>> Hello and welcome to the Penguin Prof channel.
This is Valerie Pennington, and today I want to talk about hacking the limbic system,
and this really feeds into the importance of humanizing your courses,
especially in the online environment.
We're going to talk about neuroscience and we're going to talk about some real nuts and bolts
of what you can do in order to help your students approach new challenges
with curiosity rather than fear.
So I don't need to tell you that teaching is hard.
Online education is even harder.
It's hard for students.
It's a challenge for faculty as well.
It's just a lot of extra barriers.
But understanding how the brain works can really help you to reduce fear and anxiety
in your students and to create, you know, the challenging, engaging,
learning environments that we all want.
Okay, we're going to talk about the brain.
The brain wants both novelty and comfort, but too much comfort becomes boring,
and too much novelty is overwhelming and frightening.
But let's look at both of these extremes here.
I probably don't need to tell you about your comfort zone.
We're in the middle of a pandemic right now, so everyone is retreating into their comfort zone.
The brain loves predictability.
We're comfortable.
We're with our tribe.
You know, they get us.
We're in familiar surroundings and the comfort zone is extremely important.
I just want to point out it's not a zone where much growth or learning takes place.
The fear zone is, of course, rather the opposite where you're surrounded by things
that you don't know and situations that are unpredictable.
We fear judgment and lack of social acceptance.
This is not a zone where learning or growth takes place either.
We're sort of in a flight or fight mode here.
So at the intersection of comfort and fear is the challenge zone
and it is unique to each individual.
This is your sweet spot.
This is what is referred to as "good stress."
The challenge zone has been getting a lot of press lately, too,
but studying this challenge zone kind of goes way back.
One of the first classic papers dating from 1903, the performance stress curve.
I'm sure you've seen it.
It's a bell-shaped curve, and when stress levels are too low, the brain is bored.
It's inactive.
You start to add more stress, this good stress, the brain becomes interested and curious.
You get energized.
There's some level of stress where you get peak performance, but if you have more stress
than that, things start to go downhill.
You have fatigue and anxiety.
If you have even more stress than that, it gets pretty serious.
Now, I am not in any way denying the truth in this.
I'm sure we've all experienced it, but is all stress the same?
Is it really this simple?
You get input and processing and output and that's it?
Because that doesn't answer some of these questions.
Why are some things pleasant under some circumstances
but unpleasant under other circumstances?
Why sometimes is being afraid so much fun?
And really, is there is a difference between excitement and fear?
Because physiologically the responses are identical.
So here's a great example, tickling.
If you're with your special someone and you're in a good mood and everybody's playful,
tickling is fantastic, but if you're having a fight and your special someone tries
to tickle you, I guarantee it's not going to be a pleasant experience, right?
So it's the same stimulus, but it's perceived very differently.
Other examples, rollercoasters, haunted houses, scary movies, first dates,
they're all causing the same physiological responses, but is it fear?
Is it excitement?
What is going on?
We need to understand the difference, because as educators we want our students to be excited.
We don't want to scare the living daylights out of them.
So we got to get into the brain to understand what is going on here.
Some of you will see this and immediately know what it is.
In case you don't, if you take a head and a brain inside and you divide it right
down the middle into right and left sides and you turn it and you look at it
on the side, that's where we're at.
This is called a "mid-sagittal section."
This is the left hemisphere of the brain.
This diagram I showed you is the right hemisphere of the brain.
So to give you a little bit of geography, right, you see the front and the top and the back
of the head and the spinal cord coming down.
So I teach anatomy, I kind of have to do that.
I want you to know where we are.
The limbic system is a set of structures deep in the brain.
It's buried under the cortex surrounding the brain stem and it's heavily involved
with emotions and motivation and a lot of really primal stuff, anger and fear and hunger
and pleasure and sex, and it's also heavily involved in memory.
Some of the notable structures I want to mention include the amygdala.
The amygdala is really important in fear conditioning, among other things.
This is how we learn to fear things.
Fear is not innate.
The hippocampus is really essential for memory indexing and retrieval, so when you have damage
to the hippocampus, you cannot form new long-term memories.
But the star of my story today is this little guy, the nucleus accumbens.
It's been studied for about 40 years.
It's really important in the reward pathways, reward and behaviors that lead to reward.
It's been thought of as kind of a switch, an on/off switch, but it's more complicated
than we thought, and I want to talk about some research
that was done in rats to illustrate this.
So here's a little rat brain and where the nucleus accumbens sits in a rat.
They can implant microelectrodes to stimulate different regions of the nucleus accumbens.
I know that sounds bad, but we actually implant electrodes all the time even in human brains.
We use it to treat severe epilepsy and Parkinson's, for example.
The brain actually has no pain receptors, so it's not that big of a deal as it might sound.
Okay, so we stimulate the front of the nucleus accumbens in the rat and what happens?
We get an approach, curious and exploring behavior.
When researchers stimulate the back of the nucleus accumbens, they see avoidance and fear.
Now, if you're wondering how do you know what mood a rat is in,
they actually measure the angle of the rat, the length of the rat, and the height of the rat,
so you can actually quantify rat mood.
The two extremes here I think make sense.
So this posture is the most defensive, and basically,
you've got the teeth and the claws ready to go.
It's ready to fight for its life.
This is the most relaxed and happy a rat can get.
Researchers call this a "pancake rat."
I don't think it's that different from humans, but I don't know, you be the judge.
Okay, so you've got the front of the nucleus accumbens is curious,
back of the nucleus accumbens is fear.
But it's not that simple, not even in rats.
So researchers wondered: Is the response of the nucleus accumbens context-dependent?
Does it matter what the environment is that the rat is in?
Scenario 1 we call "rat nirvana," okay?
This is everything that rats love.
It's warm, it's dark, it smells like the entire rat family all together in a sauna.
Now when you stimulate the nucleus accumbens, you actually get the same response, approach,
curious, exploring, but in rat nirvana, when you stimulate the back of the nucleus accumbens,
you get approach, curious, and exploring.
Whoa, that is really different.
Okay, next scenario, rat nightmare.
Now, the rats were not tortured, okay, but they were exposed to different levels of light
and sound that were very unpredictable, so it was just very uncomfortable for the rats.
They never really knew what was coming.
Now when they stimulate the front of the nucleus accumbens in the rat nightmare scenario,
they get avoidance, fear, and retreat,
just like when you stimulate the back of the nucleus accumbens.
So if you're keeping track at home and you're making this little table,
under a regular environment, the front gives you approach, and the back gives you fear.
In rat nirvana, it doesn't matter where you stimulate, you get approach with curiosity.
And in rat nightmare scenario, it doesn't matter where you stimulate, you get retreat in fear.
This applies to humans, too.
A great way to see it is in babies.
Many, many studies here.
Babies fear strangers when they're in unfamiliar environments,
but if they're in a familiar environment or if at least one parent is present,
the same stranger is often perceived with curiosity.
So predictable fear or fear that occurs when we feel safe activates the nucleus accumbens.
The brain is basically saying, "It's okay to be afraid when we know we are safe."
And in fact, predictable fear is fun.
This gets the limbic system fired up.
We feel alive, right?
But we're not worried about actually dying.
That's key.
How does this apply to education?
So it's our job as educators to challenge students and to get them
out of their comfort zone, but we want students to approach new situations
with curiosity and not with fear.
So if you're wondering "how do I do that," I'm so glad you asked.
Your course should be built on a scaffold of comfort and predictability.
Now, this is true whether or not it's face to face or online.
Within this scaffold, challenge students with the stuff that's scary,
the new knowledge, skills, and experiences.
Okay, so nuts and bolts here.
Keep your structural components consistent.
How you organize your learning management system, when you schedule things,
assessment due dates, all of those things should be consistent.
For example, new modules launch every Monday at eight, all assessments are due Sunday
at 11:59 p.m., and every module is going to have the following components.
This kind of predictability builds comfort.
Every module is structured exactly the same, so in this example,
every module has learning objectives, the checklist,
what they're going to do, and helpful hints.
Every module exactly the same.
Design elements are really important here.
So the fact that you use welcoming and encouraging images, language,
introductory videos, consistency, making it easy for students to find what they need,
all of this will make your course environment comfortable.
Certainly one of the most important things is trust.
It doesn't matter what the teaching modality is, trust is key.
Trust is built when the student believes two fundamental things, that the instructor cares
about their success and the instructor repeatedly demonstrates follow-through.
That is, you do what you say you're going to do.
Test them on the material that you told them you would and allocate points based
on the priorities you establish and prepare them for those high-stakes assessments
with lots of low or no stakes assessments.
Here's an example of an organic chemistry instructor demonstrating different types
of problems.
Now, the students are using the same molecular models, so they're demonstrating and practicing,
and the students are asking questions,
and eventually the assessment will be similar to what was practiced here.
So the students get lots of opportunities to ask questions
and to be wrong long before any assessments happen.
So inherent in the educational system is a lot of fear, right?
This is what we're asking students to do all the time.
Everything is new, everything can be scary, we're testing, there's lots of judgment,
opportunities for social embarrassment, but instructors can use this comfort side
and build this into their courses in order to get at that sweet spot
where students are fearlessly asking questions and they drive their own learning.
I think it's easy to forget how scary it is for students to even ask questions.
They risk a lot here, but the more comfort you can build into your course,
the more likely it will be that students will be able to overcome that fear and participate.
They will be okay with making mistakes and they will welcome feedback and self-analysis.
The brain, again, is saying, "It's okay to be afraid when we know we are safe."
So in summary, there is mounting evidence that the responses
of the limbic system are not fixed.
They're context-dependent.
So novel challenges that occur when we feel safe are perceived positively, and novel challenges
that occur when we do not feel safe are perceived negatively.
Creating challenges within a framework of trust will motivate your students, and encouraging
and creating space for them to ask questions, to be wrong,
and to handle embarrassment will make their learning more meaningful and satisfying,
not just in your class but really in life.
As always, I hope that was helpful.
For more videos like this, check out the EdTech playlist, and I'll see you in the next video.
Bye-bye.