The Squishy Wetware in Our Skulls
A warning about this post: although I am about to discuss the brain on a cellular level, I am not a neuroscientist. I am a writer, and perhaps that has something to do with why I’m so interested in how the brain works. What makes us humans do what we do, think what we think, remember what we remember?
Because I am not a neuroscientist, or any kind of scientist (don’t be fooled by the “Labs” in NogginLabs), I am thrilled with the amount of popular literature out there that attempts to explain the mind and its mysteries to someone like me. There are several fascinating authors/scientists (of whom I am in awe/incredibly envious) at work today. My favorites so far are Oliver Sacks, who wrote this book, Jonah Lehrer, who wrote this book (both men also often contribute to this lovely radio program), and VS Ramachandran, (who has written several books and been profiled in this fascinating article).
The literature tends to be a combination of several fields of study, including neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive science. Sounds heavy, but one of the great things about this stuff (“stuff” being a very scientific word, trust me) is that there’s always an amazing, impossible-but-true anecdote that sparks the weightier, scientific explanation behind it—the kind of thing I find myself compulsively sharing with others, unable to contain the spread of my wonder. I mean, come on: a person with one arm can trick his own brain into thinking he has two just by waving that one arm in front of a mirror!
Even better (and perhaps more relevant) is that most of the current popular literature on the human brain eventually has something to do with how humans learn. According to VS Ramachandran in this 2009 TED talk, not only do we have neurons in our brain that fire when we reach up to scratch our heads, but we have another set of neurons that fire when we see other people reaching up to scratch their heads. In fact, those neurons probably have something to do with how human beings can learn so much so quickly.
At NogginLabs, we think a lot about what our learners are going to experience during our e-learning courses. We brainstorm activities and approaches, tinker with the organization of content, and experiment with visual ways to get that content across onscreen and into the learner’s brain.
It’s mind-boggling, then, to think about how much goes on in those learners’ heads that we don’t even consider during our development process: how their brains make connections, how their neurons behave, and on and on. The fact that we don’t actively think about these things is, I’ve decided, a good thing. It would take a better content producer than me (maybe Priscilla Mok*, another content producer here, who studied cognitive neuroscience as an undergrad) to map course content not just to specific learning objectives, but to specific neurons.
Although my mind has been blown wide open by what I’ve read about how it works, it’s not yet clear to me how (or if) this information will affect what I do on a daily basis. But at least I know, when I read articles like this one, that what I’m doing—and what NogginLabs, as a company, is doing—is worthwhile.
We don’t call ourselves NogginLabs for nothing, folks.
*Thanks to Priscilla for her help in sorting out the three fields of study, and for giving me the title of this post
Maria Parrott-Ryan
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Senior Content Producer
NogginLabs, Inc.
