Evolutionary cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga argues that one useful way to understand the brain is as a collection of modular units each evolved to solve particular functional challenges. Let me give an example:
You’re standing on the curb ready to cross at the pedestrian lights on your way to work. The lights turn green and you start to step onto the road. Just as you step forward a flash of red in your peripheral vision causes you to step back quickly onto the curb.
Several things have happened in this scenario. Because you are familiar with the process of crossing roads and have crossed this road many times before, your brain is following a script for how to read the green light and where to walk. You do this relatively automatically, perhaps directing your attention to a podcast you’re listening to or thinking about your day ahead as you stand at the lights. When you step forward onto the road and the flash of red light is detected in your peripheral vision, another set of scripts come into play. You have learned that vehicles travel on this road and that they may approach fast and be dangerous. Your brain detects a possible danger and structures deep in the brain activate autonomic responses which cause you to jump backwards. Your heart rate is elevated, digestion is slowed, your pupils dilate and your body automatically prepares itself to respond to the threat.
Activating your “fight or flight” response in this instance was a very good idea. Although this brain system is very primitive - your response was anatomically roughly the same as that of a dog or a lizard were they to have been crossing the road beside you - jumping out of the way of a bus has clear evolutionary advantages. Inside your brain are structures which evolved to keep you safe from predators but which are still clearly functional in the modern world.
It is of course possible that the flash of red was not a bus. It might, for example, have been the reflection of a billboard on your new sunglasses. In this case you would have jumped for no good reason but you would still be alive. Over-reacting has only minor negative consequences. Under-reacting is potentially fatal.
Now consider this scenario:
You are at a football game dressed in the colours of your team, excited to have got rare tickets for this finals match. Last year your team also got into the finals and you also managed to get tickets for you and a couple of mates; you stood in the middle of the fans chanting and cheering and had a brilliant time feeling at one with the team. This year you got delayed and your mates arrived before you. In your hurry you went in through the wrong entrance and you’ve found yourself in the middle of the opposition fans. Nobody has said anything, but you feel like people are looking at you and you remain subdued. It’s too late in the match and things are too packed for you to move. You quietly take off you scarf and hat and put them in your bag as you watch. After the match you catch up with your mates for a drink at a local cafe. There’s a TV in the cafe and when an item comes on the news about refugees entering your country, you join your mates in complaining about refugees coming to your country rather than staying in their own.
Cognitive neuroscience shows us that, just as we have structures in our brains that are evolved to keep us safe from predators, so too we have structures evolved from our hunter-gatherer past to help us identify with our social group and make us wary of outsiders. In our evolutionary past, these structures served the purpose of creating strong bonds between group members leading to behaviours that increased the likelihood of individual tribes surviving. It’s probable that competition between tribes for limited resources meant that outsiders were often dangerous and it was wise to be wary.
In this instance, a deeply embedded evolutionary structure or “module” is very problematic in our modern world. Although we still enjoy and find comfort in tribal behaviours - such as supporting football teams - our world has evolved beyond tribalism but our brains are struggling to catch up. In our complex globalised world we need more than autonomic responses to enable us to live well together.
Conceptual Understanding
We perceive ourselves to be deliberately thinking about the world, sorting out the information available to us, and making considered decisions about what we will do next. Mostly this is wrong. Mostly our actions are determined by scripts and systems such as the one that saves you from being hit by a bus or causes you to chant and scream at a football match. Micheal Gazzaniga is one of many cognitive neuroscientists whose work shows that the basic architecture of the brain is not designed to work carefully through to a decision but rather to make predictions using existing scripts and modules to allow for quick responses which minimise cognitive load. The part of our brains that does the hard thinking work - our short term memories - is easily overwhelmed and needs shortcuts and supports to help it do its job.
One way to think about education is that it is the deliberate front-loading of the scripts needed to allow us to function well. In a cultural world which is evolving faster than our brain architecture, we need to be front-loading scripts which can be accessed to allow us to quickly navigate each new challenge as it faces us. These scripts range from narratives about good and evil which can front-load moral behaviours to strategies for approaching computational challenges such as which packet of breakfast cereal is better value. Extrapolating from the work of philosophers such as Jurgen Habermas and Amartya Sen, we can see that the process of reasoning through a solution to a particular problem is not something we do in our heads in the moment, rather it’s something that has been mostly done for us through the scripts we learn. Sen and Habermas argue that what is “reasoned” and “reasonable” is a culturally evolved negotiation between those who shape our cultural understandings. When we learn those scripts, we inherit those negotiated understandings.
Which brings me to the the idea of Conceptual Understanding in education. Here’s how I am increasingly finding myself to be understanding Conceptual Understanding: when we absorb the scripts of our culture, we are gaining Skills and Knowledge; when we learn that the scripts are scripts and that we can engage with them as constructed conventions, we have Conceptual Understanding.
We can know that it is wrong to see people from a different cultural group as less human or less deserving than ourselves. Conceptual Understanding happens when we understand that racism is not just wrong, but complex and problematic and the result of culturally constructed scripts which have fuzzy boundaries and possibly some functional elements. Loving our own children more than the children of strangers is not wrong, but it is a script evolved from the same conceptual foundations as racism. Learning for Conceptual Understanding means that we are learning to have agency over the scripts which will shape our identity and our future impact on the world rather than simply learning the knowledge and skills that will shape us.
I wonder if we may often mistake Knowledge and Skills for Understanding in our work in education. In the vision of Conceptual Understanding that I am generating here, Understanding is as much a matter of our relationship to Knowledge and Skills as it is any particular educational acquisition; it has as much to do with agency as it does with how we organise information. Evolving beyond the limitations of our hunter-gatherer brains to have the agency to shape a better world, means working deliberately with our modular brains knowing how they work to keep us alive and understanding how we can work with them to make changes for the better.
Afterword
Whilst the specialisation of brain function is relatively well understood and foundational as a concept in psychology, modular brain theory is an emerging and more controversial development. The relationship between mind and brain implicit in modular brain theory can be described in multiple ways and, if Gazzaniga's book Human is anything to go on, there's a lot of very interesting work still to come.
