The first stories about learning...

I’m going to try and tell some of the first stories about learning that you have ever heard:

 Story 1:

 Thousands of years ago, two of our hunter-gatherer ancestors – Ug-ak-u-lak and Wa-ki-cha - sat round the fire to tell stories. Wa-ki-cha had great admiration for Ug-ak-u-lak; whom he felt was a fierce and imposing hunter. Ug-ak-u-lak was also a good storyteller, acting out his story complete with facial expressions. Tonight, he told a story of how he had been hunting monkey. He was taken by surprise by a puma. He noticed how the puma’s eyes shone with an unnatural light before he pounced. He fought with the puma, the blood ran from his arm, but he prevailed. That night he ate the puma, and he shows Wa-ki-cha the animal skin.

 When Wa-ki-cha retells the story, he reconstructs it. Much of the detail is lost – but the things that moved him stay: he talks about how large and fierce Ug-ak-u-lak is, about the shock of being surprised by the predator, the ghostly shining eyes, about the bloody struggle, about how impressed he was when Ug-ak-u-lak showed him the pelt.

 A thousand years later, there is a myth of a great warrior – Ug. Ug is depicted as fierce and covered in blood and wearing the skin of a jaguar. The story goes that a mighty demon, in the form of an eight-eyed jaguar surprised him during a hunt, that they fought for two days, leaving Ug covered in blood and the jaguar dead.

 Whilst almost everything has changed, the affective elements of the story remain essentially the same– indeed the legend owes it existence to the additional emphasis added to these elements: Ug is fiercer and bloodier, the peculiarity more striking, his foe more fearsome.

 Story 2:

 Mary is annoyed that the 7:05 from Bracknell is cancelled. By the time the 7:35 arrives there are twice as many people waiting for the train.

 More people get on with each stop and by the time they get to Richmond the train is horribly overcrowded. There are shouts of ‘can you move down please!’. As the doors are closing a man carrying a latte jumps on the train. He spills some on another commuter. A heated argument ensues, escalating to the point where one of the men shoves the other hard, causing him to fall backwards into a woman with a pram. A man intervenes and two other commuters attempt to calm things down.

 When Mary arrives at work she immediately re-tells the story to Joe. She likes Joe. ‘You won’t believe my train journey today’ she begins

‘they cancelled my train, so by the time I got the 7:35 I was absolutely fuming – then it got so crowded that peoples’ faces were pressed up against the windows – we got to Twickenham and this bloke spilled his coffee all over this other bloke – I mean he was drenched! – and then they were yelling and shouting at each other –

‘Oh my God!’ says Jo ‘that sounds crazy! Did someone kick off?’

‘Yes!’ Mary continues ‘this bloke punched the other bloke and then he knocked this lady’s pram over – I mean it was just horrifying…’

‘Wow. Was there like a whole crowd of people involved?’

‘Absolutely – loads of people – they were holding this bloke back and yelling… anyway, it was complete madness.’

 In reconstructing the story, Mary uses emotional imprints, discarding details that had no especial affective significance and making predictable errors: both Richmond and Twickenham are relatively enclosed, and since they are one after the other they feel very similar (despite having very different names). She exaggerates the severity of the incident – reflecting the shock that she experienced as a witness. Her reconstruction is also influenced by her emotional state at the time of telling: She wants to impress Joe (no-one likes to tell a dull story) and he prompts her. She is not altering her memory: her recollection is always a product of past affective imprints and her current affective state.

It sounds odd to say that these may be some of the first stories about learning that you have heard – especially since many of you will work in learning – so please allow me to explain. You will have heard other stories that claim to be about learning, but really aren’t:

 The first type is ‘educational’ stories in which some people manage to memorise boring information and pass a test.

 These aren’t really stories about learning, they are stories about how you can take a system designed entirely around emotional significance and get it to store stuff which has very little emotional significance (‘boring’ in layman’s terms). We have learned some tricks for doing this – for example using anxiety generated by worrisome tests. This obviously works best if your parents are especially anxious about you passing tests, or if your teacher is a terrible bully or threatens physical violence.

 Nicer techniques involve practical exercises, real-life examples, or storytelling. If a teacher is passionate, that can make a big difference. All of these techniques work because they add emotional significance.

 My friend, the neuroscientist Dr Itiel Dror, spends a lot of time talking to groups about how we can’t really memorise things unless we attach affective significance to them. He has some lovely examples. But I continue to believe we should understand why this is so.

 The other kind of story that you will hear about learning is the scientific story. It may involve rats running mazes or pressing levers. Or impressive-looking FMRI scans with bits of the brain lighting up. These are often only stories about a very specific aspect of learning – namely the way in which positive or negative affective reactions shape our behavior. It has always struck me as odd that we didn’t acknowledge that if a creature can be operantly conditioned that the creature necessarily feels good or bad about things – rats don’t press levers for wooden pellets after all. What else could ‘aversive stimulus’ mean? Maybe it disturbs us to think that we share our basic learning mechanism with the cockroach - and that it is emotion!

 But the point is that our emotional systems don’t merely respond to ‘great’ and ‘horrible’ extremes of our experience – we have a different emotional reaction to numbers, hairstyles and colors. Some of us may feel differently about various grouting methods. So to focus on the impact of two extremes really misses the whole story. And taking pictures of our brain is about as useful as trying to understand Shakespeare via the chemical composition of the ink in his complete works.

 If we are going to reform education and understand learning we will need to look at it with fresh eyes, and tell honest stories

 Repeated Reproduction from Memory (covering Bartlett's 'War of the Ghosts' study) Cambridge University Press, Roediger, Bergman, Meade. https://psych.wustl.edu/memory/Roddy%20article%20PDF's/BC_Roediger%20et%20al%20(2000).pdf

Saul McLeod, Simply Psychology, 2010, (describing Loftus & Palmer - Eye-Witness testimony ) https://www.simplypsychology.org/loftus-palmer.html