[Kathleen Ann Goonan]

What exactly, happens in the brain when we learn?

Presently, we do not know.

The brain is dynamic. Your brain is changing as you read this. Parts of your brain to which you have no conscious access forge some new connections and discard the possibility of others. Eric Kandel’s groundbreaking, Nobel Prize-winning research confirmed the mechanisms of memory in the giant sea snail Aplysia, but Aplysia’s brain is simple.

Our brains are complicated.

The 21st century is the Century of the Brain, when, with an ever-expanding arsenal of research and tools, we will begin to understand the neuroscience of learning. The United States, with its recently implemented Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative and Europe, with its Big Brain Project, are both funding research that promises to bring the neurological processes of learning to light.
When we know what happens when we learn, we will be able to facilitate the process of learning in real time, not only for those with learning disabilities, but for all of us.
Despite living in a technological age, we have not used many to our educational advantage. MOOCs are changing how people access university courses, but few persevere. Online university courses are becoming more common, but both innovations are simply logical outgrowths of the internet. When mature, they will save time, and help students focus on what is most useful or meaningful to them. However, they will not change us, not in the way that the new technologies based on revelations about how our brains work will change us.

We experience explosive brain growth when young. We learn to grasp, to walk, sing, dance, and run. We learn to speak our complex native language—and we can learn several if they are used around us. Soon, we learn to write and read.

At least most of us do—or could, if given the opportunity.

I envision inexpensive and ubiquitous new tools that spring from science-based research that will give educators fine-tuned insight into exactly how each individual learns, and what we might be able to learn at a particular time. These might be brain-imaging technologies that give us more nuanced information about what is happening in the brain in real time. They might be cheap and portable enough to be in every learning environment, so that experienced teachers can devise individual and, thus, highly effective learning experiences for every student.

Presently, physicians prescribe drugs for children with learning difficulties. These drugs are often ineffective, addictive, and have unpleasant side effects. Once we can actually see, on a very fine level, through imaging nanobots or other devices, how various substances interact with the brain, as well as see how the brain looks when learning occurs, individually tailored bio-nanotech therapies will help people of all ages learn more quickly and retain more of what they learn. (Such therapies will also be a boon to those with post-traumatic stress disorder, who have learned too completely that which prevents them from living a full life in the present.)

Most of all, I hope for a completely revolutionized educational environment in the next ten or fifteen years. Humans are born to learn; we are not hardwired with survival information that will allow us to go out on our own in quick order. Instead, we spend our first twenty years of life—and, often, our entire lives–satisfying species-deep curiosities about the world. What is going on? How do things work? How can I invent something? What stories does my environment tell? What are my stories, and how can I tell them? Our first task in life is that of establishing and refining our senses through interaction with the world.

Facilitating learning through research and technology will change the world as surely as did the printing press. And it will happen in the foreseeable future.

[Kathleen Ann Goonan]

Perhaps the “island” metaphor references a place where one can do experiments without hurting anyone. When I was a teenager, I knew of people who wanted to experiment with chemicals–which they could freely obtain at that time–who would go to waste areas and blow things up. Launch rockets. Thereby learning firsthand what worked and what did not work outside the proscriptions of what you could do in a chemical lab in public school and, for the most part, going on to be regarded as gifted chemists. Almost every aspect of this would be impossible today.

How would you get on to the island? Seems like everyone probably has a goodish dose of mad scientist in them during their teen years, so every single person should get a shot at an island year no matter how dull they might seem on the outside. Go from the neurobiology island to the let’s blow everything up island to the island where all is mad art, previously unimagined art, then go to other islands where disciplines mix. Learn how to get the resources they need for their art-work-life. Request help from mentors. Create their own island. Join groups of like-minded people until that becomes intolerable, form new groups.

Trust in human potential. Learn how to create islands in society, which already exist–in academia, in thinktanks, in business, at Google.

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