Teaching With the Brain in Mind

Learning and Behavior
While it’s exciting to make some sense out of the
actual cell-to-cell connections, learning and behavior
are often different. You might have learned how
to teach a better class from a book. But your
behavior might still be the same as it has always
been. Why and how does this happen? Certainly,
we could point to outside circumstances like
excess stress or a student’s behavior. Yet our behaviors
are more likely governed by our complex
emotional states and memories. The daily chemistry
of our brain adds great complexity to the
question, “How does our brain learn?”
Our everyday behaviors are heavily affected by
other “floating” chemicals in the brain: the
monoamines and peptides. In fact, one researcher
estimates that over 98 percent of all your brain’s
and body’s internal communications are through
peptides, not synapses (Pert 1997, p. 139). If the
neurotransmitters we mentioned earlier, like glutamate
and GABA, act as “cellular phones” offering
specific communications, the other chemicals act
more like huge bullhorns that can broadcast to
wide areas of the brain. These chemicals are usually
serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenaline.
These produce the behaviors that you can actually
see in class like attention, stress, or drowsiness.
Later chapters will address these further. In short,
learning happens on many complex layers at once,
from the cellular to the behavioral.
Getting Smarter
The end result of learning for humans is intelligence.
Regardless of how you define intelligences,
having a bigger brain or more brain cells per cubic
inch doesn’t help. A dolphin has a bigger brain,
and a rat brain has more cell density than a human
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The Learning Brain
brain. The key to getting smarter is growing more
synaptic connections between brain cells and not
losing existing connections. It’s the connections that
allow us to solve problems and figure things out.
What percentage of your physical brain do you
use? On a given day, most areas are used because
functions are well distributed throughout it. In
addition, it has been customizing itself for your
lifestyle since the day you were born. It generally
works well for you because you’ve encouraged it to
develop for your precise world. If you’re good at
music, you’re likely to sing, compose, or play. If
you’re good at sports, you’re likely to practice or
play. If you’re good at numbers, you’re likely to do
some computation daily. In the real world, your
brain’s just right for you.
On a more theoretical, mathematical basis, the
story is much different. It is estimated that we use
less than 1 percent of 1 percent of our brain’s projected
processing capacity. Each of your 100 billion
neurons ordinarily connects with 1,000–10,000
other neurons. But they could theoretically connect
with far more. Since each neuron has several thousand
synapses, your entire brain has trillions of
them. Your brain is capable of processing as much
as 10 27 bits of data per second (Hobson 1994).
However, Paul Churchland (1995) postulates that
the total possible configuration is 10 to the 100
trillionth power. That number far exceeds the
number of known particles in the universe. Our
brain is, indeed, quite a miracle. The brain is what
we have; the mind is what it does. In other words,
the “mind” is not a thing; it’s a process.
Could this potential neural connectivity be
responsible for so-called “genius” behavior in isolated
individuals? We don’t know yet. Almost 10
percent of children under 5 have a photographic
memory as do 1 percent of adults. Savants can