褚嘉琦 Jiaqi Chu
四川省成都市武警警官学院
Introduction
In the past few years, neuroscience has become a popular subject which helps us human beings to understand how our physiological mechanisms work and how our brains develop. Through these studies of the neural basis of human beings, we gradually grasp useful knowledge of our brains and use them to help the individual learning behaviours become more efficiently. Based on different research within neuroscience, this article introduces the development of human beings and working process of our brains in the following three aspects. First, what kinds of roles do our brains play and what is the relationship between brains and persons. Second, the plasticity of the brain and how it effects in learning and memorizing process. Third, how emotion is quite important in helping us adapting to the social environment and guiding our logical reasoning behaviours.
All these theories have great influences in the development of pedagogy. In order to make use of neurobiological features of brain to improve learning and memorizing efficiency, more and more implications should be explored and used in the future.
Brains and persons in the neurobiological level
From the perspective of neuroscience, the brain and body are not two divided parts, indeed, they are closely associated with each other. The main and the most basic function of our brains is to maintain body metabolism. Our brains also undertake the job of supervising and regulating our physiological state so that we can maintain the most appropriate physiological state. Most of these behaviours are subconscious, such as heart beat, breath, and the working of the immune system. Although they are subconscious, they play the most important role in keeping us alive. We can say that our brains decide whether we can live or not, and what kind of physical state we are in. On another hand, our brains also have conscious control which guides our behaviours beyond biological survival. Conscious control of brain decides our thoughts, knowledge, experience, emotion and memory, which distinguishes us from other individuals and makes us become a unique person. In this sense, we can say that we are our brains. Our brains determine our lives, and once our brains stop working, our lives stop as well. This emergentist point of view is confronting to reductionism. (Sankey & Kim, 2016).
Reductionism claims that the operating mechanism of individuals starts with the person and finally goes downloads to the brain. According to Francis Crick (1994; cited in Sankey & Kim, 2016), everything which makes us who we are such as emotions, experience, knowledge can be reduced to vast nerve cells and their associated molecules. We are no more than nerve cells and neurobiological chemicals. Actually, most scientists are Reductionist. Churchland (2011; cited in Sankey, 2016) is a reductionist who researched about mammal animals, she found that individual bodies have a kind of neural oxytocin which can help individuals reduce fear and increase close interactions between social communities. Oxytocin encourages individuals to produce a series of actions, including increasing concerns to others and increasing frequency of body touch. Through these behaviours, individuals can maintain good relationships between families and friends, which could accelerate the process of socialization. Moreover, these increased actions can also promote the secretion of oxytocin in turn. This phenomenon proves that human behaviours and neurobiological foundation can accelerate and affect mutually to develop individuals. Thus, the developments of individuals are not always following the one-direction-natural laws described by the reductionist. It overturns the theory of Reductionism because once the behaviour generates, it will consistently affect the neurobiological foundation and the change of biological base will affect behaviours in turn. These kinds of changes will take place with individual developments and degenerations throughout the whole lifetime. This means that since we interact with the world after birth, we are impossible to return to the basic neurobiological basis. Of course, we need to admit that the neural basis of our brains provides the foundation for our growth and development. But our learning behaviours and connections with social environment enrich us and make us far more than the sum of neurobiological chemicals.
All in all, our brains are the basis of our existence. The theory which describes that we start with the person then go downloads to the brain is not entirely correct. The neurobiological basis of our brains is the foundation of human beings, but not the whole part of us.
Memory development from the neurobiological perspective
Our brains are constantly developing during the whole life time. This development is not only influenced by genetic factors but also affected by social environment. From a neurobiological perspective, the brain's ability to change constantly is called the brain plasticity. Actually, plastic changes of the brain such as obtaining fresh knowledge and remembering new information are the process of establishing new connections between the synapses and neurons in the brain. These new connections store useful information, knowledge or experience in our brain. With the development of the brain, amount of connections will increase and they will generate more and more complex neural network structure which can influence our learning and other behaviours.
In the 1950s, many research of people’s brains showed that our brains will experience a specific developing period calls “sensitive period”, which is crucial for normal development of brain and perceptivity. This period will occur soon after birth, most of it will last three years or five years. During this period, brains are more sensitive to accept environmental stimulation and generate connections between synapses and neurons (Hubel & Wiesel, 1962; cited in Choudhury, Charman, & Blakemore; 2008). From the1970s, scientists found that in some areas of the brain, the sensitive period is not only existed in early childhood, but also last for a quite long time. One typical example of brain areas which has a long sensitive time is prefrontal cortex (PFC).
However, the development of children’s brains is tortuous, and there will be a regressive phenomenon in adolescent time. During first few years in childhood, the brain keeps forming synapses and establish connections between synapses and neurons in a high speed so that the synaptic density (the number of synapses per unit volume of brain tissue) greatly exceeds adult levels. But when adolescence comes, the amount of synapses and connections will significantly decrease to the level lower than adulthood. This period is not truly a brain retrogress, in fact, the behaviour of brain to strengthen frequently used connections and eliminate infrequently used connections is to make preparation for generation of personality and character in the next stage (Huttenlocher, 1979; Woo, Pucak, Kye, Matus, & Lewis, 1997; cited in Choudhury, Charman, & Blakemore; 2008). After this period, our brains have completed the pruning of nerve cells and the reorganization of the neural network, and will enter a new stage.
From the view of dynamic systems theory, developments of brains are the process of plastic learning and memory (Sankey& Kim, 2016). At first, our brains accept new learning data and store it in short-term memory. This kind of short-term memory relies on electrical and chemical events in the brain. After constant practice or multiple repetitions, the brain can form new connections as we said before and reserve knowledge in a more stable way in long-term memory.
To explore long-term memory, we need to understand a concept of Long-term potentiation (LTP). LTP is an important form of synaptic plasticity which was discovered in the rabbit hippocampus by Terje Lomo and Tim Bliss in 1973. It is a cell model for plastic learning and memory. It describes a phenomenon that after giving a brief high-frequency stimulus to the presynaptic fibers, the synaptic transmission efficiency and intensity can increase several times and persist for several hours to a few days (Squire, & Kandel, 2000). Nowadays, LTP is still a popular topic in neurobiology and psychology. Some scientists try to explore the causal relationship between LTP and learning behaviours. Others hope to develop ways of improving learning and memory efficiency by improving LTP.
Research evidence in LTP now proved that we tend to remember things which are meaningful and salient. This discovery gave the education scholar some inspirations about teaching strategy and teaching content. We need to encourage teachers to teach meaningful so that student can learn and memorize knowledge more stable and durable
The function of emotion from the neurobiological perspective
Emotion is an important way for us to explore the world and express ourselves. In fact, emotion and thinking are closely related to each other. Emotion is a cognitive and physiological process, including both physical and mental aspects. Emotions can use the brain system to adjust physical states. For example, when we feel nervous, our emotion could change our physical behaviours like increasing heart rates and breath frequency through our brain systems. In this way, emotion can further affect our thinking (Immordino-Yang, 2011).
Education scientists believe that cognitive and emotional processes are not taking place in a vacuum, but in a social and cultural context. How people make decisions is associated with their past social experiences and cultural background. Meanwhile, research shows that human beings have specific ability to feel other persons’ emotions, then take actions and accumulate them into their own experience and knowledge. Therefore, we could say that human development and exploration of the world are generated through the series of actions—analysing current situation, comparing with pre-knowledge and experience, adjusting behaviours, learning new knowledge and accumulating experience. In this process, emotion plays a critical role.
According to an observation experiment of many prefrontal damaged children, Antonio Damasio and his team found that although the child's cognitive ability and function does not have any physical damage, which means they have entire knowledge structure in their mind, they still can not deal well with problems in a specific situation by using their pre-knowledge. The reason is that brain injuries deprive their ability to produce and perceive emotions. The absence of emotion leads to serious problems in children’s learning capacity and problem solving ability. First, as we mentioned before, learning is a process related to culture and social context. These patients could not analyse current situation correctly, associate with pre-experience, and obtain new knowledge from their mistake and experience. They lost the capacity of using emotion to guide reasoning process, and also could not interact with the social environment (Damasio，Grabowski，Frank，Galaburda，&Damasio，1994; cited in Immordino & Damasio, 2007).
Second, without emotion, people will become peace, calm and will lose their personality. “They would have no preferences, no interests, no motivation, no morality, and no sense of creativity, beauty, or purpose.”(Immordino & Damasio, 2007; cited from Damasio, 1994)
When realized that emotion plays an important role in our cognitive and learning behaviours, psychologists and educators began to consider and evaluate our current pedagogy patterns. Indeed, which part should we focus on in our school education is always a controversial topic. Traditional theories believe that enriching students' objective knowledge and improving logical reasoning ability should be the most important purpose of education.
But recent research of neuroscience shows that emotion can influence the process of learning and problem solving, especially in helping to analyse different situations, associating with knowledge and using logic to make the best choice. Therefore, some education scholars and psychologists claim that we should adjust our pedagogy pattern to pay more attention to teach students about how to make use of their emotion in learning and memorizing knowledge, as well guiding logic reasoning.
From my point of view, we need to focus more on using our emotion in learning and problem-solving in education. However, we should consider more about children’s intelligent development and learning ability in different ages. In the lower grades, learning basic knowledge is more important. With the increase of their ages, children begin to use knowledge to analysis and make logic judgments. And then, teachers can help them to use their emotion in associating with social context and guiding logic to make the best decision. Children development is a continuous and gradual process, we still need more research and exploration to help us use emotion effectively.
Conclusion
This paper introduces three main research aspects of the current popular subject--neuroscience and their application in education. In fact, the neurobiological basis of the brain and its working mechanisms are still not be understood by humans completely. With the development of science and technology, I hope that scientists will keep their paces in exploring neuroscience and achieve greater success in the future. According to existing research, we have known about the important roles that our brains played in the neurological process of learning. We have also learned that how our emotions controlled by brains help us to regulate our biological state, analyse social environment, and guide logical reasoning process. In this sense, how to use meaningful learning materials and appropriate teaching strategies to improve the children's learning efficiency and memory duration, and when to teach children to use emotions for judging and reasoning should become the direction for education scholars to explore.
References
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