The Embodied Brain: Professor Kathleen Taylor
Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. These are the words of 17th-century French mathematician, scientist, philosopher, and all-around logical thinker, René Descartes. He declared that the mind (which he called soul) and body are separate substances, with the body essentially a machine that could move and sense and even remember, but not participate in rational, meaningful thought. The only way to acquire knowledge and discover truth, he claimed, was through the intellect. The body’s senses were just distractions. “But it turns out that’s not how our brain works,” says Educational Leadership Professor Kathleen Taylor.
Taylor should know. She and her co-author, DePaul University Professor Catherine Marienau, have written a book that provides surprising new insights on how we learn, thus challenging long-standing ideas about the most effective ways to teach. Facilitating Learning with the Adult Brain in Mind: A Conceptual and Practical Guide, is also helping adults overcome years of negative feelings about learning and themselves as learners.
Current brain research shows that actually, “we feel, therefore we learn,” Taylor said. We learn with our entire bodies, including emotions. “It begins in infancy. Babies learn with their mouths and as they sense safety, nurture, and comfort in loving arms. This begins their embodied understanding of the world around them.” And even after we consciously use our intellect, “learning continues to be a whole-body experience throughout the lifespan.”
But Descartes’ influence has been pervasive and people still describe the brain in terms of a machine. “A few hundred years ago, the brain was viewed as clockworks, with springs and gears. More recently, it was like an engine. Now it’s like a computer, or even just a massive central processing chip.” None of it is accurate, Taylor said, “but, interestingly, we do that because the brain understands new things in terms of familiar things, and each of these comparisons is based on the technology of the time.”
Their interest in the workings of their learners’ minds led Taylor and Marienau to seek out information in diverse fields beyond neuroscience, including cognitive science, artificial intelligence, psychology, and philosophy of mind. “The advantage of being educators and not neuroscientists was that we were not bound by our discipline and so were willing to look at what everybody had to say.” They also discovered these fields don’t talk to one another all that much. “Artificial intelligence talks to cognitive science, but most of the time philosophy of mind is way too far out there for the hard science folks,” Taylor added.
Their book is specifically designed to appeal to others who, like themselves, do not have a background in the hard sciences. “We took a lot of technical material and tried to make it accessible to people who don’t know or care where the anterior cingulate cortex is located,” Taylor explained. (It’s a collar-shaped section of the brain that appears to play a role in autonomic functions like regulating blood pressure and heart rate, but is also involved in higher level functions like reward anticipation, decision-making, impulse control, and emotion.) In addition to explaining brain anatomy and function in nontechnical language, the book also focuses on practices that encourage and strengthen adult learning, by tying together theory and practice.
Current research shows that cognition takes place in the whole body. The brain learns by comparing this moment in time to previous embodied experiences, or as cognitive linguist George Lakoff says, by “metaphor” and “analogy.” Linguists might take issue with this misappropriation of literary terms, Taylor says, but “It’s an incredibly useful way to describe the nonverbal, associative aspects of how the embodied brain functions.”
Over our lifetimes, we build our gradual understanding of the world and ourselves in it by constructing and reconstructing nerve impulse bridges among the estimated 46 miles of nerves in the adult human body. These synaptic connections constitute our customized metaphor for reality. It explains, for example, why we say “I can feel it in my bones,” or “My gut tells me…”
“Think of common words such as ‘close’ and ‘distant,’ or ‘up’ and ‘down,’” Taylor said. “They’re not just about the placement of our body in space, they also describe feelings. We are usually happy when we feel up or close and less happy when we’re down or distant.” Such body-brain associations precede language or logic and are the real basis of our understanding. However, it appears to us—as it did to Descartes—that thinking and understanding is based on words, Taylor explained, because verbalizing is what brings such hidden knowledge to awareness. “In fact, words are the caboose—the last car—of the train of meaning. The embodied, analogical brain has been busily figuring things out long before you get to words.”
Also affecting how modern adults learn is the fact that brain responses that helped our forebears survive on the primeval savannah are still operative in our 21st-century skills. Early hominids had to be constantly alert: can I eat it or will it eat me? Those who quickly and correctly decided which situations were dangerous lived to be our ancestors. So modern brains have a strong negative bias—better safe than sorry. Taylor and Marienau describe this in terms of the anxious brain, and potentially a critical stumbling block to learning.
In any new learning environment, the anxious brain reviews one’s lifetime of stored, embodied learning experiences. Adults bring with them memory traces of everyone who mocked or shamed them for not knowing an answer quickly enough—sometimes teachers, but also relatives or classmates. During professional development workshops, Taylor may suggest they briefly reflect on these prior experiences and write down the names of their ghosts from the past. Participants are then asked to wad up the paper and throw it in the middle of the room. When Taylor says, “Those people are gone now, you don’t have to listen to them anymore,” grown men and women often get misty-eyed and then feel exhilarated at this act of liberation.
Overcoming the anxious brain also allows people to be more open to other ideas and to expand their horizons and change their minds, capabilities essential to collaborative, civil society.
Someone who thinks a lot about the anxious brain and its effects on life, learning, and society is Brant Choate MA ’92, EdD ’08, director of the Division of Rehabilitative Programs for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Under Choate’s jurisdiction, over 90,000 incarcerated adults strive to change their lives through education and treatment. Most of them participate in courses that help them understand their brain and how they think. A lifetime educator who is well-versed in the latest theories about adult education, Choate was particularly interested in the book’s strategies for overcoming embodied barriers to learning.
“We have folks who grew up in abusive situations, whose parents may have been drug addicts or were incarcerated themselves,” Choate said. “Their parents didn’t read to them when they were small.” In fact, they may have been on the street selling crack by the time they were 8 years old, when most kids are in third grade, he added. “So they’ve pretty much given up on school.” They are not only prisoners of the state, they are also prisoners of their own anxious brains. It’s important that instructors and counselors understand how to counteract that history.”
Most prisoners in the state system are required to participate in educational programs of some kind. From the state’s perspective, there are some very good reasons to do so. “It changes lives,” Choate said. For prisoners preparing to work once they get out, there are career preparation programs available. “Some of the coursework is pretty difficult, though. You need some strong math skills to get into the construction program, or welding, heating and ventilation/air conditioning, or auto mechanics,” Choate said. That’s motivation enough to get through the coursework and pass the GED or get a high school diploma, he said.
When prisoners earn certification in a skill, for many it’s the first certification they’ve ever earned in their lives, Choate said. “They’ve never graduated from anything before and, as Kathleen Taylor said, they have internalized the message that they are not capable of doing school or finishing anything.” Choate’s aim is to turn that around by showing these students that they can do it. Even the lives of prisoners who will never get out, who are serving life sentences without parole, see benefits from the educations they receive.
“So, you have to question, why are we bothering to educate them?” Choate said. Prisoners in the state’s first cohort seeking a bachelor’s degree have reported that they are recognized in the prison yard as leaders. “They used to teach people how to make shanks, and now other inmates are begging them for copies of some the classic literature they’re studying.” It has reduced violence and crime in the prisons.
Eventually, these educated prisoners will serve as tutors, teaching college prep classes to other inmates. Their primary motive, he explained, is helping other people. “They’ve realized that they’ve been in prison for 20 or 30 years and are getting older. They’re looking for meaning in life, and the only way to do that is to serve others.”
When he visits classes, Choate is amazed to see how well versed these inmates are in the literature they’re studying. “And they are able to liken the stories to their own lives and to understanding people and how the world works. It causes a transformation.” There is also an interesting effect of this higher education on the families of prisoners who have no hope of getting out. “We’ve seen children of these prisoners planning to go to college, something we might not otherwise expect,” he said. “I’ve read this statistic, that educating one prisoner affects at least 50 other people.”
Choate hopes to do a study confirming the effect of education in the California prison system on inmates’ recidivism. He pointed to his department’s study of 80,000 people who had been released from the California system and the effect of substance abuse treatment on their tendency to reoffend. A 46 percent recidivism rate was reduced to 15 percent among people who received treatment in prison and continued it on the outside.
Thus, it appears that teaching and counseling with the adult brain in mind can have positive effects on other inmates, the prison environment, prisoners’ families, and the outside world into which some prisoners are released. “It creates hope,” Choate said, “and hope is contagious.”
“What’s more,” Taylor added, “given the Brothers’ emphasis on social justice, respect for all persons, and quality education, it’s ultimately very Lasallian.”