Chapter 3 Novelty And The Human Brain

The Human Brain and Learning

The Human Brain is a Novelty Engine

Teacher Note: First day of class use surprise, something unexpected, as a foundational experience.  In short: “in this class, expect the unexpected.”  I used liquid nitrogen (which behaves unexpectedly) or the black box demonstration where water poured into the box the first time comes out blue the second time.)  Or in Biology: “turn to page 344 but don’t tell your parents you saw an x-rated photo in your science class. Eye roll here when students find a photo of a male frog atop and squeezing eggs from a larger female frog for external fertilization. Use of humor in t the classroom has a dopaminergic effect.

It is illegal to transport parts of human bodies in your car without a special license, so I was driving more cautiously, eyes on the rear view mirror, “under the radar”.

With human body parts in the the back seat of my car, I imagined being pulled over.  “Well officer. You see I’m a science teacher on my way to Foothill High School where I teach Biology, Human Anatomy, and Physiology. See. Here’s the Physiology book we use. My students are in Chapter 8, The Central Nervous System.”  Believing naively that I could talk my way out of jail, I drove on to school with parts of two human bodies behind the driver’s seat thinking about how interested my Physiology students would be and how to answer their inevitable questions.

“I didn’t see it coming.”

I wanted my students to know just how big their brains really were, to hold a human brain in their very own hands to heft it’s weight, the weight allowing them to see and wonder about what they were holding.

Once I carried those brains into my classroom, they opened the door and sent my career into the realm of brain science.  From that auspicious beginning, across 39 years to when I delivered the keynote address at the International Conference on the Brain and Learning.  Picking up those two human brains altered the course of my teaching career.

This book is a result of that journey.

The human brain has evolved around reward centers and pathways: the mesocoricolimbic dopaminergic system, one if it’s main systemic components.  

In short, the human brain has powerful reward pathways that are normally dormant when things operate as expected.  

But heavy dopamine rewards are dumped into the brain whenever we experience things that are "out of the box" of expected outcomes, like David Copperfield performing his best illusions. When the human brain experiences the “unexpected” it catches fire in a buzz of network activity because the chance to glean a new pattern out of the daily routine helped our early ancestors to survive.  Cocaine, heroin, slot machines, casinos and video games trigger the same pathways.  The brain tells us to repeat what we just did to get that reward.   This system triggers memory centers in to brain to focus attention on the all attributes of the rewarding experience to better increase future repetition.

“Not surprisingly, it is a very old pathway from an evolutionary point of view. The use of dopamine neurons to mediate behavioral responses to natural rewards is seen in worms and flies, which evolved 1-2 billion years ago.”  http://neuroscience.mssm.edu/nestler/brainRewardpathways.html

 

These dopaminergic pathways act beyond reward actions and are involved in learning, executive function, neuroendocrine control and motivation.