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Your Learning Brain:
What Neuroscientists Know

If you understand how your brain works, you will be a more astute user of learning 4.0 because you will know why some of the learning 4.0 practices work and be able to improvise your own methods. Thanks to your brain:

• Your eyes, ears, skin, nose, and taste buds take in and make sense out of information in your environment.

• When there are dangers or surprises, your adrenaline kicks in and you take quick action.

• You can find the information you need, even on a messy desk or through networks at work or socially.

• You can turn tasks that were hard to learn into habits that take less energy (think tying your shoes).

• You wake up in the morning with new ideas and solutions to yesterday’s problems.

• You go beyond your own abilities by creating and using tools and technology to help find solutions to difficult tasks.

• You discipline yourself to follow a plan or a goal, even when tempted to do something else or just be lazy.

• Most amazing and magical of all, you are aware of yourself; you even talk to yourself while you do all of this.

You are made to learn. But how does it happen? How does your brain work? And how can you use it to learn better?

Brain science is a particularly hot topic today, thanks in part to new research and technologies (such as fMRI) that let you see what is happening inside your brain as you learn. We are just beginning to understand how the amazing brain-body-mind partnership works, and theories sometimes conflict. Learning 4.0 takes advantage of this emerging knowledge by shaping 4.0 learning practices. When you know how your brain works, you can improvise your own learning techniques. Improvisation and imagination are important qualities of a 4.0 learner.

Use your imagination as you read this chapter. Imagine yourself on an adventure inside your brain. Prepare to go behind what you see every day in the mirror.

Start as a 4.0 learner starts: by thinking about the questions you want answered as you go inside yourself as a learner. Get ready to be curious, feel wonder at the vast capabilities inside you, and become more confident because you know you have more capacity than you ever imagined.

Your Senses: Letting the Outside World In

First take an imaginary spin around your senses—your eyes, ears, nose, skin, mouth, and taste buds. As you quickly circle these amazing receptors, appreciate the richness and variety of their capacity to monitor and bring the world that’s out there to you.

Realize that your ability to learn is grounded in your senses and your physical body—you learn with your whole body. And 4.0 learning takes advantage of this because you deliberately make learning as multisensory as possible and create multisensory visions of yourself in the future. This creates multiple paths for later remembering.

While you are thinking about how your senses keep you connected with the world around you, there is a brain quirk to be aware of. Your brain is not a neutral observer. Centuries ago, Plato said that what we see is always ourselves projected on the world—much of what we see “out there” is coming from “in here.”¹ Neuroscience supports this view. As David Eagleman, science host of the television series The Brain, says, “We don’t perceive things as they are but as we are.”²

Because your filters are usually unconscious, you may miss or resist opportunities to acquire 4.0 learning practices that help you see beyond your own biases. This is important to understand because you don’t want to get trapped in your own assumptions while the world changes around you.

Your Brain Network’s Parts and Particles

This is a good time to remind yourself that your daily choices (eating, sleeping, exercise, positive and negative thoughts and emotions, choice of environment, attention, and so forth) affect everything that’s going on inside you. If your biological systems are not working well, they can create stress and detract attention and energy away from your ability to learn.

You are a very complex organism, and the majority of how you work is automatic, directed or supported in some way by your brain—the most complex organ on the planet. Most people take it for granted and know little about it. Even scientists who spend their lives studying the brain admit that they know very little. But take this opportunity to explore some of what we know about how your brain works so that you can use it better when you learn.

Your Neurons: Underlying the Learning You

As your imagination travels inward past your senses and through your brain’s protective layers of bone, membranes, and brain-cushioning fluid, realize that many very tiny cells are at the heart of your ability to learn. These are your nerve cells (neurons). You have about 90 billion of them. Neurons have tiny bodies that contain your DNA and do the processing that keeps them alive, and tails (some as much as a meter long) that carry messages to other neurons that may be anywhere in your brain or body.

Each neuron lives in a specific part of your brain or nervous system, receiving electrochemical signals from thousands of other neurons through thousands of little branches (dendrites) that reach across tiny spaces called synapses. When you learn, the structure of these little branches changes because of the electrochemical activity in the synapses.³ Then the changes are communicated to other neurons along 90,000 miles or more of insulated nerve fiber channels.

On a physical level, neurons and their connections and communication routes are your ultimate learning target. But early-stage neuron changes are not very stable—something has to happen to support and strengthen them. Master learners know this and take actions like those you will learn in part 2 to help stabilize and sustain their learning.

It’s a busy place inside your brain. Think about it—90 billion neurons, many with tails a meter long, making 100 trillion connections. This amazing, tightly packed, extremely complex network of neurons is the focus of a lot of brain science today, and is called the connectome.⁴ And it’s always changing—like right now, as you learn about your brain!

As you can imagine, your connectome uses a lot of energy. And, because a high concentration of neurons resides in the thinking, conscious—front—part of your brain, deliberate activities like learning take special effort. The practices and tools in this book recognize that your conscious learning brain consumes a lot of energy: They will help you manage the energy your learning requires.

So, if you are going to learn, your neurons and their connections must change in some way. The connections that are already in your brain are helpful here. Your brain can pull what you already know from your memory so you don’t have to learn everything from scratch. Imagine what happens when people who are blind or deaf from birth are suddenly able to see or hear. The world will make no sense to them until they build up connections between the multiple, initially meaningless, sight and sound tapestries around them.

Your ready-made connections are a learning asset, but they can also be a learning liability. As you get older, it may take a bit longer to sort through your brain’s existing connections to file something away or remember something. Some of those connections support very entrenched habit patterns that may not serve you well anymore. In addition, your brain naturally projects past experiences and assumptions onto your current reality. This means you may find yourself watching a movie created in your past instead of seeing what’s in front of you. For example, if you meet an old high school friend, you may focus solely on what is familiar about her. When you project your past assumptions onto today, it’s easy to say, “There is nothing new here.” Unless you are aware of this brain distortion, you’ll miss how your friend has changed since high school, when your initial view was formed.

Appreciate your brain and its billions of neurons and trillions of connections that are ready to support your learning right now! And feel confident that you have more than enough capacity inside you to shape and succeed in your learning and life.

It is utterly amazing, and it is all part of you!

The Bigger Parts and Regions of Your Brain

Each of your neurons has many thousands of connections and is part of a network vastly more complex than the Internet or even the galaxies. But your neurons also live in specific areas of the brain. If you know more about these parts you will be better able to manage your learning habits so you can choose and use the right learning techniques.

Your Cortex

The first thing you notice on this part of your journey is your cerebral cortex—the gray matter that covers the folded and convoluted mass (the cerebrum) that you see in most pictures of the brain. Mammals have a cortex; other creatures don’t. Your cortex is very thin (a 10th of an inch) and has more layers of neurons than in other mammals. Those additional layers are called your neocortex. They are thought to support a lot of your more complicated conscious brain work, which makes them important for your deliberate learning. Your cortex contains 20 percent of all your neurons, and even though your brain is only 2 percent of your total body weight, it uses 20 percent of your energy. Researchers believe your neocortex consumes half of that brain energy.

How your brain works and how its parts work together are still big mysteries. It receives, processes, and integrates information from your senses and directs a lot of your behavior. But it does most of this work without your conscious attention. (There is no way you could consciously control 90 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections, any more than an executive in any organization can control the behavior of all the people in it!)

If everything you do were run by your automatic system, you wouldn’t want or need a book about learning. But your brain has mechanisms to override your automatic and habitual behavior and help you adapt to and shape the world around you. Many of these mechanisms are unique to humans (and, to a lesser extent, to apes).

Most important to your special abilities as a human is the front part of your brain—your prefrontal cortex. It contains the densest connections (the connectome at work!) with other parts of your brain, which makes it possible for you to manage yourself and to override your automatic behavior when hormones, excessive emotional reactions, or even habits want to take over! Electrical activity in that part of your brain sparks when you take more conscious control by planning, thinking critically, creatively solving problems, innovating, using self-control and will power, and acting for long-term benefit while sacrificing the short term.

Because it is a control center for conscious activity, your prefrontal cortex is the key to guiding learning 4.0 behavior. You use it to direct your attention and your learning process. You draw on its resources to set yourself up for success and control distractions that other parts of your brain may be drawn to. Your prefrontal cortex is a heavy energy user, though. So as a 4.0 learner you need to direct your learning knowing that you have an energy-management challenge. And you should find ways to both stimulate and minimize energy, put yourself into energy-efficient learning flows, use sleep, and strategically draw on natural brain chemicals (see chapters 9 and 10 for more).

The Hippocampus: The Home of Your Short-Term Memory

To find additional parts of the brain that are important to your learning, you have to travel deeper into your brain. So, move your imagination to the place scientists think is your memory’s first port of call: your hippocampus. This seahorse-shaped part of the brain works very closely with your neocortex when you are deliberately learning.⁵ The hippocampus is like what’s on your computer screen before you save it to your files. It is your working memory—the place where you first process new information before it gets stored someplace else in your brain.

Your hippocampus also plays an important role in storing and finding memories later. It is like an Internet search service: indexing, storing, combining, and retrieving information. Many scientists think that the hippocampus codes and indexes memory bits, helps them move to various storage places in your brain, and then finds and reconfigures the bits into meaningful memories when you call for them.

Your Thalamus: A Busy Relay Station

This part of your brain receives electrochemical signals from your senses and sends them to the appropriate parts of your cortex, which then turn the signals into the sounds, images, and feelings you experience. During this process, the information from your senses mixes with information already in your brain. The result is that what is moving around in your brain or landing in your hippocampus is not exactly the reality outside you. Be alert to how your own stored memories are influencing your learning behaviors, even as you take the information in.

Your thalamus also regulates your sleep and wakefulness, so it plays a big role in attention, which is one of the most important success factors in learning.

Your Amygdala: An Emotion Center

The next stop on this part of your inner-brain journey is this walnut-shaped emotional center. Your amygdala helps you recognize threatening situations, attaches emotional interpretations to events and thoughts, and helps you react fast to crises and danger. It usually gets visual, auditory, and other sense information from your thalamus. But in threat situations, it receives direct signals through a faster channel that bypasses the normal senses-to-cortex pathways.

Your amygdala is right next to your hippocampus (the place where your new memories initially land). This means that emotions will inevitably affect what you learn and how you learn and recall it. Your amygdala colors many of your memories with emotional overtones and plays a role in prioritizing your memories for storage; for example, you will be more likely to remember things that help you stay safe or that are associated with good or bad feelings. There is some evidence that your amygdala stores memories that are connected with fearful situations. This may explain why it is hard to unlearn these kinds of memories! Your amygdala is also the target of advertisers, politicians, and others who want to influence or even control your behavior. A 4.0 learner recognizes amygdala hijacking when it occurs.

Your Claustrum and Insula: Missing Links?

Before leaving this tour of your brain, stop to appreciate two of its more unusually mysterious parts: the claustrum and insula. They may hold the answer to the most burning question in neuroscience and psychology: How do physical parts like neurons, synapses, the cortex, and so forth translate into consciousness and self-awareness? That is, how can something physical (neurons, chemicals, brain parts) produce something intangible and subjective (your awareness). Currently nobody can answer this, and the laws of physics don’t seem to apply!

One brain part that may be the link between the what (physical) of you and the who (mental, spiritual) of you is your claustrum, a thin sheet stuck under your cortex deep in your brain. It is unique because it seems to simultaneously give and receive input from everywhere in the brain. It also seems to bring various inputs together in some bigger orchestration, perhaps creating what you experience as consciousness. If this is true (and this is a controversial area in neuroscience), the claustrum may be a kind of internal missing link. Does it hold a key to understanding how biological parts create consciousness and our awareness of ourselves? Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, called the claustrum the “Neuronal Super Hub” and spent his last days trying to understand it.⁶

Another interesting part of your brain that seems to play a big role in consciousness—especially feelings and social interactions—is your insula. This part of your cortex is folded deeply into your brain, and seems to affect your ability to empathize and to recognize, feel, and act on emotions. It is part of what makes your brain appreciate and participate in social learning. Like the claustrum, it may be the key to a larger integration, possibly of your entire emotional and social landscape.

Undoubtedly, someday we’ll know more about how the claustrum and insula work and what they do. Can they turn the physical activities of your brain into thoughts and feelings? In that case, they are very important for your most difficult learning challenges. For now, it’s mind-boggling just to know that your brain is designed to make all these complex associations and connections that are the physical basis of you.

Your Chemicals and Waves

Chemicals and electrical waves also influence your learning success. When you know something about what they do and how they are triggered, you can design a learning approach that works for you, whether you are working toward a long-term goal or just trying to get something out of a 30-minute mobile course or game or conversation.

Your Brain Chemicals

Your body contains and creates more than 100 chemicals! Let’s look at a few you should be aware of in your 4.0 learner role.

Adrenaline helps you stay alert by releasing the brain energizing nutrient glucose. It also helps make your neurons’ memory traces stronger. However, it can be addictive and depleting. (I’m sure you’ve heard of adrenaline junkies.)

Your system unleashes dopamine—a motivating “feel good” chemical—when you achieve goals, satisfy a curiosity, or are surprised in any way. That rush of dopamine helps keep you motivated so you can continue working.

Endorphins are also important for feeling good. When high endorphin levels are present, you feel a general sense of well-being, which creates a receptive environment for learning. Aerobic exercise is a good way to increase your endorphins.

Another chemical that increases when you are with others or learning in teams is oxytocin. When you are bonding with other people and feeling empathy and connection, that’s oxytocin at work. It creates good feelings that you can use to help you keep learning, which is one reason to consider learning with others.

Then there is cortisol, the stress hormone. It keeps you on your toes in reaction to a threat, an anxiety, or a fear (including the perceived threat of a test). But it is generally damaging to your learning. While a small dose of it can help focus your attention and store memories, too much of it interferes with retrieving memories. Cortisol may help you prepare for a test, but will also make it difficult to take it! Cortisol stays in your system for hours, and too much of it over an extended period leads to chronic stress, which damages your neurons, the networks in your prefrontal cortex, and your amygdala. So, remember that this stress hormone affects your executive mental functions as well as your emotional health, both of which are important for your learning!

Is there a way to reduce the damage from stress? The answer is yes. There is a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) that works in the synapses of your neurons, where the changes that support your learning occur. BDNF strengthens your neurons’ electrical charge and even helps them grow more branches to encode your learning.⁷ How do you stimulate your cells to produce this amazing asset for your learning? Through physical exercise! You can do anything from two- to three-minute sprints to longer exercise periods to stimulate BDNF production. Another big reason to keep moving!

Your Electrical Waves

When your neurons fire, they create electrical waves that operate at different frequencies. Several wave patterns are usually operating at one time, but the dominant waves change throughout your day. These waves affect your learning, but you can influence them by using specific techniques that you will learn in part 2. For now, just know that one of your jobs as a 4.0 learner is to try to match your brain waves to your current learning stage and challenge. Let’s look at the main brainwaves, arranged from lowest to highest wave frequencies (number of wave cycles per second):

• Your slowest brain waves are infra-low. They are like the deepest water layer in the ocean—providing a stable base for higher brain functions. They are so slow (one wave every two seconds) that current equipment has a hard time tracking them.

• Ratchet up the energy levels and you arrive at another low-energy delta wave state (a half to three waves per second). You want to have long periods of delta when you are sleeping because that’s when your body most restores itself.

• Theta waves (four to seven waves per second) use more energy. They operate in the space between awake and sleep, and seem to be important for information’s transition into memory. Theta is also active when you are dreaming. (This is very important for learning because dreams are a time when there is no conscious control, but memories are consolidated.) When you are learning something and time seems to disappear, you are probably in a theta state (some say you are in flow).

• Alpha waves (eight to 12 waves per second) are active when you are relaxed but focused on what is happening right now, in the present moment. Because these waves seem to border conscious and unconscious states, they are often the target of meditation and mindfulness activities. These waves are also associated with higher creativity.

• Your beta waves are dominant as you solve problems and go about your daily work. They operate in a broad range of wave cycles (between 13 and 30 firings per second). They are slower when you are just exploring something, and faster when you are in complex thought and trying to integrate diverse information.⁸ Caffeine seems to stimulate these waves.

• Gamma waves fire fastest (31 to 120 waves per second). These recently discovered waves appear when you are concentrating especially hard or doing very complicated mental and emotional tasks. They also seem to be there when you have bursts of insight, which is something that makes us special as humans.

While we don’t fully understand the role of all these waves in learning, it’s clear that different wave frequencies correspond to different kinds of brain processes. For example, when you are in a flow state of high-intensity learning, your waves are at the edge of alpha and theta. Additional mystery surrounds the slowest (infra-low) and fastest (gamma) waves. Like the claustrum and insula, these extreme-end waves may relate in an important way to higher consciousness and therefore to more learning potential. Better understanding them may help us better cope with the complex and fast-changing learning environments we are in today and continue to create. Updates to learning 4.0 will undoubtedly include ways to stimulate more of these waves. So, stay tuned to more discoveries here. In the meantime, the practices in this book will help you influence your brain-wave state.

Being a 4.0 learner starts with appreciating your brain’s resources. Now that you know more about some of your brain parts, chemicals, and waves, and what they’re for, it’s time to learn a bit more about how your brain operates when you are learning.

Two Processing Systems for Life and Learning

How do all these parts work together? For a start, it’s useful to distinguish two major modes of brain work: automatic and conscious. On one hand, a lot of the work to keep you alive and adapting moment to moment is done automatically and unconsciously (your automatic system). On the other hand, you have immense capacity to direct what you do (your conscious system)—even if it means overriding what’s automatic.

Your Automatic System

Most of what you do is automatic. Neuroscientist David Eagleman puts it this way: “The brain runs its show incognito” most of the time.⁹ What you do and how you react is usually habitual, routine, and programmed with the embedded knowledge from thousands of years of evolution and your own life experience. “Automatic” is your brain’s oldest, most developed, and—in many situations—preferred way to operate. Some scientists think it takes less energy to run on automatic, and that the brain’s goal is to keep it that way

Your automatic system acts fast and it takes over when you face unfamiliar or threatening situations. For example, you will automatically swerve your car when a deer jumps onto the road. You may have a flash of conscious thought, but your reaction is mostly automatic! (This is a good thing, because your automatic system processes this kind of information fast enough to save your life.)

When you are learning, your automatic system will first turn to familiar interpretations and habits, for it doesn’t like to spend much time in deliberate thought. Rather, it relies on previous knowledge, emotions and heuristics (rules you’ve developed from experience), and programming from eons of human evolution. These shape, or bias, your actions. When you learn you may want to examine and change some of this earlier programming.

Some of your automatic actions are a reward for many years of practice and learning: playing a sport, coordinating logistics, playing the guitar, running a well-designed meeting, flying an airplane, stocking a shelf for best marketing exposure, playing chess, or finding and fixing a computer problem are some examples. In cases like these, what you do may be very complex or have a hidden logic. Observers may think you are a born “genius.” But, because you worked hard to earn this deeper expertise, what you do is simply routine and automatic for you. While others look on in amazement, you achieve what looks difficult with little effort of your own.

Your automatic system is a huge ally in consolidating learning. Once you’ve started to learn something, your automatic system can help you process and store the new information. If you’ve concentrated in the first place, then while you do other things, including sleep, your automatic system continues to process and file what you’ve learned.

There is something else to know about your automatic system: It uses sleep to help you learn. Imagine yourself resting in a deep sleep while parts of your brain busily do a number of things in your mental underground: clearing paths; strengthening, connecting, and reconnecting neurons; sending what’s in your short-term memory (hippocampus) to the neocortex for long-term filing. All this can happen in sleep because your conscious system is temporarily offline and not taking in new information.

While some of this automatic brain work happens as you go about your normal day, much of it happens while you’re sleeping. To get these benefits, there must be something new in your short-term memory for your sleeping brain to process. And you need to sleep long and restfully enough to get these benefits—much of your memory storing and consolidation seems to happen your last few hours of a seven-hour sleep.¹⁰ For this to happen, your automatic system needs the support of your conscious system to make sure you get enough sleep!

Your Conscious System

Your conscious system oversees your thoughts and deliberate actions. With it, you set and pursue goals that you wouldn’t achieve if you stayed on automatic. You use your conscious system when you solve complex and unique problems and imagine alternate futures and ways to get there. You also use it to control and override automatic reactions, biases, and emotions that aren’t appropriate for the situation or that will have negative future consequences. It is within your conscious system that you make the hard choices and judgments.

You use your conscious system for learning when you set agendas and scan for the best information and help; when you direct and focus your attention on what you want to learn; when you use deliberate learning techniques; when you replace old habits and routines with new ones; and when you make changes in your environment that support new behaviors. Use it to sustain your attention and energy for long-haul learning and difficult habit changes.

Your conscious system also helps prime, and even program, your automatic system to support and consolidate your learning while you sleep and do other things. Then, in the best learning situations, your conscious system can ensure that you draw on both!

Your conscious system uses the same physical resources as your automatic system—all your brain and body’s resources. And while it relies on your automatic system, it also has the ability to override and even change what is automatic. This is something you do when you learn: You deliberately focus your senses and thought processes on your learning agenda. With extra training, you can even influence what your neurons, chemicals, and brain waves do.

Your Learning Brain, in Brief

In this chapter, you’ve traveled inward to explore your learning brain. You discovered that neurons and their connections are where learning is encoded. You saw that although parts of your brain specialize in specific functions, it works as a connectome—a network filled with cross communication.

You briefly explored some parts of the brain that are important targets for 4.0 learning practices:

• senses (your connections with the world)

• cortex and neocortex (executive functions that drive and store learning)

• hippocampus (early memory formation, and later indexing and retrieval)

• thalamus (the information relay station)

• amygdala (an emotion processor that picks up emotional tones and colors and humanizes information)

• claustrum and insula (integrating and transforming physical impulses into consciousness).

And you saw the role that chemicals and waves play in supporting learning and moods around learning.

Finally, you learned that two information processing systems are at work inside you: Your automatic system runs most of the show, and you use your conscious system for deliberate work like overriding habits and knee-jerk reactions, mobilizing attention, and guiding behavior and learning in a purposeful way.

Being a 4.0 learner means taking charge of both your conscious and automatic systems, and supporting your entire body in the learning process. But from what perspective do you take charge? Something else is steering your conscious actions. It is your bigger you. To understand it, we leave the realm of biologists and brain scientists and enter the world of psychologists, philosophers, and mystics. They are the ones struggling to answer questions like, who is this bigger you? Who is the you who has unique aspirations and interests, the you who is on a totally unique life path, and the you who uses your amazing brain?

That’s the focus of the next chapter.