 Hi, my name is Tracy Takahama-Spinoza and this is a video on module 2 of Mind, Brain and Now where we're going to be looking at learners' productive courses of action. So in this particular video, we're going to be considering human learning. We'll be looking at this from a mind, brain, health and education perspective and by considering how learning is for life, a lifelong process. And we'll do this through the vision of formal learning as well as informal learning context. Then we're going to complement that with the understanding of growth mindsets. So to begin, what's really important is to basically understand how does the brain learn anything in the whole world. And number one, number one, you have to pay attention. You're perceiving your world around you and you do this through your senses. You sense your world through all of your different modalities. You see things, smell things, hear things, taste things. And that signal then travels up through your brainstem, base of the brain and the very first stop it makes is within different memory hubs. So concretely, there's a first stop at the amygdala to see if there's any emotional memory, anything that they should be worried about, anything that would preserve the body, basically. And then less than a split second later, it goes from a lobe and back to the hippocampus for a confirmation of that information. So we'll see that from the very get go, the main idea is the two key pillars of all learning are attention and memory, which is mediated by sensory perception. What you perceive about your world or what you can remember that you perceived about your world. Once you have that sensory input, in order for that to become learning or a kind of a memory in the brain to create synapses, connections between different parts of the brain, most learning does not occur immediately instantaneously just after a single exposure. You really do need to have several rehearsals of that information in order to create that synapse. Synapses are created electrically and chemically. Basically, usually it's an electrical signal that triggers release or inhibition of certain chemicals that will create the possibility or the potential for that synapse to occur, that link between the different parts of the brain. And if it's rehearsed over time, then you get what's called a strengthening of the myelin sheath. And that's basically the white matter in your brain, which are glial cells, which will coat that synaptic connection, which increases the speed. This is why if you rehearse something over and over again, for example, driving a car, initially you were very slow and it took a long time. It was heavy, cognitive load, a lot of energy to do something. But once it's been rehearsed over time, you have a lot of these glial cells, the white matter, which speeds up the connections so that you're able to retrieve those memories much quicker. The most important element to consider is that in order to really prove that somebody has learned something, is that they're able to recall it. They can use it, apply it, and basically transfer it to new contexts. So globally, how does the brain learn? You pay attention. You have sensory experiences. You check with memory systems to see if something already exists there. In order to create a new memory, you have to have a certain amount of rehearsal in order to speed up the retrieval of that information and then be able to apply that new knowledge, skill, or attitude in a new context.