.6 Subliminal learning

The final thing I'm going to mention is one of the things brain researchers are being kind of confused about: subliminal learning. Subliminal learning is learning that is designed to sneak up on you. Some people think if a teacher puts a poster up on the wall, and never mention it, the students will learn it subliminally. That isn't subliminal learning, that is peripheral learning. If the students just look up at the poster and see it, they have chosen to look and learn it. Subliminal learning is learning that sneaks up on you.

One of the kinds of subliminal learning is alter-light level learning. You project two images on the screen, one is bright, and the other is dim. People think they are looking only at the bright image, but in fact they are picking up information on the dim image as well, that's subliminal learning. Another one is high-speed flash projection. In the middle of the movie, and you've probably heard of people doing this, it turns out that if you flash an image, that is typically is 1/300th of a second, the eye will not see it, but the brain will register it. They have done experiments with ads in movies like that. If you flash an add for popcorn, and then stop for intermission, everyone goes and buys popcorn for no reason other than they now have popcorn on the brain. That's subliminal learning.

A third type of subliminal learning is something called variable insertion; I don't really understand this. But it's kind of like a flash card. If you take those little decks of cards, and flip through them and each picture changes just a little, and it creates a moving kind of something. That can be used to produce subliminal learning. Although, it isn't completely clear to me how it works. I understand the flash cards, but I don't understand how that relates to subliminal learning.

Shat you are hearing from me is that I am struggling to try and understand brain research and I have been working at it. I am still struggling to try and understand it and I don't. I admit I don't. I'm struggling. All I'm trying to do today is to invite you as perspective teachers, to try and participate in that struggle. There is lots of stuff in here that I am very confident is useful stuff.

How useful it is, what we should do with it, and how we should put it together, I really don't know. It seems to me it is important for you as perspective teachers to know about this. I argue in our teacher education committees that we probably ought to have a course on the neurology of learning as a part of teacher education. So far I haven't been successful in convincing anybody about having a course. One of the reasons that people are nervous about having such a course, is it's not quite clear what such a course would produce. I don't think it's clear what such a course would produce, but I think it's clear that we need to have teachers thinking about such things.

One of the things we are told by brain researcher is when you involve learners in the learning they learn more. It doesn't appeal to me at all to think we have to get everything figured out before we can start teaching it. I am very happy to share with you what I know, and share with you a lot of the stuff we are learning about that really confuses me. I don't try to hide that confusion, I'm not saying here is this wonderful new stuff we know exactly what to do with. I don't know what exactly to do with it. But we should all think about it, because it will make us better teachers.

For example, if you to think about the fact that the brain is a multiprocessor, and that it likes to operate on a lot of different levels simultaneously, that probably means that if I had some music in the background, some little things going up here, and some little things going on over there, we would have a more attractive learning environment. I don't know. It would be kind of wild to think that if we just had background music going the whole time that might produce more learning. I don't know.

They have also discovered that when people have control over their learning environment, they learn more. When I was dean of education at UMASS, I created one room, where we took out all the chairs in the room, and we put carpet on the floor and scattered pillows around. It turned out that was the most popular room in the whole school. The teachers were just lined up to have classes in that room. Can you imagine having English 110 in a carpeted room with pillows around, with no desk in sight? The teacher has to sit on the floor leaning against the pillow, right along with everybody else.

Do you understand, that creates a different learning environment? I would personally like to have an environment that would have some comfortable chairs, and pillows on the floor. So the people who are chair type people can sit in the chairs, and people who are pillow type people can lie around on the floor. Why do you have to have one size that fits all? Most of you would not feel socially comfortable siting in the middle of the isle, even if that were physically comfortable for you, because you would feel you might get criticized for it. You shouldn't feel criticized for anything that is reasonable within the learning environment that doesn't get in the way of other people learning. If you can rearrange you environment so it is more attractive to you, you should be encouraged to do it. Those kinds of negations make everybody feel involved with the learning environment. You have a stake in your space, rather than having a learning environment presented to you. Learning environment are crucial in terms of learning takes place.

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