Concepts in Mental Development: Limits to Cognition

Children are not taught, they learn. How well and how much they will learn depends upon the skills that they master, long before they are aware that they are learning. Whether or not they have the chance to master those skills depends upon their caretakers.

Even the best of us is limited in what we can learn and what we can conceive. Such limitations applied to Albert Einstein and they apply to you, and your dangerous child. But all of us can learn ways to push against our limits, if we wish. Most people never come close.


The video above, "Cognitive Limits," is a useful introduction to the cognitive science of human learning and memory.

Concepts of "Attention and Memory" are key to understanding how a relatively inexperienced and ignorant human infant can develop into a skilled walking and talking toddler who is into everything he can reach, learning and remembering as he goes.

Everyone is limited in what he can hold in his short-term working memory -- some more limited than others. Likewise, each person is limited as to how many active thinking processes he can maintain simultaneously -- how many dynamic activities he can keep track of.

Brief intro. to Cognitive Load Theory:

In essence, cognitive load theory proposes that since working memory is limited, learners may be bombarded by information and, if the complexity of their instructional materials is not properly managed, this will result in a cognitive overload. This cognitive overload impairs schema acquisition, later resulting in a lower performance (Sweller, 1988). Cognitive load theory had a theoretical precedence in the educational and psychological literature, well before Sweller’s 1988 article (e.g. Beatty, 1977; Marsh, 1978). Even Baddeley and Hitch (1974) considered “concurrent memory load” but Sweller’s cognitive load theory was among the first to consider working memory, as it related to learning and the design of instruction...

...Schema acquisition is the ultimate goal of cognitive load theory. Anderson’s ACT framework proposes initial schema acquisition occurs by the development of schema-based production rules, but these production rules may be developed by one of two methods (Anderson, Fincham, & Douglass, 1997), either by developing these rules during practice or by studying examples. The second method (studying examples) is the most cognitively efficient method of instruction (Sweller & Chandler, 1985; Cooper and Sweller, 1987; Paas and van Merriënboer, 1993). This realization became one of the central tenets of cognitive load theory.

Once learners have acquired a schema, those patterns of behavior (schemas) may be practiced to promote skill automation (Anderson, 1982; Kalyuga, Ayres, Chandler, and Sweller, 2003; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977; Sweller, 1993) but expertise occurs much later in the process, and is when a learner automates complex cognitive skills (Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977), usually via problem solving. _Cognitive Load Theory

Reference examples for the deeply interested who have a research bent:

Cognitive Bottleneck in Multitasking (PDF)

Dynamic Competition and the Cognitive Bottleneck (PDF)

Advanced educators not only try to introduce useful "schemas" to the learner -- they also try to choose conceptual schemas that will be useful in multiple contexts:

Students do not automatically connect, apply, or extrapolate what they know to other learning contexts. So what foundations can we put in place to ensure we are dong the best we can to nurture conceptual understanding and seek its transfer to new contexts? Here is my attempt to map out a few strategies that work for me:

1. Make transfer the big goal of conceptual teaching and learning – always have ideas in mind about how students can transfer their conceptual understandings and skills to new contexts.
2. Concepts over content – think big picture not activities. The exploration of concepts during collaborative teacher planning sessions will lead to a multitude of activities that can be applied in the classroom – the activities will always take care of themselves!
3. Less is more – working with fewer conceptual understandings means that you can use and extend the knowledge and skills students present in a meaningful, formative way – be mindful.
4. Prior knowledge – Take the time to nurture student’s interest and avenues into the concepts you are teaching.
5. Authentic assessment – map out the formative and summative assessment opportunities that are likely to arise through the teaching and learning experiences. Through these opportunities, challenge student’s misconceptions, stereotypes and tendencies toward rigid thinking.
6. Levels of transfer – transfer can happen on a “near” level where contexts can be very similar, or transfer can happen on a “far” level where the context is more abstract and removed from the original learning, some learners are natural abstract thinkers, others are not.
7. Think discriminatively – be measured about when opportunities arise for students to apply transfer, be mindful about when you can make it happen authentically, create opportunities for success and not failure.
8. Value thinking, nurture it and make it visible – train and engage students in a variety of daily thinking routines, use Socratic questioning in discussions to connect new ideas with existing knowledge. Metacognition, metacognition, metacognition!!
9. Nurture the potential of transfer in younger students – (EY- G1) value and reflect upon the meaning of children’s connections in collaboration with others. Make children’s connections visible and a part of discussion for other learners.
10. Homework – getting students to apply what they are learning in class and explore the meaning of concepts to their own lives can provide rich and diverse opportunities for transfer. Infinitely more valuable than completing worksheets!

_Conceptual Learning in Classroom

In terms of modern classroom educational practise, many of these ideas are more useful than a lot of what one sees -- if they are ever applied in anything but the rare, ideal classroom setting, which is unlikely.

More commonly, the best of theoretical intentions go badly awry when the rubber meets the road. This is particularly true when the masses of teachers attempt to implement the conceptual ideas and schemas of theorists, most of which they themselves only vaguely comprehend.

Remember: The teacher does not teach. Instead, the learner learns. If the learner's mind is not structured and ready to learn the concept for the day, it will not matter how well the teacher has prepared his lesson.

The learning mind must be "empowered" from the earliest age, and continuously reinforced -- until it is the child himself who is doing the reinforcing. This self-reinforcement occurs at different ages for different children -- even under the most ideal conditions. Young Mozart, for example, required much less external reinforcement to achieve a given level of mastery than did young Salieri.

So far, we have skipped around one of the central issues: how to learn difficult concepts which do not come naturally to most children. We know that boosting self-esteem doesn't work for that. We know that paying a cash reward doesn't work. Even the promise of sensory pleasure and euphoric mind states are limited in how well they will expand the learner's conceptual grasp, within apparently innate cognitive and conceptual limits.

But we must learn to walk before we learn to run a marathon up a mountain. This is a blog, not a textbook. Our approach will necessarily seem a bit scattered and of variable depth. Readers may choose to stop reading and abandon the quest at any time, without penalty.

That is not necessarily the case for those who work at the Al Fin Dangerous Child Institute.

An Unexpected "Back Door" Into the Brain?

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. _PNAS Abstract

Researchers at Hebrew University in Israel have discovered that the human brain is capable of unconsciously solving arithmetic equations, and unconsciously understanding multi-word expressions. This "extra-conscious" processing of both words and arithmetic equations caught many researchers by surprise.

To come to these conclusions, the team used a technique known as Continues Flash Suppression (CFS) to present target information to volunteer subjects subconsciously. The technique involves displaying target information to one eye while simultaneously displaying colorful images to the other. The colorful images demand so much attention that the target information is not noticed, at least in the conscious mind.

In the first exercise, volunteers were shown short word phrases during a CFS session; some of which made sense some of which were nonsensical. Afterwards, they were asked to recall the phrase. The researchers found that the volunteers were able to recall the nonsensical phrases faster than those that made sense, indicating they had been understood while still in a subconscious state.

In the second exercise, the researchers used CFS to flash a simple plus/minus type mathematical equation, minus the answer, to one eye, while the other received the colorful images. Afterwards, each volunteer was asked to say out loud a number that was presented to them. The researchers found that response times were shorter when the number shown matched the answer to the math equation they had been shown.

Thus far, CFS is only able to distract the mind from perceiving information for just a couple of seconds, thus, the types of data that can be tested is limited by the amount of information (or its mathematical complexity) that could reasonably be expected to be absorbed in such a short time period. But the results suggest that people might be processing a lot of information in their daily lives that they aren't aware of because their mind is elsewhere, a finding that the researchers suggest, means that views on subconscious awareness and thought processing, perhaps needs updating. _MXP

What the researchers discovered is one of the possible mechanisms for subliminal suggestion, hypnosis, and unconscious solving of problems -- when a solution suddenly "pops into the mind."

This sophisticated "unconscious" processing is certain to leave lingering effects -- particularly if the subject matter of this processing is emotionally relevant to the person.

This approach to unconscious learning and processing has long been utilised by scientists and clinicians who are now working on the Dangerous Child Method project. Because it is so important to lay the groundwork for future learning in a Dangerous Child's mind at as early a stage as possible, much of the earliest training takes place on a pre-verbal and quasi-unconscious level.

While it is never too late to have a dangerous childhood, it is similarly never too early to get started.

A Few Words on Conventional Education from Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky is a renowned MIT professor of artificial intelligence, robotics, and cognitive science. He is the author of a number of publications on cognitive science, including The Society of Mind, and The Emotion Machine (Intro).

Here are some of Minsky's thoughts on "The Concept of a General Education" from his MIT webpage:

§2.6 of The Emotion Machine: The “playfulness” of childhood is the most demanding teacher that one could have; it makes us explore our world to see what's there, to try to explain what all those structures are, and to imagine what else could possibly be. Exploring, explaining and learning must be among a child’s most obstinate drives—and never again in those children’s lives will anything push them to work so hard. [1]

Indeed, some children focus so much on their hobbies that their parents fear that this will conflict with their education—and try to find ways to discourage them. However, this essay will propose, instead, to postpone “broad” education until each child has had some experience at becoming an expert in some specialty.

So here we’ll propose to re-aim our schools toward encouraging children to pursue more focused hobbies and specialties—to provide them with more time for (and earlier experience with) developing more powerful sets of mental skills, which they later can extend to more academic activities. These issues are important because our children today are growing up in increasingly complex and dangerous worlds—while our institutions are failing to teach correspondingly better ways to think. The result has been a global pandemic of adults who lack effective ways to deal with increasingly challenging situations.

Conjecture: once a child builds a cognitive tower that works well in some particular realm, that child will thereafter be better equipped to develop proficiencies that can be used in other domains.

The idea is that it seems plausible that the first few such developments could have a major effect on the qualities of that child’s future ones—because those will the child’s first experiments with organizing such ‘vertical’ structures. If so, then this would imply that our children’s early education should focus on activities, hobbies, and specialties that have the ‘desirable’ kinds of such qualities. Of course, this also implies that we’ll need good theories of which such qualities would be desirable’and what kinds of curriculums could help to promote them.

To what extent can a child’s mind spontaneously ‘self-organize’ its higher levels, without any external guidance? To what extent can we help children to learn how and when to make higher-level abstractions or to resort to self-reflection? I’ve never seen much discussion of this; instead, we assume that such developments happen spontaneously if we just expose a child to the proper kind of curriculum, that child’s mind will somehow construct appropriate systems of processes to represent those experiences. Then, when we come to recognize that some children excel at doing such things, we simply assume that those children are ‘brighter’ than the rest—instead of trying to find out what’s happening. _Marvin Minsky

Minsky seems to have come to conclusions about early childhood education which parallel some of the approaches taken in The Dangerous Child Method. Children do need to become self-directed and self-motivated. They do need to develop relative mastery over a number of skills quite early in life.

Where the professor errs is in his pragmatic and overly conventional assumption that this more optimal approach to the education of children would be neatly folded into conventional education. But anyone who is familiar with modern conventional education -- particularly government schools -- would immediately see the impossibility of this approach, in most cases.

There has never been a greater need for Dangerous Children.

Using Biofeedback to Help Train Your Dangeorus Child

It is not easy to raise a truly dangerous child. Necessary, yes, but not easy. As we learn more about brain development, we are likely to develop better tools to assist us in this difficult work.

Biofeedback is one such tool which is likely to be of great help in dangerous child training, to assist the child in learning to keep a level head.

A new game developed at Boston Children's Hospital... helps children with anger problems to control their temper, so they’ll get along better with other people.

The game, appropriately called RAGE Control, requires the young player to shoot at enemy spaceships while sparing friendly ones. The child’s heart rate is monitored and displayed on the screen, via a sensor attached to one of their fingers. As long as they keep calm and their heart rate stays below a certain threshold, they can keep blasting at the spaceships. If they lose control and their heart rate goes too high, however, they lose the ability to shoot – the only way to regain that ability is to calm back down and lower their heart rate. _Gizmag

Dangerous children are taught a broad range of skills -- including several skills which could be hazardous to the health of the child and those around him, if they are misused. Emotional control is one critical skill which, if mastered, will help to make the mastery of other dangerous skills much safer.

The biofeedback method used in the Boston Children's Hospital game is quite primitive. Heart rate is a couple of levels removed from actual brain function -- which is what we are truly concerned with. A better approach would be to use neurofeedback, which will allow for more precise monitoring and response over a wide range of emotions.

The concept of developmental windows is crucial in the training of emotional control and executive functions. This type of training is best done between the ages of 4 years and 7 years.

Emotional resiliency and emotional mastery are skills which should become intuitive before the child reaches puberty. If the parents neglect this training, they are in for some turbulent years ahead.

Remediation is possible if developmental windows are missed. But only to a limited degree. If you want to save yourselves worlds of trouble in the training of your dangerous children, you will want to act in a timely and well sequenced manner.

Adolescent Psychiatry

5 Year Project by Antonio Damasio to Look at Music and Child Brain Development

Famed neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and associates at USC will follow children for 5 years -- during the period between roughly the ages of 6 years old up to 12 years old -- in order to qualify and quantify the effects of high intensity music training on brain development.

Childhood music training has been linked to superior language skills, better math skills, and enhanced creativity. The study described in the article below should add significant information in relationship to those questions.

Researchers at USC Brain and Creativity Institute will explore the effects of intense music training on cognitive development...The five-year research project, Effects of Early Childhood Musical Training on Brain and Cognitive Development, will offer USC researchers an important opportunity to provide new insights and add rigorous data to an emerging discussion about the role of early music engagement in learning and brain function.

Starting when the children are between the age of 6 and 7, to ages 11 and 12, the researchers will use standard psychological assessments and advanced brain imaging techniques to track brain, emotional and social development. The group of children involved in the YOLA at HOLA program will be compared to a control group of children matched in age, socio-economic status and cognitive abilities, but with no musical training.

All children will be followed for five consecutive years, providing a rare chance for researchers to discover the effects of musical training on emotional, social and cognitive aspects of development as they actually occur, rather than inferring later-life effects. The USC Brain and Creativity Institute team began working with YOLA at HOLA students in September 2012. _NeuroscienceNews

The young human brain passes through developmental windows -- or critical periods of development -- when specific brain plasticity leading to the ability to learn particular skills becomes optimal. After these windows for specific cognitive skills are closed, it is more difficult for the child to develop those skills to a mastery level.

This is true not only for musical skills, but for foreign language skills -- and probably for some cognitive skills that lead to later mastery of some forms of higher mathematics.

The early and middle childhood years are quite precious in terms of fortifying the child's brain for meeting the difficult challenges he will meet in the future. Modern societies typically squander these early years -- despite what is already known about critical windows of development.

The truly explosive knowledge regarding developmental windows of opportunity is likely yet to be discovered.