Epilogue

It just learns …

—Geoffrey Hinton, (2019)

Today’s learner is the singularity child with exponential potential. The world of learning and teaching has shifted dramatically since 2000. It will change even more dramatically in the next five years. By comparison, the brain of a human infant born in 20,000 BC had the same potential as any infant born up to 1990 (125). Twenty thousand years ago, the child would have some language, no science, no understanding of computers. Yet, she survived. Place that pre-historic infant into today’s world and she could play multi-player video games, stream movies on her device, read, write, and think in as abstract a fashion as any child. The brain is amazing!

Since the 1990s, large-scale advances in neuroscience research have brought the human brain into areas of everyday life that seemed unprecedented just a few years earlier. It began with the Library of Congress and the National Institute of Mental Health bringing a new focus to the study of neuroscience, which became known as the Decade of the Brain. Accordingly, several initiatives came out of that period that testify to the excitement around “a deeper understanding of human brain organization and function (136).”

Initiatives include the Human Brain Project, the Human Connectome Project, the BRAIN Initiative, and the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study. Because much of this work is made available on the web, teachers, guardians, and students are able to access detailed images and ideas that heretofore were simply not available outside certain rarified ivied halls in the academy.

The human brain weighs about 3 pounds and is responsible for everything from managing a person’s blood pressure to riding a bike. It does this through a series of complex neural networks that send and receive information through electro-chemical messengers. Machines can do this also. Geoffrey Hinton, winner of the Turing Prize 2019, describes how he was able to achieve infinite capacity with “deep learning” by emulating the human brain.

Learning science together with neuroscience can achieve the same kind of success in tomorrow’s schools. We don’t need the machine. We have teachers. Our students shouldn’t be programmed either. With a neural perspective, teachers know it’s all about changing a child’s neural connections. In Hinton’s own words he cast a challenging shadow over pedagogy …

When we foster children in learning spaces, with no labeling, no stratification—learning is natural and real. The brain takes over. Every child is neurobiological in the learning space—hardwired to learn. Each brain makes connections, myelinates, and floods the synapse with appropriate neurotransmitters so that the student wants more. The human brain has trillions upon trillions of connections. Learning is what we do best.

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
3.238.228.191