Education 2.0
Harnessing Brain Science and Wearables for Personalized Learning
of a radical shift in WE ARE ON THE CUSP our understanding of the mind-brain interface and the mind-brain-behaviour nexus. ‘Brain mapping’—wearable sensing and remote integration of brain-body states, bio-feedback-based enhancements in self-awareness and the causal understanding of one’s environment—makes possible a whole new set of approaches to behavioural change and enhanced learning.
In recent years, the range and sophistication of measurement scales and techniques for capturing the elusive phenomena of empathic accuracy, mental acuity, logical depth and informational breadth of reasoning and argumentation have increased dramatically, and as a result, by the end of this shift in our understanding of the mindbrain behaviour nexus, we will have un-learned much of what we have learned about cognitive and affective science. For instance, that brain function and IQ are ‘hardwired’; that aging necessarily makes us slower and more forgetful; that intelligence itself cannot be taught; and that IQ, EQ [emotional intelligence], MQ [moral intelligence] and xq [execution intelligence] are the best we can do in terms of measuring the intelligence and ingenuity of the pragmatic-yet-thoughtful doer.
We will also have synthesized ways and means of ‘getting smarter’, of building quicker, nimbler, more stable and more robust minds and ‘behavioural blueprints’ by productively interacting with the very brains on which mental behaviour supervenes; and engineered novel blueprints for dealing (more) productively with adversity, setback, ambi- guity, uncertainty, complexity and conflict.
The remote sensing of the brain-and-body states of an individual and the ability to feed back to her precise feedback on how she feels, what she sees and attends to, how she breathes, how nervous she might be, what is making her nervous, and how conscious she is at any one point in time makes possible the discovery of mechanisms for learning and behavioural change that are both grounded in basic Neuroscience and subject to deployment.
As a result of this progress, the ‘project’ of every educational enterprise—to transfer useful, useable skills and impart meaningful behavioural change to its participants—is about to receive a transformational boost from the gamut of discoveries of neurophysiological mechanisms underlying behavioural change and skill acquisition, as well as from the newly available set of technologies for the recognition, mapping and shaping of behavioural responses at the individual level.
Just as ‘personalized medicine’ is the next step in health care—enabled by the synchronous deployment of genetic mapping and analysis, remote access of patients’ medical records, test results and instantaneous physiological states, and Web 3.0 platforms enabling the collaborative aggregation of expert opinions and the integration of patient and condition-level data—‘personalized learning’ and self-development must be the next step in all levels of education.
The empirical record of cognitive, developmental and social psychology and recent econometric work on the lifetime value of acquired skills—especially of non-cognitive skills—suggests that behavioural change is difficult,
unreliable and rare but also possible and immensely valuable. It is also clear that behavioural change and skill transfer correlate very highly with personalized, timely, participant-specific feedback: every human needs her own ‘transformational path’, which the ‘batch processing’ approach to education and the large-sample size approach to outcome evaluation do not deliver on.
The technological revolution in wearable computing devices and brain-body sensing is well underway: there are already 500 wearable companies, with over $50 billion invested, and the advances in brain-specific mapping of tasks and stimulus response patterns will enable both learners and teachers to ‘search inside themselves’ in real time and receive timely, guided, specific, physiologically detailed and behaviourally- actionable feedback of the kind that can be used to optimize learning on a per-user basis.
Think about it: what experienced executive would not want to know the right mood and body states in which to call a particular meeting or make a key decision, given sound evidence that physiological variables like blood sugar levels impact the way even experienced decision makers think, perceive, relate, empathize, speak, move and react?
‘Personalized learning’ and self-development must
be the next step in all levels of education.
What CEO would not welcome an early-warning system for the onset of states of anxiety, rage or contempt and an app that suggests just-in-time remedies given the overwhelming evidence that the affective heat of such emotional demons cripples the reasoning and perception of even the soundest minds?
What trader would not want to reconstruct and shape her daytime ‘rationality quotient’—given evidence that mood, context and body states can influence trades that can make or break their funds?
What educator would not want data on behavioural outcomes and brain-level data on skill transfer across domains of practice (athletics academics; music math; verbal reasoning rhetorical craft; etc.), given good evidence for neuroplastic changes in brain connectivity and activation as a result of specialized training?
What city planner would not want ‘anxiety indices’ of people interacting in various settings, around various places, and under various levels of time and social pressure? What athletics coach would not want to be able to guide her trainees through the ebbs and flows of movement, posture, gesture, breath and self-talk, given instantly available maps
Physiological variables like blood sugar levels impact the way even experienced decision makers think, perceive, relate, and react.
of the ‘inner world’ of the athlete?
Sensing the right data at the right time, and displaying it in the right format for the right purpose will enable wearable devices to turn the Big Data revolution into the Smart Data revolution. What lies ahead goes way beyond the discovery of new models of learning and behavioural transformation— to the production of new educational tools, interventions, models, modules and platforms for the optimization of learning and skill transfer.
The rapid evolution of wearable technologies and sensor suites alongside the proliferation of mobile computing and augmented reality platforms such as the Google Glass, the Intel Recon, and the Meta Spacex devices make possible both instantaneous access of the instructor or facilitator to otherwise-indiscernible but behaviourally-relevant changes in the brain-body states of the leaner and enhanced access for the learner himself to the brain body states which shape, screen and often determine his experience.
In order to embrace these exciting developments, The Mind-brain-behaviour Institute has been established at the University of Toronto. Also known as the Mind Brain Behaviour Hive, MBBH is a research and development lab
Wearable devices will turn the Big Data revolution into
the Smart Data revolution.
powered by the latest in wearables technology and stateof-the-art brain science, aimed at both uncovering basic mechanisms of learning and adaptive behavioural change and applying them in the classroom—and developing and commercializing technologies and applications that will power Education 2.0.
The Hive will play at the intersection of learning practice, brain science and wearable computing to bring real time skill transfer and behavioural change to education. In doing so, it will help to create the foundations for a new wave of Big Data—let us call it ‘mega-data’. Quite often, the implicit goal of Big Data training and analysis is to ‘tame complexity’ to simplify, truncate, classify, enumerate, reduce and compress. Yet the opportunity arising from the remote sensing of the brain-body environment of individual learners points us in a different and complementary direction: more, rather than less, data, of the right kind, available at the right time, in the right format, with the right actionprompts and user interfaces—are needed to instrument real skill transfer and development programs.
A multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary enterprise, the Hive draws on researchers from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Faculty of Music and the Rotman School of Management to create a distributed problem solving environment that addresses head-on the challenge of accelerating and enhancing human learning and behavioural change.
The MBBH will generate a suite of technologies, techniques and methods for the neuro-physiologically informed acceleration of learning by using — and continuously improving upon — the tools of neuro-imaging (FMRI, Real Time FMRI/EEG), neuro-feedback, neuro-measurement and neuro-intervention to the end of designing, engineering and producing change in the cognitive, affective, behavioural and perceptual patterns, propensities and proclivities of learners.
This ground-breaking new institute benefits from its embedding into one of the health sciences and bio-medical research and development hubs of North America, which allow its researchers and developers to use a suite of state of the art brain imaging, visualization and modeling facilities. It is also embedded in one of the largest research intensive universities in North America, enabling direct access to a multi-disciplinary research team and a proving ground for its educational innovations. Under the guidance of its Founding Advisors, the Hive will create commercializable technologies and tools that will enhance learning in the classroom and lab, in the online environment, on the sports field, in the boardroom and on the performance stage.
Functioning as a pedagogical R&D engine, the MindBrain-behaviour Hive will fuel the coming shift from traditional classroom-based learning to personalized learning environments, producing the platforms, tools and techniques for personalizing skill transfer and identification that will shape the $4.4 trillion global education market.
Keep an eye on these pages as Education 2.0 unfolds.