Shenk mentions many instances where abilities come from repeated experiences, and not innate skill as previously thought. For example, everyone assumed that the great European chess masters of the late nineteenth century had "innately superior visual memories", but in actuality " their abilities sprouted directly from specific experiential memories that they had created over the years" (170). Similarly, the size of taxi London taxi drivers' posterior hippocampuses correlated with the drivers' experience, meaning that repeated experiences caused their spatial skills to become better (35). Skenk postulates that these learned abilities come from the brain's "plasticity", or its "built-in capacity to become, over time, what we demand of it" (35).
Does the concept of plasticity solely apply to humans? What evolutionary advantages does plasticity have? How does the idea of abilities coming from repeated experiences compare with animal learning processes that we learned about such as imprinting and operant/classical conditioning?
Jessica Hua (jhua33@yahoo.com)
Placsticity is something that is very important to evolution and is something that Shenk stresses a lot throughout his novel because of its importance. Shnek not only addresses it in the novel but in his TED talk from 2010. He mentions this idea of plasticity.
ReplyDeleteOf course this idea applies to many organisms, specifically ones that exhibit some sort of learning curve or any apparent evolutionary changes due to the environment they live in. Plasticity is such an advatage evolutionarily because it allows an organism or a species to "learn" from its surroundings and evolve into living more easily and have better chances of survival and reproduction. Reproduction is the ultimate goal in order to survive so the use of brain plasticity is necessary to physically change the shape of the brain in order to utilize the areas it needs most. The idea of repeated experiences is something that humans need to experience at a very small age. Having things explained more than once and actually physically doing something repeatedly is the fastes most natural way for the information to be "ingrained" in our minds. This is similar to the idea of imprinting on other animals who require the information to be given to them at a very young age. Conditioning is also something that helps to enforce important actions in the youngs' minds. This is evolutionary beneficial because the earlier that the offspring knows the customs and the right things to do, they older generation will become obsolete and no longer be necessary. Once all the teaching has been done, the older generation is able to die so that the next generation has full access to the resources in order to reproduce for themselves.
This however, is not how humans operate which is not evolutionarily beneficial but is something that many "second generations" find fullfilling to keep the older generation around as furthering knowledge. And due to our increase in parental care, the parent is more attached and therefore so is the child.
Hannah Perl (hannahperl94@gmail.com)
Plasticity does not apply solely to humans. One example of similarities in human and animal learning is the concept of habituation, which is the gradual loss of reaction to a stimulus due to repeated exposure to the stimulus. One example of this is the "Baby Einsteins" videos, which are shown to toddlers in order to help teach them early. However, Disney has been sued for these videos because of studies that demonstrate that toddlers who watched these videos would "habituate them to become a stimulus addict" and, ironically, hinder their learning as they become accustomed to the stimuli and ignore the lessons (USA Today, Edutainment:Smart Programming). Nonhuman organisms, like dogs, also undergo habituation. In fact, in the "Principles of Animal Learning," by Stewart Hilliard, dog owners are given the suggestion to provide dogs with weakened versions of stimuli that scare the dogs in order to habituate them to their fears.
ReplyDeleteSimilar to humans learning more based on repeated experiences, animals learn classical conditioning based on repeated cause and effect relationships. A well known example, is Pavlov's dogs. By always feeding dogs after sounding a metronome, Pavlov trained the dogs to learn that they will receive good upon hearing the metronome. This caused them to salivate whenever the metronome was sounded (About.Com, Pavlov's dogs). This clearly demonstrates the plasticity of the dogs' minds, because they were able to learn about the connection between the metronome and food through repetition.
In addition, both humans and animals demonstrate plasticity due to operant conditioning, which is when people or animals are taught through rewards and punishments (negative and positive cause and effect relationships). Humans can be very susceptible to positive and negative reinforcement. For example, if a child is rewarded $5 every time they complete a homework assignment, they are more likely to do homework because they associate completing homework with the reward of money (Simply Psycology, Skinner-Operant Conditioning). Similarly, the same article notes that tests have been done with rats in which rats were placed in a cage that either shocked them when they pressed a lever or rewarded them with food. The rats who initially got shocked were reluctant to press levers in the future, while the rats who received food were eager to press levers in the future. This is due to the rats learning that pressing the lever caused a punishment (shock) or reward (food).
Animals with plasticity have numerous evolutionary advantages. Most importantly, plasticity allows humans and animals to respond and adapt to changes in their environment. For example, if a new predator was introduced into an environment, animals with plasticity could be able to recognize what he predator looks, smells, or sounds like in order to escape or hide from it. However, an animal without plasticity would be less able to respond to a new predator and would more likely to be eaten. This ability to learn and change ones behavior increases the chance of survival and success of an animal. These animals with plasticity would be more likely to survive and reproduce.
Laura Perlman (Laura4@comcast.net)