[xmca] RE: Educational neuroscience & Andy Clark

["Simon Knight" <sjgknight@gmail.com>]

Rod, it's worth noting that while that article might not be specifically
about education, the new Eidyn Extended Knowledge project does have an
educational component to it - so I look forward to seeing what comes out of
that! (relevant project description excerpts:
http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/knight/2013/03/the-extended-knowledge-project/
) 

I've suggested that Andy's work could be considered compatible with the
pragmatism of people like John McDowell in philosophy before, which your
description would support.  Jan Derry (my MA supervisor) at IoE has written
in that vein in the educational context (including with Mike of course).
Best
Simon

> I am reading a fascinating article by Andy Clark - 'Whatever next?
> Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science'
> BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2013) 36, 181-253
> doi:10.1017/S0140525X12000477 - not specifically focused on education 
> but offering a powerful set of arguments for understanding cognitive 
> processes (including perception and action) as always involving both 
> top-down and bottom-up components. We don't simply take in perceptual 
> information and pass it through a series of processes to extract 
> information from it, instead we actively anticipate what we are likely 
> to experience and check our perceptions against these predictive 
> models, paying attention only to aspects where there is a mismatch. 
> This is grossly oversimplifying a complex argument but I think it does 
> relate to questions about neuroscience and education because it 
> clearly shows that what we already know (a product of our experience - 
> always social and always cultural) directly informs the way our brains 
> process new information. We have our (unique) genetic biology but we 
> also have our (unique) history which makes our perezhivanie
> - what we understand from our experience - unique to us. Some aspects 
> of neuroscience can help us to challenge the simplistic, 'mind as machine'
> models which neuroscience has tended to encourage (mainly among people 
> who are not involved in it).
>
> All the best,
>
> Rod
>