Mind games

Terrific interview with cognitive developmental neuroscientist Adele Diamond from Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Diamond has found that full-body involvement and dramatic play facilitate learning (something we're committed to at Workplace Productions). Surprisingly, some now-rejected traditional strategies such as memorization also help. Diamond's research focuses on children, but I think some of these ideas relate to adult learning as well. What's your take?

Good words

You don't teach someone to the limit of their ability; you teach them to the limit of your ability. - Aubrey C. Daniels

Say what you think, think what you say

Newsweek's Sharon Begley, who can always be relied on for thought-provoking science reporting, has a great piece in the current issue. "What's in a Word?" describes new experiments by Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky that explore the question of whether the language we speak reflects or creates our perceptions. (By the way, I recommend that you click that link to Boroditsky's site and mouse over her picture. That's my kind of scientist!)

Begley quotes Boroditsky as saying, "'Even a small fluke of grammar' -- the gender of nouns -- 'can have an effect on how people think about things in the world.'" Speakers of gendered languages tend to see objects in terms of traditionally masculine or feminine qualities: bridges as immense and powerful (masculine) or as light, soaring and beautiful (feminine). Note: these adjectives were applied to the same bridge, by French and German speakers, respectively.

I've always felt that language shapes what we notice in the world. Although not fluently multilingual, I had the good fortune to be able to study several vastly different languages at fairly early ages -- early enough so that each of three languages has a profound internal logic to me. And boy, are they different!

Read the article for some fascinating examples of how languages and perceptions differ. And think about what we English speakers take for granted that just might not be so somewhere else in the world.

Graphic by Lera Boroditsky. I hope she doesn't mind!

Learning links

Good stuff on learning from various blogs:

From Cognitive Daily: how using gestures help us learn. The article describes an experiment with children, but I'd suggest it works for adults, too. And here's how an eye exercise can improve scores on a memorization test, at least for the right-handed.

From The Frontal Cortex: what's it like to be a baby, with a wonderful first comment about tight vs. open focus. And more on focus and creativity in a post about neuroenhancing drugs. Comment #2 is especially interesting here.

From Developing Intelligence: what happens to memories when we forget them (kind of technical, but fascinating nevertheless).

Enjoy!

Good words

Whenever I ask a question, and the pain comes, I know I have asked a really good question. ...The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn.
...you won’t learn anything if you don’t invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.– Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The Sirens of Titan

No foolin'

One of the enduring paradoxes of the human mind is that it doesn’t know itself very well. The conscious brain is ignorant of its own underpinnings, blind to all that neural activity taking place outside the prefrontal cortex. This is why people have emotions: they are windows into the unconscious, visceral representations of all the information we process but don’t perceive. - Jonah Lehrer

Good words

Insight requires a clean slate - Mark Jung-Beeman, quoted in Jonah Lehrer's book How We Decide