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The brain is an extraordinarily dynamic environment with glial cells (including astrocytes), and neurons able to morph into either cell type,139 depending on the requirements of the brain at the time. The brain struggles to create entirely new brain cells, except for the gyrus and the hippocampus, but it can repurpose cells in certain conditions. We refer this repurposing process is what is referred to as the plasticity of the brain. The plasticity of the brain is not yet fully understood and we possibly undervalue this potential. There is currently a lot of research taking place in this field.
This capacity to predict outcomes, that seem unknowable via any other means, is extraordinary by any measure. We may refer to this ability as intuition, but it all comes down to our brain’s ability to predict using our huge number of stored and automated concepts. The capacity to form new concepts ‘on the fly’ in this way is unique to the human species. It is one of four reasons why we dominate the planet140- for better or worse.
Developing each learner’s learning competency and ability to the point where they can express an increasing degree of agency over their capability to create new concepts and concept frameworks is now a critical education issue. It is more critical now than it was 10 or 20 years ago for two key reasons:
1. Due to the increasing complexity of our relational, working and social lives and the increased decision making this demands, everyone needs to be able to develop an understanding of new concepts in an age where we need to access and develop additional knowledge, ideas, concepts and concept frameworks at an unprecedented rate. In other words, we are all increasingly becoming lifelong learners. By building a conceptual understanding of our world and mapping learning patterns, we can then use those patterns to predict how to make use of everything from online banking to accessing, downloading and using the latest app.
2. The internet now hosts the greatest intellectual resource ever created in the history of the Earth, and embedded within that is the largest set of collaborative tools ever assembled. All this is becoming increasingly available at a very low cost. Our ability to learn new concepts ‘on the fly’ is not only possible, but extremely desirable and increasingly essential for most people; not just the 20% who told the 80% what to do throughout the last industrial revolution.
One of our most important responsibilities as educators is to adequately prepare young people to live and work in a world that is increasingly dynamic and changing in ways we cannot possibly predict with any degree of accuracy, and all this just when we thought humankind was settling down to a predictable trajectory.
139 Kennedy, B. (2015). Chemical transformation of human glial cells into neurons.
Retrieved from http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-10-chemical-human-glial-cells-neurons.html
140 See the beginning of section three for these four reasons.