What is learning? Give me the basics!

(12 min read)

Or listen to the podcast…

This is a great question, and the full answer would fill several books. But here we go – an attempt to distil the very basics of what we know about the brain, memory and learning to a few key messages.

Learning is an incredibly complex process. At a neurological level we don’t actually know a great deal, yet. But being able to form memory is critical to survival – of any animal – to adapt to changing environmental demands. It always has been, and will be, a hot topic for research.

Learning is much more than just memory.

Within this intricate neural network, there are at least eight distinct systems whose interplay produces that thing we call ‘learning’.

These systems include:

1. Episodic memory. These are the processes that bank specific events or episodes. Your first day at school, or when you got married.
   
   Or when you and your siblings borrowed your father’s car to see if it could go down a near-vertical field (it couldn’t, and the farmer-rescuer then towed it into the gatepost).

2. Then there’s conceptual learning – the brain’s ability to draw out patterns and themes from different systems. Most school learning is this.
   
   You don’t need to remember what your teacher was wearing, what the weather was like or who you sat next to when you first learned about photosynthesis- you just need to be able to remember the concepts – the key parts pertinent to the topic. It’s a very sophisticated process.

3. Conditioning: when the brain reacts to a stimulus automatically – Pavlov rang a bell each time he fed his dogs. Eventually, the dogs salivated upon hearing the bell, even when there was no food in sight. Conditioning involves parts of the emotional centre in the limbic system. A bit like when someone’s phone pings and everyone starts subconsciously patting their pockets mid-sentence.

4. The control system: the prefrontal cortex sits behind the forehead and acts like an executive, choosing which specific systems need activating or deactivating in order to carry out a task. It also communicates with the limbic system, so that our emotions are integrated in the plan or goal. (In another article I’m going to write about stress and the prefrontal cortex system).
   
   You know when you go to the kitchen for something, but have no idea what? You’re standing by the fridge, wondering why. Well, the control system has told you to go there. But the part of the brain that remembered it was for the milk has forgotten.

5. Reward-based learning: the celebrity of neurotransmitters (and the one most frequently misunderstood thanks to all the ‘McNeuroing’ of, well, everything) is dopamine.
   
   The dopamine system is responsible for making you go back and have just one more chocolate, even when you know that you have already eaten too many, and actually you don’t even like them anymore.
   
   Converse to popular misconception, dopamine is not a ‘pleasure’ chemical. Instead, it is a signal for how desirable an outcome is – it is a motivating chemical, that drives us to achieve something. It influences pleasure-seeking behaviour, not pleasure itself.

6. Procedural memory: this is that near-miraculous ability to perform frequent and often unconscious activities. They take a lot of time to perfect. Reading takes hundreds of hours to be proficient.
   
   This is the premise of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers – after ten thousand hours anyone can be expert at something (the number of hours put into a skill, like playing the piano or swimming always trumps any natural innate ‘talent’. Angela Duckworth’s book Grit says something similar. The plodders, who put in the hours, emerge as leaders in their field).
   
   Each time the action is performed, looping outer-to-inner circuits connect the cortex to inner structures, like the basal ganglia and the thalamus.

7. Learning from observation – watching your child do the ‘floss’ dance and being able to have a good stab at it. Not at all embarrassing for them to watch.

8. Learning by following instructions – We can produce a fairly decent meal that we’ve never cooked before by following a recipe.

So what, or where, is memory?

This is one of the things that I think is so miraculous about learning: the information held in the brain exists between the actual neurons themselves; in the connections.

It is physical. It’s not like a computer system.

The making of memories happens in three stages: acquisition (or encoding), consolidation and recall. Acquisition and recall happen when we’re awake.

But consolidation, where information is embedded into long-term memory, can only happen when we sleepⁱ. That’s when it’s moved from where it is acquired, to where its stored, out in the cortex.

So, when a child learns about photosynthesis, it’s is first incorporated as an episodic memory in the hippocampus which then needs to be refined and linked with previous knowledge about plants or energy, and the irrelevant parts discarded (conceptual learning). The ‘photosynthesis’ information then shifts outwards to the cortex as part of semantic memory.

The knowledge physically moves when your child is asleep. Teachers have very little influence over how much sleep a child has, so even if they produce stunning lessons, aligned with how the brain likes to learn, with all the right ingredients in place, they can still be scuppered by 2am Fortnite sessions.

And you thought that was complex? Well, its only the beginning…

The brain’s priorities

The brilliant Professor Michael Thomas, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Birkbeck, is the Director of the Centre for Educational Neuroscience. He’s also been very kind to me over the years and patiently answered my questions at the end of his fascinating talks about neuroscience, learning and the neuroscience of poverty. I went to see him last year to discuss the content of our not-for-profit schools programme, which translates findings from educational neuroscience and cognitive psychology into something the teachers can do in their classrooms the following day.

One of the gems of wisdom I picked up was that the brain has a ‘priority’ list of behaviours – things it is compelled to act on.

First, movement: brains evolved to allow movement. Things that don’t move, don’t have brains. Trees don’t have brains; neither do jellyfish (they have a primitive nervous system, but not a brain. They’re also thought to be the oldest multicellular organism, so from a survival perspective, perhaps brains are overrated).

Walking or running, or playing sport even, are about the most complex and sophisticated movements on earth: no robot will ever be able to propel itself round a hockey pitch or tennis court whilst manipulating a stick or bat to control a ball.

In the classroom, movement can include fiddling, or even focusing eyes on text.

Secondly, socialisation: we are socio-emotional beings. This is an evolutionary tactic that allows us to live in complex social groups – the fact that we give birth to big-headed, helpless babies, means that without a social group, humans would be unlikely to survive. You can’t cart your newborn baby around whilst hunting, or even gather roots and berries if you’ve just given birth.

This preoccupation with socialising will prioritise anything relating to relationships – friends, boyfriends and girlfriends, an invite to a party.

We’ve evolved to survive as a result of our mastery of social living.

Thirdly, emotion: Any input to our brain first passes through the limbic system; a group of structures that perceive emotion. It is only after it has been checked for potential threat that it then passes to the cortex – the outer layer of the brain where many the things that set us apart as being human happen. This means we can react to things before we’re even consciously aware of them.

If there is any hint of a threat to safety, or your position in the social order of things, then these concerns will dominate. It could be as simple as forgetting your homework for the lesson you’ve just sat down in. Or that your parents had a horrible argument that morning.

Learning becomes harder when we are worried.

So when does learning happen?

After the other priorities are in stasis. Be it learning to read, multiplication or the nitrogen cycle, the brain will only focus on this once the other three needs are satisfied.

If we provide our children with opportunities to move, help them to have a happy and healthy social life, and teach them about emotional wellbeing, we provide the foundation for learning. The same goes for us!

I’ve recently been involved in the repurposing of a learning space – ripping out the now defunct IT suite and turning it into something that more closely resembles the environments our children will be working in as adults. Having room for the students to move around is a key feature.

How do you balance these needs with learning? What works for you? Please do share and comment; I’d love to hear from you.

(PS: Just to return to the Dad/car story: I’d just like to document that my elder brother took the full blame, and my father didn’t even raise an eyebrow. I am still in awe of them both).

i^ Rasch, B. and Born, J., 2013. About sleep’s role in memory. Physiological reviews.