Brain abilities. Revelations of the neurolinguist Tatiana Chernigovskaya

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The amount of information in the modern world is growing exponentially. On Facebook alone, 30 billion new sources appear per month. According to the calculations of the international analytical company IDC, the amount of information in the world every year at least doubles.

Most of the information today is easy to find on Google, so the value of encyclopedic knowledge is decreasing. How a person should think in order to be effective and compete with computers is the argument of two experts in neurocognitive science - Barbara Oakley and Tatiana Chernigovskaya. High-tech recorded their discussion at EdCrunch 2019 about how modern education should look like, what skills will be in demand in the future, and whether total robotization and a technological apocalypse threaten humanity.

Tatiana Chernigovskaya - Doctor of Sciences in Physiology and Theory of Language, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Education, Honored Worker of Higher Education and Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation, Professor of the Department of General Linguistics of St. From 2008 to 2010 - President of the Interregional Association for Cognitive Research. Graduated from the Department of English Philology, Faculty of Philology, St. Petersburg State University, specialization - experimental phonetics. In 1977 she defended her Ph. D. thesis "Features of human perception of low-frequency amplitude modulation of sound and amplitude-modulation characteristics of speech" in the specialty "Physiology", in 1993 - her doctoral thesis "Evolution of linguistic and cognitive functions: physiological and neurolinguistic aspects" in the specialties "Theory of linguistics "And" Physiology ".

Barbara Orkley is a professor at the University of Auckland. Her research interests are stem cell research and engineering equipment design, pedagogical research and teaching techniques.

Language is the basis of thinking

Tatiana Chernigovskaya: Questions “Where did the language come from? So what's this? - no less a mystery than everything connected with the brain itself. If you ask any person on the street what language is, 99 out of 100 will answer that it is a means of communication. And so it is. But all living individuals have means of communication, even the slippers of the ciliate. For people, language is not only a means of communication, it is a means of thinking, a tool for building the world in which we live.

No matter how hard you try, you still can't teach a chicken the human language. This requires a special brain, the genetic mechanisms of which will do the work that is beyond the power of all linguists on earth. When a child is born, his brain must decipher the code that it has entered.

Another aspect: language as a means of communication has many meanings. In Morse code, what he passed was received. It doesn't work that way in language. It all depends on who is talking to whom. From the education of the interlocutors, from their position in relation to the world and to each other.

There is an objective thing that is said or written. But its decoding depends on a huge number of factors. Language implies multiple interpretations.

Barbara Oakley: For an adult to master this level of language, you need to get a doctorate. Learning a new language is difficult. In doing so, your brain changes dramatically. The same happens when you learn to read. On a tomogram, it is easy to distinguish the brain of a person who can read. The part of the brain responsible for recognizing faces migrates from one hemisphere to the other, and that's when you get the skill to understand written letters.

If you put a child in an adult environment, he just picks up the tongue. But if you leave him with a bunch of books, he won't learn to read. That's what training is for.

To teach effectively, you need to understand the learning process

Barbara Oakley: It is very important to bring insights from neuroscience and cognitive psychology into the learning process. It is neuroscience that explains what happens to your brain when you learn.

Ask your university to launch the How to Learn Effectively course. They will do two weeks of hours about how a child learns, two weeks about theory and history of learning. And maybe they will add quite a bit at the end of how people actually learn. But they won't include anything from neuroscience, because it's too complicated.

We did the opposite. We started with the basics of neuroscience. We use metaphors to communicate ideas more clearly. People will get fundamental and very valuable ideas quickly and easily. This course is different from what we used to think of as a learning process, but at the same time it is very hands-on and has its roots in neuroscience.

Neurobiology is a science that studies the structure, functioning, development, genetics, biochemistry, physiology and pathology of the nervous system.

Cognitive psychology is a science that studies cognitive processes and functions (memory, attention, thinking, imagination, and others). Also, the sphere of interests of cognitive psychologists includes the modeling of cognitive processes: pattern recognition, learning and decision making.

Tatiana Chernigovskaya: In the modern world, our task is to use knowledge about how the brain remembers and processes information. Any brain does it perfectly: the brain of a child, an adult, smart or not. If there is no physiological pathology, any brain does it flawlessly.

The modern world is an environment that did not exist before. What are we going to do with the current two-year-olds when they turn six and start school? They need computer technology, they already know how to get information. They don't need a teacher who says, "This is called a book."

They will need not a teacher, but more a personality shaper, an educator. Or he will teach what Barbara is talking about: how to learn to learn. Explain that the learning process gives every right to make a mistake, to make inaccuracies. There are no perfect people, children should have the right to be wrong.

The advantage of a man over a machine - solving non-standard tasks

Barbara Oakley: We need to solve non-standard and ambiguous problems, puzzles. I know students who solve math problems with ease. But when the stage comes to apply the task to real life, they often find themselves in a dead end. This is much more complicated.

It depends on how you received your education - if you are used to solving non-standard problems along with standard and formal ones, in the real world you are more flexible in solving problems.

For example, I ask students who are solving binomial problems to come up with some fun metaphor for the problem. Some people easily come up with many metaphors. Others look in amazement. They never even thought about it. I think that in the modern world, a creative approach to solving problems is just valuable.

The binomial distribution shows the probability distribution that an event will occur during a series of independent repeated tests.

Tatiana Chernigovskaya: Several years ago I developed a project in which I collaborated with talented developers. I learned that they were asking job seekers to solve a metaphorical problem. They don't want people who can count or type quickly. A computer can handle these tasks perfectly. We needed people with a different outlook, capable of looking at tasks from unexpected angles. Only such people can solve problems that at first glance are unsolvable.

This is what we must teach people. The great scientist Sergei Kapitsa said that learning is not memorization, learning is understanding.

Sergei Kapitsa is a Soviet and Russian physicist, the son of the Nobel laureate Pyotr Kapitsa. Editor of the magazine "In the world of science", host of the program "The obvious - the incredible."

Now the exam looks like a one or more choice test. Great discoveries were not made using standard algorithms. Great discoveries were made when an apple fell on Newton's head.

Barbara Oakley: Thomas Kuhn said that great discoveries are made either by very young researchers who have not yet immersed themselves in a subject, or older ones are changing it. For example, Francis Crick, who was originally a physicist, then took up biology, which he considered the key to a religious, spiritual awakening.

When you dive into a new area of research, bringing in knowledge from the previous one, this is also a kind of metaphor. It helps you be creative, productive, and that's part of your success.

Thomas Kuhn is an American historian and philosopher of science, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Francis Crick is a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neurobiologist. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Tatiana Chernigovskaya: Among the students, I notice those who, when asked "How much is two plus three?" will not answer five. Those who say: why are you asking? What is five? What is three? What is the amount? Are you sure the amount will be exactly five? They, of course, will receive deuces in the modern system, but they think outside the box and are therefore interesting.

Will we see a technological apocalypse? Of course, if we do not return back to feelings. Intelligence technologies are already beyond our control. Computers are learning all the time, they don't get drunk, they don't fall in love, they don't miss classes. We are not rivals to computers in what they do well.

To survive as a species, we need to develop in children the ability to live in a changing world. To such an extent that the world in the evening will not be what it was in the morning. If we try to count everything, we will lose.

Repetition is the mother of learning

Barbara Oakley: When people ask me how I train my brain and what technologies I recommend, I can say that there are no complicated techniques here. I use the technique that today's research suggests is the fastest and most effective learning technique - repetition exercises.

When you receive new information, it travels to the hippocampus and neocortex. The hippocampus is fast, but information doesn't last long. The neocortex is a long-term memory, but it remembers for a long time.

Your task is to pave tracks in this long-term memory. Going back in time, you ask yourself, for example, what was the main idea of today's discussions? Or what you just read on the page. Take a look around, try to get this information from long-term memory, and it will build new neural connections. This is exactly what repetition exercises allow you to do.

The hippocampus is part of the limbic system of the brain, which, among other things, is responsible for attention and translates short-term memory into long-term memory.

The neocortex is the main part of the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for sensory perception, thinking, and speech.

Tatiana Chernigovskaya: I will add that if there is something that the brain cannot do, it is to stop learning. Learning does not start at the desk or at the blackboard, it happens absolutely at every moment. I am constantly learning. I want to relax for a second. But no way.