Just world

For quite a while now, I've been fascinated by the degree to which a sense justice comes built in (not just in people but in "non-human" animals as well):

When responding to ownership violations, children can focus on the victim’s needs, the perpetrator’s punishment, or both. Recent studies show that 3- and 5-year olds are equally likely to respond to second- and third party violations, and 3-year-olds return objects to their rightful owners. Children’s interventions are consistent with justice for victims.

[snip]

Together, these results suggest that although children intervene in loss events experienced by them- selves and others, their interventions are a general re- sponse to any unpermitted loss of property rather than punishment of theft.

Young children remedy second- and third-party ownership violations
Julia W. Van de Vondervoort and J. Kiley Hamlin
Trends in Cognitive Sciences | September 2015, Vol. 19, No. 9

A "second-party" violation means that the child himself or herself was the victim; a third-party violation means that a puppet was the victim.

In either case, your basic 3-year old's attitude, with which I completely agree, is: Give it back.

I wonder at what age children start to feel that justice requires punishment? (Or perhaps children at this age innately feel that punishment relates to a different set of wrongs?)

I'm pretty sure I've come across a fair amount of research showing that a desire to see wrongdoing punished is built-in, too.

Way too much thinking

I've mentioned (a gazillion times -- sorry!) that I'm writing a book to do with the basal ganglia.

The basal ganglia handle nonconscious learning and intuition. (Turns out intuition is a real thing - ! Basically, intuition is nonconscious category learning.)

Meanwhile, the entire education world is obsessively focused on conscious processes.

Critical thinking.

Problem solving.

GROUP problem solving.

Cognitive science (and common sense) tell us that all of these activities depend upon nonconscious processes, but never mind.

Here's a typical passage describing current thinking (thinking!) in cognitive science:

A great deal of complex cognitive processing occurs at the unconscious level.

[snip]

It is largely accepted that lower levels of processing (e.g., motor reflexes, sensory analysis) can operate outside of perceptual awareness (implicitly) (e.g., Castiello, Paulignan, & Jeannerod, 1991). And although the existence of nonconscious computations at higher levels (e.g., semantic or inferential processing) has been controversial (Dixon, 1971; Eriksen, 1960; Greenwald, 1992; Holender, 1986), a range of empirical findings on the unconscious over the last several decades has led most cognitive neuroscientists today to believe that mental activity can occur outside of conscious awareness (Hassin, Uleman, & Bargh, 2005). Some have argued that all information processing can, at least in principle, operate without conscious experience, and that consciousness (C) may thus be of a different nature (Chalmers, 1996). This view goes along with the hypothesis that nonconscious processes can achieve the highest levels of representation (Marcel, 1983). A large amount of complex cognitive processing appears to occur at the unconscious level in both healthy and psychiatric and neurological populations. For example, evidence from patients with blindsight (Goebel, Muckli, Zanella, Singer, & Stoerig, 2001; Weiskrantz, 1986), prosopagnosia (Renault, Signoret, Debruille, Breton, & Bolgert, 1989), implicit awareness in hemineglect (Cappelletti & Cipolotti, 2006; Marshall & Halligan, 1988; Vuilleumier et al., 2002), nondeclarative learning even in amnesia (Knowlton, Mangels, & Squire, 1996; Knowlton, Squire & Gluck, 1994; Turnbull & Evans, 2006), and the “split-brain” syndrome (Gazzaniga, 1995) supports the idea that unconsciously processed stimuli can activate high-level cortical regions.

- The Neural Basis of the Dynamic Unconscious

Expertise is heavily nonconscious. Most of the time experts don't know how they do what they do,  they just do it.

Yet all of K-12 these days seems to be premised on the belief that being able to "explain your answer" equals "understanding."

That belief is nonsense on stilts.

Yes, experts think when they solve problems. But eureka moments come out of the depths.

We have no access to our nonconscious minds, and we can't explain what our nonconscious minds do.

What's more, if we didn't have nonconscious minds, we wouldn't solve problems.

So what happens to problem solving when you stop teaching the nonconscious mind?

What happens to problem solving when you believe that conscious "thinking" is all that matters?

Here's Barry on Explaining Your Answer.

Jet lagged in high school

Andrew has graduated!

In June --- (which reminds me, I must try to get the photos the director of pupil personnel took...)

We've been getting up at 6:15 am for years (is it 7 years now? longer?).

The bus for his new program comes around 9, so now we get up when we wake up.

It's amazing, but also disorienting. Have to figure out a new morning routine.

In a series of conversations with sleep scientists this May, facilitated by a Harvard Medical School Media Fellowship, I learned that the consequences of lack of sleep are severe. While we all suffer from sleep inertia (a general grogginess and lack of mental clarity), the stickiness of that inertia depends largely on the quantity and quality of the sleep that precedes it. If you’re fully rested, sleep inertia dissipates relatively quickly. But, when you’re not, it can last far into the day, with unpleasant and even risky results.

Many of us have been experiencing the repercussions of inadequate sleep since childhood. Judith Owens, the director of the Center for Pediatric Sleep Disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital, has been studying the effects of school start times on the well-being of school-age kids—and her conclusions are not encouraging. Most adults are fine with about eight hours of sleep, but toddlers need around thirteen hours, including a daytime nap. Teens need around nine and a half hours; what’s more, they tend to be night owls, whose ideal circadian rhythm has them going to bed and waking up late. As schools have pushed their start times earlier and earlier—a trend that first started in the sixties, Owens says—the health effects on students have been severe. “It’s not just sleep loss. It’s circadian disruption,” Owens says. “They have to wake up when their brain tells them to be deeply asleep. Waking a teen at six in the morning is like waking an adult at three at night.”

The result is a kind of constant jet lag—and one that is exacerbated by sleeping in on the weekends. Executive function and emotional responses get worse, hurting everything from judgment to emotional reactivity. The ability to make good decisions can suffer, and kids can become more prone to act out and get depressed. In fact, the rise in A.D.H.D. diagnoses may, in part, be the result of inadequate sleep: in children, symptoms of sleep deprivation include hyperactivity and impaired interpretation of social cues. Owens has seen many such misdiagnoses in her clinical practice. The effects are physical, as well. Children who undersleep are more likely to gain weight and become obese. Even for infants as young as six months, amounts of sleep can predict weight gain three years later.

Schools with healthier start times, on the other hand, see an increase in attendance, test scores, G.P.A.s, and health. In one study in which an intervention pushed start times later, it wasn’t just academic outcomes that improved; car crashes went down by as much as seventy per cent, and self-reported depression rates fell. Even a delay of as little as half an hour, Owens has found, improves outcomes. “It should be about the health and well-being of the students,” she told me, “and not the convenience of adults.”

The Walking Dead by Maria Konnikova | July 9, 2015 | The New Yorker

Question: When can you trust your intuition?

Answer: When you possess knowledge stored in long-term memory, not on Google.

I'm semi-beavering away on the writing exercises for Ed's textbook (with Katie Beals) and on Eric Hollander's & my book on the compulsive-impulsive dimension, which has meant long stretches away from Kitchen Table Math (frustrating!)

Trying to organize my collection of articles on the basal ganglia, the orbitofrontal cortex, associative learning, OCD, ADHD, addiction, impulsivity, compulsivity, the cognitive unconscious, intuition, cognitive biases, cognitive heuristics, Go/NoGo (I'll stop here), I came across this:

When should I trust my gut? Linking domain expertise to intuitive decision-making effectiveness
Erik Dane, Kevin W. Rockmann, Michael G. Pratt
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 119*2012) 187-194

ABSTRACT: Despite a growing body of scholarship on the concept of intuition, there is a scarcity of empirical research spotlighting the circumstances in which intuitive decision making is effective relative to analytical decision making. Seeking to address this deficiency, we conducted two laboratory studies assessing the link between domain expertise (low versus high) and intuitive decision-making effectiveness. . . . Across both studies, and consistent with our overarching hypothesis, we found that the effectiveness of intuition relative to analysis is amplified at a high level of domain expertise. Taken together, our results demonstrate the importance of domain expertise in intuitive decision making and carry a number of theoretical and practical implications.

[snip]

While theory suggests that people may perform well using intuition . . . , we expect that the benefits of intuition are most likely to be realized by certain individuals -- those who have acquired a substantial degree of expertise in the focal domain (Kahneman & Klein, 2009; Klein, 1998; Salas et al., 2010). Domain experts are well equipped to capitalize on the potential benefits of intuition because they possess rich bodies of domain knowledge that foster the rapid and sophisticated associative processes that produce accurate intuitions (Dane & Pratt, 2007). Although little work has demonstrated just how much expertise must be accrued before the benefits of intuition begin to take hold, the benefits of intuition are generally most evident - and most striking - among those who have engaged in intense, repetitive practice for a number of years, or even decades (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 2005; Ericsson & Charness, 1994; Simon, 1987).

By the same token, we expect that intuition is likely a poor or misguided decision-making approach for those with very little domain expertise (i.e., domain novices). On this point, research suggests that the intuitions of domain novices are generally based on relatively simple, context-insensitive heuristics (Dane & Pratt, 2007; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). These intuitions tend to be biased and thus inaccurate (Bazerman, 2006; Hammong, Keeney, & Raiffa 1998).

Kai on teachers writing curriculum

Kai writes:

Wasn't Englemann the same one who said (paraphrased), "Making curriculum and teaching it at the same time is like building the airplane as you try to fly it...".

Curriculum is hard. At one of my schools I spent 30 hours over the summer just making a scope and sequence with four other people. "Making your own curriculum" is just shorthand for non-systematic throw it against the wall and see what sticks.

Building the airplane while you try to fly it---I love that!

I don't remember reading that before.

Let me tell you: 30 hours to write a scope and sequence with four other people sounds fast to me.

That reminds me!

Daniel Kahneman has a fabulous curriculum-writing story in Thinking, Fast and Slow:

A few years after my collaboration with Amos began, I convinced some officials in the Israeli Ministry of Education of the need for a curriculum to teach judgment and decision making in  high schools. The team that I assembled to design the curriculum and write a textbook for it included several experienced teachers, some of my psychology students, and Seymour Fox, then dean of the Hebrew University's School of Education, who was an expert in curriculum development.

After meeting every Friday afternoon for about a year, we had constructed a detailed outline of the syllabus, had written a couple of chapters, and had run a few sample lessons in the classroom. We all felt that we had made good progress. One day, as we were discussing procedures for estimating uncertain quantities, the idea of conducting an exercise occurred to me. I asked everyone to write down an estimate of how long it would take us to submit a finished draft of the textbook to the Ministry of Education. I was following a procedure that we already panned to incorporate into our curriculum: the proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person's judgment. ... I collected the estimates and jotted the results on the blackboard. They were narrowly centered around two years; the low end was one and a half, the high end two and a half years.

Then I had another idea. I turned to Seymour, our curriculum expert, and asked whether he could think of other teams similar to ours that had developed a curriculum from scratch. This was a time when several pedagogical innovations like "new math" ha been introduced, and Seymour said he could think of quite a few.

[snip]

He fell silent. When he finally spoke, it seemed to me that he was blushing, embarrassed by his own answer: "You know, I never realized this before, but in fact not all the teams at a stage comparable to ours ever did complete their task...."

This was worrisome; we had never considered the possibility that we mint fail. My anxiety rising, I asked how large he estimated that fraction was. "About 40%," he answered. By now, a pall of gloom was falling over the room. The next question was obvious: "Those who finished," I asked. "How long did it take them?" "I cannot think of any grow that finished in less than seven years," he replied, "nor any that took more than ten."

[snip]

Our state of mind when we heard Seymour is not well described by stating what we "knew." Surely all of us "knew" that a minimum of seven years and a 40% chance of failure was a more plausible forecast of the fate of our project than the numbers we had written on our slips of paper a few minutes earlier. But we did not acknowledge what we knew. The new forecast still seemed unreal, because we could not imagine how it could take so long to finish a project that looked so manageable. ... All we could see was a reasonable plan that should produce a book in about two years....

[snip]

We should have quit that day. None of us was willing to invest six more years of work in a project with a 40% chance of failure. Although we must have ended that persevering was not reasonable, the warning did not provide an immediately compelling reason to quit. After a few minutes of desultory debate, we gathered ourselves together and carried on as if nothing had happened. The book was eventually completed eight(!) years later. By that time I was no longer living in Israel and had long since ceased to be part of the tam, which completed the task after many unpredictable vicissitudes. The initial enthusiasm for the idea in the Ministry of Education had waned by the time the text was delivered and it was never used.

This embarrassing episode remains one of the most instructive experiences of my professional life.

Planning fallacy

Jibber-jabber

Off-topic ---

I'm sitting here at the breakfast table reading the paper, and I've come across this fabulous sentence in an op-ed by Daniel Levitin:

"Every day we're assaulted with facts, pseudofacts, news feeds and jibber-jabber, coming from all directions."

Wonderful!

I must say, that pretty much describes a normal day for me, inveterate information-consumer that I am. 

Of course, I like jibber-jabber.

Speaking of which, I have a guillotine deadline on Thursday -- so back with more education jibber-jabber after that.

Invisible gorillas I have known and loved

Seeing as how there are about 5 other things I'm supposed to be doing right now, I am instead cruising the abstracts for Psychological Science articles.

The Invisible Gorilla Strikes Again
Sustained Inattentional Blindness in Expert Observers
Psychological Science July 17, 2013

Trafton Drew
Melissa L.-H. Võ
Jeremy M. Wolfe

Researchers have shown that people often miss the occurrence of an unexpected yet salient event if they are engaged in a different task, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. However, demonstrations of inattentional blindness have typically involved naive observers engaged in an unfamiliar task. What about expert searchers who have spent years honing their ability to detect small abnormalities in specific types of images? We asked 24 radiologists to perform a familiar lung-nodule detection task. A gorilla, 48 times the size of the average nodule, was inserted in the last case that was presented. Eighty-three percent of the radiologists did not see the gorilla. Eye tracking revealed that the majority of those who missed the gorilla looked directly at its location. Thus, even expert searchers, operating in their domain of expertise, are vulnerable to inattentional blindness.

I'm going to have to tell my story about sitting on a subway with a knife pointed almost directly in my face (or my boyfriend's face, at any rate) & not noticing.

I did notice that my boyfriend (I was maybe 20-years old at the time) was looking anxious as all get out.

That, I noticed.

I also noticed the couple standing immediately beside him, arguing over something to do with an apartment they were going to. As I recall, they were ticked off at its resident--they agreed on that--but they seemed to disagree on what to do about it. So they were arguing.

Didn't see the knife one of them was brandishing.

Or the gorilla.

Bloom

I need a good critique of Bloom's Taxonomy -- and, oddly, I'm not finding one. Neither Daniel Willingham nor E.D. Hirsch so much as mentions Bloom.

I find people like Tom Loveless pointing out that knowledge is the essential prerequisite of "deeper learning," but I'm pretty sure Loveless is fighting the last war.

In the new war, nobody's denying that students must acquire knowledge.

Instead, acquisition of knowledge is the taken-for-granted. Has to happen, but it's nothing to get excited about. 

In my district, administrators are now using Bloom's Taxonomy to justify flipped classrooms. Because "Knowledge" and "Understanding" are the lowest intellectual skills, they can be acquired at home (or on the bus) via 7-minute lectures on YouTube. Precious class time is thus preserved for  Application, Analysis, and Evaluation.

For anyone who thinks knowledge and understanding are the highest skills, not the lowest, Salman Khan's rationale for the flipped classroom is the problem now.

Should math students explain their answers in words?

Complex information, such as that required for motor skills, can be learned implicitly, without awareness.

[snip]

Imagine you are riding a bicycle, and you start falling to the right. How would you avoid the impending crash? Many cyclists say they would compensate by leaning towards the left, but that action would precipitate the fall. When responding to the same situation while actually riding a bicycle, these same cyclists would turn their handlebars in the direction of the fall. The example (from Ref. 1) highlights the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge*. Implicit learning refers to the ability to learn complex information (e.g. skills such as bicycle riding) in the absence of explicit awareness. Anecdotes such as the bicycle example offer subjectively compelling demonstrations for the existence of implicit forms of knowledge that are distinct from (and possibly in conflict with) explicit knowledge, but the existence of such learning without awareness has been difficult to prove scientifically.

Implicit learning revealed by the method of opposition
Tim Curran
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.5 No.12 December 2001

It's an article of faith, inside schools of education, that procedural learning is dumb.

Having spent a great deal of time immersed in the literature on the basal ganglia, which handle  procedural learning, I'm pretty sure that assumption is wrong. Possibly very wrong.

The emerging research on the intelligence of nonconscious learning and the cognitive unconscious hasn't surprised me at all, mainly because, years ago, I read Arthur Reber's Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious. Reber's book was so world-altering that I have kept it on my desk ever since.

As I recall (it's time to re-read), Reber opens his book with the question of expertise: how to transmit expert knowledge from one generation to the next.

In other words, he opens with the question of education.

e.g.: We have, today, people who know how to perform open-heart surgery. We will need, tomorrow, people who also know how to perform open-heart surgery. Since the people who know how to perform open-heart surgery today will grow old and die, we need to transfer their knowledge to the next generation.

How?

People's first thought (again, I haven't read Reber's book in years, so take my summary with a grain of salt)…. People's first thought was that experts should simply tell novices how they do what they do.

Simple!

But that didn't work out.

The reason it didn't work out: experts don't know how they do what they do.

That fundamental insight into the nature of expertise has never left me.

Experts don't know how they do what they do.

The fact that experts don't know how they do what they do has made me highly skeptical of "explain your answer" questions as the sine qua non of math achievement and comprehension. As far as I can tell, adults who are really good at what they do have an enormous amount of nonconscious knowledge and comprehension, so shouldn't that also be the case with children who are good at math?

I don't think the second proposition necessarily follows from the first. Perhaps math students should be able to explain, in words, why they did what they did in order to arrive at a correct answer. However, anecdotally I do see "math kids" who "just get it" -- and, anecdotally, those kids always look like the good-at-math kids to me.

In any event, I was tickled to discover that people who know how to ride a bicycle not only don't know how they do what they do but in many cases consciously believe they do exactly the opposite of what they actually do.

How to study

Look what I just found!

Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology by John Dunlosky1, Katherine A. Rawson1, Elizabeth J. Marsh2, Mitchell J. Nathan3, and Daniel T. Willingham4

Now I need to drop everything & spend the next two days a) reading "Improving Students' Learning" and b) employing "Effective Learning Techniques" so I can remember how to Improve Students' Learning....which is sounding a bit circular as I write.

I'll get to that as soon as I finish annotating Tony Wagner's 2008 "Rigor Redefined," which our new $400K superintendent distributed to the board of ed last week.

The board is now deciding the future direction of the district, so naturally it's time to roll out a vintage piece of warmed-over, pre-crash Tony Wagner:

Daniel Pink, the author of A Whole New Mind, observes that with increasing abundance, people want unique products and services: “For businesses it's no longer enough to create a product that's reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique, and meaningful.”1

Remember those days? The days when "increasing abundance" could simply be assumed?

That was then.

Color me not surprised

In sum, we propose that adults never fully outgrow the cognitive and perceptual biases that are so striking in infants and preschoolers. That is a humbling thought, much as it was humbling to discover that humans are not the center of the universe or as rational and ‘‘in control’’ as once thought. However, if clarity can come from investigating extreme cases, then perhaps studying children, who show these biases more blatantly than adults, might be a rich source of insight and future hypotheses about adult cognition.

Not Quite as Grown-Up as We Like to Think: Parallels Between Cognition in Childhood and Adulthood
Adele Diamond and Natasha Kirkham | Psychological Science Volume 16—Number  4 | p 291-297.

I'm just waiting for the day they find out crows are smarter than people.

A lot smarter.

Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

Terri reminded me of the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, and thank the gods! A couple of months ago I was trying to think of the name of the effect and trying to think of the effect itself. I couldn't remember either one, but I vividly recalled thinking the what's-it effect was extremely cool.

I was driving myself crazy.

Nonconscious arithmetic

The modal view in the cognitive and neural sciences holds that consciousness is necessary for abstract, symbolic, and rule-following computations. Hence, semantic processing of multiple-word expressions, and performing of abstract mathematical computations, are widely believed to require consciousness. We report a series of experiments in which we show that multiple-word verbal expressions can be processed outside conscious awareness and that multistep, effortful arithmetic equations can be solved unconsciously. All experiments used Continuous Flash Suppression to render stimuli invisible for relatively long durations (up to 2,000 ms). Where appropriate, unawareness was verified using both objective and subjective measures. The results show that novel word combinations, in the form of expressions that contain semantic violations, become conscious before expressions that do not contain semantic violations, that the more negative a verbal expression is, the more quickly it becomes conscious, and that subliminal arithmetic equations prime their results. These findings call for a significant update of our view of conscious and unconscious processes.

Reading and doing arithmetic nonconsciously Asael Y. Sklara, Nir Levya,1, Ariel Goldsteinb,1, Roi Mandela, Anat Marila,b, and Ran R. Hassina
19614–19619 | PNAS | November 27, 2012 | vol. 109 | no. 48

I'm sure our friend friends the basal ganglia have something to do with this....

Here's the press release.

Prior knowledge gets around working memory limits

[I]t’s well known that extensive background knowledge allows one to circumvent the limitation of working memory. To take an obvious example, if I ask you to hold six letters in mind for one minute, it will be much easier to do with B-R-A-K-E-S than with X-P-W-M-Q-R. Although both are a string of six letters, the first forms a word, so you can treat it like a single unit. It’s like holding one thing in working memory, not six. Naturally, this saving of space in working memory only works if you know the word “brakes.” The same phenomenon is observed in many other domains. The chess expert looking at a board does not see 16 white pieces—she sees several clusters of pieces, each cluster defined by the relationship of the pieces to one another and to opposing pieces. Whether it’s chess pieces or letters in a word, the compacting of many things into one thing in working memory is based on prior knowledge.
Have Technology and Multitasking Rewired How Students Learn? by Daniel T. Willingham

Why students have to memorize things - revised

I've been trying to get this post right, and it's getting closer.

I'm sensing an uptick in anti-knowledge sentiment, so I need a rebuttal.

Why students need to memorize, Common Core edition

"...anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think."
- Daniel Kahneman | Thinking Fast and Slow

The only way to clear space in working memory is to store knowledge in long-term memory.

AND SEE:
Why students have to memorize things
#whystudentsneedtomemorize

10 days between AP exams versus 1 day

ABSTRACT
In many education and work environments, economic agents must perform several mental tasks in a short period of time. As with physical fatigue, it is likely that cognitive fatigue can occur and affect performance if a series of mental tasks are scheduled close together. In this paper, we identify the impact of time between cognitive tasks on performance in a particular context: the taking of Advanced Placement (AP) exams by high-school students. We exploit the fact that AP exam dates change from year to year, so that students who take two subject exams in one year may have a different number of days between the exams than students who take the same two exams in a different year. We find strong evidence that a shorter amount of time between exams is associated with lower scores, particularly on the second exam. Our estimates suggest that students who take exams with 10 days of separation are 8% more likely to pass both exams than students who take the same two exams with only 1 day of separation.

The Impact of Time Between Cognitive Tasks on Performance: Evidence from Advanced Placement Exams
Ian Fillmore and Devin G. Pope
NBER Working Paper No. 18436
October 2012 JEL No. D03,I20

"How to learn things automatically"

More on the Matrix-type memory downloads

Video here

As I understand it, in Shibata & c.'s experiment subjects learned 'X' not by seeing 'X' or being told about 'X' but instead by generating the brain activation pattern of a person who knows 'X' and who learned 'X' in the customary way.

To generate the brain activation pattern of a person who knows 'X', subjects reacted to 'neurofeedback': a green circle indicating how close the subject's activation pattern was to the pattern produced by people who know 'X.' Subjects were able to change their brain firing by changing the green circle, and once their brains were firing the way brains fire when brains know 'X,' the subjects knew 'X,' too.

Without ever having seen or been told about 'X.'

Wow.

For the record, I have experienced neurofeedback myself, and I can tell you that it works. Back in college, as the T.A. for a Learning and Memory course, I was once hooked up to electrodes and directed to produce alpha waves with my eyes open instead of closed (which is when we normally produce alpha waves). I was the demonstration project.

Obviously I had no idea how to produce an alpha wave on purpose, but after just a few minutes of neural feedback in the form of a tone that sounded every time my brain randomly produced an alpha wave, I was able to produce alpha waves intentionally.

I was able to turn the tone on and keep it on.

(Producing alpha waves with my eyes open, by the way, was not a particularly pleasant sensation. Producing alpha waves with my eyes closed was relaxing; producing alpha waves with my eyes open made me feel sleepy and semi-blind. Very strange.)

Ever since that day I've wondered why biofeedback, which is what it was called back then, never took off.

Articles & excerpts:

How to learn things automatically

From the study:

With an online-feedback method that uses decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals, we induced activity patterns only in early visual cortex corresponding to an orientation without stimulus presentation or participants’ awareness of what was to be learned.

[snip]

[W]e developed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) onlinefeedback method, by which activation patterns corresponding to the pattern evoked by the presentation of a real and specific target orientation stimulus were repeatedly induced without the participants’ knowledge of what is being learned and without external stimulus presentation [see supporting online materials (SOM) and methods]. The mere induction of the activation patterns resulted in significant behavioral performance improvement on the target stimulus orientation, but not on other orientations.

[snip]

Although previous fMRI online feedback training is a promising technique for influencing human behaviors (10–13), as in lesion or TMS studies, it could at best reveal influences of the entire extent of an area/region on learning/memory, which is a certain limitation for neuroscientific research (20). In contrast, the present decoded fMRI neurofeedback method induces highly selective activity patterns within a brain region, thus allowing the investigator to influence specific functions. It can “incept” a person to acquire new learning, skills, or memory, or possibly to restore skills or knowledge that has been damaged through accident, disease, or aging, without a person’s awareness of what is learned or memorized.
Perceptual Learning Incepted by Decoded fMRI Neurofeedback Without Stimulus Presentation by Kazuhisa Shibata,* Takeo Watanabe,*† Yuka Sasaki,‡ Mitsuo Kawato

Related:

In this study, we have shown that it is possible to directly condition neural activity using reward feedback derived from fMRI. Subjects were able to discriminate between two cues and respond to each by activating the appropriate region of their left sensorimotor cortex, while suppressing activity in a second region.
Direct Instrumental Conditioning of Neural Activity Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging-Derived Reward Feedback
Signe Bray,1 Shinsuke Shimojo,1,2 and John P. O’Doherty1,3

two years is two years

more from Barry's article on the Common Core:

This approach not only complicates the simplest of math problems; it also leads to delays. Under the Common Core Standards, students will not learn traditional methods of adding and subtracting double and triple digit numbers until fourth grade. (Currently, most schools teach these skills two years earlier.) The standard method for two and three digit multiplication is delayed until fifth grade; the standard method for long division until sixth. In the meantime, the students learn alternative strategies that are far less efficient, but that presumably help them "understand" the conceptual underpinnings.

Once again, knowledge stored in memory is entirely different from knowledge stored on Google.

Biological memory is a biological process that requires a period of time during which new memories are consolidated:

Memory consolidation refers to the idea that neural processes transpiring after the initial registration of information contribute to the permanent storage of memory.
Memory consolidation, retrograde amnesia and the hippocampal complex
Lynn Nadel* and Morris Moscovitcht Cognitive Neuroscience

I don't know how much time the brain requires to consolidate memories, but I recall John Medina suggesting that the figure may be as long as 10 years. (That would jibe nicely with the 10-year rule for development of expertise, wouldn't it?)

The "consolidation lag" between first learning a new skill and really knowing that skill explains why "just-in-time" learning is so crazy. There is no such thing as just-in-time learning. The brain doesn't work that way. No matter how smart you are, if you are 17 and you don't know how to do long division, you can't just have your professor show you how and then start doing it. Knowledge has to be consolidated before you can use it well, and consolidation takes time.

Here is James Milgram on his experience teaching Stanford students who had not been taught long division:

What happens when you take long division out of the curriculum? Unfortunately, from personal and recent experience at Stanford, I can tell you exactly what happens. What I'm referring to here is the experience of my students in a differential equations class in the fall of 1998. The students in that course were the last students at Stanford taught using the Harvard calculus. And I had a very difficult time teaching them the usual content of the differential equations course because they could not handle basic polynomial manipulations. Consequently, it was impossible for us to get to the depth needed in both the subjects of Laplace transforms and eigenvalue methods required and expected by the engineering school.

But what made things worse was that the students knew full well what had happened to them and why, and in a sense they were desperate. They were off schedule in 4th and 3rd years, taking differential equations because they were having severe difficulties in their engineering courses. It was a disaster. Moreover, it was very difficult for them to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. It seems to take a considerable amount of time for the requisite skills to develop. [emphasis added]
Transcript of R. James Milgram
1999 Conference on Standards-Based K-12 Education

There is no just-in-time learning, and you can't catch-up.

For the sake of argument, say it takes two years to consolidate the skill of adding and subtracting double-digit numbers. (I'm guessing it takes more than two, but I don't know.) If a child learns to add and subtract double-digit numbers in second grade, he or she will be proficient in fourth grade.

Delay teaching the algorithms until fourth grade and now you have a cohort of students who won't be proficient in addition and subtraction until 6th grade.

That's the way it works. Two years is two years.

and see:
Eide Neurolearning explains elaborative rehearsal 


today's factoid

All but five states no longer require the teaching of cursive handwriting in public elementary schools.
With Pen in Hand, He Battles On
By GENA FEITH | September 3, 2012, 4:38 p.m. ET

Another executive decision from central administration.

Oh well. It's not as if handwriting matters, or anything.