George Lakoff | What Studying the Brain Tells Us About Arts Education

hi first I'm delighted to speak to teachers I've been teaching only 47 years now does my 4740 at UC berkeley and i want to start a little bit with what i do technically i work on the relationship between the mind the brain and language and what we've been doing for the past quarter of a century is trying to figure out exactly how the brain does thought and language to model it with neural computation to look at neuroscience in doing that to take the cognitive linguistics and the Experimental Psychology and bring them together and they're actually coming together and I talked a little bit about that but also why you should care as what is it what does it matter the first thing to realize is you think with your brain you don't have a choice ideas are not floating in air the question is how does that work I mean you got think of it this way how do you get ideas out of neurons Noren says fire but you know how do you get ideas out of them well we'll give you some idea as we go along but we have a pretty good sense of how that works secondly why should you care all right think of it this way yesterday in the New York Times there's a story that one out of four African American children coming into kindergarten assume they're going to fail right what is that about well first uh one thing we know is that you are born with 100 billion neurons each connected to between a thousand and ten thousand others that gives you close to a quadrillion connections and by the time you're five half of them have died the half not used and that's important by the time you are five your brain has been been shaped and that's one of the reasons why early childhood education is absolutely crucial one of the reasons why you must have it why parents aren't have to be involved in teaching I mean this is not just something that you just can pick up at any time what is what you've done earlier matters and matters a lot so just to begin there you know if anybody's going to talk about early childhood education that should be sentence number one because most people don't know that very very crucial second ah because you think with your brain every idea that you have is physical ideas are not floating in air they are physical and we have been studying the structure of those ideas we know a lot about them after doing it for I've been doing it for 50 years working on this now what we've been doing is figuring out the details of these we'll get into that in a bit but crucially every idea and every connection of ideas that you have is given by a neural circuit in your brain okay now many of those are fixed for life they're the things you learn the ideas that you learn early many of them early and very often they are metaphorical ideas which we'll get to but the important thing is that if you do not have a neural circuit for understanding an idea you won't understand it at all it has to be close enough to what you're teaching it has to be comprehensible otherwise it'll go quote one in one ear and out the other it won't make any sense so when you're teaching it's important to know what people already know that's not trivial it's extremely important to figure out because you know if I try to teach something that with it no there's nothing that anyone connect can connect to it's not going to be there so that's the next sort of obvious thing to understand hey what happens after that well uh the big thing to get is that the classical view of what reason is has failed and that's important let me try to give you a sense of what I learned about reason I learned that it was all conscious it's 98 percent unconscious and it has to be why the brain functions in parallel reason functions literally consciousness functions linearly you have massive parallelism you could not be consciously aware of most things going on in your brain it's an impossibility most things are going on and you don't know they're there but they're structuring your conscious thought so if you think you know what you're thinking you probably don't and that's but there are ways to find out and that's important so second and what we've been doing is showing how you can find out so that that is crucial another idea that is taught about reason is this that reason is abstract and it's embodied and not just embodied in the brain but it comes out of your actual physical and embodied experiences in ways that we'll talk about in a bit that is it's not the case that the reason is just abstract ideas don't float in the air they come meaning comes out of what you experience another idea that you get is that reason is logic it's logical thinking and there are logics of thinking but I was trained at MIT as a mathematician as well as I also trained in literature both and linguistics and what you find out when you do logic is that that's not how people mostly think they mostly think in things called frames and metaphors what is a frame very simple think of the frame of a classroom okay you have typically you know a teacher students a subject matter etc maybe lessons point lesson plans ideas of what you're teaching but and lots of other big ideas that you guys are trying to change but there are the things that don't happen in a classroom you don't have surgery in most of you know K to 12 classrooms you know you don't have hopefully herds of elephants coming through your classroom I mean things don't happen there other things do all right in this there are things called semantic roles your teacher that's a role that you play students play a role they come in they may be of any age and they're still students you may be of any age you're still a teacher hey that is you've played that role that is what a frame it has roles it has things that happen in whatever you're talking about or thinking about metaphors are not in language they're in thought the language is superficial the language is real there are linguistic metaphors but metaphorical thought is much much deeper let me give you a feel for that the first here's the first one you've heard of the fiscal cliff right you probably have heard of it a lot right now up other people have pointed out economists are pointed out that there is no such thing that you know it's not there and what happens is they've tried to change the metaphor and it doesn't work make it a fiscal hill doesn't work a fiscal curb doesn't work the austerity bomb doesn't work etc why what happens is this the fiscal cliff is what we'll call a super metaphor it is something that has a what's called a cascade of other deeper metaphors supporting it that cascade is fixed in your brain and it's hard to get rid of it and let me try to give you a feel for how powerful that can be you have a metaphor that is around the world but many metaphors are learned everywhere simply through experience like more is up les is down why is more up you pour every water in the glass the level goes up there's a correlation in your experience in that correlation in your experience is registered in your brain in two different parts and you learn a circuit connecting them that circuit in your brain is more is up now in that you understand the stock market is going up to GDP is going up or down etc if you look at the graphs that you have of let's say of the GDP or a stock market graph it's going to go forward and up or down right perfectly normal why should you have an economy seen as moving ever thought of that an economy is a collection of economic activity there is a general metaphor that action is motion you say how is your project coming along how are things going well I'm stuck you know hit a brick wall all those things right action is motion and the economy is seen therefore as moving why is it moving forward because the future is ahead and in the past is behind right there's a reason for that we're looking ahead to things that's why it's moving forward and then you have a measure of economic activity to go up or down fine now what is the fiscal cliff about when Bernanke introduced this what did he say he said oh he had in mind the idea that oil economy might go up a little for a while but if you certain things happen it could go way down and you have a picture of this cliff so far so good but what do you know about a cliff it's not just something that goes down it's dangerous right you know you could drive off a cliff and die falling is failing right if you die that's the end of it and if the economy dies its non-functional right like the computer dying its non-functional metaphorically the fiscal ending therefore you're going to be afraid of it the fiscal cliff has all of those things is at once all of those frames and metaphors are there simultaneously in the fiscal cliff but not in the fiscal hill or the fiscal curb or any random metaphor you can't just replace a metaphor and have it fit reality the fiscal cliff does not fit reality at all but it's there and it's going to stay there because it's so deep right so one of the things you need to know is what are the other deep metaphors that are there they're important if you're teaching and they're all over the place by the way is there some water because I could use some sorry um now rescue thanks terrific it even has lemon in it cool now um there's another very deep thing that we learned I learned about when I went to school about rationality rationality is supposed to be about self-interest and maximizing that self-interest and one of the things has been learned in neuroscience is the following in 1996 a remarkable thing happened in Parma Italy in a neuroscience lab of Professor Ritz alati and I've been in the lab they were studying and I've worked with people there I study macaque monkeys and they were trying to figure out exactly what neurons were firing when the monkey did certain tasks and they had implantation x' in the monkey's brain for neuron by neuron checks and which is quite remarkable in itself in the premotor cortex which choreographs actions actions happen up here premotor over here connections underneath right now the if you're going to pick up something like this glass and take a drink I have to do lots of things I have to raise my shoulder I have to hold it I have to move my elbow each one of those is one thing that is done up here in the motor cortex those actions are choreographed elsewhere in the premotor cortex and what they discovered was this they had trained the monkey to let's say eat bananas peel banana and eat it eat peanuts fine press a button grab a ring grasp objects let him go things like that and they could find out what was firing in the brain one day one of the people running the experiment who I've since gotten to be friends with went out had lunch experiment was going fine came back so a pile of bananas started peeling it kneading it and heard the Machine go click click click click click as if because the monkey's brain was firing so we went to see what was firing what was firing was the set of neurons for peeling and eating a banana but the monkey wasn't eating the banana he was right he discovered mirror neurons that is their set of neural circuits in the brain that fire when you perform an action or you see someone else perform the same one now in addition those neurons are connected to the emotional regions of the brain which is why you can tell if somebody else is writhing in pain or if they're happy or smiling or feeling sad or drooping you can see it because you see their muscles and they're connected to yours and every emotion you have has a physical Carlat so and that's remarkable so one we have a physical basis for empathy think about that second it is a ridge near there about this far away in the brain and in that Ridge there's another set of neurons that fire when you either see an object or there's a normal action you would perform on that object you see a banana you peel and eat it but it does that's a normal what's called a canonical action but sticking it in your ear is not a canonical action so then there are on safari for the canonical actions but not for sticking it in your ear okay so they what that means is you are connected to the physical world via normal actions we evolved to figure out well how to act normally in the physical world we are physically connected to that now think about what that means about the environment the word environment suggests it's outside of us it's actually also inside of us you cannot enact in the environment without it being inside of you and that changes the whole idea of what environmentalism is right we can get into that later so very important change so one thing is this about emotions very important thing about emotions there are certain parts of the brain that fire when you're feeling certain emotions those are connected physically to your body so for example when you experience anger your skin temperature goes up about half a degree your heartbeat rate goes up your blood pressure goes up it's harder for you to see accurately it's harder for you to do fine movements accurately right standard things it turns out that that physiology of anger gives you the Ahmet ofourse for understanding anger that's why you can say my blood is boiling he's red in the face etc he's about to blow up hey and and on and on we've studied this in very great detail and I have we have there now long studies and books on this for the full range of emotions they all work metaphorically by the physiology of the emotion what you learn about the brain and how it's connected to the body shows you how your thinking and therefore also how you're speaking and what the I those ideas are they're not separate now one of the most important discoveries about the brain is this when you are imagining something the same part of the brain is used as when you're actually experiencing it so when you're imagining seeing something the same part of the brain is used as when you're actually seeing when you are imagining moving some part of your body the same part of the brain is used as when you're actually doing it so there are fMRI studies that put people in the machine and say okay you're imagine you're you know kick it kick it first I move your leg to kick a soccer ball and move their legs certain part of the brain up here fires now move your hand to grasp a baseball hey they move their hand it fires their now imagine move your move your you know move your mouth to bite an apple fires they're fine now imagine don't move anything imagine kicking same part of the brain fires imagine grasping same part fires imagine biting the same part fires the same part of the brain is firing when you're imagining as when you're doing and it also is true when you are remembering when you are dreaming and when your understanding language language is met under the meaning of language involves mental simulation in your brain right you are simulating what you're understanding in your brain and when you're doing that you're also engaging your mirror neuron systems to understand and connect with other people and your canonical neurons second of your canonical neuron systems to connect with the world that is you are connecting with people when you are reading so now think about reading novels what is involved in that or reading poetry or understanding art or involving or seeing a play what you're doing if you understand it is simulating what is going on you're becoming part of those pre people your understanding that and you're imagining things that don't exist in the world but that you could experience through them right what you're doing is learning how to simulate things now you can simulate things all the time through you know which don't exist you can make up things that don't exist and the question is how are you doing it what is the brain mechanism let me give you an example imagine a flying pig whose name is pig Isis okay what does that flying pig look like how does it fly well it has wings where are the wings it's back which way is it's now directed relative to the wings in terms of its direction of motion it's going horizontal and forward where the beak of a bird would be right how did you all know that you saw the movie yeah ah but there's another kind of Flying Pig whose name is super swine he's got a cape it goes like this okay now the point is you can do this instantly in about half a second how hey the name for the for this phenomenon is neural binding and what it does is this if there are circuits for taking ideas that you already have pigs and birds and binding the relevant parts together the wings of the birds the shape of the pig and so on and you can't move things in your brain all you can do is have connections between them and the question is how do you get those connections and that's what we're figuring out that's fairly straightforward way given what we know about neural learning I'm not going to give you a lecture on neural learning but it's crucial your brain can do this like that you can imagine new things and the question is how do you get trained to imagine new things it's a natural thing that your brain can do and that is by reading by reading poetry learning to understand it through drama through the arts through folktales through all of those things now let me talk a little bit about mathematics because one of the things that you are constantly taught is the following we need to teach more math and science in the schools and we do let's not debate that and we also need to have more innovation in our economy we have to out-innovate everybody else right we have to have new ideas which is why we have a big ideas conference right that's why you're here the big ideas come from neural simulation which comes from reading and thinking and putting things together and all of those things it doesn't just come from learning the math and science though there are big ideas in math and science but they're not they're not training the imagination in just that way and that's important it is important if you're going to think about innovating anything and train people to do that to have them read and learn about the arts and I buy the arts I include the visual arts I spent some time back in the late 70s on the back in the Carter Administration for those of you might remember that on the policy panel of the NEA visual arts division you know working on arts policy and what they needed to do was change arts policy I was the consulting linguist they needed a non artist and what we did was something important we changed the definition of art with respect to grants up until that time photography and crafts were not considered art and could not get grants and we said Photography is art you know if you're you know all sorts of craft making is art all over the country right we changed it because you can innovate in even in the government even in the in the field of art you can new you're going to innovate even in administration you can innovate you can change things because you can think a new thought ok now one of the things that I've been doing for the last 35 years is studying metaphorical thought and I want to talk a little bit about how that happened all right they in 1978 I was teaching a freshman undergraduate seminar at Berkeley with six people sitting around a table and uh one of the London one day we were reading various papers and we were reading a paper on metaphor on the classical view of metaphor and the philosophical view of metaphor and so on and it was raining because it was February sort of like it's today and one of the young women in the class came in a little bit late and drenched and in tears so she sat down at the table about four feet away from everybody else and we all tried not to notice that she was in tears Hey so we're discussing this and on page 10 professor so-and-so says this what do you think about that let's go around the table we get to her she says I'm sorry I can't do this today I've got a metaphor a problem with my boyfriend maybe you guys can help 1978 in Berkeley we say sure oh well trained she says on the way over here my boyfriend said something disturbing he said that our relationship had hit a dead end street you know I don't understand what to make of this and we said okay well let's hit a dead-end street you can't keep going the way it's been going you may have to turn back right we realized that there were several expressions in which love was talking about in terms of travel so this is a linguistics class right so we say okay let's look at all the ways in which love can be talked about in terms of travel okay guys how can you understand love relationships in terms of travel but one at a time okay what was it I didn't hear that getting the first base what else hmm off ramp others it's a long bumpy road what else I'll fly me to the moon right more that's a journey what else what kind of journey right a long journey relationship can be on the rocks off the tracks what else spinning your wheels what in the air yes what train wreck right you if it's in the air you may have to bail out right when separate way should go in in different directions you're at a crossroads all right hmm go all the way yes now given those we said okay nice list all right is there a generalization about this list that's what we do that's our job to figure out the general principles so you say yeah what are the lovers in these metaphors they're travelers right what is the relationship it's a vehicle either car a train about a plane whatever all right what's going on is they are traveling together in a vehicle toward common goals okay and these each metaphor is about the problems in doing that so it's always you know on the rocks off the track going in different directions you know etc bailing out it's about those difficulties in relationships in terms of travel fine and the young lady says I'm sorry I don't care about your generalization my boyfriend is breaking up with me he's thinking in terms of this metaphor well okay I'm the linguistics professor I say that's interesting how can you think in terms of a metaphor how does that work okay let's take spinning your wheels in the relationship okay you have that is there an image that you have no right where are the wheels or the wheels is it just wheels or they attach to something they're in in mud and sand and other is there something that they're attached to or just the wheels the car okay it's a car is the car moving no do you want it to be moving are you trying to get it moving how do you feel you all know the right answers now that given that image and the knowledge about the image let's apply the metaphor which is basically a mapping from travel to love by our lovers or travelers etc okay so the traveler the lovers are travelers in that vehicle the love relationship is not getting anywhere it's not going toward their common life goals they're trying to get it to move to go somewhere and they're frustrated and that's what that idiom means right now it turns out that they all work like this there's a general metaphor that that maps travel to love and that this works for all sorts of cases whether you're going in different directions they mean different things because each of those is a separate image with separate knowledge but the general metaphor applies to it that's cool okay it's like what we saw with the fiscal cliff it's a deep thing now what we learn from that is that metaphorical thought is normal now how is that possible how do you learn metaphorical thought at all the answer is you use your brain and you don't know you're using it and you're usually a little kid so how do little kids learn metaphorical thought and when do they learn it by about two years and nine months maybe three every three-year-old granddaughter she's doing just fine all right how does that work here you're a little kid and you look around and you see your parents pouring water into a glass or milk into a bottle every time the level goes up now you may not be paying attention consciously but your brain is it notices verticality change quantity change and that there's a relationship between them Moore's up and two parts of the brain together notice this or suppose they're held warmly that is their they're held affectionately and they experience temperature in different parts of the brain what happens is these parts of the brain start being active and as they become active over and over again the activation spreads along existing pathways and it spreads further and further till the shortest pathway is found between them and you form a circuit and that circuit is the metaphor of more missouri's up or for affection as warmth now once you have those in your brain they affect behavior they're not just there for understanding which they are therefore they're not just there for language they affect what you do you live according to them you know so for example we understand time as a resource a money-like resource you spend time invest your time budget your time etc and you live that way we have a clock right here right telling me that huh how much time we have for this thought right we live by that metaphor and we live by lots and lots of them all over the place now the experiments are cool or warm depending on how you think about so here's an example at Yale which is a pretty cold place in winter ah John Bargh and his students set up an experiment where they brought in subjects and they gave half of them a warm cup of coffee ice in the winter and the other half a cold cup of coffee and then they brought them and said now we're going to start the experiment tell us imagine you've met somebody what do they like the guys who got the warm cups of coffee met friendly people the other guys met unfriendly people all right similar experiment in Toronto which is also cold in winter hey they bring in some subjects usually College sophomores and you know they go into a room and the people in the room are told in advance we're going to who the subjects are and they say okay some of them we're going to snub I'm going to treat them act like they're lepers other people going to be very warm about v3 friendly etc you know in a systematic way right now afterwards these people leave on the way out they're asked to judge the temperature of the room the ones who are treated warmly say it's five degrees warmer and the one so far it's not okay now I can go on and on there's a marvelous book that just came out about a month ago called louder than words by Benjamin Bergen and it's it is an introduction to how the brain works and how the mind works through 200 such experiments beautifully done and funny cuz he's hilarious now so if you're interested in this at all louder than words is a great book it's also very readable easy to understand and so on I recommend it very highly but the point here is that how you behave has to do with the metaphorical Cascades that you learn and that stay there with you or your life they're there and that's important to know now what else is important to know we know from empathy and from the mirror neurons that which are the basis of empathy that there are a couple of ways that you can teach you can be a nurturing teacher empathizing with your students or you can be a strict teacher trying to discipline them period ly getting them to do what you want period and those are very different ways of teaching and they have very different effects on students when you're teaching to the test you're trying to just give them information and there's another metaphor used and that metaphor is what is called the conduit metaphor it's one of the major metaphors for communication it says that ideas are the objects words are containers and communication is putting the ideas into words and sending them to somebody else but then takes the same ideas out of the words you've heard this theory it doesn't work it is absolutely false that's not how you communicate other people have to have the same brain the same kinds of metaphors the same kinds of frames they have to have a basis in the neural structure to understand what you're saying all right teaching is a two-way street always it's not the conveying of information it is not the conveying of information that is learning involves something active you've got to do something right now one of the problems with the way that computer teaching is done is it's all too often done via the consuming a conveying of information I'm going to sit there in the screen and be passive you know not move and I'm going to convivial information that somebody else is going to get wrong they're going to have to interact in some way you don't have to be doing something and preferably not in front of a computer preferably with a real human being because if you're really learning something it's largely because you care about it and you care about it when someone empathizes with you right this is very important now you may wonder why it is that certain kinds of people with political ideas want are very much coming down on teachers these days why they want to get rid of teachers what you know teachers are wonderful why because if you look at their ideology and the way they think about the world it's in terms of strictness not in terms of nurturance it's in terms of strictness in the economy in business in you know every aspect of life and it's very different than if you're thinking in terms of nurturance and caring one of the reasons that they want to privatize education is to control the content of it but also how it is taught and who teaches it and they want to get rid of nurturers you that's serious it's very very serious there's a reason for this and it's not just budgets right and there are metaphors involved here and frames that are important what is a pension a pension is delayed pay for work already done when they cut pensions they're stealing your money think about it nobody's saying that people are not out there political leaders are not saying that they need to say things like that because that kind of frame is toxic the idea that you're just after you retire well we're paying you for doing nothing hardly we're paying you for a lifetime of work with delayed pay all right crucial to understand that if you just you know if you look at the discourse there are metaphors being used that are harmful harmful not just to you but to your students and to our country okay so it's really important that you understand how brains work this is not trivial and this comes up in every aspect from the fiscal cliff on down so I want to stop now and just take your questions and whatever you want to talk about it's a fortress

Channel: bigideasfest

Views: 25,036

Rating: 4.8527608 out of 5

Keywords: bif 2012, big ideas fest, linguistics, creativity, George Lakoff, education, cognitive science, arts, arts education

Id: fpIa16Bynzg

Length: 39min 54sec (2394 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 17 2013