And the photos keep coming in for The Brain Audit competition. Today’s photos are from New Zealand and all the way from the Arctic Circle.
It’s child’s play..
Martin Thompson, Auckland, New Zealand
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I am sending the photo of The Brain Audit book, which travelled with me and a couple of friends 150 km north of the Arctic Circle. We had to carry all our food for 10 days on our backs, but I couldn’t resist packing the book as well. There is something very weird (in the nicest way) about reading about marketing when you don’t see a living soul for days.
All the best from Europe.
Ondrej Ilincev,Prague, Europe
PS: I am the one on the right.
PPS: I thought there would be more snow as well, but we were very lucky with the weather and it was 20-25 degrees Celsius.
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And here’s a biggie: I’m amazed at this book. And if you’ve ever wondered about the factor of getting old (and stupid), or wondered how we learn (and unlearn stuff), then you need to read this book. I intend to take snippets of the information and put my own spin to it over the weeks and months to come. You’ll understand all of that information so much better, and how it relates to talent—if you read this book.
I was sitting at my favourite cafe in Takapuna with Renuka’s niece, Marsha.
Marsha was only three and half years old at the time, and happily drinking her um, ‘coffee’, when she looked upwards (as most kids do), and noticed a black object on the glass.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Fungus,” I said.
“Fungus,” she repeated about three-four times.
Then promptly she forgot. And asked again.
Of course I told her it was called fungus. And she nodded happily.
When she went back home to her mother, she ran through the door and said “Mama, I saw a bungus.”
Of course confusion reigned till I stepped in to clarify that it was a fungus.
And Marsha was delighted to correct herself and say the word correctly.
Most adults don’t act like Marsha
They’re defensive. Incredibly defensive.
They’re attacking. And it gets a bit scary how they fight back at times.
They don’t want to make a mistake.
They don’t want to appear in a bad light.
They are insecure. Because if they weren’t insecure, they would have no problem making mistakes. Or letting the world know about mistakes.
Most of us want to appear perfect.
We don’t want to make mistakes.
We don’t want others to learn that we’ve made a mistake.
In effect, we’re dolts.
Even a three and half year old knows better.
In fact the reason why kids have an enormous learning capacity is because they follow a very clear pattern of: 1) Learn
2) Talk
3) Implement
4) Make mistake.
5) Go back to start.
Most kids are smart because they’re professional mistake makers. They live in a world of ‘conscious incompetence’. Most adults are dolts.
They learn less not because they don’t have the time. Or because they have no talent.
They learn less because they can’t be like Marsha.
This isn’t a learner sign: It’s a ‘I’m going to make a mistake’ sign
Think of anything you’ve ever learned.
Anything.
Ever learned.
And the only way you’ll have learned it is by making a mistake.
Look at the act of learning the alphabet.
Speaking; walking; running; talking; dancing, and just about anything.
And you’ll never be able to point out even one instance in your entire life that was learned without making a mistake.
This idea of willfully making a mistake scares the heck out of most people.
It literally means that you have to make mistakes—and that if you don’t make mistakes you can’t learn. If you can’t learn, you can’t acquire a new talent. If you can’t acquire a new talent, you remain exactly where you are.
Are you scared?
You should be.
Because the younger you are, the less you’re afraid of making mistakes. The older you get, the more you tell your brain it’s bad to make a mistake. The older you get, the more you feel you have to learn something quickly, and correctly the first time.
Yet that’s not the way the brain learns at all.
The only way the brain learns is through actively making mistakes. The brain’s most powerful tool is to make the mistake, recognise the mistake, and then try to remember the mistake. This is so that it doesn’t make the mistake again, or doesn’t create mistakes of an equal intensity.
This process needs time and effort.
The smaller, and simpler the task, the quicker the brain is able to eliminate mistakes. The more complex the task, the more time and effort is required to make the mistake, recognise it, remember it and finally correct it.
And yet the correction factor is almost never 100%.
So let’s say you’re learning a new dance step for instance. The brain has to first goof up. Once it has goofed up, it has to recognise the goof up, or it won’t improve. Once recognition sets in, all your neurons have to fire in the right sequence to memorise this mistake.
The more you muck up the dance step, the more your brain has to work out what’s wrong. And with every mistake, it eliminates only a percentage of the error. It’s only when it eliminates 100% of the error, does it then get that dance step right.
What’s interesting is that you’re never learning one step at a time.
You’re learning several steps. And the brain has to go over this whole sequence of making the mistake, recognising it, memorising it and then fixing it.
And it has to do this entire sequence for every single mistake.
Luckily our brains have enormous computing power.
And they’re able to process these mistakes and make corrections in a matter of milliseconds—if we are willing to make the mistake, that is.
The biggest reason we don’t get talented is for a simple reason.
It’s because we can’t bear to make a mistake.
And as you can now tell, that’s the biggest mistake of all!
Note: During this lesson I had to go through this exact process, because I was trying to learn how to insert an ’em-dash’. On my PC, I have to press Alt + 0151 on my keyboard to get an ’em-dash.’ On a Mac, it’s different. I have to press Shift+ Alt + – to get the same result. I learned how to create the ’em-dash’, and then promptly goofed it up. I had to go back several times to learn it. And now I think I have it. Or do I? 🙂
Learning and talent is all supposed to hinge on ease of instruction.
But what if you made learning difficult?
And what if there was no apparent benefit or payoff?
One Indian researcher ended up doing just that, quite by mistake…
In the year 1999, Sugata Mitra occupied an office at NIIT (a computer-training institute that has trained over five million students). And his office overlooked an urban slum in New Delhi.
A wall separated the slum from the office
So Sugata and his colleagues made a hole in the wall, and placed a computer in that hole. The monitor and the touch pad faced the slum. And the computer had a decently fast connection and was connected to the Internet.
Then Sugata and his colleagues sat back and watched.
What would happen next?
About eight hours later, an eight year-old child and six year-old girl were browsing the Internet.
Now the browser was in English, and technically at least, the kids didn’t speak the language.
But what if they were somehow helped?
There they were browsing the Internet, but hey, this was an urban slum. It’s possible that they were helped by someone with an understanding of computers, and/or an understanding of the foreign language.
This experiment was bringing up more questions than answers
So Sugata headed off to Shivpuri. Now Shivpuri is reasonably remote in the state of Madhya Pradesh.
They put another computer in the wall, and it was found by a 13-year old school dropout.
Yet in eight minutes, having never seen a browser before, he was busy browsing. By the evening, over seventy (yes, seventy) kids had begun to browse (again with no prior knowledge of browsers).
By the year 2000, the experiment had gone one step further.
Sugata took the experiment to a village called Madantusi, near Lucknow, in India.
Now if you know India, even just a little bit, you’ll know that English is all pervasive. Yes, the accents and the pronunciation is a bit different, but you can make yourself understood in English.
Well, the village of Madantusi didn’t seem to have an English teacher at all.
And once again, the computer was placed in the wall, this time with CDs available. And no Internet connection.
And the computer was left there for three whole months.
When Sugata came back three months later he was amazed
The little kids turned to him and said they needed a faster processor. And a better mouse.
How did the kids learn what they needed?
Amazingly, though all the terms and the information was in English, the kids taught themselves to understand the ‘code’ of English.
The kids were now using over 200 English words in conversations with each other.
In fact, in many instances, when the computers were hooked up to the Internet, the kids would search for a website that would teach them the English alphabet.
Are you stunned?
You should be.
Not only was the concept of the computer alien to most of the kids.
But the language was the equivalent of you reading an unknown language, like Swahili.
And yet, the kids quickly worked it out.
So how did they work it out?
Were they more talented?
As it turns out, they were not.
The kids were just kids from the village, who’d found something interesting.
So how did they pick up this talent of browsing, finding websites, and speaking a foreign language?
You see, talent is a matter of understanding code.
If code is simple to follow, then you understand and apply it.
But as it turns out, even when things are difficult, the human brain is able to work things out.
So why do we not become as talented as we should be?
Parents. And teachers.
The people who believe that we’re born to do certain things.
And not other things.
The people who tell us that nature, and family and heritage determines talent.
Time and time again, these parents and teachers tell us who we are.
And what we should be doing.
And what we can’t do.
But as it turned out, in this experiment there was no parent. Or teacher.
The hole in the wall computer was manned only by curious kids, eager to learn.
And to teach each other the ‘code’.
And time and again, they succeeded, across the length and breadth of India.
No matter what the level of education, or language, or diversity. The experiment played out almost the same way time and time again. And a whole bunch of kids became magically talented.
Which makes you wonder, eh?
Are parents, and teachers, and our school system…who believe in talent, the factor that kill our talents?
Hmmm…
Note: Watch the video below that details the experiment. If you’re reading this on email, you’ll have to go to https://brainaudit.com to watch the video. If you’re online, you can already see the video right under this line.
