Summer SAVY, Session 5 Day 5, Intro to Neurobiology (5th-6th)
Dear SAVY families,
Today we learned about two new topics in the morning. The first is metacognition. Our students came to know that memorizing facts or learning a simple skill is a more primitive (and yet still crucial) type of learning. Such learning can be achieved via conditioning. This ability is shared by humans and animals. Our students watched pigeons playing ping-pong and dogs doing math. Then more advanced learning was introduced: thinking about thinking, or metacognition. Our students had a series of metacognitive experiences by completing tasks such as evaluating the relative difficulty of 2 math problems and giving a confidence rating when answering a list of trivia questions. Then we talked about metacognitive knowledge, such as a person learns better by listening than reading, or a person knows that she is not as socially sensitive as one of her friends. Our students were invited to reflect on their own thinking, share with the class one characteristic of their thinking, and what actions we can take to help us learn better now that we are aware of our thinking styles. The answers were very informative. Some students said that when they got stuck with a problem, they would go for a run or take a break, and when they came back, usually they would feel better and come up with better ideas. Some other students talked about the optimal for them to learn, such as by seeing.
The second new topic today is sensation vs. perception. New concepts like stimulus, objectiveness, subjectiveness, sensation, and perception were introduced. It was fascinating for our students to see that what we see, feel, or hear (the perception) is actually only the result of our brain activity. People can have different perceptions even if they experience the same stimulus. Our students saw “The Dress”, which went viral a few years ago on the internet when people debated about whether it was blue/black or white/gold. They also saw a few optical illusions, which was very helpful in shifting their firm belief of “seeing is believing” to a more abstract view that distinguishes between stimulus and perception. We experimented to explore Weber’s Law, and our students enjoyed it very much! Then our discussion became a little philosophical – we talked about what reality means and whether you can make people experience things that actually do not exist by simulating brain activities.
A little before lunch our students went into the computer lab to work on their final projects. They continued to work on it for 40 minutes after lunch. Their topics and slides were brilliant in both breadth and depth: déjà vu, electricity, memory, treatment for amnesia, comparison psychology, simulating the human brain, brain evolution, amygdala, dog biology, forgetting, why human eyes appear red on photos, color theory, and dreams! Each of our students got the chance to present in front of the whole class and did an excellent job. They also brought home hard copies of their final projects!