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Overview

Many children don’t want to go to school because education systems have failed them. The problem isn’t with the curriculum or exam reform, but something much more fundamental.

The author believes that education has failed because teachers don’t have a good understanding of how the brain works.

The following are key points about how we learn and remember things. These also look at the way intelligence has been misunderstood in the past, as well as examining new teaching methodologies that can be applied to make better learners. These ideas aren’t just useful for young people; they’re applicable to adults too, particularly teachers who want to improve their skillset and continue learning throughout their lives.

In this passage, you will learn why our brains don’t like to think; how the Dutch military’s average IQ increased over a 30-year period; and how we can improve teaching without spending money on expensive smartboards.

Big Idea #1: Humans aren’t actually that good at thinking, but we are pretty great at pattern recognition.

Teenagers are often stereotyped as being addicted to the internet, playing silly games and not using it for educational purposes. This is unfair because they have different brains from adults, who can think more clearly than teenagers. We should learn about how their brain works so we don’t judge them unfairly. Their brains like to do things that require less thinking, such as looking at pictures or playing games on the internet.

The human brain is naturally inclined to avoid hard thinking. It’s slow and energy-intensive, so it was more important for our ancestors to focus on other tasks that were more relevant in their time. As a result, humans are better at seeing and moving than computers. For example, though a $5 calculator can do math faster than most people can, no computer can walk along the beach like we could.

So, our brains don’t like to engage in serious thinking. We do, however, have a knack for pattern spotting and recognition. This is because this skill enables us to quickly interpret situations by comparing them with what we’ve seen before rather than having to spend precious energy on thinking every time we encounter them.

Infants learn language by recognizing patterns. They instinctively connect certain sounds with situations and objects, like “mom” or “dad.” The same way they spot the pattern of saying good-bye when someone leaves, infants recognize that a specific sound is associated with different things. Memory helps us use this pattern recognition to avoid overloading our brains.

Big Idea #2: Humans have two equally important types of memory.

Imagine if, each time you chopped an onion, you had to figure it out anew. You’d have to hold the knife at a certain angle and cut in a specific place. Luckily, your brain has developed this way so that you can use what worked in the past when dealing with similar problems.

There are two types of memory. Working memory is a form of consciousness, and it receives information from our environment. It’s used for temporary storage, like memorizing phone numbers or counting how many onions have been chopped.

Working memory is limited in capacity. It can only hold or process seven items at a time. However, there’s an upside to this limit because it prevents us from having to remember every phone number we’ve ever seen.

Only some of the items in working memory get transported to long-term memory. Long-term memory is where the brain stores information, but without us necessarily being conscious of it. The transfer only happens if the information is considered important enough. A nice analogy for long-term and working memories are computer RAM chips and hard drives. RAM, or Random Access Memory, is where machines store information necessary to run processes, but for no longer than that. On the other hand, hard drives store really important data permanently since humans’ memories are such efficient systems for processing and storing information; early computer scientists actually took human brains as their model when designing computers!