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YouTube Video - Jeff Hawkins: Brain science is about to fundamentally change computing

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I have always been fascinated with the brain ever since I learned that it’s responsible for much more than you think. I remember being amused while learning about the ancient Egyptians who regarded the heart as the commander in chief of the human body. Then again, what do I know? History keeps telling us that we are probably wrong. At least no one gets killed anymore for their ideas. I can only speak for westernized countries.In the video above, there is a man everyone should know about. His name is Jeff Hawkins, and you may or may not know him as the co-founder of the Palm. He became quite wealthy with that company making small hand-held computers. Now, he’s shifted all of his focus into understanding the brain and creating practical applications out of this understanding.I remember the first time I found out about him in a magazine article. Here was a guy with lots of money, which I think may be in the billions. He had this underlying passion, and now he is committing to it whole heartily. He’s also pretty darn smart. Google him if you want to know more.

My passion is to create practical applications for education. I know that I need take other people’s understanding of how the brain works to create something really ground breaking. The question is why.

I think the best way to answer this question is to imagine an ideal educational environment. I am picturing an extremely smart person. However, he is not the student. He is a mentor. He is a personal mentor that helps guide the student to maximize his or her potential. The student also has access to any tool that exists on earth to help the student by actually doing and creating. This helps solidify theory and teach the student how the theory translates into real world impact. This mentor has a working knowledge of everything, or it could be many mentors who are experts at their specific field.

The problem is that such a scenario would only work if student belonged to a very wealthy family and had parents who considered it a good idea to invest so much in their child’s education. However, I beg the question. Can we somehow create this ideal within a virtual environment? What would we need?

We’d something that would emulate the mentor. The mentor is a human being, which is flexible and adaptive. A human being who can recognize a child’s unique situation and act accordingly. If we could just somehow model the mentor virtually…

This is where research like that of Jeff Hawkins comes in. He mentions in the video that the first applications are not trying to replicate a human being. This would entail much more of an understanding of how our outer cortex interacts with our more primitive parts of the brain. However, we can still start by emulating what we deem makes us intelligent without all the survival mechanisms that help us avoid tigers and angry mothers.

According to Jeff Hawkins, there hasn’t been a theory or framework that makes sense of all the data these biologists, neuroscientists, and other scientists have collected. Jeff thinks there must be a theory or framework before we can start trying to make sense of the data. With his work so far, he believes it comes down to our ability to make predictions.

He is already creating real applications that can go into cars that will be able to predict if someone is in a dangerous situation. His brain machine can potentially create learning software that will able to quickly understand what level a child is at and start teaching the child with continuous interactivity. The possibilities are endless.

I have only scratched the surface of how we can apply new research into creating better learning tools. If you can’t already tell, this is something I am very interested in, so you will likely to see many future posts about this topic. They will probably be much more specific.

Anyway, let me know what you think and have a great day!

Carl Zetterlund

P.S. I find those TED Talks strangely addicting. Hearing the leading thinkers of the world talk is quite amazing. To think if I was born decades ago, I may have never been able to experience so many great thinkers while sitting comfortably on my bed.

This post is inspired by Discover Magazine’s article, “This is Your Brain on Video Games”. I am seeing more and more articles on how video games affect the brain in a positive way. This definitely won’t be the last post on it.

One of my interests is how we can use immersive virtual worlds to help make the learning process much more effective. There is a reason why some games are so addictive. How can we harness this drug like addictive power of these popular video games?

The article brought up one interesting point about reward systems in our mind. They studied dopamine in people’s minds while playing video games and found plenty being released when achieving certain goals in the game. I like the way they put it here:

“If you create a system in which rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you’ll find human brains drawn to those systems, even if they’re made up of virtual characters and simulated sidewalks. It’s likely those Tactical Ops players in an fMRI machine were able to tolerate the physical discomfort of the machine because the game environment so powerfully stimulated the brain’s dopamine system.”

Ah hah! This is such a simple concept yet so fundamental and powerful. Let’s take it back to the traditional school system.

My experiences has been that there are actually very little rewards built into the school system. The predominate system I can think of is the grading system. Achieving a good grade should activate the release of dopamine. For many students, this is a true statement, and they are successful in our current school system. Many gifted students do well because school is easy for them, so they are motivated to continue despite an uninteresting subject. They are working hard for the drug like dopamine release when they see their A. I can definitely relate to this. I became obsessed with those 5 letters of the alphabet.

What about the students who find the school system or “game” difficult? They seem to have a hard time achieving good grades, as they look at their peers who are making good grades with the same effort. These kids slowly start to dislike the school system game and decide to play another (video games, gangs, etc).

Is this fair? No, of course not. So, where is the problem?

I think we have to look back at a child’s experiences outside of the classroom. Children differ by their genes, how they were raised, and other environmental factors. Some children just have it easier than others in the school system “game”. We end up judging kids against their peers and rewarding the kids who were predisposed to winning. The system is rewarding good parenting and genes it seems.

Sure, some kids break through the barrier and become great students, but only after they see their own potential with a positive mark. Most kids stop playing the game because they don’t feel anything from playing it. They start to view grades as a joke. They quickly realize there are better and much more stimulating games to be played.

My intuition says that the current grading system is just a way to label kids. It doesn’t effectively take the individual in account. Different reward systems need to be set up for each individual, or there needs to be a reward system, which has flexibility in accommodating a diverse group of players.

Now… how in the world would we do this? One idea would be to throw away the grading system and apply individual mentorship. Well… this won’t work either because there are already a shortage of teachers as it is.

The best solution I can think of is along the lines of an interactive learning computer game that goes at the pace of the individual. The individual can start to be rewarded early on by setting the game to start at their current level. They no longer have to initially compete at the high bar set by their much more developed peer. They will learn subjects and be consistently rewarded for their own individual improvement. They will slowly become addicted to doing well in school.

Keep in mind that video games face the same problems. There is a reason why a game isn’t popular with everyone. Some puzzle games overwhelm a majority of users because the initial difficulty is set too high. Some games are just plain difficult to get hooked on due to barriers such as complicated controls. However, some games are just plain intuitive. These games are usually immersive role playing environments that we can relate to in our own world.

These role playing environments have incremental rewards. You start as a weak character and slowly have to improve yourself. This gradual progression is addictive. This is why you see games like World of Warcraft with such a loyal fan base. Did I say loyal? They are diagnosing people psychological disorders due to their addiction! I have definitely been there.

To wrap this up, let’s look at the key point. The reward system inherit in the school system is ineffective because the barrier to play the game is high. This is the equivalent to me trying to play many puzzle games. I get bored very quickly and leave because I’m not getting anywhere. The potential solution is to look at environments with reward systems that increase in difficulty based on individual success. Each player (student) starts at their own level and progress from there. In this situation, everyone will have the opportunity to become addicted to doing well in school.

I intentionally left out many factors that may also have a role, but I think the potential value in looking at reward systems is huge. I disliked school, but I still graduated top of my class at college because I was addicted to the reward system. Unfortunately, many kids are left behind.

I’ll discuss more potential solutions in another post. If anything, I hope I made you think twice about our traditional grading system.

Thanks for reading,

Carl Zetterlund

P.S. Improving reward systems in school is definitely not the fix-all solution, but it gives us insights on why some students succeed while others fail. However, the subjects still have to be interesting and relevant to students. I will go more into this in later posts.