The Social Brain and the curriculum
Dr Ben Seymour discusses how our ideas of the Social Brain could affect how we think about learning:
"I think there are three levels at which our understanding of the brain and social behaviour have potential relevance for a curriculum.
1. "Pro social". Is it something we can teach?
"The first is to what extent is "being pro-social and cooperative" something that a) should be on the curriculum, and b) is something we can teach? We think that much of pro-sociality stems from the way in which the brain learns to behave optimally in social situations. The benefits of cooperation are not obvious to novices: life is competitive, but cooperative benefits are an extrinsic fact of the world (consider, for example group hunting). As such, competitiveness comes before cooperation: you need to be competitive to realize that being cooperative is valuable. When we consider the decision-making systems in the brain it is clear that merely being told cooperation is valuable is not enough: it takes experience and observation or experienced others to figure this out, and this can seed a ‘cooperative culture’.
2. Do we learn more effectively when we cooperate?
"The second issue we can address is what role cooperativity and prosociality have in learning other things – how does teamwork improve the knowledge welfare of the group? Innovation, curiosity and novelty seeking are intrinsic rewards to the brain. The brain treats information and skills as inherently rewarding, and we think that evolution has made them as such. In both humans and animals, for example, we see this in play fighting: young individuals are learning a skill set that may prove life-saving in the future if their social group is under attack from predators. So this seems to raise the possibility that people ought to be well placed to acquire information in groups – a sort of cooperative innovation, although how this might be achieved has not been studied by neuroscience yet.
3. Is teaching itself "pro-social?
"The last issue is about the role pro-sociality in teaching in society – to what extent is teaching itself pro-social, and part of our culture. It may be that a propensity to teach is a fairly innate motive, at least towards kin: meercats for instance teach their young how to handle scorpions safely. But teaching itself is a cooperative and potentially altruistic behaviour – it takes time and effort with often no immediate or obvious personal gain. In some professions, teaching is a central part of professional culture: in medicine for instance, it is even enshrined in the Hippocratic oath. This achieves cooperative and potentially personal benefit (you might end be treated by your students). It is likely that encouraging professionalism across occupations and trades permits teaching cultures to develop within them, and perhaps children should be exposed to this early. One way of doing this would be to allow companies and professionals to have direct contact with schools."
Dr Ben Seymour, Senior Research Fellow at the Welcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, took part in the Curriculum and the Social Brain seminar at the RSA
Share