Let's talk about Education: The Learning Mind

Education is evolving faster than ever - from digital classrooms to the psychology of learning.

In our special blog series "Let's Talk About Education", Dr. John Collick, international education expert and author, explores trends, ideas, and challenges shaping the future of teaching and learning.

Let’s look at some of the latest discoveries about how the brain works, and their implications for the classroom. This blog is one in a series called “Let’s talk about education”

We've discovered more about the workings of the human brain in the last thirty years than in the previous twelve-thousand, largely due to the introduction of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) in the 1990s. What we've learned has turned many of our assumptions on their heads; ideas about how we absorb and retain skills and information that once seemed obvious have since been disproved.

How Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging unlocks the secrets of the mind

Unlike the invasive procedures of the past, fMRI allows us to study the human mind in its natural state while it's thinking, feeling and learning. While the process is still crude (for example, whereas brain cells send messages to each other in milliseconds, fMRI only registers changes in seconds), it has produced a vast amount of new data. This points to conclusions about the human mind that are as revolutionary as they are breathtakingly exciting, one of which being the way the mind handles failure.

Yet this approach not only flies in the face of the latest discoveries in neuroscience but also our own personal experiences. We only have to remember learning to ride a bicycle to realise that repeated failure eventually leads to success. This happens at both a cellular and a higher cognitive level. When we first attempt a task the brain lays down a complex chemical network in our brains. If we give up at that point the links fade within hours, but if we try and try again, that network is adjusted and strengthened until it becomes a web of permanent connections. In the case of a bicycle this typically takes a couple of weeks of falling off and scraping our knees before we finally figure out how to ride. Same goes for academic learning.

Failure Enhances Cognition

Failing at a task increases neuroplasticity, which is the process by which the brain forms the new connections described above^[1]. It also causes the release of dopamine, which is linked to motivation. What is also very interesting is that watching someone else try and fail also has the same effects in the viewer's brains. We are programmed not only learn from our own mistakes, but also from those of our fellow human beings.

In our modern goal-oriented and often ruthless world, is there any sphere of activity where trying and failing, and watching others try and fail, are seen as positive experiences? If we step out of the classroom and into the world of gaming we find a completely different dynamic.

You Failed - Try Again

We love to fail when playing computer games. There is nothing more boring than a game that's too easy. One that continually challenges the player with ever-harder puzzles and situations keeps players hooked as they continually try different approaches before finally winning. One of the most successful games of 2013, Flappy Bird became a worldwide hit because it had been deliberately programmed to be virtually impossible to win.

Learning Through Failure

Furthermore, the addictive nature of failure in the gaming world is almost matched by the popularity of YouTube videos of players trying to win their favourite games. For example, the YouTuber jacksepticeye, who films himself regularly losing in games like Dark Souls, has 31 million subscribers. Once again, this bears out the link between failure and cognition, and watching others fail. Outside the world of education, with all its institutional expectations about student success and the use of failure as a badge of disgrace (as in the pejorative terms 'failing students' and 'failing schools'), failure is not only fun, but essential to exploration, cognitive growth and increased brain resilience. Somehow we have to bring this joyful non-judgemental attitude back into the classroom.

To understand how a student's mind works in the classroom it's important to realise that the human brain is the result of billions of years of evolution in environments that are totally different to a modern school. For most of human history the prime drivers were survival and reproduction in often hostile settings. The brain evolved functions and behaviours designed to cope with the search for food and the avoidance of predators. Unfortunately, what makes perfect sense in the wilderness, when confronted by, say, a charging tiger, is totally inappropriate in modern urban society. Yet the evolutionary mechanisms of the brain are so fundamentally integrated into its processes and structure, that they automatically control our responses despite the fact that we are no longer faced with the same challenges as our ancestors.

The Primacy of Emotion

This is particularly the case with emotion, specifically the negative emotions of fear and stress. fMRI-based research has uncovered the processes by which the brain copes with danger and the impact they have on our ability to think, understand and learn^[2].

The Amygdala is the key

The key to our emotional response to stress is the Amygdala, a small structure at the base of the brain. When confronted by a dangerous situation it does three things:

1. Activates the hypothalamus to start the fight or flight response by releasing hormones that increase heart rate and respiration, and divert blood to the muscles.
2. Suppresses higher brain functions such as reason, analysis and decision making.
3. Remembers the threat and the response so that next time the response will be quicker.

In terms of learning and education, the second effect is the most significant. The bottom line is that fear makes us stupid. There's a very good reason for this. If a bear attacks you in the forest, stopping to think about the situation will reduce the chance of survival. That's why people blank out in dangerous situations. Suppressing cognition keeps us alive.

The Impact of Low-level Stress on Thinking.

Unfortunately the Amygdala doesn't distinguish between immediate danger and the constant low-level stress of 21st-Century life. Without help to manage this stress, the brain will continually suppress its higher functions while embedding its response in its instinctive memory. The implications for learning and studying are profound.

A student stressed out by sitting a maths exam is physically less able to think.

A student shouted at by an angry teacher has a suppressed ability to learn.

Students who are bullied, or who find school scary, have a reduced capacity for processing information and learning effectively.

The neuroscience of emotion clearly shows us that happy and relaxed children have minds that operate at 100%. On the other hand, stress and fear prevent us from learning at a fundamental biological level.

The Unnatural Number Line

The way we process and understand numbers is also tied to the brain's focus on survival. This means that the mind handles certain concepts much better than others. 

The base 10 number line, which we teach at the very start of the curriculum, is not natural to the way we think. Historically it's a very new invention. For example, the Babylonians counted in base 60. The number Zero, a fundamental part of the number line that allows us to assign place value and handle negatives and decimals, wasn't invented until 500 AD. Why did it take so long? Because knowing the number line and place value is no guarantee of survival in the hostile environments in which the brain evolved.

Ratios Keep Us Safe

Ratios are a completely different matter. We instinctively 'get' ratios. In fact, most higher order mammals are able to understand concepts like 1:1 and 3:2. In a fascinating experiment. zoologists used a hidden speaker in a bush to broadcast the sounding of roaring near a path regularly used by a pride of lions.^[4] If a single lion heard a single roar, it avoided the bush. Two lions hearing a single roar went straight towards it. Two lions avoided the sound of two roars, three lions approached the bush 50% of the time. Not only were the lions calculating ratios, but also tackling probabilities, based on survival and potential conflict. 1:1 are risky odds, 2:1 is probably safe.

Logarithms and Distance, from the Amazon to the classroom

Another example of this link between mathematics and survival is the Munduruku, a group of indigenous Amazonian people. When asked to place their number system on a line they positioned it logarithmically^[5]. In other words, the higher the numbers, the smaller the spaces between them. This corresponds to the brain's perception of space. When we look down a row of objects, for example trees, the gaps get smaller the further away they are. From this the brain can calculate the distance to a predator, or prey, a fundamental survival skill.

So are we teaching mathematics in the wrong order? Ratios and logarithms are often seen as difficult concepts to be introduced at later stages in the curriculum, whereas the number line and place value are 'simple' foundational ideas. Neuroscience tells us the opposite. We instinctively 'get' ratios because we needed them to survive over millions of years of history, whereas the number line has only really been useful to us since the Middle Ages.

The recent revolution in neuroscience has transformed our understanding of the human mind, how it thinks and learns. The implications of many of its findings are startling, exciting, but also very timely. In an era where young minds are exposed to new, powerful technologies, we need to understand how they affect the development of the brain. We want to take advantage of the benefits, while guarding against the dangers.

From a teacher's point of view, how do we integrate the new discoveries in the science of the mind into classroom practice? This is not as clear cut as some would have us believe. Neuroscience doesn't contain any magic formulae to transform kids into geniuses. What it does do is help us understand why we often act in ways that seem odd, inappropriate or downright confusing. It also shows how many of our traditional approaches to teaching and learning are far from brain-friendly.

The human brain evolved to keep us alive in a world very different from now. The importance of trail and error, the way fear overrides cognition, our intuitive understanding of rations and logarithmic distance - all of these are survival mechanisms. 

We can make changes at a classroom level. We can encourage game-based learning that sees failure as a joyful process in learning. We can do all we can to reduce negative emotions and perceived threats. Perhaps we can reorder the maths curriculum (though changes like this need to be done at a policy level). 

In the rest of the Let’s talk about education series I'll dive deeper into the world of neuroscience, and suggest ways in which I think we can draw upon its benefits. In the meantime please let me know your thoughts, opinions and experiences around this exciting new field. 

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[1] The error-related negativity (ERN) moderates the association between interpersonal stress and anxiety symptoms six months later, International Journal of Psychology, July 2020, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167876020300672?via%3Dihub, accessed 3/10/2025

[2] See Destructive Emotions and How We Can Overcome Them, Daniel Goleman, London 2004

[3] Spotlight on math anxiety, Silke Luttenberger 1, Sigrid Wimmer 2, Manuela Paechter 2, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6087017/, accessed 3 Oct 2025

[4] Roaring and numerical assessment in contests between groups of female lions, Panthera leo, Animal Behaviour, February 1994, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003347284710529, accessed 3/10/2025

[5] Slide Rule Sense: Amazonian Indigenous Culture Demonstrates Universal Mapping Of Number Onto Space, Science Daily, May 30 2008, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080529141344.htm, accessed 3 Oct 2025