How Our Brains Learn

Key takeaways

Engagement is a crucial factor in successful learning environments, marked by curiosity, absorption, and enthusiasm.
Personal stories and real-life connections to material can significantly enhance student engagement and understanding.
Transcendent thinking encourages students to apply their learning to broader societal contexts, promoting personal values and resilience.
Educational reform must focus on creating conditions for students to engage deeply with their learning, prioritizing understanding over compliance.
The emotional connections made within the learning process play a significant role in memory and knowledge retention.

Summary

The Importance of Engagement

The podcast opens with a reference to a famous scene from 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off,' which illustrates the profound disengagement many feel in both classroom and workplace settings. Shankar Vedanta notes that genuine engagement—characterized by absorption, alertness, and eagerness to learn—is missing in many educational and corporate environments, leading to apathy. The episode aims to explore why this disconnect is so prevalent and how to rekindle engagement in educational or organizational settings.

Understanding Engagement Through Personal Experience

Mary Helen Immordino Yang shares her personal journey through education, depicting how her own boredom in school contrasted with moments of deep engagement in self-directed learning. She emphasizes how different educational approaches can lead to varying levels of engagement, using her own experiences to underscore the complexity of motivation and interest in learning environments.

The Role of Storytelling in Engagement

The podcast discusses research conducted by Yang and her collaborator Antonio Damasio. They found that personal stories elicit strong emotional responses and can promote deeper engagement in learning. Using real-life stories, particularly those related to struggles for education like Malala Yousafzai’s, students are encouraged to connect emotionally, fostering a more profound understanding of complex ideas and transcending individual experiences.

Transcendent Thinking and Its Benefits

The concept of 'transcendent thinking' is introduced as a higher level of cognitive engagement that helps students connect their personal experiences to broader societal issues, cultivating deeper values and beliefs. Yang explains how this mode of thinking leads to greater resilience, life satisfaction, and identity development in adolescents. Examples from research highlight how students' ability to engage transcendentally enhances their understanding and well-being.

Educational Reforms to Facilitate Engagement

In the latter part of the episode, Yang advocates for a fundamental shift in educational practices to prioritize engagement over rote learning. She suggests that curricula should focus on large, compelling questions and allow for agency and self-directed inquiry. This approach encourages students to see the relevance of their studies to their lives, fostering a love for learning and deeper understanding.

Show notes

Have you ever fallen asleep in school or during a work meeting? Maybe you felt your eyes glaze over as your boss or a teacher droned on and on about a topic that had no relevance to you. What's missing from these classrooms and conference rooms is engagement: A state of being absorbed, alert, and eager to learn. This week, psychologist and neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang explores why so many of us feel apathetic at school and at work, and how to cultivate the magic of engagement.

Do you have follow-up questions or comments after listening to this episode? If you’d be willing to share your thoughts with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas@hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line “learning.” Thanks!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.