 Hello, my name is Tracy Tokohama Espinosa. I'm speaking to you from the Universad San Francisco de Quito here in Ecuador. It's a pleasure to be with you here in week three to talk about building the mind. As a point of methodology, we're going to be going through a presentation in a video format, but I want you to feel very free to interrupt at any moment. We know the way the mind works is that, you know, waiting to ask questions at the end really isn't the most appropriate way to actually learn a lot of things. So at any moment that you'd like to cut into the video, please tell the facilitator in the classroom. I'd be happy to let my other me who's, you know, live talk to you. So methodologically speaking, we're going to be looking at a bunch of concepts. This week's focus has to do three main topics, cognitive development and intelligence, then social cognition, other factors aside from general intelligence that actually influence our success to learn. And then we're going to look at early interventions or things that we can actually do in informal and formal school settings that can impact the way an individual maximizes their potential. Also going back to the methodology of this particular lesson, I'm going to be integrating a bunch of videos along the way. We're not going to look at everything. I just feel that there's a lot of good information out there, and people who express themselves far better than I can about certain topics. So we're going to be integrating those. As you'll see in the slides, we're not going to get to all of the videos, and I'd like to encourage you to do this on your own at home, okay? So in this first topic, what we're going to try to be looking at is linking what Dr. Hudson in last week related to the development of the brain itself, the physical structure of the brain, and actually trying to get a sense of how that brain development influences what the mind is able to do at different stages, okay, of neurological development. And we're going to also consider how what the mind is perceiving in its own environment actually changes or can shape the brain itself. To do this, in each of these topics, we're going to do some subtopics. So in the very first topic related to cognitive development and intelligence, we're going to first consider kind of a historical perspective or evolutionary perspective of anthropological neuroscience, kind of in brief. And then we're going to be looking at two key theorists, Piaget and Weigatzky. And then we're going to look at the general global idea of intelligence. Another point about methodology in this lesson is that we know, you educators out there know this already, it's always better to do a few things in depth than to do this huge, you know, scanning of a panorama and doing a lot of things lightly. However, given the format that we have here, hopefully you're going to be able to use the supplementary videos and the supplementary readings to actually fortify this depth aspect. And unfortunately, for the time sake, we're actually limiting and only going to be looking at contributions of Piaget and Weigatzky because they have been pivotal, whether they knew it or not, in actually giving birth to this field of mind, brain health and education. So we're going to choose a few people. So sorry if we're not doing your favorite theorists about cognitive development, but the idea is basically to integrate or to look at the processes that they went through or the types of things that they looked at as far as cognitive development. And then to actually expand on that, and I'd like to ask you later to actually come back and say, well, what about so-and-so's theory or somebody else's way of approaching this? Because there's a whole lot of wonderful information out there. We've just not got the time to actually go into a bunch of it in as much depth as we'd like to. Okay? After that, we'll look at topic two and three, but first we're going to start with cognitive development and intelligence. In this view, we're going to take some, I'd like you to think about these things as we go through these first few slides. Basically, main question in this first topic is how and why and when does the mind develop? Does the brain build the mind or does the mind build the brain? I'm sure that you've already been thinking about that for the past couple of weeks. How our mental scheme or our mental constructs develop? How do we understand red? Or how do we understand that math might be a different way of thinking than thinking about literature? Okay? So just how do we think about things or how do we build these global constructs in our mind? And then finally, what evidence do we have that mental schema are physically evident in the brain? And I'm sure you spoke a lot about that last week. I hope you are actually more deeply into this in your sections this week as well. But basically, bottom line idea is that we know there's physiological changes in the brain even before there are manifestations and behavior. So can we actually document when somebody or when a little kid finally, you know, light bulb goes off and he connects different ideas? Is this possible to do? Okay? So these are the main questions that I'd like to think about as we go through these first few slides. Basically, this first topic or subtopic related to cognitive development has to do with anthropological neuroscience. There's this idea that basically as humans evolved, their brains evolved, now what happened? It's kind of a chicken and an egg scenario. What caused what? So did the idea that we have our adaptation and we have there's a lot of theorists who are really working hard in this field to actually show, well, the way the environment imposes itself upon human beings, made human beings innovate and adapt things and build different types of tools. Therefore, they actually that changed their brains and other people are taking it from the other direction and basically saying no humans were evolving due to small changes in their environment. Therefore, they actually their brains allowed them to have greater innovation than even their environment was demanding upon them. So basically, the way this is this field works is that they look at changes that actually occurred or suggestions because nobody can look back at million year old brains. We just don't have those around. The tissue isn't there. So they only look at basically brain capacity and that's not even a good indicator because we know that Neanderthal man had bigger brains than we do right now. So the idea is to understand how different connections might have been made based on the type of tools that we were coming up with. So we realize that there's very big changes that occurred through the evolution of the brain related to spatial perception, motion detection, color detection, categorization abilities in the brain. And we have evidence of this in the types of tools that that humans left behind. So basically, this evolution of the tools is giving us an idea of the way the human brain was actually changing dynamically. Now, why is this important in this class? Basically, it's to give us a sort of a forward looking vision of how it is that your that little kids brains in their own individual lifespans actually also develop based on demands of the environment based on adaptive abilities and based on just human ingenuity, the way that the human brain is basically made to learn and to adapt. This is all about survival. So basically, understanding that helps you understand how little kids actually go through the motions of understanding or learning new things and basically what their brains are going through. Now, anthropologically speaking, this is coming from this really wonderful concept of the ball. It's called the balden one effect, but basically that anything that's going on in the environment that is beneficial to the learner can be manifested and then embodied and expressed in genes that will basically encoded for future generations. So basically, a concrete example, human beings have not been reading or writing for a very long time only a couple thousand years ago. So basically, the idea, and this comes from Stanislaw Zahane's work, he basically talks about the idea of a recycling neuronal recycling. So areas of the brain that used to be used for scanning the savannah for the lion coming at you are now being readapted for things like basically perceiving written words on the page. So the idea is when this is actually beneficial, human beings who are able to read and write have extended memories, they have a way if you're taking notes right now, you're basically extending your working memory because you and then you're actually able to go back and turn this into long term memory and real learning because you've actually got sort of an extension of your brain, your brain can't handle too much stuff at once. But if you take notes, it works for you, it helps you you can learn more. So the idea is that reading and writing are actually beneficial to survival to the human race. So let's so that's incorporated and basically it becomes encoded in your genes so that in future generations have this capacity in an easier way. So basically, we look at the local environment and how you know, social behavior, the dynamics of social behavior, look at what the needs are actually turn into what an individual does. Okay, an individual begins to take notes of debts or things that happen to him or mark things out. And this, if it's if it happens in mass, the whole society is actually working or trying to use these types of new tools, then this actually becomes something that in an evolutionary perspective is actually manifested within your genes. So this is basically saying that necessity has caused a change in the way that humans have adapted to what they consider is their their new environment. And so that's expressed in the genes and we actually have people now who can read and write easily. This gives pause to us to think about, you know, what's going on with kids brains now? I mean, what is actually changing now? How are their brains adapting and how are they becoming slightly different than a generation ago? And a lot of this has to do with questions of technology, which we can look at later. And I hope that you will explore on your own because this is a fascinating area of actually the dynamics of evolutionary rain changes that are occurring within this generation. So basically, last question on this, this first subtopic is, did human brains adapt to the needs of the environment? Or did human invention actually change the environment in which they lived or both? Okay, so I'll leave you with that. And you'll find I hope I hope people don't get annoyed with this tactic. But basically, I would really prefer that you leave this particular encounter with far more questions than you had coming in. So I'm not here to answer any questions. I'm here to make you think about questions. Okay. So anyways, now we're going to move on to the second subtopic that has to do with theories of cognitive development. Basically, I'm going to look primarily at Piaget and Weigatzking and look at their, their ideas about basically looking at this anthropological perspective as well, their ideas related to the social nature of learning. Is the brain a social organism? Can you learn as effectively just individually or really do we need or do we thrive on having other individuals to work with to actually learn? Okay, so we're going to look at those points and also some of their, their main contributions. We'll start off with Jean Piaget. Jean Piaget was an amazing thinker that today, even though most of his published works come out of the, you know, the 50s, 60s, we still find that he is a huge contributor to mind, brain health and education science because basically he considered himself a biologist, you know, but he was actually looking at human development and in these very carefully documented case studies was actually able to sort out and categorize for himself what he would suggest would be four key stages of cognitive development in humans. He starts up with the first sense of motorist stage basically zero to two years old where the everybody is always learning through their senses, which we know occurs throughout the lifespan. All learning occurs through your senses, but basically being limited to sensory input at the stage because you don't have language or other intercommunicative tools. He basically said everything is happening due to your senses. Okay. Then secondly, he went to the preoperational stage in which when children begin to acquire language, they actually find a new type of learning occurs because of a social dynamic that occurs. All right. So they're able to count and classify and actually get feedback from others in a more subtle, it's actually a more subtle way of learning things than direct sensory input. But it's actually, it's the huge foundations that are laid that during these earlier years that create different types of habits or habitual ways of thinking or connecting different concepts in the mind. The third stage, we get into more concrete operational stage and students and kids at this order, they actually because of the way that they order their world that they actually can see their world, they are actually able to sort of reconceptualize things and they get, they go from a more personalized egocentric in focusing way that they are categorizing a senior world and they're connecting with others and they can actually begin to perceive what other people are understanding about the same concepts. This ability to understand the other, which we'll talk about in the second topic of social cognition is incredibly huge. There's actually theories that talk about the need to understand others in order to understand yourself. So you're sort of placing yourself in what one person's belief is about a certain idea versus your own belief actually modifies and changes the way that you actually perceive or categorize that same concept. And finally, Piaget looked at this idea of formal operational stages. At this stage people can actually get beyond not only, you know, what do I think, what are you and the other thing, but actually into this world of intangibles of actually imagining what other things could be like. And basically he sort of stopped at the stage and basically said this is the maximum we can get to as far as human thinking is concerned, is being able to put all these pieces that only have to do with the concrete world, they only have to do with how I perceive things, they only have to do with the way that I work with the other, but also go beyond that into what I can imagine, you know, into other types of dimensions. So this is a really fundamental, it's a fascinating concept, why? Because it's basically parallels everything that's going on in the brain. Basically, this idea that you're, you know, you have these two book ends here, right? You're going from concrete stages, very, very egocentric inward thinking, little babies who don't have a real clear concept of anything else but their own personal needs. And then going to this other extreme where you have adults or you have young teenagers who can actually go into abstract thinking and they can internally reflect and they can project into new ideas that are, don't have to be anything physical or tangible. So basically these, these four stages that Piaget presents to this are actually fundamental in understanding how the brain is really constructing itself during this time and what does this mean? Is it manifest into actions or behavior in the mind? To look at this, maybe to make this a little bit more concise and more clear, probably, we'd like to look at a video right now, a short video, it's just about 3-4 minutes long and with that I hope you stay really clear with what Piaget was looking at. Thanks. So I'm going to make two rows of quarters. Does this row have more quarters? Does this row have more quarters or are they the same? The same. The same? Okay, now watch. Now, does this row have more quarters? Does this row have more quarters or are they the same? That one has more quarters. That one has more quarters? Yeah. Why does that one have more quarters? Because it's stretched out. Because it's stretched out? Yes. Okay, so how many are in this room? 8, 4, 5. Okay, how many are in this room? 8, 4, 5. So, are there more in this row? This row or are they the same? The same. The same? Yeah. Okay, so we have two sticks. Is this stick longer? Is this stick longer or are they the same? The same. The same? What about now? Is this stick longer? Is this stick longer or are they the same? That stick is longer. The stick is longer? Yeah. Can you tell me why? Because you moved it over. So now it's longer? Yeah. Okay, tell me. I'm going to pour blue water into each of these cups and you're going to have to tell me when they have the same amount. Okay? Can you tell me when this one is the same? The same. The same? Those two are the same now? Yeah. Okay. Good. Okay, now watch this. We're going to take the blue water from this glass. I'm going to pour it into this glass. Now, does this glass have more water? Does this glass have more water or are they the same? It has more water. This one has more water? Yeah. Can you tell me why? Because that one's higher than that one. That one's higher than that one. Right. Can you tell me? Does this ball have more play-doh? Does this ball have more play-doh or are they the same? That one has more play-doh. That one has more? Yeah. Let's try and make them the same. Make them two of the same size. What about now? They're the same. They're the same now? Yeah. Okay, now watch. Does this one have more play-doh? Does this one have more play-doh or are they the same? That one has more play-doh. That one has more play-doh? Can you tell me why? It smushed that one. Because that one smushed. How about now? Does this one have more play-doh? Does this one have more play-doh or are they the same? The same. Now, they're the same. Why are they the same? You go that way back up. Okay. Great. Okay. Did we share the graham crackers fair? Is this fair? Yes. Yes? Can you tell me why it's fair? You have what I do. I have one. I have two and I have one. Is that fair? No. No? How about now? That's fair. Now that's fair. Why is that fair? You have two and I have two. Okay. Now, having looked at that, that's kind of Piaget's perspective on things. Now we want to look at some modern core concepts. Many of you probably already know this wonderful, the Center for Developing Child here at Harvard is actually fabulous in its work with looking at what's going on in young children's brains. And actually to sort of divide some of these really important ideas, we're going to look at three really short videos that have to do with experiences. How is it that experiences then at all these different stages that maybe Piaget was referring to and what we're going to look at it with Fygotsk in a minute, how does that actually build the architecture of the brain? Okay. And then in a concrete way, because of the social nature of learning, why is it fundamental that there is this exchange between a knowing adult and a learning child, the serve and return concept. And then we're going to talk about, I'd like to ask you this big question. Well, as you watch these videos, does this really mean then barring all negative things? You know, barring toxins in the environment, barring asbestos in your walls, barring poor nutrition, barring all this. Does this mean that the brain will work, the brain will pull itself together, that all of these things actually happen naturally? Is learning fundamentally a natural process? So we'll look at the toxic stress, how that derails normal development. And then look at those quick videos right now. Okay, now we're going to move on to Fygotsk's influence on mind, brain, health and education. He's done a lot, he did a lot of amazing things, but we're going to focus on three big ideas, three of his biggest ideas or maybe his most well known ideas, because they do have a direct contribution to mind, brain, health and education. First we're going to talk about Fygotsk's concept of inner voice, you know, how do we think, you know, with words or without words. Then we're going to talk about very briefly about Fygotsk's zone of proximal development, which I think many of you might be very familiar with already, but it still remains a very core concept in educational settings or how we learn as human beings. And finally we're going to look at Fygotsk's cultural, historical psychology or this perspective that not only do we need to care about the kid, the individual, his social connections with other human beings, but also the grand influence that culture or that your society or that the influence that you might have from the country that you grew up in or the language that you're speaking, how does that actually also shape the way you think. A quick introduction to this is we're going to look at this idea of Fygotsk's developmental theory, just a really quick recap of this in about four minutes. What I'd like to encourage you to do is there's a fabulous lecture in the classroom, much longer, it's more than an hour long, that really goes into depth into Fygotsk's work. So if you're interested in these concepts, I encourage you to look at that video as well. Let's take a look at this quick video here. So let's look at this first concept of the Fygotsk presented as related to inner speech, which is fascinating if you think about it, because a lot of these things are, I don't know if you've all read online these work, but basically we do these things mindlessly. We're not even conscious of these things that are going on, but he talked about this idea of there's speech without thought, okay, and then there's thought without speech, but then there's this verbal thought that's sort of somewhere laid somewhere in the middle. But perhaps the main idea here related to the concept of words to speech or this understanding of how do we think, for example, the main question here is can you think without words, or how do you think, or is thinking word dependent, okay? So he believed that inner speech is a natural state, okay? Basically we're always bouncing these ideas off around in our heads, right? And that external speech develops from inner speech when there's enough social contact, okay? So through gradual process of internalization, this is when you see, you know, these little kids, little kids are always talking to themselves, right? They're always talking to themselves and mumbling, you know, talking, you know, they're actually saying what's going on in their heads. They're actually, you know, letting that spill out. But basically, Vigazzi says with the maturation of the brain and with the maturation of inhibition skills, basically we stop allowing that, you know, speech to come out, except for schizophrenic or have other types of problems. We stop that kind of external speech from spilling out when we're just thinking, and we limit it to when we have social interactions. So we generally don't talk to ourselves a lot out loud, okay? So thinking out loud. So basically the main idea here is that the natural state of having all these ideas bouncing around in your head always will exist. Through maturation, we begin to inhibit allowing that to just spill out into the world, and we basically regulate that with our social connections with other people, okay? So what does this mean? Some of the qualities of inner speech, things that are happening inside our head, which is basically thinking, is that probably we're not thinking in full sentences, you know, we have very abbreviated things that are spilling out. It is private. We can actually think things to ourselves or sell ourselves. We have an inner speech that can be saying a lot of things that are inhibition is going to keep us from saying to the outside world, we hope, in a lot of different cases. There's not necessarily any structural or formal syntax. It's predicate oriented, it's condensed in its meanings, and there's far fewer words that are happening in our heads, and you might have, and a lot of people, there's some newer theories that actually are trying to see, is it really word dependent or are these, can concepts be thought of without words? Are there, you know, blobs of visual things as opposed to, you know, going through this word type of thing? So I'd ask you to think about that yourself. I mean, right now, as you're trying to connect, focus on these things, you know, somebody just walked in with a coffee, you guys have got all kinds of other stuff going on your lives, your personal lives. How is that, you know, how are you regulating all those different calls of attention that are all over the place and being able to focus, hopefully, on what we're doing here in class together? So basically, this kind of self-regulation thing that's basically, you know, shortened, abbreviated way where we're embodying different concepts. How do you think about thinking? Are you thinking in words? Is it possible to think without words? Can concepts be expressed in ways that are non-word related? So these are bigger questions that still remain. Really, it's very, very hard to measure this. We can do brain scans while people are doing recall of words and you can look at different parts or different links or networks that are connecting. But to say whether or not that is representing, and you can in general see, are we looking at a visual concept or are you looking at a word-based concept? You can see that when people are thinking. But it seems that the brains are just so unique in that sense. How are there different preferences? Are there some people who do think more in words and some people who do think more through visual images? We just don't know that yet. Okay? Okay. So we know just in some relation then. Evakowski's concept of inner speech is that it's a line of social communication. Okay? But speech is also something that's used to think. Okay? It's internal. And that we know that a child is mediating, you know, they use speech to mediate their thinking processes. All right? But then again, the opposite is true. The thoughts are also limited or mediated by speech. Those of you who are interested in language and we're going to do another unit on this, which is really fascinating to me, is that there are, especially really to multilingualism, that, you know, are your concepts, are your thoughts limited by the words that you have to express them with? Can you think more broadly if you have more language skills? We'll get to that in another unit. Okay? So basically, external speech is basically taking thoughts and putting them into words. Basically, the general concept that Bygotsky had about inner speech. A second huge idea that Bygotsky has is related to the zone of proximal development, which many of you have probably heard. Basically, you know, there are things that a kid can do on his own. There are things that a kid needs help with. And basically, in this little space in between, if we can actually mediate this, we know what a kid knows, we know what is not known, and then those things that are in the middle there, if we can help that kid mediate that through information that's given by either a knowing adult and can be even another peer. But basically, what's just beyond that kid's reach. This is what a kid knows. This is what he wants to know. He just doesn't know this. But what's just beyond his reach is the zone of proximal development. And this is mediated learning with a guidance or encouragement from another caregiver. So basically, look at this. We realize that you cannot put something way too high up and call this a zone of proximal development. If it's really far beyond the reach of an individual, what he already knows, he won't learn it. But if it's just beyond his reach, it's very easily facilitated with somebody who knows just a little bit more. The concept that is used often with Bygotsky's zone of proximal development has to do with scaffolding. You know, when you build a building, you know, you put up these beams on the outside and you sort of help build the second floor and the third floor. Well, the idea is scaffolding is this concept in which the child will actually build upon information from somebody else. You know, these beams that are hanging there and to be able to reach a little bit higher than he might be able to do on his own. All right. So basically, summarize the zone of proximal development. Bygotsky believed that learning always precedes development in the zone, which is very interesting. We can debate that. And the development always follows a child's potential to learn. So basically, if a child has a very low potential in some area, you know, the zone is going to help him a bit, but it won't really get him there. So basically, there is this, you know, a child's only innate potential to learn something as compared with the zone. You know, you have a high potential and a good zone of proximal development, you're going to have learning. But what happens if you have low potential in an area and how much can the zone of proximal development actually help you? Okay. That's interesting. And then finally, the last concept is the zone of proximal development is a prospective view of cognitive development as opposed to a retrospective view. So this means that we're talking about a child's innate capabilities, his independent way of actually learning things and that coupled with his connection to societal context. Okay. The last point, Vygotsky, the third point that's very important for us to look at in the context of mind, brain, health and education is Vygotsky's cultural, historical, psychological perspective. He believed that it was not just the individual who had experiences nor his interaction with a one-on-one with an individual or a friend or a peer or a parent, but rather the entire society had an impact on the way an individual can learn, given the way cultural tools are mediated, for example language or exactly the way that we actually choose to interact with one another. That also has an impact on the way we can learn. So basically, Vygotsky's view was that we had to go more broad than just an individual. We have to start with an individual, micro systems of analysis. Basically, the child's home is interaction. Then meso systems that have to do with home values, things that are done within other settings that create actually not necessarily only value structures, but actually things that form attitudes towards the way we approach different learning environments. And the nexus systems that have to do with basically external bodies, institutions that have an influence and macro systems that go beyond into actually cultural elements of an individual's life. So basically, if you think about, and we will talk about this later, the way language is structured. It has an influence on the way you do think about the whole rest of the world, the language, the words that you actually can use. So basically, these elements, the three elements that we mentioned about Vygotsky are very important, the idea of the inner voice, the zone of proximal development, as well as this cultural perspective. To sort of sum up this vision, we'd like to look at basically comparative view. What is it that Piaget brought to the table on Mind, Brain, Health, and Education? What is it Vygotsky brought? Both of them, you know, are from this vision of a constructivist attitude that an individual, and this is what we also know about brain studies, right, they're building, continually constructing on past knowledge, an individual has to build their own understanding of the world. So how do they actually do that? I'm going to show you a very quick video, 90 seconds, but basically to sort of summarize the comparison between these two people. Hang on just a second. So as we can see, basically there's there's a distinction between Vygotsky and Piaget fundamentally in where we believe what is our core analysis, what is the greatest influence on an individual's learning potential, and Piaget always work from the core of an individual. What does the individual believe? Individual's constructive processes, the cognitive structures that are happening in one's own individual. And on the other hand, we find that Vygotsky put a huge emphasis on the great role that the individual society or where that person grew up or the cultural aspects of learning. So we know that both of these things, you can't say one negates the other, they're both very important theories and they're actually complementary in so many different ways, but it's where we put the emphasis in their view. And this is also something for every individual here to actually think about. We're talking about mind, health, and education in a balanced way. We're talking about cognitive development, trying to look at all these different ways that you can envision this. Nobody's asking you to buy into any of that 100%. And the idea is that you're actually able to form your own visions of this after seeing how others have approached this task. So we're going to move on now from this idea of cognitive development and to actually look at the way that this is measured. Intelligence, again, it's fascinated by human beings forever. But we have, basically it's very intangible. How do you measure intelligence? And that's something that we've always been driven to do. It's not necessarily the smartest thing to do. So we'll have to think about, you know, is it intelligent to measure intelligence? To do this, I want to ask you all to sort of think about some guiding questions here. And this is, again, how the why and the when of things. How, why and when is intelligence formed? What evidence do we have that intelligence is fluid? That means it's ever changing. There are people who still think today, you know, somebody's born good genes, here you go. This is basically you're born with a potential and that's about it. Is that always true? I mean, how dynamic is intelligence? Are you changing? Is your brain changing every day? Is that a reflection necessarily of intelligence? Or could you be changing to become dumber? I mean, we have to look at what is the dynamics of brain, interaction there. But basically do we adopt the idea that all intelligence is fluid? It can change. People can get smarter. Or do we accept another notion that basically intelligence is fixed? You have smart kids and dumb kids and that's about it. And then finally is the quality of our thinking dependent on the quality of our language? So when we talk about intelligence we're also going to talk about ways that we actually manifest this. How do you demonstrate that somebody is smart or not? And does that come through language or other means? So basically to begin with it's kind of helpful and I don't want you to sort of, you don't need to buy into any of these definitions but I'd like to look at a collection of some of these definitions of intelligence across the ages just to see if you can sort of pull from this pull from each of these explanations or each of these definitions what would be your own definition of intelligence? If I were to ask you right now quickly give me 15 seconds of your time and write your own definition of intelligence it's sort of like the elephant in the room everybody knows it's there but very few people know how to sort of articulate its presence so how would we actually define this? What is intelligence? I mean it exists, it's there, but what do we call it and how do we put that into words? So some of the definitions that exist are really related to functions so basically and these are things that are very interesting because you can correlate them directly to different brain functions or networks in the brain so the ability to use memory, knowledge, experience, understanding reasoning, imagination and judgment in order to solve problems and adapt adapt to new situations the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge so that leaves the definition of what is knowledge but we'll move on from there individuals different from one another and their ability to understand complex ideas so that's a very different thing it's not just the functional element of do we have good memory but can we adapt to new situations or can we create or react to complex ideas others talk about the ability to learn, understand, make judgments have opinions so this goes more into an act not an aptitudinal thing but actually an attitude towards things can we actually judge the way things are either good or bad or that it's a general mental capacity that among other things involves ability to reason, plan solve problems, think abstractly comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience so these are some very generic definitions of intelligence but I think if I were to ask you right now can you sort of separate these at least into two broad categories just think about that for a second where we look at a few more others say that it seems to us that intelligence that there is a fundamental facility the alternation or the lack of which is the most important for practical life this means this is something you're actually born with okay so that sort of is a hint as to the categories of information that we have so what we can see from Benet's perspective Alfred Benet is basically yes he's Stanford Benet he's the one of the founders of the famous intelligence test that some of you may know about but basically he's looking at intelligence from a perspective of something practical, common sense initiative faculty being able to adapt to different situations so this puts a different face on things when you have these types of definitions you understand exactly what these people are actually looking for and in Benet's case for example this concept of memory for example is absent though we know it's fundamental to intelligence and learning Benet says that's not what his focus was he doesn't care how well you memorize things he wants you to be able to see for example patterns to adapt to what would be coming next so it's a very different perspective on intelligence from the first definitions we saw we also see that some people believe that intelligence is more an adjustment or being able to adapt as we saw in some of those first definitions so it's not all the things that you know but it's actually what you have the potential to know if you actually change ideas so you can have a bunch of good information here but the minute that you join them in a different light you can actually adapt and create something even better this is the kind of one plus one is three idea the more ideas you have the better ideas you can have because you can join or adapt to new circumstances or basically you know Howard Gardner intelligence is the ability to solve problems create products that are valued within one or more cultural settings so we know for example in the hills of Colombia there are some kids who can really literally they can watch a cow approaching and by the way it walks or how heavy it looks they can estimate how many liters of milk is going to come out of that cow now that is really amazing but is that intelligent and so basically Gardner would say well if several cultures think that that is a good definition of intelligence then we'll buy into that so basically if you look across curriculum and across the world you'll find that they all tend to share very very similar points they all test general language ability general mathematics or logical abilities so there's some things that we teach in all schools around the world all the time and then there's other things that are very culture specific so the culture specific things aren't necessarily things that we're going to call intelligence so basically to sort of box in this definition a little bit more and finally a good old boring he believes that intelligence is just what's measured by intelligence test so basically it's what we choose to put on the test and then we call somebody smart what's important to realize though is that when we try to apply this whole idea of psychometrics how do you actually measure this what's very curious to find is the types of things that are on a lot of different intelligence tests tend to come up with similar readings so basically when you have a typical bell curve you'll find that most people are falling right in the middle there except for all you guys at Harvard who have on the other side of the scale but basically we find that most people 68% of the population is just going to be one standard deviation within the means so everybody has an average is going to be 100 so let's say average is 100 so that you're going to find very few people who are all these absolute geniuses above 130 so you only have like 2% of the population actually going to have higher scores than that on any intelligence test what's very curious to note is that within a normal curve if you look at the most popular intelligence tests used today within school systems you'll find well just done for Benet you'll find that they basically share the same curve so that should tell us something about what's going in the tests are basically testing similar things and if you spread that even further and look at all kinds of other tests or other sub portions of the Sanford-Bernet or Welsh you're going to find that they're they're not that different so basically the idea of the bottom line is this yes there's a standard bell curve we don't know exactly I mean we know that it's fair in that sense but the content of what is being measured is really what we should be looking at and in general when we have devised these kinds of tests for schools we're finding that they're basically measuring similar things or similar types of intelligences why because we're getting similar scores for different types of tests all this begs to to ask a bigger or kind of maybe more macro question on this level is whether or not intelligence has sort of sub elements or not there's a general acceptance now that when we talk about intelligence you know you have general intelligence gee okay but then there are domain specific intelligences so for example you might find somebody who is terribly gifted in math for example and you might say well they have a domain specific intelligence for math that's superior maybe to other people in the population so you need to ask yourself these tests then that we're looking at they tend to be measuring general intelligence right fluid intelligence so if we're doing that then you have to ask kind of another chicken and the egg thing does general intelligence give way to specific domain area intelligences or is it the opposite the general general intelligence actually is born of very specific domains so going back again to the very first slides that we looked at anthropological view of neuroscience is it that you know we used to be good at a few little things but then you know the necessity means that now we have to do a lot more broader things and then overall we're measuring a global intelligence or a general intelligence which is very different from domain specific it's kind of the chicken and the egg thing so what happens first so some people say general intelligence sort of gives birth and that's you know you're born with general intelligence you have this and then as you get older you're able to refine domain specific intelligences that's that's one vision other people think that no the domains start off first you start off with domain domains and then they give birth to this wider broader view of what would be fluid intelligence crystallize intelligence on a general intelligence level and then there's other people who actually think I'm sorry I skipped a slide here other people who think that they're developed in parallel do they actually you know are they born at the same time so we we have the general intelligence which is your general potential for things and then you you also work on different domain specific areas in parallel okay so there's all these different visions it's not really I mean the bait is almost on a philosophical level until you talk about the brain if we're going to talk about the brain then you have to ask yourself what are we measuring are you if we are measuring if we know there's certain neural networks for certain connections related to symbol systems and math which are distinct from certain symbol systems or networks that are related to language or retrieval of historical facts or faces or whatever it may be if we know those things are different then what is it that we're actually measuring and when you're looking at a general intelligence test you really aren't looking at those domain specific areas you're actually looking at more what we saw in those first definitions of an ability to adapt to anticipate patterns to actually envision or unite things that weren't that might not be black and white on a page but that you're able to see how different things could potentially go together so this actually tells us that while somebody might have really highly developed domain specific areas of intelligence that doesn't necessarily mean that's going to show up on a joe average intelligence test people who are pretty good with strong you know logical abilities that's going to come across the scope of things but say you have somebody who has an incredibly well developed artistic sense or aesthetic perception that may not come out in these typical intelligence tests okay so in order to illustrate that I want to share another idea with you a video that we're not going to have time to actually share within this class but I would like to really motivate you to look at this maybe Maggie Toplick has actually summarized really elegantly in you know 13 minutes or so basically what is the problem with intelligence test that we use today in school so I hope I can encourage you all to have a look at that okay so that's sort of wrapping up what we were looking at the general idea of topic one which has to do with cognitive development and the global ideas of intelligence we looked at some ideas of I got ski Piaget and also some definitions of intelligence and ways to measure it now we're going to look at topic two which has to do with social cognition and this is kind of going back to the video is recommending that you look at well we might value or prize or measure certain types of cognitive aspects of human development there's a whole lot of other stuff going on that actually influences the success with which we can learn so we're going to look at an idea concept of theory of mind the social nature of learning in general and then have a look a quick peek at Colberg's moral stages of development and Salove and Meyer's emotional intelligence concept just to sort of round out the picture what does it mean to have a well rounded person who actually grows and learns throughout their lifespan so I'm going to start by looking at again some maybe some leading questions that we can start off with basically why do some people believe that cognition is socially constructed and shared okay so is cognition dependent on social interaction and second are there social foundations of cognitive development so is it necessary I mean do we have to have social constructs before we can have cognitive development is this another chicken and the egg thing or is it basically one thing has to pursue the other and then finally what's the relationship between cognitive moral and emotional development if you can think about those questions as we as we go through the next few slides that'd be great we're going to start off with an idea of theory of mind which is a fabulous concept that basically says that the way we know ourselves is by knowing others so basically it's very hard for me to judge or understand or or gauge my strengths or weaknesses as an individual as a human being until I actually get my head around what other people are doing so understanding social expectations is a huge element of theory of mind and it's actually something that it seems intuitive that that as you grow as your brain grows and you get out of this sort of egocentric state and you start to look out towards the rest of the world but there would be an impact and influence and as we saw with Bygotsky's work the general impact that your social context would have on your learning so we know that there's something important there but actually how would that work and so we it's kind of a he said she said I think this person is thinking that person is thinking and then you can all be totally wrong it's kind of a game of broken telephone so there's two main elements that are important to consider one very fundamentally related to mind, brain health and education is related to mirror neurons mirror neurons are it's a fabulous idea a fabulous concept that we know we have very limited knowledge in less than 15 years of study that on basically neurons in the brain that fire when we perceive other people doing something so basically they started off with studies that were done in Italy that showed that a monkey seeing somebody pass by eating something all of a sudden the monkey is sitting there doing nothing but their neurons start firing like crazy as if they're eating something so this is fascinating idea maybe seeing somebody else triggers our own mind to kick into gear so they did more experiments and you see people watching people throwing a baseball themselves will have certain more to neurons going off but people watching somebody else throw a baseball will have their mirror neurons firing so the idea is if our mind our brain is so connected to the other the idea is that we can perceive or anticipate what's coming next or what the other might be thinking when this theory was sort of like it's been it excited a lot of people because it explained a lot of things that didn't have explanations before and it as as everything else that's called a theory theory of multiple intelligence, this theory of mind this is a theory nobody has proved anything yet and we're going to see in just a second a short video by Dan Siegel that actually puts that all into context but basically we got excited about this because they realized that this might be an explanation for some things for example like autism a misconnected mirror neuron system that was not completely linked up meant that understanding the other was almost impossible and it's not the fault of the person who's got this problem, it's the fault of this mirror neuron system that wasn't working or isn't working correctly so we still don't know if that's true but the idea of being able to understand yourself better by understanding or knowing the other is a huge concept in mind-brain health and education so hope you enjoy this video so a second concept of theory of mind so mirror neurons might be an explanation of this idea of theory of mind but a result or a resulting situation or a resulting structure of theory of mind has to do with a false belief test and they find that when children develop as they grow older as their brains get more connected that they are able to not and as Piaget was pointing out before even earlier what we saw earlier in the class what is at face value isn't always what is true but the older you get the more you realize this so one of these ideas of theory of mind has to do with a false belief theory is better expressed in the video we're about to see right now so basically in summary excuse me theory of mind has to do with all things it would have to do with interactions with other people so theory of mind can't develop in a vacuum all by yourself you do need to have contact with other people this can be executed by making inferences by interpreting other people's emotional states it can be through anticipating discourse by giving hints and seeing what happens after the incident occurs by helping little kids for example make predictions what do you think is going to happen next the first house blew down, the second house blew down what do you think is going to happen when the wolf blows at the third house so basically helping them, helping kids develop what would be inside of somebody else's mental state so the general global idea of theory of mind has a lot to do with the way our social interaction helps to find ourselves we're going to move on now and again I apologize that all of these concepts are kind of glossed over it's to give you guys ideas about how there are different ways that the brain as it develops gives birth to the mind so there's so many different angles to this that in a really quicky lecture this is really hard to cover but I do want to give you sort of an understanding of what the terrain looks like so that you yourselves can actually piece these things together and make some judgment calls because there are some people who feel really strongly that we need to be just focused on cognitive development and these are people who want to see good test scores in schools or whatever there's other people say no we have to have nice members of society so let's look more at this whole theory of mind how do you connect with the other there's a balance there and I'm going to leave that to you and nobody can tell you what's the most important thing I do believe all of them play a role here which is why we want to have you have a broader vision of all of these ideas at once and then we can sort of piece our own visions together individually so we're going to look at two more things Colberg's stages of moral development and also emotional intelligence Colberg is an older idea but phenomenal and it's time in the 70s when he basically laid down a series of experiments which were really fascinating one of which I remember to this day where it really caught your attention because you'll find that different kids at different ages will actually be able to reach different types of moral standards so you can't expect a two year old to be morally righteous but you might expect an eight year old so in a classic experiment one of these questions that was posed to different kids were something for example Johnny walks into a room and he accidentally breaks at that time ten records CDs or whatever it is these days he accidentally breaks ten then another scene Mary goes to Pepito's house and on purpose breaks one record so here's the big dilemma here you ask the kids well what was worse and inevitably younger kids under around seven or so eight years old they will always say that quantity outweighs everything it was far worse to break ten records until they get a little bit older then they'll say no no no no doing something bad on purpose that is worse than the quantity thing so basically this theory went around a bunch of these case studies where they would give situations that had to do with you know stealing medicine to help your sick wife and other things like that basically to come under the to figure out at what stages really can we expect that that individuals develop this and then nowadays some very fascinating researchers try to see if how does that actually parallel brain development I mean what is going on in there that actually allows for those types to occur and we talk about social cognition basically we return again once again to there's different stages really when you have this outward looking vision is more highly developed and understanding the other does become much more important so basically he had Kohlberg stated basically three key levels and he also linked those things to types of two kinds of conflicts so basically in the first stage you have kind of the obedience punishment sort of black or white thing right and this is kind of focused on a very much self-interested stage and this is of course he parallels this with younger ages then you have conformity in a depersonal accord versus authority and social order so basically school aged kids can handle that and then you get into what we're talking much more about the social connections, social contracts and then even broader universal principles yes I love my friend but if he steals something in the store and somebody says did somebody steal something I will say he stole something so basically there are things that are bigger perhaps than even our close friendships there is what is correct you've all seen these terrible movies where the husband wife turns over their spouse and says yes he was wrong so basically this acceptance that there are things that are a higher order of things they're even more important perhaps in social relationships so anyways that's Colberg's ideas and they're very very important and they're closely related to something that came out in the 90s well 1889 was a actually 1990 was the first time this came out but Sullivan and Meyer actually suggested this idea so other people had to even earlier Aristotle even talked about emotional intelligence but basically laying it out and saying what are the pieces of emotional intelligence what does this have to do with the way or how we can learn across the lifespan so they were basically the first to sort of put this down in paper and actually break this down into different different structures and one of the most classic ways that we sort of look at this now is popularized by Diane Coleman but basically the idea is there are different levels one thing has to do with recognizing something and then the other is regulating it and then the other parallel has to do with myself and the others have to do with the others so basically first stage and this has to do with being very young you have at the top there by self-awareness this is the me the me and the recognition can I understand can I label and this has to do with language now can I articulate my emotions those of you who teach preschool or know or work with small kids you know one of the best things you can help a small child do is to say well okay I know you feel angry label it right because John took the ball from you okay so cause and effect what made you feel that so basically helping a child articulate and identify and be able to say yes I feel angry yes I feel sad yes I feel hurt or whatever it is so being able to recognize the emotion is a very big thing secondly would come you know throughout the lifespan self-control you know being able to regulate your own behavior then coupled with that that's the that's the me aspect but then the other is can I perceive can I recognize the feelings of others can I recognize their emotional states can I empathize with what they're feeling do I feel what they feel okay and then even farther on level then then how and in what way can I influence what they feel can I get them into the right mood to do the things that that would be best for our group or whatever can I manage others emotions so basically that's the global concept of what they were presenting in different formats and different people have taken emotional intelligence and turned it all around in different ways but basically they have those are the basic core concepts when we look now okay even a last vision of what would be development we're talking about how does the brain give birth to the mind we've looked at cognitive development we've looked at social cognitive development and now in this another classic that has been Eric Erickson was sort of an unknowing contributor to this whole field as well but basically understanding a psychosocial development so how does this evolve throughout the ages so basically I'd like to recommend that you have a look it's a 12 minute video we're not going to take the time to do this right now in class but I'd like to recommend this nice summary that explains the age stages of psychosocial development according to Erickson as well okay so that's wrapping up topic 2 to get into the last topic we're going to look at interventions are there such things as great starts informal education or informal education or do we know do we have a recipe for success do we know how to go about cultivating bringing out the best in all these kids in all of these different ways is there a system so what is the evidence that exists out there so we're going to start with the big classic you know there's a debate is it worth putting money into early childhood education so in what levels can we say it is or isn't and then look at what are characteristics of appropriate practice and then from there we're going to look at a couple of examples of informal learning environments that are successful and also formal learning environments that are successful okay so round out the lecture looking at those points to do that I'd like to begin with basically this debate on early childhood education and recently well in 2010 a big meta-analysis of the effects of early education interventions on social and cognitive development so this was very important there's a lot of studies out there that only look at you know whether or not school test scores went up if you went to kindergarten or not this study was actually a lot broader and tried to understand what were the general benefits to the individual cognitively and also to society what were the other things that came out of actually going to early childhood programs again a wonderful video but we're not going to have time to look at it in class but this has to do with generally the debate you've got a bunch of experts here in this video giving the pros and cons about having early childhood education so I encourage you to watch this video if you have time what were the findings of Camille's study basically that attending preschool sorry high quality preschools and we'll talk about characteristics of good preschools in a minute if you attend a good preschool there is a positive impact on cognitive outcomes, social skills and progress in schools, school completion rates and so in general they conclude that high quality preschools are associated with positive effects for cognitive development however big however there's little empirical evidence to show us how to design these types of structures that work the best when you get the NOI any EYC's position paper statement they basically look at how should we form young children what is developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs so they basically try to spell out in a couple of different points we're going to look at here what would be if you were looking say you're looking for the preschool program or kindergarten program what are the characteristics of the most successful programs okay so basically and this is actually looking for birth through age 8 we're going to look at some of the indicators that they point out here they basically say that all domains of development this is very important when we talked about whether or not intelligence tests are just measuring cognitive development or not and when we talked a little bit about social cognition they say that the best programs out there look at a balance of different domains they look at the physical development of a kid and cognitive domains I mean they're all considered to have equal place in the curriculum secondly we understand that different aspects of children's learning they have certain sequences we know that certain things you have to crawl before you walk and walk before you run we understand that basically this the developmental stages need to be very much present in the mind of the people who are working with kids who can't push kids to do something that they don't have the foundations for so basically developmentally appropriate practice basically going back to the whole developmental concept is that those caretakers have to be very very aware of what types of things should precede other things so a kid coloring within the lines is that really necessary for them to actually be able to do pre-literacy skills or whatever I mean basically helping understand a third point has to do with development and learning the idea that development and learning proceed at varying rates and so we can't expect all kids to do all things at the same time we have to have that space to differentiate across the learning spectrum this is very hard because we created an educational system that advances kind of by ages and that's not always the smartest thing to do ages are a good indicator of certain milestones they definitely vary within maybe even a 12 month span Steven Pinker's work about language certain language milestones can vary up to 12 months in either direction so we have to be very careful about what we expect and given point two it's much more important the order of skills as opposed to the age at which they learn the fourth point is that development of learning results from a dynamic continuous interaction of biological maturation and experience so basically they're saying nature nurtured question is like resolved it's just a balance between all of these things number five early experiences have profound effects both cumulative and delayed on a child's development which is why we're focusing very much on this early stage of formation of the brain and the mind in this particular class and that there may be some optimal periods for certain types of things we know that kids who don't who were tied to cribs in Romania and didn't have a lot of physical activity have a very difficult time depending on the age that they were finally taken out of that setting to actually learn gross motor skills we know that same thing can be true for language which we'll look at in the coming weeks sixth development proceeds towards greater complexity self-regulation and symbolic representational capacities this is identical to what Piaget was saying so basically it's that concept put into practice here seven children develop best when they have secure consistent relationships with responsive adults and opportunities for positive relationships with peers so six is telling us okay look again at Piaget's developmental stages and seven is saying hey wait a second it's more important or equally important is this whole social cognition this relationship with others to actually know ourselves better eight development and learning occur in and are influenced by multiple social and cultural context this is hearkening back to who was it the end of the V yes by God's key so basically all of this development has to happen within cultural context and so this is important so you can't really import different models you can't say oh yes what worked terribly well in Singapore let's do this here in California or whatever it doesn't really translate so basically the influence of cultural limitations or cultural expectations are really huge on learning in preschools nine always mentally active in seeking good programs are always mentally active in seeking to understand the world around them children learn in a variety of ways a wide range of teaching strategies and interactions are effective so basically this is just general good practice and instruction just teaching one thing one way all the time doesn't work if in this class you were only told do the readings and will give you a test which is not nearly as effective as saying do the readings and attend a lecture or do the readings attend a lecture take notes or watch the video do the readings take notes and look at other videos the greater variety of ways that you have to bring the same type of interremation into your brain the easier it will be to retrieve in the future so basically the suggestion is that the the brighter a greater variety of activities that reach toward the same goal are best practices in early years and I would say across the life span ten plays important play is an important vehicle for developing self-regulation as well as for promoting language cognition social competence so basically what is the job of a preschooler is to play well eleven development and learning advance when children are challenged to achieve at just level beyond their current mastery what is that one called again by God's key zone of proximal development right kids who can reach just a bit beyond what they already know that's development of the appropriate practice so basically to be able to do this you really have to know your kids well you have to know what the kids already know and make them stretch just that much more than they already have twelve children's experiences shape their motivation and approaches to learning persistence initiative flexibility these are all what maybe Costa Arthur Costa would call habits of mind that it developed over the lifespan allowing a kid to give up that's terrible practice but basically helping them persevere you know get through things and rewarding when they take initiative to try new things that's how we develop the right types of habits of mind for a kid across the lifespan all those points probably don't catch many of you by surprise and those of you who are parents probably think that that's you know old habit but actually getting them put down into paper in 2009 was a huge leap I think for a lot of us because basically these things have been intangibles up to then but if you notice and a good exercise would be to go back to those twelve points and see just how many of those were actually just taken straight off the page from Piaget and Bagotsky so have a look at that again okay informal learning just two concepts that I'd like to point out to one has to do with what kids do when they're not in contact with other human beings so we know my mother calls us the one-eyed babysitter we know that TV you know is there it's a it's part of our culture or society and we know that there's a terrible there's a lot of bad TV out there but then we know that there's a lot of good TV the children's television network Sesame Street program that started in I believe it was 1968 absolutely fabulous initiative to try to get kids on an even playing field they found that kids who came from houses with lots of books with parents who read came into the school system age four or five better equipped for academic success than those kids who came in usually from poor neighborhoods who didn't have lots of books at home who didn't have parents who read to them and those kids would stay behind forever so basically the idea of Sesame Street was can we create a level playing field if we do pre-literacy pre-numeracy in an entertaining way in television is that going to help get an even playing field and then they've shown generation after generation I don't know how many of you are Sesame Street babies but I grew up with it and thanks to Sesame Street you know I've got where I am I think I mean good parents and all the rest of it yes my parents have read however the idea of having this support this falling in love with learning loving letters loving numbers loving how those things go that are associated with you know amicable characters is a positive thing so there are informal learning experiences that also shape the way we take in information about the world in future years for those of you who have time I would love for you to have a look at the video there's a 10 minute video here on Sesame Street and actually where it was grounded you'll find some wonderful studies that were done in Harvard in the late 60's to actually help guarantee their formula of how each program is designed to actually take advantage of natural attention spans of kids and where they tended to look on the screen and to call attention to these things so that kids could actually dominate these symbol systems of letters and numbers very easily we also know informally that secure home environments are key and this comes back to one of our first questions if barring all bad things and does the brain just learn what's really necessary to have the good things some good stimulation so is neutral just as good as you know strong or weak things we have to we'll have to look at that and we'll have to revisit that in the discussion sessions because I think that's very important but basically having secure home environments we know gives kids a head start in any in any culture now we're going to look at some formal learning early childhood interventions which are important to be aware of for those of you in mind, brain, health, and education because they do have a great impact all of these come from education I'm an educator, I'm totally biased towards the E part of the mind, brain, health, and education although I understand the whole balance of things I'm much more informed about educational things than I am about any of these other aspects that we've been discussing about brain and mind however I really love for you guys to take the time to get to know Jeffrey Canada's work in the Harlem Children's Zone project, it's just fabulous to see what across the board interventions can have at an investment that's a fraction of the cost of putting somebody in jail, let's say that was basically his premise, he said look at how much it costs to keep somebody in jail if we just spend a fraction of that on doing prenatal care, taking care and ensuring that the kids get into school that they have regular health checkups look at what we could do with that amount of money, so I'd love for you guys to have a look at that video if you have time P&C grew up great, obviously they're in the Perry Preschools, they're all wonderful initiatives, we're going to take a little bit deeper look at Head Start but basically if you look across the board, the studies that have been done recently they coincide with what we were looking at at Camilleries Studies is that basically there is a savings that's given to society when you do have high quality preschool programs we're not getting into the negative there are some terrible structures out there and they cost us money because you develop bad habits it's not that I guess somebody once told me practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent, so if you have kids in a poor school structure from early ages, you're creating bad habits that will persist so what we're talking about here are good programs the good programs have a huge benefit to society they keep people healthier they don't get sick as often, they don't go to jail as often, they stay in school longer they contribute better to the economy there's all kinds of positive things that come out of good or well structured programs one of the examples of a good program would be Head Start which seeks to promote school preparation, it was meant to be a school program but it was actually in response to and basically history comes from Johnson, when he wanted to declare the war on poverty, one of the bigger initiatives was to try to get students who had not had good preschool experiences, who didn't have access to high quality schools or teachers get them in a setting where they could actually have a good start, a head start in basically in school so I'm going to take a really quick we're not going to look at this particular video because this one is actually a history of Head Start, for those of you who are interested in understanding more or less what's happened over the years in summer we can say that over since 1965 or almost 50 years, they had sort of served more than 30 million children over a million children or served each year, it's in every state of the United States and it started off as sort of a short project, what would happen if kids had a good dose of good prepping if they were if parents were taught basic things about nutrition and health and all this and it sort of grew into this much broader agenda to actually help kids develop good habits about self reflection, about social interaction, beyond what was just the idea of giving opportunities to people from poor neighborhoods to actually get a good head start in school, so it's actually grown in its in its mandate. We're going to look at a very short video it's less than four minutes, just sort of giving a general, a global view of what Head Start is and what it's meant to some people who have been benefited by Head Start. So basically, as you can see from the video there's a whole lot of different elements to this but basically this is the general philosophy and the physical structure of how they actually work things. Everything you know rotates around the child but with a high dose of family intervention, it's basically you know, it takes a village you basically have to have a whole community working towards this development. So basically that's the formal structure as it is right now. We know that they're all over the different parts of the country, they have more presence in other places but it's basically saying, okay, get kids four year old to get them into a preschool so that by the time they start kindergarten five year old, we actually have everybody on a level playing field. Okay, sorry for the marathon run through all of these topics. Deep breath. Let's look at final reflections on this. We looked at the first topic that had to do with cognitive development intelligence. We look at the second topic that had to do with the importance of social cognition and in this third topic we looked at certain interventions that actually can facilitate or make some of these better qualities that we see or the more positive interventions come through. To bring this all back to the global idea of this whole class, mind, brain, health and education, think about this. Now we've looked at cognitive stages of development, social situations, emotional states, psychological well-being and we also understand the impact of biology. We haven't spoken enough about what actually nurtures that and nurtures in the sense of nutrition. Okay, we should talk a bit more perhaps about things that have to do with health issues based on good nutrition in the early years of life but a child's biology is not his destiny. This is something that's a huge message I think as a takeaway. It is hugely important, vital, what's going on in during pregnancy, prenatal care, early years however it's not the whole story. We know kids who can be have wonderful births and wonderful early year nutrition who still fall through the cracks. So there's other stuff going on there. We also know kids who despite having a mom who takes drugs and despite having all kinds of other stuff happen to them in poor conditions and lack of good nutrition or care at the home, they still come out on top. Why? So there's a big question here left what's the resiliency question? How far can you stretch human beings? And which of these pieces or has the most impact? That's the whole reason we look at this as mind, brain, health and education as a balance. If anybody tells you if you just do this, that will happen. It's just not true. There's just such a huge range of human variety and potential here. So we have to keep open to that. So basically I want to close by just inviting you to have a look at those extra videos that we've mentioned and to think about these guiding questions that we talked about most especially how is it then that brain that you were looking at last week, how is that it that it gives birth to the mind? And with that we'll close right now. Thank you very much.