Matthew Taylor
speaker
407 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2011
last heard Nov 2011
Matthew Taylor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
But it's not the fantasy and imagination of video games that interests the neuroscientists.
Instead, they've noticed something unexpected going on in players' neural networks that seems to be affecting the brain's plasticity.
I'm at Dufferin School, a Newport comprehensive, with a neuroscientist, Dr Paul Howard-Jones of Bristol University.
The act of gaming releases a chemical called dopamine, which we think makes the brain more receptive.
Crucially, this is not because people always win, but precisely because they don't, because the rewards are uncertain.
Paul Howard Jones's study indicates that brains on alert for uncertain rewards are more likely to absorb new knowledge.
So here we are in the classroom, waiting to see whether this software really works.
So before neuroscience came along, the debate about motivation seemed like it had completely stagnated, that all it was was a matter of opinion, there was no scientific basis for going forward.
And then neuroscience comes along.
In the study, the monkeys' dopamine levels were ramped up most not when they always got a drop of honey for pressing a button, but when getting the honey was a matter of chance.
And humans too seem to produce more dopamine when anticipating an uncertain reward, like in a game.
The challenge is firstly whether what's being seen in animals can be utilised in humans, and secondly whether we can actually use these neuroscience insights in the classroom.
As they're waiting for the reward, that's when you can give them information which they're particularly likely then to hold.
Doesn't this method drive us towards very shallow forms of learning?
Because when that dopamine gate is opened, as it were, in the brain, you can't shove a love of Shakespeare through the gap.
You can just shove a date or a fact or something like that.
So isn't there a danger this is going to dumb us down to nuggets of knowledge rather than deep learning?
Paul Howard-Jones' technique is exciting.
It suggests an answer to the growing problem of how schooling can compete in the ever more stimulating world of video games and the internet.
But I had some misgivings, so I did an entirely unscientific evaluation of my own.
Showing 161–180 of 407 · page 9 of 21
← Previous
Next →