The Social Brain in Education - A Conversation with Dr. Samah Karaki

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

You can use the same mechanism by using the oversensitivity that a teenager can have to belonging, to feedback, and to autonomy that will trigger the reward system the same way. They are not just there for fun. They are actually the motor that can make learning natural, like a basic fundamental human need.

Hi everybody, welcome back to the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan, brought to you in partnership with Intrepid Ed News. On this week's episode, I'm speaking with Dr. Samar Karaki, who is a neuroscientist and the founding director of the Social Brain Institute. The Social Brain Institute is an NGO based in Geneva and operating across Europe and the Middle East, implementing research-based strategies to support individual and organizational change. Samar's research focuses on the neuronal basis of stress affecting emotional and social behaviors. She is also interested in the neural basis of memory and unconscious processes, empathy, behavioral change, and creativity. Summer has delivered tailored seminars to over 2,000 academics, corporate executives, entrepreneurs, scientific institutes, as well as universities, teenagers at schools, and consulted on change management programs for leaders in various organizations. Summer also works on bridging the gender and racial gap in the field of STEM and is active in outreach and the public communication of science. In October of this year, Summer's book Le Travail en Équipe is published, which addresses the factors that allow human groups to collaborate effectively, told from the perspective of cognitive science.

Hello.

Hi, Summer. Hi. How are you?

Great.

Good. Well, thank you. It's a real pleasure to be able to talk to you today about many things that you're working on. Particularly, I'd love to start just asking you about the Social Brain Institute that you've established and obviously in general, your work bringing neuroscience and cognitive science into education, both in France and globally. So I'd love to invite you first, just if you could give us a bit of background about the, your overall purpose for starting the Social Brain Institute.

Uh, yes. Thank you, Tim Logan. So I'm a neuroscientist. I have a PhD in neuroscience, but I am aware that neuroscience is just one perspective. That can take into account the complexity of the human brain. So the idea of Social Brain Institute was to, to draw on many other disciplines, many other perspectives in the cognitive and social science to advance those research-based tools and methods. So the mission is to connect social environmental systems and to tackle emerging organizational and educational threats. So we use our understanding of the social, cultural, and educational neuroscience, and we design strategies that we provide for policymakers, educators, public and third sector organizations to enhance learning, culture, and social and environmental justice. So we train educators to, to assist children and adolescents in promoting their critical thinking, problem solving, emotional regulation, and to shift the focus on the technical skills that the educational system is based on. So that's the mission actually, is to stop looking at challenges from one perspective and to look at many different interpretations of how we behave, how we learn, to see how can we merge these different, the biological science, but also the psychological and social sciences.

It struck me very interesting the fact that you've chosen to call it social brain because I think, as you say, quite often it's like there's an application of neuroscience or cognitive science into the classroom or the organization, but actually now we know that the brain is kind of enmeshed in this cultural and social context as well and environmental, and therefore you can't separate the two. So it's, it's an interesting combination of bringing all of that together. Brilliant. Now, why do you think that— obviously my focus primarily is education, but Why do you think that we've focused historically more on, as you say, maybe technical solutions, or we've ignored— because to me it seems pretty core to what we do as educators is related to learning and the brain. Why is it that we haven't involved that in our work so much?

I would think of two possible reasons for that. The first one is technical limitations. So when we are starting to, to try to understand how a system works, that is the brain, it's logical to start looking at it you know, like to study it in the laboratory with controls and to look at how it responds to stimuli and how it processes information. The idea is that this is important, but it's not enough. Then you have to look at that brain, how it interacts with others. This brain is fundamentally emotional and fundamentally social, and most of the processes that take place inside the human brain are social. But to study that, it's very difficult to organize and to imagine scientific methods that take into account the complexity of the social systems. And also there is maybe the second reason is that there is a sort of a conflict between biological sciences and social sciences because the methodologies are not the same. Even sometimes we, you know, you have ideological differences. One of them is how do we understand talents and how do we understand gender, for example, and the relationship with the environment. So which makes it very complicated to organize debates between those two disciplines. So actually, there's no— the debate shouldn't be about who's better or who's giving more precise account of how it functions, but say, this, this is what I have as data, and this is what you have, and then how can we, you know, tackle the issue by merging those informations and by imagining scientific questions that we can address with each of them.

Yeah.

So there is something that is maybe wrong in the way that universities are organized in between hard sciences and human sciences, as if hard sciences were not human, you know, as if the biology is social, the biology is cultural, and it's, it's not supposed to be opposite concepts.

No, very nice. And then from a putting it into practice in terms of you know, in the classroom, it's always struck me that we work with young people primarily cognitively, with their brain, in this social environment, you know, with all these aspects that for them understanding their own brain, how they emotionally regulate and how that brain is social and how it's affected by lack of sleep and all of these aspects, that's always seemed to me to be a kind of a missing piece of the way that we work with young people and run schools. And as obviously, as you say, there's debate between different sciences in the academic sphere, but also then you've got to put stuff into practice for it to make a real difference. And how do you see that as being in terms of the way that we work and train teachers or the work directly with students? How could we kind of tackle that piece?

So before wondering why aren't we showing children, adolescents, how they learn, we should make sure that educators know how, what's going on in the brains of the people they are teaching. And this is something that is quite ambiguous. When you question educators about how they actually understand learning, you see that the lack of this bridge between what science is about and what is actually addressed in the classroom. So if you look at the human brain, you know, we know that we have a control system, an executive control system, This is where all logical and analytical and conscious processes take place. So we can, we can say that the educational system is all about that network and all about developing our analytical and our, you know, like, how can we exercise good judgment? How can we plan? How can we solve problems and take decisions through math or through other disciplines. But what we actually don't really integrate into that concept is that this, this part of the brain that is our prefrontal cortex— and that, by the way, we have the, you know, the most highly developed prefrontal cortex than other, than any other species— that it is paid, that it is triggered by other networks in the brain. So we have to imagine that this part is really costly It consumes lots of energy. So it's, you know, like it will look for energy from one particular network in the brain that is the reward network. So what is the reward network? It's triggered by everything that is a fundamental human need. So, you know, like we know that it's triggered by food, by sex, by social interaction, because those are, you know, logically they are important for our survival. But what we actually now know, and neuroscience had a lot to do with it because we can look inside the brain to look that and to see that this network is also activated by learning itself, is activated by feedback, is activated by autonomy. So actually our brain processes those psychological factors just like it processes sugar. So if I want to build a learning environment where I am taking into account, into consideration, the need for efficiency of the brain, you know, how this part of my brain that do the math, I want to give it sugar for it to work. I want to pay it. So I can give it through autonomy, through social interaction, through feedback, through challenge. So I can really use them as drugs because we can be addicted to that. So instead of taking a top-down approach to learning, I can consider that I can actually use it more efficiently and to try to design learning environments that look like something that the brain will look for, as breathing and eating. And so This is what's lacking. For example, when you take the teenage brain, we often hear that the reward system of a teenager is overly activated. And that's why they, you know, sometimes they have reckless behaviors, they take more risks, and they are more sensitive to drugs. Well, this is not only bad news because, you know, again, you can use the same mechanism by using the oversensitivity that a teenager can have to belonging and to feedback and to autonomy that will trigger the reward system the same way. So yeah, there is a lack of understanding of those components. They are not just there for fun. They are actually the motor that can make learning natural, like a basic fundamental human need.

Yeah, it's very interesting. It's almost like we've set up an education system that teaches a disembodied prefrontal cortex separate from the rest of the brain. And what you're saying is that, as we know, completely enmeshed and interconnected, and therefore that has implications for the way that we need to set up classrooms or set up our learning experiences, etc.

There's also something cultural about the function of the prefrontal cortex. One of the executive functions is to delay gratification. You know, this is the part of our brain that can make us, you know, like pay attention to the teacher speaking because you are delaying gratification and you are not looking at your phone or, you know, like doing something else. So when we think about this idea, you imagine that you have to have self-control, you know, you have to have this ability to shut down your need for gratification. But maybe we have to think of it differently, to think, what if the gratification is learning itself? So I'm not delaying it, I'm using the delaying gratification as a tool to learn because I'm making learning exciting.

Yeah.

So this is what video games do actually. Video games, if you want to teach teenagers the capital of the world or, you know, whatever, if you design a video game that incorporates those elements, they will learn them because there's something, you know, gratifying intrinsically in those games. And if you see, okay, why, why video games work better than a classroom setting, it's because they provide feedback, they provide a social network, they provide belonging, they provide incremental learning, you know, you are getting immediate gratification from it. So you don't need to motivate children or teenagers to play, right? This, this is how learning should be.

Yeah, it's an interesting implication, isn't it? Because obviously, you know, especially adolescents— I have one in my own house of my own, and you know, she does enjoy that gratification she gets from the screen time. And as an educator, you are obviously, you're working in that context, but you're also competing against that in a way. And without just converting everything that we do in education to the form of a video game, which clearly, you know, there's there's a lot which you miss from that as well, right? So I think part of it is enabling us to improve and develop education environments which take some of those lessons but also retain the other aspects of human social interaction that perhaps you don't get from a video game. Would you agree with that?

Yes. So yeah, if, if you want to analyze or to, you know, design learning environments, we have to look at the things where we look, where we see our children and teenagers attracted to. And to analyze why does it work, why social media. And they also work for us.

Yeah.

So, you know, if you, if you look at the, the brains of teenagers when they are watching, when they are scrolling on social media, and you look at their, at their reward system when they are looking at their own profile, and you see that activation. Why? Because they are, during that period, they are wired to have lots of interest in the social validation and the social hierarchy. And the way others perceive them. So in, in the learning environment, this has to be one of the components— peer teaching. And, you know, they are interested in that, and this is natural. This is part of the development of the brain. So instead of fighting against those things, maybe we have to see why do they work and how can I achieve the same, you know, how can I bring the same factors inside the, the learning environments.

Yeah.

Something that I, I'm aware that most of the educators do not really consider is that the brain is changing, is plastic. This neuroplasticity, this, this ability of the brain to be shaped by experience. And we had until really relatively recently, it was thought that those changes, that the brain was only actively developing during childhood.

Yeah.

But now we know that it continues to develop during adolescence. And the changes that occur during adolescence are really striking. The brain becomes overly sensitive for social cues. Just like you say, a 3-year-old child is overly sensitive to walking, to moving his— there is all those sensitive periods. Well, it's for a teenager, what's important during that period is social belonging, social validation. Those areas in the brain are highly, highly activated, and they undergo, you know, like sort of storm where they are wired, and they are very important. So it could be even absurd, you know, to imagine those brains going through all of those reorganizations sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher explaining things. So they— we have to use that sensitive period in order to make learning more social, more meaningful, so that they work together on projects. And, you know, this is where project-based learning is something that is very natural for the brain to acquire information through pattern and categorization and through, you know, constructing new knowledge based on what they actually care for. So this is something that you can encounter in alternative pedagogies but is not yet considered as the rule and not the exception. It's not like, uh, side activity. It should be the way we approach learning as a meaningful experience socially and emotionally.

And is there a consensus around what you're saying in the scientific community? So this, as you said at the beginning, the differences, disagreements between the different sciences, social sciences, etc. Is there a consensus around these ideas about the way that the brain functions and needing meaning and needing social and emotional, all of the things you've described? As I understand it, there doesn't seem to be anymore a lack of consensus?

Yes, we are moving forward towards a common vision. I would say 50, 60 years ago in biology, we would consider that social aspects and emotional aspects are not that important in the decision-making process, for example. And more and more neuroscience is actually approving what social sciences intuitively predicted, is that we are affected by social exclusion just as we're affected by physical pain, that we are triggered by the need to conform and to belong, you know, as a survival need. And we can see that in the brain. We can see how uncertainty or lack of control, for example, activates the pain centers in the brain. So when, when you see that, it's neuroscience, it's biology that is showing that psychological aspects and social aspects are as important as physiological ones, and they trigger the same exact responses in our body as if we are lacking sugar, as if we're cold. So if you are feeling ambiguity in front of a math problem, you are actually living the same exact stress response, physiological responses, as if you're cold. So if a teacher looks at her, you know, children looking at her explaining a math problem, she should be aware, or he should be aware, that they are going through a stress response as if she or he are hurting them physically. This is what math does to our brains. So there are lots of considerations to— there are lots of words that need to be voiced in order to say, I know what's going on, I, I know what's going on, and we're gonna go through that storm together. And the minute a teacher voices that, it means that I validate, I understand, I see that it's painful. This ambiguity is not natural for our brain. Let's solve it together. Let's see how can we solve this ambiguity. And we're gonna go through mistakes, and this is totally important. And I'm not gonna ask for the right answer, I'm gonna ask for the wrong answer. Because the wrong answer, we're gonna give us insights about what road we should not take. And once the teacher understand that an error, a mistake, is something essential for learning— it's essential for learning— this is how we memorize. It's through trying out a path, through patterning. So the whole mindset of the classroom culture changes, and a teacher needs to know that. And also the student needs to know that. The student needs to know what's going on. Why am I going through this? Why am I not feeling comfortable? Why am I not interested in that? Maybe because it lacks meaning. So how can I actually find meaning? And, you know, like, there is a lack of education about ourselves, like, the self-awareness. But I don't mean self-awareness as, you know, like this, well, I was— as a well-being, uh, personal development thing. I mean aware of how our brain functions, just like we're aware about how we move our muscles and how our heart beats. And so we need to be aware of the impact of uncertainty and of effort on our brains.

Brilliant. Now, that's so interesting. So then, just to move, move on slightly, the reason I discovered your work was through the video you produced about talent, and so I'd love to ask you about that because I think that's also obviously a key part of what we do. I think historically perhaps we have treated every individual student as a kind of uniform entity that comes into our classroom and we teach them all in the same way, and then they, you know, we end up hopefully with this kind of standardized product at the end of it. That's clearly not For me, what I think we should be doing in education, and many people would agree, we have these unique individuals coming in, into our classroom who have different profiles and different talents. And so it's this whole question around the innateness of talent and how much we can pick up that and develop that. Where do you think the public debate around talent has gone, gone perhaps in the, in the wrong direction?

Yes. The debate over what's innate and what is socially learned or environmentally learned is quite over in scientific community. We know that it's a matter of interaction, that genes are influenced by environment, and that we are genetically wired to be influenced by the environment. So, you know, like, what is innate in us is actually to learn through experience. So the question is very complex, and scientific evidence is not sufficient to allow, uh, very certain conclusions to be drawn when it comes to the issue of genetic and experiential factors. The problem is that it's technically very difficult to study. To, you know, like, if I want to provide support for the talent account, so I have to look at neural correlates for exceptional skills. So I have to look at a brain and see that this person that has an exceptional skill, I can see a neural correlate that includes evidence that those neural correlates are innately determined. And this is something that technically we cannot do, because how can I be sure that what I'm looking at is something that is not driven by experience? So the question is already technically limited. And imagine that we are actually able to really determine the genetic, the biological components in the expression of a particular ability. Still, we have to think about what could be the alternatives to that in, in society, because this is what we can actually affect. This is what we have in our control, in our agency. And if you look at data, you would see that when we repeat experiences, when we practice, the visual, the auditory system, the muscular systems are all trained by practice. And even when we, when we think about exceptional skills, like for example music, you'd see that violinists— if I'm a violinist, I would have a cortical representation of the digits of my left hand or the right hand. It's that, you know, the hand that is involved in fingering the strings. And I will see that musicians, they have a larger area that represents those digits. What's important is that I can see that area growing through practice. So this plasticity of, of the brain is actually explained by practice. It's not just the correlate of it. So what's important is that I can bring ordinary adults and give them large amount of training and skills, and that I see that those trained subjects will achieve performance sometimes higher than what, you know, most people thought could be possible. So if I consider that I can achieve exceptional levels of aptitude through practice, through opportunities that a culture could provide— for example, if we keep on talking about the music, we know that in some non-Western cultures, musical achievements are, you know, way more widespread than in our own. When we consider that Mozart did amazing things at 3, 4-year-olds, where we can see that. And, and some non-Western cultures, this is very common. So there are factors that are opportunities that culture— that a cultural emulation can provide. So maybe variability in performance could be caused by differences in the opportunities to learn something and the support and encouragement that we receive from parents, from educators at a very early, early age. And they, they can explain a huge or a big part of what we are gonna do with that ability.

Yeah.

So there's also the emotional appetence, you know, like the interest that can make the pain that comes with effort to learn pleasurable. And what— this is something we call reduced aversiveness. Because effort, effort is aversive, but if you are getting a reward out of it, so this aversiveness becomes rewarding. So I cited repetition, practice, encouragement, feedback, autonomy, the way that you are actually choosing something to, to practice. All of these factors should be the factors that we are centered on when we are building learning environments. Why? I'm not saying that there's no genetic part in the way skills are expressed. I'm saying that it's something that is beyond our control. All what we can do as educators, as practitioners, is to actually focus on the elements that make learning possible, and maybe to question why are we considering exceptional ability as an important thing. What can we actually get from someone who can memorize everything. This hyperamnesia, the obsession we have of people who do things quicker, faster. You know, Albert Jacquard was a French genetician, and, you know, like, of course I wouldn't doubt the awareness that he has of genetic importance in the expression of our traits and aptitudes. And a journalist was, you know, interviewing him over the, the myth of innate intelligence. And at some point she asks him, well, but you cannot say that some students learn faster than others. And he says, of course, but why is that important? Why do we consider that learning fast is what we, you know, the way it should be done? Maybe learning differently, maybe someone that is learning slower is actually you know, building a different path, a different access to that information. And this is a whole cultural shift that we have to, to think. It's, it's about why do we need to categorize, why do we need to hierarchize— I don't know if that verb exists— but is to consider that with the same ingredients I can make different recipes. And if the teacher, educator, is expecting one recipe, then of course He will say, this is the best, this is the faster, this is— but if he doesn't want to taste other things, then there is, you know, something in the mental flexibility, in the tolerance to different ways of learning. And we are starting to integrate this idea when we think about autism, when we think about dyslexia, it's about not considering that these are problems, but these are differences. Yeah, so let's, let's widen this view to every child and every— and also, you know, also to us, that we learn differently. And genetically, it's impossible that you have a gene called music. You would have maybe a gene that is a better motor coordination or your auditory, and you can do whatever you want with that. By the way, you can— maybe you have all the genes that allow you to become a good musician technically, or a good, you know, it doesn't mean that this is what you should do in your life. It's very sad to imagine a society where we are looking at students and we are saying he is predisposed, he is predetermined to be good in this, because we are removing all the magic of life experience that make us shift interests, that make us you know, like be interested in things maybe we are not good at. And this is the beauty. And when people say, oh, you are removing all the magic of the innate talent, I'm saying I am actually defending the magic of life itself, of what life can bring as interests and as appetence and as rewarding experiences that are way more interesting for learning than technical abilities. And maybe there is a danger in believing in talent, you know, when I consider that believing in it means that there are just a part of people that would be, you know, more advanced in a certain skill, and that I can, I can as an adult look at children and predict who is going to be excellent in a field. I find danger in that, in that idea because we are affected by the beliefs of, or of others. We are basically, basically our self-beliefs are driven by the way people we care about look at us. And so if I, if I tell you there's British survey, it's an informal survey but it's published in '94, that three-quarters of music educators who decide which young people are to receive instruction believe that they can detect innate gifts, you know, the first days of training. So just imagine this Pygmalion effect. If I am looking at you as someone that innately has a gift, then I will give you more opportunities. I will give you more support. That would finally lead you to achieve my prophecy. And, you know, so when I say talent doesn't exist, I am precisely targeting the concept of talent as something that, that determines us to become this or that. And that in the absence of this— because this is also the problem of believing in it, is that it justifies the poor learning context. That it's the consequence of this belief is that innate gifts are precondition for high achievements. So if, if I don't consider that some people are innately gifted, then I will deny them the help and support and all the, the factors we talked about: the encouragement, the autonomy, the feedback, and also the belonging feeling. If I consider that you are not talented in a domain, that you don't feel that you belong get there.

Yeah.

You know, you'll feel that it's illegitimate for you to try. So, and this is how you end up not trying, and your brain will not engage any energy. Again, obsession with efficiency. Why would I engage energy in a domain that the whole world doesn't consider me able to achieve excellence in it?

Yeah, wow, there you go. There's a lot in there. Yeah, no, that's amazing. I mean, the, I mean, the self-fulfilling prophecy is called that for a very clear reason, right? I mean, the power that we have as educators, if we do, when we do label young people, then that has a manifest effect on their outcomes, and we can see that through the research.

Yes, maybe to summarize any focus on the ego of the student is not helping the learning process. It's the process that we have— we should be focused on. So, you know, the idea of talent is again a focus on the person itself, on something that is, you know, on the ego. And the brain is like— the brain's energy, the learning energy, the learning capacity is hindered by our ego. I need to forget about myself in order to learn. This is what happens in the creative process. This is what happens when athletes are running, when jazz musicians are improvising. They forget about themselves.

Yeah, it's that kind of flow state and there's being in the zone. And yeah, interesting.

This is a hypofrontality state. So I am— this is very costly to think about ourselves, so The teacher, the educator, should also forget about the egos of the students and to look at their brains as processors. And, you know, like, and yeah, we have to shift the attention from the person to the learning process and to mold this process together. Children adults and educators horizontally. There's no transfer from the teacher to the student, there is a collaboration.

Yeah, that's really interesting because it's— I think that discussion has happened and does happen now with related to feedback. So, you know, giving process-based feedback rather than person-based feedback, clearly, you know, and linking it in with growth mindset and those kinds of ideas about encouraging effort. But I think there's usually well-intentioned discussion around talent because you want, you know, we want to be enabling young people to develop attributes of themselves which they are firstly passionate about and excited about and motivated to do, but then also have some strengths in. And so I think there's a— it hasn't quite— that kind of person-centered aspect hasn't quite reached that discussion around talents because there's generally a positive, you know, a positive meaning behind the way that people talk about it.

You know, you mentioned growth mindsets. That is actually not just the work of Carol Dweck, you know, like lots of psychologists and educational researchers were working on those implicit theories of traits and intelligence. But she made it, she made it maybe more common to talk about it because she did those very, you know, very interesting experiences. And one of them is that she is actually giving positive feedback.

Yeah.

So she's just giving the "Oh, you're smart, you're brilliant," you know, to adolescents, to pre-adolescents. It's 10, 11-year-old students doing math exercises, I guess. And she looks at the brain activations once I'm giving you this positive feedback that is focused on the self. That actually the brain sort of comforts itself. Yeah, that I am good in that, you know, I don't, I don't need effort anymore. And when you see that outstanding people in their domains, if you question them, you see that it was all about effort, pleasurable effort, of course, not, you know, this should not be related to pain and to struggle. No, it's the— you talked about the flow. It's that experience when I am struggling, when it's effortful, but I'm also experiencing pleasure. But it takes lots of time. It takes lots of trying and lots of mistakes, lots of risks to get there. So if I tell you, you're good at something, you have innate talents, I'm kind of removing the control from internally to make it external. So it's even unfair to people who might have actual talent because you're telling them it's not about your work. It's not about the risk you're taking. It's not about— it is, it's something that is there just like the color of your eyes. And it is unfair. And it's actually what— if every time you question a talented writer or a talented exceptional athlete, they would tell you, no, no, no, it wasn't about, about this, you know, like, unexplainable thing. It was about work, and it's about inspiration and following models and copying people sometimes. And then at some point, I started doing something different. So it is It is that process, whether we look at it positively or negatively, it is part of the process, it is part of the, of the, of the learning process.

Yeah. Can I ask, do you see there's a role in education for focusing in on those? I mean, I'm even hesitant to use the word talent now, but, but do you think that there's a role that education has? Because I, I think if you contrast it to the way we have historically done education, it's been uniformly standardized based around a fake average for everybody. But actually, there is clearly a lot of discussion around personalized education and the way that we tailor experiences in a way, as you've just said, to bring meaning for individuals and more motivation and autonomy for particular individuals. There seems to be a move towards a more strengths-based model of education, there is the reality that when a child comes into my classroom, they have certain aspects which they enjoy more and are better at. And therefore, what do I do with those in the context of a more kind of individualized or personalized educational experience?

Yes, there is a confusion when we say that innate talent is exaggerated or oversimplified. People sometimes interpret this as if we are saying that there are no differences between— actually, it's totally the opposite. People are different for lots of factors that I would consider that most of them are related to the things we've been through, to the prior knowledge, to the skills we've built, to the words we've heard, to the eye contacts we encountered, to the people we observe doing things, and to the relationships and interactions we had with educators, friends, family members, to the social and economical class where we come from, to the culture where we come from. And those accounts for me and for, you know, like part of the scientists, because again, some also defend, you know, like a bigger role for genetics in that, but whatever. Let's say, let's focus on those elements. So you are in front of you, there are people that have those differences that are explained by the multitude of factors, let's say genetic or environmental. So of course, one size should not fit all. And of course, I believe that if there would be something positive out of technology, it's just to help us tailor the challenge that we are providing for kids to their interests and to their level of competency. There's one element that activates the reward system, you know, I talked about autonomy, about feedback, is the, the challenge itself. But this challenge has to be aligned with my levels of competency. Again, this is something that is present in the video games, you know, the video game, if you lose a lot, it will, you know, lower the level. And if you win a lot, they say, okay, I'm gonna give you something that at that is aligned with the challenge level. If I can read, you know, those interactions, those between the difficulty of what I'm offering as learning content and the developing competency of the child, then I would keep the child always triggered by that reward that comes from the challenge itself. So we can hope for tools, technological tools, that would be there to give us— and by the way, they exist, you know, like Khan Academy that are based on that. And this is how we can actually delegate one of the, of the roles of an educator to the machine so that the educator would be actually focusing on the social and emotional aspects of learning and on, you know, like giving the feedback itself. But the challenge offered for the children are— or for the adolescents are aligned, are balanced, so that the level of interest and the level of competency is, you know, adequate to what we are proposing. So what can we do? We can actually see how can I be able to read the level of preparation of my students' brains. If we consider teenagers, for example, we know that the circadian rhythms in teenage are shifted. So you cannot consider education the same way for a teenager. They are shifted for almost 2 hours, so they naturally, they will sleep later than adults or children. And it happens very quickly. The educational system doesn't follow that because we bring them to school very early when they are supposed biologically to be asleep. So these are the things that we can use by genetics and biology and to say, okay, there is actually something that we are wired genetically, biologically for, and that we have to read and accept as something, you know, really powerful and leave biology do its work when it comes to what my parents gave me as predispositions. Because it would be impossible to study and consider that as an adult, as an educator, I do not have the aptitudes to read that, to detect that, to predict that, even if I've been doing this for 50 years. I could be mistaken, and the mistake could be very dangerous because I could impose my view on, uh, on someone, positively or negatively. And that I have my own cultural considerations, I have what I consider as, as interesting, and maybe it's not anymore for the era, for the generation, for culture that my students are growing into.

Yeah, no, that's very interesting. And yeah, I can see how you would— may impose that. But maybe the role of educator is to not try to read the level of talent within a young person, but to actually enable them to just have experiences where they create those for themselves in a direction that they want to go in, right?

Totally. This autonomy is essential for learning. This is how babies explore the world. They decide to go to that direction to lick that toy, and they do this autonomously. And, you know, if you impose an object to a baby, you know that just the fact that you're imposing a learning experience, you are actually removing a part of the motivation to explore. So this is how we should always consider learning. We should We should offer opportunities for students to choose, if it's not the content, at least the way they want it to be acquired.

But I think also part of that is that, and I think some people, some educators react negatively towards that analogy of, you know, that we should treat them the same as we treat autonomous and rapidly developing babies because they've got to be prepared for the world where they're not going to get free choice, etc.

Our brains, uh, do not change at that level. Also, you know, all marketing that work on us adults are giving us illusion of control. They are, you know, like when you are going to buy a coffee and they tell you choose the size of the cup and choose what you want to put in it, or you want to buy a sandwich and you choose the bread, and you want— and you know, they ask you 5 questions where they are giving you options that motivate you to buy the thing. When I'm talking about babies, this actually— if we observe how babies learn, we have the keys for how we learn, you know. How they actually— they themselves, they augment the challenge every time they acquired a new developmental stage. They themselves, they show us how we get bored by something we already explored and how we are excited by something novel, but not too novel. Not too difficult. And those elements, those needs, do not change with the development. They— we become even more sensitive as teenagers and adults to be agents of our, of our own words.

What about though the developing need to negotiate and collaborate, which you've already mentioned, but what— how does that fit in there? Because obviously, you know, clearly babies will interact with one another can kind of be social, but ultimately they're on their own path autonomously to learn the thing they want to. But, but as you grow, there is a, a requirement, and a positive requirement I would say, to have to negotiate your own aims and goals in relation to somebody else's, because what mine, mine might compromise yours. And is that an emerging aspect which does change, which is tangibly different as they grow older.

Of course, it develops, it develops, and it is present in babies. Even moral judgments are present in babies. Babies are aware of the social rules. They are aware of people that are not respecting the social rules, and they even experience rewards when they see those people being punished. They are interested in exploring individually at a certain age, and then they start seeing that it's more interesting to get inspired by others, how do they actually experience exploration. And also there is, you know, for example, in Montessori pedagogies, they would consider that the social aspect of learning is not developed enough at 4-year-old kids, but you will see that other pedagogies would consider it differently. It's very difficult to analyze this culturally speaking, because, you know, every culture approaches development differently. We have to be conscious that most of what we know about the development of social skills, even motor skills, are Eurocentric. You know, it is, uh, it— yes, it's, uh, you know, in, in other— and maybe 70% of the rest of the planet, children learn to walk at different age and they, they, they sit at different— and this is not because of a certain, you know, biological because if you remove those people from their culture and you bring them to Europe, or you do the opposite, then you will get again the influence of culture and the influence of habits and expectations on when do we speak first and when do we walk first and when do we get interested in others first and how we cooperate and how we consider social justice and how we consider cooperation and ethics. If we are an individualistic or collectivist societies, that would not be the same. So always remember that we are lacking data of how culture affects learning, how culture affects our psychology, and to, you know, to keep skeptical, not too skeptical, because we cannot consider that my opinion about education equals hundreds of years of research. But those hundreds of years of research are still going, are still building better knowledge about how it happens. So we have to maybe consider that it's it's more complex than what we've imagined, and that even this is not completely genetically written and predetermined. So yeah, it's too complex, which makes it amazing.

It is totally fascinating. Thank you. I mean, we've already gone over time. So, so interesting. Thank you so much. There's so much in there. As you say, it's highly complex. And but it's also the granularity of what we know is increasing as we develop this research, and it's fascinating to imagine how we can then implement that in the classroom because ultimately, you know, it's not just an academic exercise, right? This is— we're doing this in order to be better at what we do in, you know, what we care about in terms of education. So amazing, thank you very much.

Thank you, Tim.

Perfect.

Bye, Tim.

Thank you so much. Bye-bye. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with us on social media with the hashtag #futurelearningdesign and on the Intrepid Ed News website, intrepidednews.com.