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The possible trigger for this dramatic rebuilding of the brains cellular makeup may well be a feedback loop based on when we become orally literate. Girls tend to develop their listening and speaking earlier than boys, as they generally spend more time in conversation with their peers and in groups. One consequence of this is that girls tend to reach this period of brain restructuring 18 months to two years earlier than boys, as boys are mostly busy running, kicking, hitting, throwing and chasing each other and not talking to each other as much as girls. Girls generally reach this transition point at about 8 years onwards while boys are closer to 9.5-10 years old.49
This transfer of neurons into astrocytes allows the brain to build and create more complex ideas and concepts and do that far more efficiently. This process then triggers our ability to map more complex concepts such as body language and social nuance which they lack when they are younger.
Because of this earlier change in cellular makeup in a girl’s brain, we tend to generalise that girls ‘mature’ intellectually earlier than boys as they can create concepts around body language, social and vocal nuance, sooner due to this theoretical change in the brain structure. Boys do catch up, and both genders are equally able to develop concepts by their late teens to the early twenties.
The (+1) Learning System – Learning via Rote
A relatively recent adaptation of our sequencing system is our ability to learn knowledge via rote (off-by-heart). This learning system is recognised in this text as the (+1) learning system. The reason for this distinction is its very recent addition to our other four established learning systems. Historically, rote learning was a minor player in our thinking and learning processes.
It was our relatively recent requirement to learn to read and write50 that suddenly forced us to remember large amounts of information by rote. Most of our learning up to that point was based on mapping our senses, sequencing our speaking and listening, as well as applying the apprenticeship system, forming ideas and concepts, and being creative.
It is not that we did not engage in rote learning, but having to memorise the shapes and sounds of letters, how words were spelled as well as build a written vocabulary, instigated a dramatic increase in our rote learning, changing it from a very minor player in our learning repertoire to one that dominates learning in our first experiences of school. We have been doing some rote learning for a while but the demand for this was small and it was usually associated with specific societal roles that involved tasks such as recording family histories, stories, songs, and some crafts, excluding ‘apprenticeship style learning which is the application of our sequencing system.
Up until 200-500 years ago, we had few evolutionary or genetic drivers looking to improve our rote learning capacity prior to reading and writing becoming common. Over the last 200-500 years our ten to twenty-five generations of genetic adaptation only marginally increased our capacity to learn via rote. Consequently, rote learning is our least efficient learning system.
The sounds and shapes of the letters of the alphabet are random and must be learned by rote, as those shapes and sounds cannot be predicted by what they look like. The same is true for words. Once we have learned the sounds and shapes of letters then we can begin to develop a vocabulary of written words as well as our oral language, and only then can we can start playing around with words creatively and apply concepts to them.
49 These statistics are, of course, accompanied by the relevant distribution curves for each sample.
50 The exceptions to this are the Netherlands and the UK which both had literacy rates of over 50% by 1650. See Roser, M. (2015). Literacy. Retrieved from http://ourworldindata.org/data/education-knowledge/literacy/
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