Francisco Mora Teruel: Cerebro, Emoción y Educación #DrawingED16

The educational environment I have the honor of introducing Professor Francisco Mora Teruel, PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Oxford, Professor here at the Complutense at the University of Iowa with hundreds and hundreds of works published in the field of neurobiology, he will speak about the brain, motion of education three. strongly interconnected words teacher welcome a round of applause good afternoon thank you very much for this invitation for this opportunity to be with all of you this morning I come to talk to you about what really is a hunger among teachers today and I would say that in general all teachers wants to have a hunger to anchor what education is in concepts in data in something that is really beyond what the humanities are what are the opinions what are the methodologies that of course you can take advantage of a lot of them in the end When we talk minimally about what I want to talk about, that is, substantiating education in neuroscience on the basis of how the brain works because in the end everything is a product of the functioning of the brain in the interaction of the environment that surrounds us, which The human obviously means to anchor in something more solid that produces less, let's say discussions about basic aspects of the aspects that are even tools that can serve us and in fact serve us without a doubt to be able to teach better not only teach better not only learn better if the two things together because the child or in the university itself learns and the teacher when he teaches also learns.

In fact, as Cicero said, the true way to learn is by teaching and we all have both things, even those of us who are neither different nor teachers. to learn a lot this is the new perspective is to say what I have been saying that would be known we should know as neuroeducation justifying this would take me a little time which is not the case because in euro because almost now for everything to be something modern you have to put it the prefix of a euro neuro walk neuro look neuro hey, we should know a little about the perspective of what the paradigm shift that we have today in the world means, the culture we live in is dying and a new one is being born, a new one that means precisely that Realizing what critical thinking, analytical thinking, and whether we can think over time, creative thinking versus magical thinking, means, and that has to revolutionize us in terms of finding ourselves in our true nature, which is the nature of which we are has been speaking here this morning, our nature, which is our genes, which are not decisive in almost anything, not even in diseases, a gene is expressed according to the environment in which it lives.

The genome is, as such, something that has potential and what is expressed in it is depending on the environment and in that environment and in the human being, education can't be what makes him because our brain is the same in structure and in determinants, let's say it so in this case, not only are they not, but What it means to express in the brain is what really makes man, it is to say something that the environmental determinant is the most powerful, the gene expresses itself and depending on the environment in which it lives and that is a new perspective where Yes, we can coin that it is the functioning of the brain that should allow us to enter a new dimension in education and that is the determinant of neuro culture and having said that, it is evident that like everything new it is not exempt from criticism, there are criticisms from the heterodox. in neuroscience they come to tell us, not without foundation, that what we know so much about the brain cannot yet be applied in the classrooms.

We know a lot but we do not know how to implement it in schools and fundamentally in teachers, although also in the university, of course. Yes, but there are others among whom I very, very modestly find myself who think that no, it is precisely the opposite of what it is now when we have to talk about what we know about the brain in relation to education because there is a lot that we can talk about and we are realizing that reality day by day as who I am, as I have the opportunity to go to schools and realize that hunger that I told them to find a more solid dimension in which with class so that those teachers can teach better and in that dimension, let me say, in the time I have, simply give you a voice that a teacher must already know what it is to learn and memorize in the context of what it truly means to learn and memorize. learning and memorizing is inherent to one's own survival; he or she learns poorly and If someone dies soon or, on the contrary, learn well and you will live long, both biologically and socially, it is as important in the anchoring of knowing what it is to learn and memorize as it is the same as eating or drinking, it has to do with that with keep yourself alive and successful wherever the environment you move in, be it in the jungle in society and that is important but what a teacher has to know is that when he teaches a child, be it a preschooler or a primary school, what you are doing is changing the brain wiring of your brain, it is not simply teaching as always, it is being aware, as a retired teacher told me, my goodness, if I had known this at the time, about the enormous responsibility we have, you are transforming physics, chemistry. anatomy, physiology, behavior, the mental processes of a child, possibly forever, this responsibility entails having in perspective how we have to transform the training of a teacher because in that anchoring of the teacher in that anchoring of learning and memorizing as many things as the values ​​of a society in a society as dishonest as the one in which we live in part, those values ​​are anchored between the ages of 3 and 6 in certain areas of the brain that we know relatively well and it is important to transfer it, very important for the teacher, but for that the teacher You have to know that this is a reality, we have to know and have the teacher know what brain maturation is during development and the debate we have had about when to start teaching a child to read and the problem of the father and mother. from the mother who constantly says that the neighbor's child at 4 years old already knows how to read and mine at 5 no, what is happening, what is happening with my child, lady, nothing is happening if we knew how to implement in school the reality that underlies knowing the maturation of the brain The areas that are not areas but distributed systems whose code is the function of time and not in spaces is the new projection of how the brain works teaches us that both the dorsal, anterior and ventral systems that code for reading mature. in different children in children at different times in each child in John Stuart Mill learned to read classical Greek at the age of 3 but I believe that the majority of school children do not do that and there are those who can learn it well at the age of 6 or at 6 and a half then the best schools obviously understand that the maturation times for each child would have to be found but that is not possible and then what do we do because we know that the maturation of the areas and china- the 39-40 of the dorsal aspect of Bernie's territories that fundamentally what transmits or transforms grapheme into phoneme do not mature, innatology or myelination are not found until well into six years of age, although there are children who at five and even at four, some of them, what can we do? make everything a very simple school and the age like Finland or Switzerland is 7 years old where all the children have already matured enough to find what and find the happiness that pleasure means in this context of learning to read while a A child suffers at 4 or 5 and some at 6 to truly learn to read that is what the brain begins to teach us and within that the critical periods, what I call them, the plastic windows, the brain does not develop all of it at the same time.

Not even in functions that are related there are no times where fundamentally there is the maximum of maturation compared to other areas of each other and it is in them possibly from the function from the functional aspect that it is where we must take advantage of those times to teach better. That is important, very important and the most important thing is to realize that while to read we do not have a plastic window to speak, yes and that while during development we need different windows for the different sensory functions as well as motor functions, for others there are no plastic windows, it is a new world that we have to take advantage of to transform education, which really is its basic substrate, the tool that we have to use to transform our human world.

That is what has happened since ten thousand years ago because ten thousand years ago we were identical as homo sapiens sapiens in terms of brain structure and in terms of genetic endowment that is clearly not epigenetic but it is true that it has been learning and memory and education that makes us different from someone from 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000 years ago, nothing more. and nothing less clear knowing that knowing it is only important because it transforms our way of thinking our way of seeing the world our way, I would say, of entering this new culture that, as I said, is in the we already have more things at the door early interventions like I I call the capacity of children in 23% of children in a school have some subtle serious problem, almost everything from dyslexia to dyscalculia to the berger scales to what it is and I call it emotional blackout, that is, aspects that today even such as in what hyper peter motility is and what the blackout means in terms of attention focus, they are treated with amphetamines and we don't know what we are doing that's how hard I make it.

Obviously there are cases where an improvement is seen with it and clearly if the child is deficient or the child has a problem, we will have to adjust him to the pace of school or is that more serious than the illness and then he will melt away well but today we are starting to do trans interventions to realize the enormous potential that a developing brain has in terms of plasticity modulation by sensory and cognitive inputs, that is, the ability to implement already published tests in which in a short time the child's brain can be transformed. Not in all children, today we have talked about variability here, each human being is a different universe, gentlemen.

We are all different, that is why I usually say and I repeat it and I never tire of it that when a human being dies, an entire universe dies, only the machines are the same, the rest of us are unique in everything and fundamentally in what I want to tell you next, which is the energy that moves the world and that is emotion we are emotional beings and I maintain based on how the brain works and only two strokes unless the phone runs a lot the time we have here controlling ourselves we are beings I told you fundamentally first and foremost for 200 years millions of emotional years and then of reason and thought and I will mention that in a second later and I also want to talk minimally about the instruments that must be used for curiosity, attention and how it is learned because the curiosity that is inherent to the mammal is what that we really discovered that it is useful to open the windows of attention wide without asking anyone for attention, only by making what you say interesting and from there learning and memorizing that if we are capable, as we all are, of classifying, achieving knowledge and Today I would also like to mention what attentional times mean.

It is not the same to teach a child as a young person or to teach an adult as to an old person because their attentional focus in time is different, nor is it the same to teach a child as a young person to a adult or an old man in terms of the subject that I teach him, it is because depending on it the focus of attention is different, all of this is giving us knowledge of the brain to teach and to learn and some of you already know that I maintain that you can only learn that what is called that which tells you something that which breaks the monotony that as a crisis just as interesting is this this common sense obviously there will be someone here who says man I hear her we also learn from pain and punishment it gives us ease forgiveness it gives us yes but What is learned through negative reinforcement is soon forgotten, I teach it to the brain, I stand up to what was said and in an institution like this, it was said, you can and you should, and the letter with blood enters, absolutely not, the letter only enters well with joy with pleasure with reward because with pain with blood it tends and the brain works like this to forget it soon and what we want in teaching to learn to read, learn to write and acquire knowledge has to be something of reward so that the individual does not forget it and constantly loves a small child more if you teach him in just one day to the age of maturation where he does not suffer but is attentive when telling him that when a roundel milestone with a tail that is the p you join it with a round the milestone and another little tail and that comes together it joins with an m and a but from the first moment and my mom goes off and I get home and say mom I know how to read mom and dad and the mother's face because the nuances of the infinite relationship between father, mother and child, if I had the opportunity, which I clearly don't have, to be able to talk to you about what two identical monozygotic twins are like the mere fact that I tell the mother of one of them at a given moment how beautiful you are Pedro and this Juanito behind and not telling him are nuances that the emotional system engrams the limbic system and saves it because that emotional memory is what we make our world from so they areimportant aspects I maintain that it is emotion, I just said what really does, what we are is not done, what we are, I have said here or at least in some way it has qualified with words, enthusiasm is the emotion that we have a brain inside the brain called limbic system limit limbus in the center that makes everything that has to enter the brain to be and be transformed into thought in any cognitive nuance that you want has to be filtered and stamped as good or bad in the brain and that is emotion It's true that they are unconscious mechanisms, right, they clearly cause it, I have caused it, so if I were the coordinator I would say,

mora

l professor, thank you very much for this point because it is enough for us to end up making everyone cry.

Well, in any case, we continue for I don't know how long. I'm trying to say that emotion is an unconscious mechanism and has a fascinating history. Emotion is, in other words, conscious mechanisms at first, but it is not a reflection. We act emotionally when faced with a dangerous situation or we act emotionally if we are hungry when faced with a good plate of food. or if we are deprived of sex before well the corresponding stimulus in any case the emotion is unconscious we are not aware of when the emotion becomes conscious that is when we have the feelings that is a feeling that is very different but in any case without emotion I maintain that There are no coordinated mental processes without emotion, there is no decision making and of course there is no learning or memory because emotion is the energy that sustains these processes.

I maintain that there is no thought without the emotional fire that warms it and knowing that is very important and here the section that I told you about the brain everything we see in the world what we touch what we smell what we taste what we hear is processed by our distributed circuits of the corresponding cortical areas because you must know that what we see We touch and our reality of the world is a lie, the world we see is not the one that is there in front of us, it is the one that our brain builds with the codes that we have inherited throughout 700 million years of evolutionary process and particularly in mammals 200 million years to know that it is also important in any case everything we see I insist and it goes to our brain to construct reality to a point where what we see means shape color movement orientation of the stimulus context where the stimulus is, which is very Importantly, it arrives without any emotional connotation, that information enters the limbic system like any sensory information and is given a stamp of good, bad, rewarding or punishing.

That is what makes us human, because it gives meaning to what the world is and What matters to us, which is ultimately the true sacred law of the evolutionary process, is survival. The brain only works to keep you alive in any extreme and circumstance. Outside of that, the brain understands nothing or very little. It is not made for knowledge. It is not. It is not made for beauty, it is not made, it is made for you to stay alive, then everything else comes and that is very important because after that addition of meaning, the information reaches the areas of that enormous cerebral cortex where the cognitive is elaborated. where knowledge is created and the basis of that knowledge are ideas, they are abstract, I call them the atoms of thought because the construction that today we know how to do is done and that for Latón, who was a genius, he obviously could not know and with that began the dualism and so much spirituality from that neuro perspective today we know that this is not how ideas are built in the brain today we begin to know how it happens from the perspective of how neurons and the distributive circuits of the brain work it is a fascinating topic in any case substance What I have already told you, when we think, we do not think with the utilitarian reason of what has always been working throughout history, I know what powerful reason means, but reason already carries in its elements, which are the atoms, which are the ideas. the abstract concepts if you want or the intelligent essences of lashkar reason have an emotional meaning of good or bad the horse that I see is not the horse that any of you see because I colored it with the emotional information that records in my memory emotional brain throughout my life that is what makes us unique in any case that what it leads us to and with that in the neuroscience part we leave it in this synopsis that when we think we do with others we always do it with an unconscious meaning of emotion and those are our decisions in the end and in the end we make decisions based on reason, yes, but the cake that first tells you, from between those two apples in the dessert, I pick this one that is not random that is determined by my brain It is determined without me knowing it by everything that since I was born I have already given meaning to the world to stay alive and it is important to know how to make decisions are to make decisions I insist again from that perspective and then nuanced as we also know today that being free as can be The fact that I suddenly want a glass of water almost a second before doing so, being aware that I am going to do it, my brain is already doing it, a constraint on our freedom from the perspective of what the functioning of the brain is and that it is a new story. that has to anchor us again to nature, that we are biologically consubstantial with all living beings on this planet and that is how neuro education begins to talk about emotion, curiosity, attention, learning, memory and consolidation of memory, consciousness, knowledge, mental processes, sleep, functions of which We have talked here about social complex social executives mental performance biological rhythms the formation of critical thinking sending ma manero architecture gifted children who suffer so much at school and of course what I mentioned about early interventions but those are not open topics because those aig anchor anchor them in different brains and in each of those we have different what each one is in childhood in puberty in adolescence in youth when one is an adult and when one is the so reviled or so reviled senescence when the human being can continue learning throughout his life while he is alive, there are interesting experiments on how one can even suspect the learning of a new language law at the age of eighty-something.

In any case, what I want is only the world, you will allow me between 5 and 10 minutes and he highlighted two things because it was important and if it is for me as I tell my students although they have to walk clark if it is important for me it is important for you well it is curiosity we all know that it is curiosity that We have created, together with dreams and color vision, when we were those little mice 200 million years ago, hidden in the dark forests in front of the dinosaurs. who sees grandpa come in close the door vectra comes out sees he says let's see what's here it's to be curious but that curiosity is what makes us here and what we all are because look how charles richter wynton the father of neuroscience said Scientific research gives us what is new, which is the most sacred curiosity.

He who wants to know the unknown is an essentially curious being. If you are not curious, dedicate yourself to something else, I want to qualify you in terms of the curiosity that today and attention and learning. and memory, and I am not going to expand on the brain, it is not just a unit, that is, something that is brain circuits that code for curiosity or code for attention. There are not different distributed circuits that code for different types of curiosity and different types of attention. In curiosity, for example, we have let's say epistemic curiosity or in this case perceptual curiosity, which is the curiosity that must be used in part to be able to teach well in a class.

If it is oral, I tell my students what they do. What would happen if it was a giraffe? my left suddenly appears, everyone silent, paying attention to me and disappears on the other side, would you continue paying attention to me or to the giraffe, obviously to the giraffe, let's transform the teachers into giraffes, yes, thank you for smiling because that's worth it, it's an important part. of the smile of what it is to accept evidence in a context of joy and that is what the giraffe would do pay attention it breaks the scheme that curiosity is not, however, what encodes in neural terms what we call specific epistemic of piste moss in Greek knowledge of the study is different circuits is not the case to enter here in area would be ridiculous but in areas I mean in distributed in in distributed systems that in part we know them and in part it is the study of what we want to do to be able to see which They are the ones that we have to implement in school in children, the basis of all of this, however, if I am only going to mention curiosity, both what we are saying, perceptual and epistemic, have the substrate of the reward and pleasure circuits of the brain, the limbic system.

The emotional system that normally codes for what we have said is emotion is fed and enhanced by the reward circuits that are brainstem and that are the ones that would activate in these circumstances the enlightenment, the awakening, that is to say, a wal, which is interesting. transmitted at the university would be that professor capable of turning anything, no matter how bland, into something interesting, he is the one who must be recruited in universities and even the highest levels and in the attention that is curiosity, you think I need tell the child, pay attention to the giraffe, no, attention comes together with curiosity, what is curious opens the windows of saying wow, how interesting that must be taken advantage of at school, but let's not forget that there is an attention that is well the basic attention is that you get up in the morning and there is a telephone and it is going to say a telephone, there is an elephant on top of you in front of you, you do not notice it, that is attention, but anything else, if you can pay attention, is not the alert attention when you go out on the street and there is a dog drooling that wants to bite you is fixed, all that focus you have placed there, nor is the orientation that you are going to wait for someone on the platform of a train or a airport and between 100 or 200 people very quickly are you able to identify who you want, who is waiting for, who is evidently linked to the reward, the pleasure systems of the brain identify it.

That is not what we are interested in, either, it is the executive attention that you have. Other circuits have impressive characteristics. It seems to me that we cannot give, sorry, I'm waiting 5 minutes, but neither is there really only one university in the world, Harvard University, which teaches something, which is attention, virtual attention, creative attention. What is unconscious is not what innovates but what creates what is capable of creating something groundbreaking new and different what Archimedes did when they read he told him not to touch or trace it is the crown because it is sacred and if I eat bullets I'm going to appeal if I don't do that Of course, and the story achieved it, I know that many of you and if we had had time it is frankly exciting in the detail but we cannot and the attention that we are now concerned about digital attention, that of the Internet in children, we believe that it competes with the executive with the necessary of the study is a principle no longer internet addiction which is a serious problem in children there are many millions of children in some countries who see five six or seven hours that there are father mother working and the child is left alone at the hour that you are browsing the Internet there are problems there are problems and logically we will have to face them in any case and fundamentally attention what we want is to enter what we call attentional times how long are you able to pay attention to me even if your eyes are that open and It is not already half of the time that is 3 thinking about food, that is, thinking beyond what I am saying.

Attentional time is a time that is dependent on what consciousness is in terms of opening the windows of attention. And I can't go into that at this moment either, but I can at least tell you that we are realizing that we have to shorten the attentional focus as much as possible so that the minimum amount of time is the greatest capacity to know. Those are the most important things. Look at the massive online course without any real petulance but I just recorded one with the Harvard University platform for neuroeducation sponsored by the beat and my surprise was that after installing all the paraphernalia that one because it is going to be for all of America well they take me and They say very well, let's record, he said that maybe 40 makes 10 minutes and then like 10 minutes cesc and 50 10 minute courses are worth more than a 50 minute course more or less what he was trying to say we have to know not only that the Attentional or attentional focus is of a child at each age is different from the adult and this from the old man but also depending on what subject the attentional focus varies and depending on the training and depending on the love with which one learns it seems to me that someone is getting closer to me and with that I talk about neuro myths or neuro architecture and if I tell you one thing we may enter the point and moment in which we have to think about a new profession within education that I propose could be that of neuro educator one day we will talk about them thank you very much there is no time sorry there is no time for questions because we arebroadcasting in streaming that we need to comply with a few hours one they pointed out that there were none but if there is one which is good I am following some instructions that is a good question we say there is a question or not who has the question the question the big question for him Professor Mora, thank you very much, I am Leticia Soberón, a psychologist and doctor in communication, I wanted to ask you how we can distinguish in it, sorry, how we can distinguish the knowledge that you, for example, teach us about what really happens in neuroscience, what can be given as relatively certain from the pseudo knowledge that There is a lot of what you mentioned at the beginning, neuromarketing, neuro leadership, neuro, which used to be small and is now neuro, so how do we distinguish knowledge from pseudo-knowledge, well, the distinction is not something fixed in the sense that I could tell you beyond what you know. accepted as solid in euro is neuro philosophy obviously began with that neuro economics neuro aesthetics neuro architecture or now neuro education because because it is definitely with solid assumptions to anchor it properly in what we know how the brain works I thought you were going to ask when how it started with the false thing in relation to the neuro what is really important what we have not been able to talk about because this lady has been approaching me telling me clearly that she will cut the bullshit for all the reason in the world and It is what is sold in schools when someone sells neuro myths when someone sells and tells you, look, you teacher or school principal, you know that the brain was used at 10%, I am selling you it is a method that your children are going to increase. 20 percent and 30 percent, since the neuro myths are false truths, it is now when we have to implement destroying them and I thought that was where the shots were going because that is a big problem today we know more than 52 myths that are sold in packages in a school about neuro education and that we have to openly fight against them and that is the dimension that I believe that on another occasion we will talk about it and continue talking about this among ourselves by sharing the networks, we are going to transfer these graphic summaries to the food area that It is on the first floor so that you can understand it, remember it, photograph it, we salute those who are watching us in streaming, we will meet again here at 3 super punctually for a fantastic afternoon program, a great ending, it is worth reading once again who has helped us why this program