Brain Function
and Children's Behaviour
Watching Panorama last night reminded me of an
important point about how the brain works.
Many people think that the function of the brain is to perceive - to take in
information about the outside world. This is completely wrong. In fact, the
function of the brain is exactly the opposite - its job is to filter/ignore
information from the outside world! Every moment of every day, a person's
senses are sensing trillions of little bits of information about the outside
world - sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. Information overload!!! The brain
is a sense-MAKING mechanism which decides which information is important and
then creates/builds up - i.e. MAKES UP - its model of what the world round
about is like.
Thus, when you talk to a boy in the playground, your brain is focussing on
the sounds coming from his mouth, and the look on his face etc., and it is
paying reduced attention to other senses (e.g. the shouting and movement of
other pupils) and filtering out some senses altogether (e.g. the feel of
your socks on your feet).
Different Worlds
The importance of this, of course, for teachers, is that we REALLY DO all
live in our own different worlds!!! There is no guarantee that the 'world'
as perceived by your brain is anything AT ALL like the world conceived by
your pupils. To take a very extreme example, that is what autism is - a
child on the autistic spectrum simply filters out different information to
you or I; where we may be focussing on the pupils walking down the corridor,
the autistic pupil may well be focussing on the colour of the ceiling - or,
indeed, the feeling of their socks on their feet. What it is important to
understand, however, is that EVERYBODY has a different focus to some degree
or another. Thus, when you look at a page of print and the one-word answer
to a question simply leaps out of a sentence, for most of your pupils it
simply will not be doing so, and the dyslexic pupil may be 'seeing' a
printed page which looks very different to anything you or I 'see'. And a
pupil whose brain is a less honed/sensible filter than yours or mine may
well be bewildered, confused, overwhelmed...
Thus the whole point of - not only education - but of every interaction we
have with the pupils is to first get them 'seeing'/focussing on what we are
'seeing'/focussing on. In a sense, this is what everyone of us knows and
automatically does - 'Look at me, please'/ 'Look at the page! - you won't
get the answer looking at my face' - but now you know why. It is not
necessarily the pupil being perverse!
Stated in such terms, this may not seem very earth-shattering, but the
implications for how we might most effectively get the children to LEARN are
enormous. It certainly explains why for 'ordinary' pupils, a boring lesson
is less effectively that an interesting one, which draws them into its world
of leaning' and causes them to 'forget' their itchy eczema and prodding the
child next to them with a ruler. It also explains what I have long said
about teaching SN pupils - that the most effective way is to create a calm
lesson, without peripheral distractions, which focuses relentlessly on the
one thing that you want the pupils to com away with.
Under Stress
What the Panorama programme taught me, however, was an associated fact that
- when we are under stress - one of the functions of adrenaline in the brain
is to cut out EVEN MORE sensory information (which the brain thus regards as
'irrelevant') than normal, and to focus wholly on the stimuli linked to what
it regards as the danger. Thus, in a shoot-out, armed police frequently
genuinely cannot remember where they were standing, what the person they
have just shot dead looked like, how many shots they fired etc. All they DO
remember is what HIS gun looked like, how his hands moved, the sight of the
sight on the end of their gun etc.
I thought that this was very important for teachers. We deal most days with
pupils who are under stress. Perhaps they have had a fight, or lost
something precious. Sometimes their stress is of our making - we are
shouting at them - for not doing homework etc.!!! We need to remember that -
in such situations - it is the NATURAL FUNCTION of the brain to obsess about
what it sees as the 'danger', and to freeze out what it sees as
irrelevancies (e.g. the pain caused because they thumping the wall/ what you
are saying). It is the NATURAL FUNCTION of a child's brain to STOP THINKING
STRAIGHT when you are getting cross with them. Again, most teachers
naturally know when faced with such a pupil how to de-stress the situation,
to get them to 'calm down', to gain their attention etc.
I am not saying never shout at a child!!!! But, again, most of us know
empirically that a short-sharp bellow, followed by calm instructions get you
much further than 'ranting'. And it doesn't do any harm to realise that when
you are shouting indiscriminately, YOU ARE CREATING the circumstances
whereby they are unable to think straight and do efficiently what you are
demanding; in a situation where you want pupils to focus quickly on
something you have 'seen'/perceived - creating a stressful situation is
counter-productive.
Posted on: Oct 20 2006, 11:19 AM