A 2003 CTE Poster Presentation Excerpt


Exponential Growth of Information

It is an established fact that every ten years the amount of information in every discipline has been increasing sixteen times, on average.

To visualize this exponential growth of information, assume you started to learn, or maybe teach in a subject area twenty years ago with one shelf of books. Ten years ago you would have had to sift through two cabinets of eight shelves each (16 shelves total). Today you would need to go through a room full of books (32 cabinets of eight shelves per cabinet) to extract all of the important information in that same subject.

Brain Based Learning is a case in point: Just about 20 years ago, in 1983, Leslie Hart in his Book  Human Brain and Human Learning, drew to the attention of educators a straight forward fact that without keeping in mind how the brain works is like making a glove without knowing what the hand looks like...

Now, twenty years later, Google alone lists over 800 web-links on the topic of Brain-Based Learning. And each of those sites have their own list of essential web-links (some important links are repeated)! The somewhat misleading label Brain-Based Learning was obviously derived from the original idea of Brain Compatible Teaching.

Following questions arise:

          How can we cope with this exponential growth of knowledge?

          How do we condense the essential information?

          What do we keep and what do we discard?

          What do we require or recommend as indispensable fundamental knowledge?

          What do we need to understand, and what do we memorize?

          Can we learn how to learn?

Filtering Information Overload

Timing

In 1996, at the American Association or Advancement in Science annual meeting in Baltimore, Dr. Warren Meck, associate professor of experimental psychology at Duke University,  reported that they discovered timing mechanisms within the human brain, leading them to conclude that "timing is the foundation for learning and memory".

Dr. Meck and collaborator Dr. James MacFall, a Duke radiologist, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a new application of clinical MR imaging, which measures the magnetic properties of water inside the body to create images of body organs non-invasively. The MR device measures increases in blood flow, and therefore activity in the brain, and translates that information into images. Meck has localized the different parts of the brain that contribute to timing short intervals, finding that some of the most active parts of the brain were the frontal cortex and the striatum, a portion of the brain previously thought to be involved only with motor skills. The substantia nigra appears to function as a metronome, sending a steady stream of pulses to the striatum. This area of the brain normally produces the neurotransmitter dopamine (It is this same area of the brain that is destroyed in Parkinson's disease). This region, which is also part of the basal ganglia, appears to be a gatekeeper that turns on and  off awareness of time intervals and feeds that information to the frontal cortex, which stores the information in memory. The complete neural circuit is called a frontal-striatal loop.

Information Fragmentation and Storage

Every information component addressing our body and brain parts through our five sensory inputs carries various amounts of sensory, emotional, cognitive, and timing subcomponents. These subcomponents or information bits arrive either directly or indirectly at the respective brain centres creating new physical links between neurons. All these information fragments, including timing information are stored in the memory. Previously established connections already in existence are utilized to optimize the memory space required for storage of the map of the complete information component, so it can be recalled, when required.