A Learning Reflection by Satrih - Friday, September 9, 2016, 4:48 PM

All the three theories about the brain presented in the videos this week by three great neuroscientists; Daniel Wolpert, John Medina, and Lynn Nadel, are just extremely amazing and actually despite the differences in views, they complete each other.

Wolpert (2011) believes that the only purpose of the brain is for producing adaptable and complex movements. It was an interesting opening remarks as I tend to believe that everybody who has not heard the same thing would say that the main function of the human brain is to think. Every time you tell people to think, you will put your forefinger on your head as to say "use your brain", am I right? But as Wolpert went on explaining about how the brain works to produce movements, it became much more interesting as it challenged our deeper and more abstract understanding of the brain.

Although it somewhat confused me which comes first and which comes later between a movement and a thought, Wolpert did wonderfully present a logical explanation by mentioning that “sensory, memory, and cognitive process are only important to either drive or suppress future movements (2011).” Furthermore, as he said previously that “movement is the only way we have for affecting the world around us (2011),” it made clear about the function of the brain. We always say that something or someone only function when they show a movement, small or big, concrete or abstract.

Wolpert also talked about how the brain controls the movements, which is the most interesting part for me, especially when watching a short video of a young girl named Emily Fox, the former fastest cup stacker in the world, to bring us into a deeper understanding by saying “nobody knows what happened in the girl's brain when doing the movements (2011).” What I was thinking of at the moment, was how fast the process of the brain works to produce those fast movements. Is it as fast as how we can see at the girl's performance or much faster than that?

It is actually much more complex than I thought as Wolpert (2011) mentioned the term "noise", which is always exist throughout the process of producing movements by the brain. It was sort of confusing at first until he mentioned that in order to produce movements, the brain needs two main sources of information namely sensory input and memory. Both of the sources always come up with noises, which may potentially result in ambiguous variables of the brain task. The good news is that the brain is uniquely equipped with a lot of effects to reduce the negative consequences of the noise. I hope I am not wrongly quoting this, and if it is correct, I was just wondering, should I take it as an information or opinion?

Now, it became more sophisticated as Wolpert related the process of how the brain works to produce sensory feedback and movements command to the process of learning to produce inferences/conclusions and actions. It is wonderful to know that an exactly similar process happens in both dimensions. When the "noise" interrupts the process of human sensory and movement command in the brain, the "uncertainty" interrupts the process of making inferences and taking actions in learning. When sensory input and memory become the main sources of information for producing a sensory feedback and movement commands by the brain, a learning process has data and prior knowledge for its main sources of information to make inferences and take actions.

Wolpert's presentation on the Bayesian statistics also made me amazed that I believe it actually revealed that our ability to make inferences or conclusions and take actions as the result of our learning process that reflect our understanding or comprehension that can be physically seen and perceived in our physical world is the reflection of the same thing or process happened in our brain.

Medina (2008) with his brain rules provides us great ideas of how to improve the capacity of our brain and to take much more benefit from a healthy brain. Also, to my amazement, he came up with a more interesting word to name the function of the brain, which is survival. His theory seems to come from a detailed observation and contemplation based on a great bunch of information and experiences although at the same time saying that his writing came from little knowledge about how the brain works. He believes some currently existing theories of the brain are just mythical but he did not forget to mention some of unusual cases that happen to some individuals related to intelligence issues.

I was still unsure when writing this, but Medina mentioned that "interest" affects how the brain works, which is to my understanding, it is similar to the case of "noise" and "uncertainty" in Wolpert's theory. So, here come the brain rules. Of the 12 rules that his book is actually about, he mentioned only 3 of them, which are exercise, stress, and multitasking. However, only exercise and stress were completely explained.

From Medina's explanation about the two brain rules, I understand that both have either positive or negative effects to the brain function. Both are limited to "size/amount" and "time/duration", and when dealing with the brain function, their influences or effects are also limited to specific areas of the brain only. One does not need so much exercise to boost the brain power just like one does not need to feel so stressed to make their brain less productive (Medina, 2008).

Medina (2008) presented a very well-observed case evidence of how exercise really makes cognition change by comparing two contradictory lifestyles of two different people namely sedentary people and exercising people. As the result showed that the exercising people really experience improvement in their cognition while sedentary people do not, proves that Medina's brain rules about exercise is a great idea for affecting the function of our brain. Another important thing about this exercise as explained by Medina is that different exercise affects different area of cognition. I would like to relate this to Wolpert's theory of how the sources of information affect the function of our brain. Two persons may have different conclusions leading to different actions toward an issue due to the different content of the information sources. Please correct me if I am wrong or confused. It would be much appreciated.

Medina's brain rules on stress is also brilliant. I cannot agree more that “stressed brains do not learn the same way as the non-stressed brains (2008).” It does happen to me all the time. Medina is also true when he said that “not all stress is actually bad for learning, some are actually pretty good for learning, even though not too much (2008).” Well, that happens to me as well. I also would like to keep in mind this idea of Medina, which I believe everybody agree with, that “what does stress a person not necessarily stress somebody else (2008).” It became more interesting when Medina said when you experience "intense pleasure or intense stress, and you give psychological panels but you blind it, randomize it, somebody else can't tell the difference in trying to figure out what you're experiencing between the two because the body reacts nearly identically to both (2008)." This reminds me of one of my old joking posts on Facebook when I wrote (in Indonesian language) "It turns out that those who are happy and those who are sad have an equal similarity that cannot be avoided, which is, they tend to be overreact in terms of what they say or how they act." I hope I am not making a false connection.

The most important part for me is Medina's explanation on how stress affects the function of our brain when he said that "stress damages cognition" and it happens in "the very area of the brain that everybody does not want to damage", which is called the hippocampus for its great involvement in our learning process since it has 3 essential elements related to the function of the brain, which are connection, long-term memory formation, and brain cells (2008). What is more about Medina's brain rules is that he provided examples of great potential solution to deal with the stress issue.

I would also like to repeat Medina's words about "control". He said that "a powerful feeling of control can change the nervous system (2008)." So it is absolutely true when someone says "control yourself" in order to stop a greater damage due to a temporal emotion.

Nadel's theory of "building brains, making minds" is equally amazing. He believes that or as he said "what seems to be right, brain is a special purposed machine that uses information to construct the present and predict the future (2008).” Nadel's presentation on what he called as the startling fact, "that we literally see clearly only about 10% of what we think we see (2008)," and the rest are made up or in Nadel's word constructed “to make the best guess for what is out there based on a variety of information (2008),” that makes sense too. His examples related to perception as shown in a video, the stopped escalator effect, the ketchup bottle, catching a baseball are all talking about how the brain processes information and then sending signals.

Besides perception, Nadel also mentioned things like prior experience, sensory input, illusion, memory that seemed to me not more than same or other words of especially Wolpert's theory. Nadel's theory that "memory is not a completely accurate record of the past (2008)" and that is exactly why the brain is there to re-construct it to produce a best prediction to maximize one's behavior in the future sounds like Wolpert's brain function theory to produce movements as the result of a process inside the brain that is based on certain information.

Nadel's presentation about Medial Temporal Lobe for the case of amnesia, hippocampus as a cognitive map and the place of cells just like what is mentioned by Medina above, and temporal discounting based the idea that "we have a tendency to want things now rather than later (2008),” makes his theory much more complex and comprise a wide variety of disciplines. Last but not least, while actually it appeared from the beginning of the presentation, Nadel's recall of theories by former scientists and criticize them in order to show to what extent they are correct and incorrect really added on.

Finally, I would like to say that all the theories are just brilliant. Nevertheless, if I have to consider which theory most makes sense to me, I am not going to choose. I prefer to give something like a structure or from where to start. So I have watched all the videos with this chronological arrangement: Daniel Wolpert's "The Real Reason for Brains", John Medina's "Brain Rules", Lynn Nadel's "Building Brains, Making Minds". As I said earlier that despite the differences in views, they actually complete each other, I think I should start with Lynn Nadel's theory and then Daniel Wolpert's and finally John Medina's in order to give me a clearer framework for a more comprehensive understanding of how the brain works.

References

Wolpert, D. (2011). The real reason for brains. Lecture at TED Global,

Edinburgh, Scotland, July.

Medina, J. (2008). Dr. John Medina. Talks at Google. Mountain View, California.

Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK1nMQq67VI

Nadel, L. (2008). Building brains, making minds. College of Science and Minds

Lecture Series. Tucson, Arizona. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=XCrYwtnzCQA

#BrainTheory #CognitivePsychologyAndInstruction #InstructionalDesign #EducationalTechnology