It seemed only fitting to write the first article on a topic that really changed my mind, literally!
The revelation that when you learn something, physical changes take place in your brain should give us all a great sense of liberation. Sharing this discovery has the potential to encourage and enthuse learners to approach learning with a more positive attitude. The motivational gains that arise when we engage in a learning situation can potentially increase confidence in even the most daunting of learning challenges. In future articles I will try to describe some of the key themes I have read from cognitive psychologists and learning designers about this topic. Exploring how we, as learning designers can communicate this key message when designing learning. Could we influence learners’ attitudes when they approach a learning challenge? Or even change their mind on how they perceive their own intelligence?
My Dad once shared some old wisdom with me: “If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right”. I had always thought this to be a great little quip to give me motivation and to encourage me to be positive about my capabilities. Later, I came across the quote again in Make it Stick (2014) only this time as I read it in a different context, I gained the additional insight that this also referred to the scientific discovery that the brain physically changes as you think and learn by restructuring and creating new neurological pathways. The references in Make it Stick led me to grab a copy of Dr Carol Dweck’s book: Mindset (which is in my pile of books to read) where this quote may have come from (although an internet search identifies Henry Ford as the originator). Dweck’s studies suggest that our intelligence is not fixed at birth, but instead has the capability to increase. This is because our brains are in fact mutable, because of neuroplasticity.
I am in no way scientific or medical and so I take all this at face value, nodding my head in agreement and wonder as I read these insights. My crude mental image of this idea is from the CGI that often depicts the brain as organic circuitry with flashes of light. But it is useful to picture these wires or neural pathways, connecting and enabling the pulsating lights to whiz along. Synapses are formed between the neurons, allowing the messages to pass, and as we make learning more robust (discussed in a future article) we make these pathways thicker and stronger, increasing the ability to recall the learning in the future. I hope one day a neuroscientist can explain this to me and correct all my mistakes! But this idea really helped me to get very excited about the fact that we have the power to develop and improve our brains.
I will be revisiting this topic many times I am sure, and after reading Carol Dweck’s Mindset I may have to rewrite this post. I want to end with the powerful ideas taken from Brown et al (2014) that our intelligence is largely in our own hands and that through effortful learning we physically make new connections in our brain, and over time this makes us smarter. The more we do, the more we can do. If you want to become an expert, you probably can. (Brown et al (2014) Make it Stick, p199).