was falling in love.

Eventually, I didn't even have to see her in order to get the raise in pulse. Just a picture would do, or the smell of her perfume (Chanel #5), or the building that housed the music studio where she practiced. Eventually just a thought was enough. That was 18 years ago, and I have to admit, when I pick her up at the airport after she has made some trip, I still get those same sweaty palms and elevated pulses. Indeed, after all these years she has had to endure living with me, I consider myself the luckiest man in the world!

What was happening here to effect such change? With increased exposure to this wonderful lady, I became increasingly sensitive to her presence, my reactions made stronger over time, needing steadily smaller cues to elicit stronger and stronger responses. (perfume, for heaven's sake?). Moreover, the effect has been long-lasting, having had the tenure of almost 2 decades. Leaving the whys of the heart to the poets and the psychiatrists, this idea, that increased exposure results in stronger reactions, all requiring less and less input to elicit stronger and stronger reactions, lies at the heart of how neurons learn things. When two neurons, one on each side of a synapse decide to remember a piece of information, it's just like the two of them fall in love. At first it takes a fair amount of exposure, one neuron giving out a large amount of energy to the other, in order to keep the connection live.

But when learning takes place, an astonishing thing occurs. The connection is strengthened, and after awhile, it takes only a little bit of input from one neuron to make the other fire excitedly as though it was some star-crossed lover. This is just like my dating Kari. At first, dating her was a nice idea. But soon, even the memory of the smell of her perfume, a tiny little input, could elicit all the palpitations of a full-blown lover's kiss. In other words, it didn't take very much after while to get me extremely excited. We call this process synaptic strength, and when neurons learn something, they strengthen their connections with each other.

Now here's the kicker. Once this excitability has been established, it will go away after a short period of time. In fact, after a piece of information has been learned, and synapses have been strengthened, it is only temporary. You have to restimulate those neurons again, do it in exactly the same way, and do it within 90 minutes of the first stimulation, or the memory is lost. That's why you have to repeat things in order to learn something. You have to continually refire that rootful of connections.

You might right now be thinking: does that mean anything to the real world of classrooms and education subcommittees? The answer is emphatic and I will say it five times: no no no no no. There is a great deal of distance between the concept of synaptic strengthening and curriculum design. Here is the reason why I am telling you this. What I find so astonishing is that we are actually creating technologies that will eventually be able to address and ultimately bridge this large gap, and turn my five no no no's into a hundred yes yes yes's. In other words, science is providing a context, a framework, that allows us the opportunity to understand the physics and chemistry behind the extraordinary ability of humans to acquire information.

I wish I could live to be 200 years old, just to see how this gap will close. We see this not only inwardly at the level of the molecule looking to outward external behaviors, but, in going in the opposite direction, from the external observation giving us hints as to what happens deep in the interior of our brains. Whenever anyone starts looking at the research on human brains and learning, the first impression one gets is that the organ is enormously sensitive to environmental cues. So sensitive it is to outside inputs that neurobiologists use the word "plastic" to describe its responsive abilities. Let me give you an example.

This work comes from Tad Tsunoda at Medical and Dental School, Tokyo. I have never seen this published in an English language journal, though MIT press quotes from this work in the book Science of Mind.

A group of linguists were interested in the affects of language sounds on brain development. Specifically, they looked at people who learned languages heavy in vowel sounds - like Hawaiian - as their primary language and then examined the brains of people who learned languages heavy in consonant sounds - like Russian. Using PET scans and MRI technology, they did things like play a violin for the two groups of people. Or have them learn something. Or give them a stressful situation. Their results were astonishing. It appeared that the people who learned Hawaiian first used different parts of their brains to hear violins, learn or become stressed, than people who heard Russian first. And it was the same difference - i.e. there was a Hawaiian pattern and a Russian pattern in each of these studies. The upshot of the work was that brains could rewire themselves based on - what? - syllables, vowels and consonants? There is no such thing as vowels and consonants in nature. Those are just man-made ideas. There are simply compressions and rarefactions banging on people's eardrums. But the brain is so sensitive to outside input, so plastic, in the words of the neuro guys that, what? You can actually rewire by simply speaking different kinds of textured languages? Is that true? And if it is, the great question becomes: what other environmental inputs help rewire the brain?

The point here is that the brain is an enormously plastic, and the kinds of inputs it is sensitive to we are only just discovering. We not only know that it is very flexible, but that the human brain is very finicky about when it wants to be flexible, and what kinds of talents will come out as a result of its plasticity. In other, words, there are the
famous critical periods of learning. Consider how deeply these things are etched.

Any self-respecting neurobiologist will tell you that it is an absolute disaster if a kid is born with cataracts and the cataracts are not removed within several weeks after birth. Why? Because there are nerves that exist deep within the infant brains that will not hook up correctly--in fact may not hook-up at all - unless their eyes are exposed to light. If those nerves are not given photons, the nerves will not achieve their final wiring instructions. Literally a baby can go blind, even if everything anatomically is perfect, if it cannot acquire a few photons. We say that those connections are experience-dependent.

Most of you know about the most famous example of a critical period of development which is language acquisition. But a colleague of mine, Patricia Kuhl also at the University of Washington, has discovered just how early this begins and ends. She has focused on language acquisition. Here's a synopsis of her work, beginning with her research rational.

Language allows predictability to come into our world very quickly. Language gives people the common ability to assess what is in each others brains, and therefore allows the magic words of human survival - learning - to take place rapidly and predictably.

Here's an astonishing fact. We know that a baby right out of the box comes pre-loaded with the ability to make every sound known in human language are pre-loaded to talk, and we may even be pre-loaded to structure our talk in a logical fashion. But not just any talk. We are pre-loaded to talk in the sounds we are hearing around us, and we are just as pre-loaded to filter out those sounds which are not around us, and in so doing, create an increasingly predictable verbal world.

Pat Kuhl has been able to show that this amazing talent to discriminate between all sounds is short-lived. In a year's time, a baby can no longer discriminate between all the sounds of all the worlds' languages, though she could when she was six months old.

Rather by 12 months of age, this talent is lost, she can only discriminate and hear - that's right - I said hear - the sounds of the languages to which she has been previously exposed. The critical period is between the ages of 6 and 12 months. Thus even though we are born able to distinguish and hear all human sounds, age 12 months, we can only hear our own languages. In other words, exposure to a particular language alters our brains and shapes
our minds, so that we perceive sounds differently.

One of the great examples of this is: Native Japanese speakers raised without exposure to English as infants cannot tell the difference between the words rake and lake. They hear them as exactly the same word. That's not true when the Native Japanese speaker was a baby. At 6 months, a Japanese baby can hear the difference. But at 12 months, that talent is gone. And is forever. Don't feel too smug. A native English speaker can only hear a single difference when a tape is heard of the sound of b going to sound of p. Thai speakers can hear three separate stages of that movement.

So you have a visual critical period of learning. You have an auditory critical period of learning. It appears as if you are born with various stopwatches inside your head that actually started ticking away even before you were born. These stopwatches govern your ability to acquire various pieces of information, and once they have ticked down to zero, it is impossible to acquire new information.

Here's another talent babies possess. You might call it another piece of pre-loaded software, something that babies appear to be born with, right out of the box. It turns out that babies are great hypothesis testers. What do I mean by hypothesis testing? You are very familiar with it, though you may not know you do it. In fact, hypothesis testing may be the single greatest characteristic of summary human intelligence.

HOOK: Let me explain how adults hypothesis test, for example by holding a baby and getting him or her to be still.

What is the process here? It's in four steps.

First step: you make an observation. In this case, "the baby is crying".

Second step: you create an hypothesis. "I believe she is crying because she is physically uncomfortable." That's a hypothesis. You don't know that this is true, though you suspect it may be.

Third step: you do an experiment "I therefore will change her positioning
on my arms."

Fourth step: evaluation. "Did she or did she not stop crying?" If she quiets down, your hypothesis is validated, and a certain amount of predictability - in the form of relief - comes to your world. If not, you need to change.

It turns out that babies can do the same thing. In fact, it has been demonstrated that babies as young as 42 minutes old can do it, which is why many neuroscientists believe the talent is pre-loaded in our genes.

Let me show you some examples of babies and little children hypothesis testing.

My son Noah sticks his tongue out at his dad. Many of you know this. If you stick your tongue out at a newborn, what will the newborn do? She will try to imitate you, and will stick her tongue back at you. My little 12 week old Noah did this in his first week of life. Three weeks ago, as I was holding him and talking to someone else, I saw him gazing at me and sticking his tongue out occasionally.

As soon as I saw him do it, I stuck my tongue back out at him, which probably made the poor person I was talking to cringe. And then Noah went crazy - sticking his tongue back out at me with much greater rapidity. We now have a game whereby we stick our tongues out at each other, and I can't wait to tell him as a teenager that many years from now that his first successful human conversation was to stick his tongue out at his dad.

What he was doing was that he was hypothesis testing. Step 1: Noah made an observation "Dad sticks his tongue out at me, and I stick out my tongue back" Step 2: He makes an hypothesis "Maybe if I stick my tongue out at dad, he will stick his tongue back out at me". Step 3: Noah does the experiment: he sticks his tongue out. Step 4: He evaluates my response "Dad DID stick his tongue back out at me." And then he repeats the experiment. This is a successful prediction. Noah is beginning to organize his world. He is discovering that the bird feeder is banging on the tree.

Here's another example of hypothesis testing. One of the things children do not have--are not born with--is a talent researchers call object constancy. A large body of evidence demonstrates that when a coin is placed under a dish, babies and small children actually believe that the coin disappears. It takes awhile for them to really understand that the coin does not disappear even if it is hidden from view, that the coin has object constancy and will be there even if they don't see it. The way little kids reassure themselves that the coin does not disappear is done in exactly the same way that Noah has a conversation with dad - they hypothesis test.

One of the first things little kids do - and they do this all over the world - is that they play peek-a-boo. Peek-a-boo at a certain development stage is not a game. Peek-a-boo at a certain stage is a series of deliberate experiments, whereby the child hypothesizes that the object is still around after all, even if you hide it, and then tests the idea. So the child hides the object and then ,when the object is revealed, giggles in glee that the object is there. It is hypothesis testing and is exactly how we scientists react in our labs when an experiment has been successfully replicated.

What is so interesting from a developmental point of view is the need for the child's need to reassure itself of its own observation. In science, we call this replicating the experiment. And children really know how to do this.

One researcher at Berkeley, Alison Gopnik recorded a baby putting the same ring under a cloth and finding it 17 times in a row, saying "all gone" each time she hid the ring and then laughing when it was revealed.

Now that story might seem apparent to you, and we all think this is cute about object constancy. But perhaps even the fact that we think it is cute is telling. To that baby, object constancy isn't cute. If she doesn't get that concept down, she can die, because the saber tooth tiger behind the bush is still behind the bush even if she can't see it.

It's a matter of survival. And it took evolution millions of years to perfect it in us. But the fact that it exists in our brains at birth means that, at some level, it is hardwired into us. And so the question I have asked myself in putting this talk together is: what does this all mean from an education perspective? Remember, I am not a cognitive educational psychologist. I work with genes, not with classrooms. The distance can sometimes be disconcerting, and I happily allow my distance from the ivory tower to stand correction in the real world of school boards and legislation.

Ivory tower or not, what is so fascinating to me as a researcher is that the gap between the synapse and the chalkboard is beginning to close--and in some cases quite rapidly. Data about neural pruning and critical periods of development and plasticity are terms very familiar to my world, the world of the T-75 and sequencing gel. In other words, the brain follows the rules of physics and chemistry.

You can even see just how important this physics and chemistry are when examining the cognitive deficits in hostile situations. When kids are severely stressed, they tend to make more a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is great for the fight or flight responses in the acute term. They shouldn't have cortisol in their blood streams for too long, because it damages an area of the brain known as the hippocampus. The hippocampus is involved in human memory, and damaging it means that you can impair learning. For kids living in our inner cities, where everyday existence is a life or death struggle, you may literally whittle away at their brain power by forcing them to continually live in life-or-death situations.

PART III) MEDINA'S LEGISLATIVE FANTASY

Now I have to repeat something before I give some suggestions. As I said at the beginning, one of the biggest reasons why I am a scientist is because I am also a chicken. I don't like the real world. I stay away from reality because the real world is too messy. It is filled with opinion, contradiction, uncontrollable variables that give birth to limited insights. It is even filled with that great enemy of objective intellectual exercise: the fad.

One of the reasons so many of us in the hard sciences stay away from education issues is that most of us attempt to whittle away at uncertainty and we definitely hate fads. Their instability drives us crazy, especially because they are often touted as the foundational last word, only to be replaced a year later with another foundational last word.

Deep down inside, education has powerful glimmer of truth in it, a power to shatter even the staunchest political agenda or the most widespread craze. As I said at the start, education is about inputting things into the human brain, and once the information is resident, using the information in specific ways. In the midst of that idea lies not a fashion, but a cortex. In the midst of learning, we fundamentally encounter not a fashion, but a neuron. Thus even though I am not a classroom teacher - and I would remind you what I said at the very beginning about earning the right to be heard, nonetheless, I am happy to provide a point of view.

Let's start with an editorial comment. The other day, I heard something that I consider to be a great mistake. I heard some policy makers say that they are establishing legislation because "we must make our children ready to learn by the first grade." I believe that is a dead wrong point of view. It is important that we understand this important biological phenomenon, which flies in the face of this thinking.

We do not have to make children ready to learn. Infants are born already ready to learn. They are born curious, which I believe to be a survival instinct, and if they lose their curiosity, it is not because it naturally goes away, such is the power of survival. By the time they hit our system, they have, in my opinion, wasted a great deal of cognitive time waiting for input they never received. And worst of all, their curiosity is being destroyed. I think it's because they are bored.

The data imply, though do not state, some interesting action steps. If Pat Kuhl's stuff is true, that all phonemes are learned in the first 12 months of life and then slows dramatically, then we are at our peak in terms of certain forms of language retention very early. But does the school system reflect that peak? No. When do we teach foreign languages? In junior high, or worse, in high school. What in the world are we doing teaching foreign languages in high school, when the developmental train left more than a 13 years before, never to return?

Here's another example. Millions of years ago, when we came out of the trees and entered the savannah we did not say to ourselves, "Somebody give me a book and set me down for a lecture so I can learn more about the savannah" No, we entered a highly organized, powerfully conceived ecosystem, one that we had to learn from by trial and error. This is the thing we do most efficiently. If that's truly what shaped this magnificent cortex of ours, why do we still treat discovery as "received truth" - when the best way we learn is to create a similarly highly structured environment and let the kid's mind roam? 20th century data suggests that "received truth" models are among the slowest ways to embed information in a human brain.

For hundreds of thousands of years, we didn't listen to lectures, we hypothesis tested, to see if that snake when it bit us would kill us. We wondered if a particular root could quench the gnawing feelings of hunger in our belly. We tested in real terms if we could extend the length of our arm by throwing a rock at a rabbit, rather than just trying to leap out at it.

These are the great forces of natural selection drilling into our heads and creating for us the most amazing brain on the planet. If that is how we naturally learn things--and the data suggests that we are doing something like this 42 minutes after birth--why in the world aren't we designing curricula that takes advantage of our innate exploratory natures? Why aren't we aligning ourselves with what evolution carved in us hundreds of centuries ago? And why do we wait to start first grade when a child is 6 years old, when they've been this doing hypothesis testing since birth? And why do we create classroom environs built for training kids like they all had the same brain, when we've known for a number years that the brain is so plastic that even external sounds can rewire our insides in unique and individual ways?

If it's true that most of the important developmental learning takes place before age 6, or even age 3, why do we continue to hold on to the notion of first grade? Asking that question may be offensive to how the education culture works presently, but 0 - 6, even 0-3, is how the brain works. And if the primary mission of education is the brain, then it is absolutely criminal to follow the culture at the expense of the neuron. That is "Why I Don't Believe in the First Grade."

That may not be how the education culture works presently, but that may be how the brain works. And if the primary mission of education is the brain, then it is absolutely criminal to follow the culture at the expense of the neuron.

The list goes on and on. Depressed kids don't learn as well as non-depressed kids. And it means that the overall emotional environment of your daughter's life is at least as important in the 0-6 years as the presence of her cortex. And because learning is a relational thing, creating cadres of teachers who know this nerve stuff and understand the interplay of emotions with learning is probably the single most important thing this culture could give the educational world.

Here's my legislative fantasy. I actually believe that teachers--whose main job is to shepherd and instruct this organ--should actually know more about how the brain works than anybody else. In the same way it is axiomatic that a geologist should study rocks to learn more about geology, an educator should study the brain to learn more about education. Over the years, I have found critical thinking to be contagious. If we trained an entire generation of teachers to not only know current literature on how the brain works, but to also know how scientists go about getting data on how the brain works, we will have just deputized an entire profession into the rank of researcher.

I thus propose to create a new Bachelor of Science in Education, and have it be a neuropsych major with a minor in cognitive psych, and have such expertise be part of the certification experience. Such a professional could give us ivory-tower types an incredible perspective, because these teachers are in the real world of the classroom. Wouldn't it be great if neuropsych departments and school districts had incredible research partnerships together, to see if any of these brain data hold up in the real world of the chalkboard?

My fantasy runs to disappointment. To date there is no education department in the US that forces its teachers to be equipped with a) the knowledge of practicing neurobiologists, and b) the ability to know how to acquire data. And so my fantasy is that we change entire ed departments and equip them with this framework.

Here's another fantasy, this one related specifically to 0-6. We need to create an entirely new class of teacher, one with all the force of the state certifiers behind it. And we need to pay this class of teacher very well. The most, in fact. This class of teacher has a double expertise. First, they know this literature backwards and forwards about how children learn 0-6, and secondly, they know how to teach parents how to teach their children in these age groups. I thus propose to create a second Bachelor of Science degree in education, this one focusing on early childhood issues.

The reason I give this as an additional part of the fantasy is because of an almost unbelievable wasteland. Where do we put infants and children in their most critical periods of cognitive development? Increasingly less and less children are spending time with a stay-at-home parent in this age group. So the alternative is that many children are placed in daycare centers, run by people who don't even have to have a high school education to be employed at them. In other words, at a time when those brains could absorb the most, we place them into institutions and situations run by people who know the absolute least about that absorption! My fantasy is a formal effort to change that, to create a teaching certificate just for those brains. And then make an infrastructure so that those curious little minds have all the knowledge their delicate little dendrites could want.

Finally, I propose the creation of a research culture that does a very odd thing: design an institute--perhaps a series of them--created exclusively to address the gap between a neuron and chalkboard. What we need is a data generator that could turn a good suggestion into a hard scientific fact, a formal institute that combined the great science of learning with the common everyday practice of learning. In it, active brain scientists of every stripe would rub shoulders and a daily basis, year in and year out with education researchers, computer scientists, education professionals, media types, business types, both to provide information and get a way to disseminate it.

The greatest benefit of all for this kind of activity is two-fold: we could create teachers with whom we ivory-tower types could partner with and who could understand us. Secondly, we could create some kind of research institute filled with neuroscientists and education professionals who could partner with these now trained teachers - ones who knew about statistics and neurons and cognitive development. We researchers would finally have eyes and ears that could actually derive data from the real world. Rather than just the false one we currently occupy, the one that gives us such a lack of insight into the trenches.

CONCLUSION
Let me conclude. The great sadness is that the data I am talking about was not established yesterday - and possibly the greatest example of the death of critical thinking in the adult arena that I can think of is that these data are either not integrated into our ed departments and day care centers, or that this point of view is new.
This part is not a fantasy. When natural philosophy is allowed to investigate physical phenomena, the first thing it does is to establish a framework that both stands the test of time and gives us great powers of prediction. This framework is anti-fad. This is how we get rid of fads. Most educators are sick and tired of watching the latest one-true educational fad blow through their classrooms like some hurricane, only to be replaced by another one-true fad a year later. I'll bet most legislators are too.
One of the great reasons I love science is because it is anti-fad, and placing educational issues on the back of human neurons, even if the distance between the classroom and synaptic strengthening is vast - is about the best way to create a time-testable, fully falsifiable framework. Incidentally, it will destroy any whim or fad. If we did such a thing, it would force us to quit arguing about how to make a politically correct curriculum and start arguing about how to make a neurologically correct plan of learning for our classrooms.
I leave you with this. The knowledge about how minds acquire information will only grow and grow and grow. In the future, if we settle down and learn how the brain works and then learn how to apply what we know to the classroom, we will lift ourselves out of every educational morass that seeks to suck us under. If I could make my fantasy a reality, I would shake things up, and create a revolution where one truly encounters the great terror of critical thinking.

About the Author:
You can reach Dr. John Medina via email at aldenj2@u.washington.edu

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