Schools Changing The Way They Work The Brain?

What separates a genius from someone who has merely worked hard to get to where they are? Some might say it’s a bad hairstyle or a little social awkwardness, but a small group of cognitive scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles says that it is the ability to instantaneously grasp what kind of problem they are up against—or the gut instinct.

The same processes are taking place when a professional baseball player “reads” the pitch early or when a master chess “sees” the best move; they are just exhibiting a firm grasp of pattern-recognition. How great would this be if we could teach this pattern-recognition in schools to help our children gain a better foothold in this competitive world?

That’s exactly what this research is trying to do with its new style of teaching called perceptual learning. Instead of focusing on the principles first and then teaching children how to implement, they’re working on a more bottom-up approach.

“When facing problems in real-life situations, the first question is always, ‘What am I looking at? What kind of problem is this?’” said psychologist Philip J. Kellman. “Any theory of how we learn presupposes that we know which facts are relevant, that we know what to look for.” Therefore, by focusing so much on how to solve a problem rather than what a problem is, we’re crippling our abilities to solve problems in real life.

In fact, the vast majority of our learning happens so subtly and subconsciously that the lesson is learned well before a person knows he or she is learning. In a landmark experiment in 1997, researchers from the University of Iowa found that gamblers reported “liking” some decks better than others long before they had realized that those decks had greater losses.

Once the brain has figured out what the goal is, it tells the perceptual system to search the environment for relevant clues. It is then that researchers say, the brain is prepped to learn how to solve a problem. This sequence of learning will allow the brain to concretize the abstract theories it is processing. Implementing this new research in schools will hopefully be able to increase our children’s ability to understand the problem so efficiently that their brain will start searching for the natural, plausible answer.