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Our Learning Systems:41
2. Sequencing
In this emerging model for how the brain learns, sequencing is our second learning system, which we share with some other animals, but our refinement of this learning process far exceeds that of all other species. We tend to think of our brain as mostly being composed of neurons, but this is not the case. For lots of reasons, researchers still struggle to count the number and type of cells in our brain, hence there are differences in how many of which type of cells make up our brain.
In the average adult brain, there are between 60-86 billion neurons, which is less than 50% of the total of 200 billion cells in the brain. This ratio is very different from the 70–80% of neurons we are probably born with. Why is there this difference? There is increasing evidence that our neurons primarily manage our ability to sequence as well as the development of our senses.
Listening & Speaking
Babies learn to speak by watching primary caregivers and siblings mouth movements, listening to the sounds that they are hearing and looking at where we are looking or where we are pointing when we identify an object with a specific sound – (see the video below).42 Our brain’s ability to sequence a learning task, primarily makes use of neurons and this allows us to copy and experiment with the sequences of mouth, lip and tongue placements and movements that we observe as babies, so we can learn to talk.
Steven Pinker43 argues that our perchance for language is also genetically passed on from generation to generation. This evolutionary process seems highly likely, and it is the genetic component that has probably driven our ability to sequence mouth movements, enabling us to develop complex language relatively quickly, within 12-18 months of being born.
The efficiency and effectiveness of this learning system is very high as we have been sequencing mouth movements and mimicking and refining sounds we make over hundreds of thousands of years. This combination of genetics and sequencing also appears to enable us to decode spoken words so we can comprehend what others are saying, which is not that different to creating sounds to speak.
Resource 9: Developing Language
41 The chapter 4 summary video can be found here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hqo2m0Vc7I if you are reading the book, otherwise click on the video icon at the top of the page
42 Deb Roy (TED); The Birth of a Word (2011) Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word#t-449712 43 Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
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