Page 41 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

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Our Learning Systems:54 3. Ideas, Concepts & Concept Frameworks
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Learning to sense our world, speak and listen and read and write all require lots of neurons but it is a different story, though, when it comes to explaining how the brain creates and stores ideas and concepts. This ability is our third learning system and our most complex. Over hundreds of thousands of years of human development, we have developed and passed on an increasing capability to form ideas and concepts from generation to generation. These concepts include hunting, relationships, understanding and managing risk, navigating the spaces we inhabit, judging time, interpreting body language, recognising social status, building structures to live in, as well as how we celebrate events, process food, keep warm and protect the tribe, town or city. Each of these capabilities is only possible as we build concepts and concept frameworks.
Understanding concepts provides us with the power to predict possible futures. As human beings, making predictions creates a more predictable, and hence safer, future for us, and a greater chance of our survival.
Because humans have been creating and developing ideas and concepts ‘on the fly’ for eighty thousand years, this learning system is extremely efficient and, what’s more, we are the only species that has this capacity to form ideas/concepts.
Forming Ideas & Concepts
It appears that the second most common type of cell in the brain is a type of glial cells called astrocytes. Many neuroscientists believe that between 30– 90% of all cells in the adult brain are astrocytes (as seen in red in the picture to the right) of a rat’s brain. In this emerging model for how the brain learns, it is thought that concepts in the human brain are mapped via a relationship that is formed between neurons (blue) and astrocytes (red)55 across synaptic connections between the neurons.56 Human astrocytes are generally much larger and more complex than rat or any other species astrocytes.
Resource 14: Neurons & Astrocytes
The role of the astrocytes in the brain has been contentious for some time with some neuroscientists insisting that the role of astrocytes was minor, and that their primary purpose is to provide support for neurons.
54 The chapter five summary video can be found here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odh_fslSMxg if you are reading the book, otherwise click on the video icon at the top of the page
55 Fields, R. Douglas. (7 Mar. 2013) "Human Brain Cells Make Mice Smart." Scientific American Blog. Scientific American. Retrieved from http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-brain-cells-make-mice-smart
56 Flickr (2010); GE Healthcare; Janet Anderl, Millipore Corporation, USA. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/gehealthcare/4254340876/in/set-72157623071062067/
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