Pascal Benquet’s conference at the University of Rennes
Pascal Benquet, PhD in neuroscience, conducted a conference on the brain mechanisms of learning. He distinguished several major stages: the role of attention, encoding, cerebral diffusion, consolidation and the automation of knowledge. All these stages are linked to different brain dynamics.
Attention :
All learning depends primarily on our attentional level: it is the one that will determine the encoding of the information. Certain factors, both internal and external (which is a matter of the environment) to the individual, will allow to attract our attention and to maintain it over a certain period of time. Certain factors, both internal and external to the individual (which is a matter of the environment), will enable us to attract our attention and to maintain it over a certain period of time. The first of these factors is emotion, i.e. on the one hand the emotional resonance of a information and on the other hand the reactivity to the discovery of new or surprising information. A second factor is motivation, which depends on personal interests and context (teacher’s characteristics, benevolence). Other factors are the rhythm of the session (a dynamic rhythm favours learning) and the semantic associations produced from the subject’s existing knowledge. These factors determine the salience of the information for the individual.
Attention will depend on several brain structures: the insula (responsible for alternating between self-focused and externally-focused attention); the fronto-parietal circuit (which increases the sensory signal related to relevant tasks and inhibits irrelevant signals) and the pre-frontal cortex (which determines attentional maintenance by modulating the amplification and inhibition of sensory signals over a long period of time).
A second selection will then take place in the pre-frontal cortex linked to the working memory. This working memory will allow us to maintain information and manipulate it over a short period of time (about one minute). Here again, only really relevant information is selected and then sent to the hippocampus.
The encoding of knowledge :
The hippocampus is involved in the encoding of information. It is a structure of the internal temporal lobe, allowing the encoding of information and its context: integration of the notion of space (localization), of the notion of time, and of the emotional aspect of the event.The hippocampus on the left side of the brain is more involved in the encoding of words related to language, while the hippocampus on the right side is more involved in the encoding of faces.
Brain activations and associations:
The mechanism of the memorization of a knowledge in the brain is the following: the more we reactivate a neuronal circuit/ the more we reuse it, and the more we reinforce the communication between the neurons by creating new synapses. Concretely, the more a circuit is activated, the faster the information is propagated (the axons, a part of the neuron, are indeed more myelinated).
After passing through the hippocampus, the knowledge is dispersed in the brain: a word, depending on the person’s knowledge, can spread to several localisations in the brain. For example, the word “hammer” will activate both regions involved in language processing (frontal and parietal regions) and regions involved in movement (frontal regions). This creates semantic spaces that are linked together from closely related concepts. Moreover, learning will be all the more effective if it relates to pre-existing knowledge: the new knowledge will thus be integrated into already existing cerebral semantic associations. Therefore, as a teacher, it is important to use analogies to explain things in a specific field that a person does not know, in order to resonate with the person’s own semantic spaces.
The consolidation of knowledge:
The consolidation of knowledge is carried out during sleep. Indeed, we reactivate at the same time during the night the neuronal networks activated during the day, which leads to a reinforcement of the synapses; and we disconnect during our deep sleep the synapses, which generates the suppression of the useless synapses. This suppression of useless synapses, ensured by the microglia, is very important because it allows the refinement of the cerebral network.
The automation of knowledge:
Once consolidated, knowledge can be automated. To do this, the prefrontal cortex disengages and the basal ganglia take over and allow the automation of motor and cognitive procedures. In this way, knowledge becomes implicit.
Conclusion:
Learning therefore requires many cerebral mechanisms, intervening in a sequential manner. The role of emotion in learning is essential because it allows the experience to be anchored almost permanently in the very long term memory.
Five words I learned:
- the benevolence: la bienveillance
- to reinforce: renforcer
- a deep sleep: un sommeil profond
- the basal ganglia: les ganglions de la base
- useless: inutile