 Hello, and welcome to Lost in Citations. My name is Robert Murphy, and today I'll be guest hosting an interview with Dr. Tracy Tokuhama Espinosa, professor at Harvard University. Tracy and I are both half-Japanese and half-American, and we both have a keen interest in the field of mind, brain, and education. In this session, we will discuss her book, Five Pillars of the Mind, Redesigning Education to Suit the Brain. I have to say, this is a groundbreaking book that I highly recommend. What is it about? Well, Tracy made a fascinating discovery that has massive implications for education. In this one-hour interview, we dedicate a good 10 minutes to the background that led up to this publication. It's really an amazing story. However, if you'd like to jump straight into the book's content discussion, well, that starts around the 12-minute mark. Now, regarding those Five Pillars, according to Tracy and her research, those Five Pillars are symbols, patterns, order, categories, and relationships. So we talk about the rationale and the neuroscience behind all of the Five Pillars. This comprises the bulk of today's podcast. And the final 10 minutes or so, I have a few practical questions for Tracy based on those findings. And her answers, wow, well, they're sure to be of great interest to just about any teacher, parent, or student. And make sure to look for the links below. I hope you enjoy this session just as much as I did. Okay, we're here with Tracy. And you are in New York now. I'm in New York. Yes, we moved from Ecuador about six months ago. Yeah. You've got this amazing view. I'm seeing this, that's the whole city. We get the, I don't know, you can see all the way over to Brooklyn on that side there. And then you get the East River and Queens on the other side. And the Empire State is right behind me somewhere. I don't know if you can see it. It's right over your shoulder. It's right there. There you go. There's the Empire State. Yeah, we've read in a number of exotic places. I wanted to ask you, do you remember, we had talked over emails and stuff, but we actually met for the first time where, do you remember where that was? That wasn't in Kyoto. It was not Kyoto. Was it before? Okay. It was before. Was it in Korea? It was before Korea. Oh, no. Oh, help me out here, help me out. The first place, the first time we actually met face to face was in Kito. Oh, that's right. In 2013, in the MindBrain Education Conference that we ran. Your conference. Yeah. Right. That's absolutely right. And you guys came up, yeah, and told me your connection with Kurt Fisher and all that stuff. That's right. That's absolutely right. Came up. If there's been an exciting time for this whole transdisciplinary field to have evolved, it's really been over the past decade. I mean, so many changes have happened and so many new insights and discoveries. And finally, you've got enough of a critical mass of scholars and academic programs sort of moving in that direction and a lot more, even I guess, thanks to COVID, believe it or not, a lot more appreciation of transdisciplinary perspectives on teaching and learning. A lot of schools couldn't teach these siloed off curricula because they just didn't have enough time. So they actually had to do a lot more problem-based learning and things that joined multiple perspectives. And all of a sudden, everybody woke up to the idea that, oh, yeah, you can solve problems better when you have multiple lenses. So MindBrain and education is much better than just education, for example, which was really, really great. So I mean, terrible that COVID has happened, but great because a lot of advances have also occurred. And Kurt Fisher, one of the founders of this whole movement, as you know, he was jointly teaching a course that I currently teach at Harvard, which is called the Neuroscience of Learning. It's an introduction to MindBrain health and education. And so at the time, he was co-teaching this with another professor. They had a falling out because she wanted to add health and he just wanted MBE. And then they also had totally different styles. Anyways, long and short of it, I'm the only teacher now. So it's sort of morphed out of this. But in that crossover time, it was great to have his insights about where things were going. Now, let's go to the book, Five Pillars of the Mind. Now, the reason I asked you about, you know, do you remember where we first met and stuff like that was another thing. Do you remember when you first told me about the Five Pillars? I had this concept. So if you're reminding me that it was in 2010, 2013, that was actually when we were completing the study for the Costa Rican government, which was really they basically said our kids are failing first grade. How is that possible? So they don't know, you know, 17 percent of the kids aren't learning to read. And we have a bunch of them who just don't have core basic mathematical concepts. So we presume something's not happening in early years, either in our institutions, early childhood or later years. So we've tried psychology. We tried education. We looked at curriculum. OK, so we can't find the answer. So what does neuroscience say? And so they contracted us to do a huge literature review of about a thousand different articles. There's very, very few studies that have been done on children's brains. But I'm trying to piece together what is the preliterate brain that the kids just learning to read and the early math brain? What is going on and how do those, you know, pieces come together to construct this understanding? So basically, this was piecing together a neuro constructivist understanding of what's happening in the brain for core concepts that get built on the entire order concepts. And so in sorting out these thousands of studies, which were overwhelming in and of themselves, I just said, OK, I've got to find a way to organize this mess because there's a lot of studies out there. And it just jumped at me that some of these were just looking at symbol systems and some were just looking at patterns and some were just trying to find order ordering systems and some were looking at categorization mechanisms and others were the relationship between concepts. But 100 percent of the studies fit those five pillars. That's the amazing part. Yeah, that was stunning to me. So I thought this has got to be a mistake or this is my over exaggeration of this, right? So I wrote to many of the key authors of those exact same studies. Stanis Lastihanou, who'd done all these things about the number sense and Marion Wolfe, who'd done things about the reading brain and all these other people trying to, I said, I've come across this. Tell me why it's either a dumb idea or tell me who else already established this, because I didn't think it could be an original idea. I just presume somebody else has got to, you know, must have thought of this before. These guys all wrote back, which is fascinating. I sent it up to 30 of these guys and 21 of them actually wrote back, including Howard Gardner and all these other guys. But they said, well, very cool idea. And basically, people were saying, actually, this fits into where some thinking was going beforehand, but nobody could prove it. So serendipitously, because of neuroimaging, improving by that stage and having more studies, I was actually able to show things that people had speculated about, but there was no evidence for it at that stage. It was jaw-dropping to me, because when I probably shared it with you, I couldn't believe how elegant and how simple this concept was. Everything that humans learn is either a symbol, a pattern, an order, a category, a relationship, everything. I kept doubting that myself. So I'm sure that when I was talking to you, I was in my self-doubt stage. Whether or not this could really be real. But tell me, how do you recall that conversation? What is it that I said to you? You were doubting yourself. Yeah, that's true. But the next time we talked about it, you actually mentioned Korea. When we were in Korea, it was even an early breakfast or late dinner. It was like, you know, before the conference or after the conference, right? One of those days. And you had a sparkle in your eye and it was totally different now. And then it's like, I've got it. It is. It's these five. And it's like, wow. And so, you know, we were both really happy. And it was like, yeah, it was. Well, that's because I also, you know, this external confirmation is so important in academia, right? Do your peers think that this is legitimate? And I really wanted before this went out onto the world stage to, OK, if you're going to tear this apart, tear it apart in private and tell me so I can, you know, start to see what's what's worth salvaging or not, right? But by that stage, I had received so much feedback from these other like the people I admire so much in this field saying that is actually pretty pretty interesting and very different. And I don't see how it's wrong. And at least like Stanislaw Seheni wrote back, at least for all of my work on math, it's absolutely true. Daniel, Daniel answer, you said, you know, well, I just do magnitude and symbolic and non symbolic representations of magnitude. And it's true. So everybody for their own little niche studies, they were saying, OK, yeah, I can see how that applies to mine as well. But the interesting thing was stepping back and looking at all of those things together. And now what does that tell you? Instead of each little niche study was saying, giving you a big piece of that. But nothing was actually giving you this whole broader image of, yeah. Well, yeah, my piece is about symbols. I didn't think about it that way. And my piece is about, you know, patterns. I didn't think about it that way. But and it does seem to fit to think about it, conceptualize it that way, which was so by that stage, by the time I saw you in Korea, I was actually I'd been received all these confirming of this validation that this seems to be right, which is really, which was a big deal. I think it is a big deal if you're going to throw something out there that's a little bit radical. So. So I'm so happy that we can talk about this book because I I I have a sideline kind of history with with the development of this book at different stages. And that's why, yeah, you know, when I thought of you and I wanted to have you on our show, I really thought, oh, yeah, yeah, this this is yeah, I'd like to talk about this book. So the five pillars, symbols, patterns, order, categories and relationships. Now, you go through them one by one in chapters in your book. And so I'd like to try that today with you. So shall we start with symbols? What is that all about? Symbols are this fascinating idea actually grew kind of in a zigzag way. My initial thought, because they had asked us in Costa Rica to look at them, why kids were failing in both math and language. And so when you try to decipher, you know, what do you mean by language development? What do you mean by mathematical conceptualization or understanding of core concepts of math? One of the first things that jumps out at you, and there were some recent studies that were showing that there were all these areas in the brain, you know, this fusiform gyrus area that was related to facial recognition. But right next to it, Stannis Lasahane was saying, oh, there's this letter box. There's actually this really unique part of the brain that's been recycled because before it was for looking for, you know, lions on the savannah. And we don't no longer need that. So neurons have been recycled, neuronal recycling hypothesis. This idea that areas of the brain that had once been used for one thing were now used for another. And he was suggesting at that time that there was a special area for letters in the brain, like the brain looks at letters different from other things. And I was thinking, well, if it looks at letters differently, why not numbers? And then when I look at all the studies, they actually had a huge crossover area. Actually, a very, very similar neural pathways for some symbols in math as symbols in reading. And so basically that that got me thinking, well, if symbols are the same, you know, let's, you know, what do what do we really mean by that? So symbols were more than letters and numbers, though. And when we start to think about that, there anything that has to do with forms or shapes or anything that represents something else. The main idea, especially as I was thinking about what teachers and our original question was, why is it that kids were failing to learn to read or failing to learn math? Is that one of the most brilliant insights that also comes from Stannis-Lasterhan's work as well is that there's something called at least a triple code. So the number three written in Arabic, the number three as expressed by three dots and three written as a word are in distinct neural pathways. They actually reach things, they're not, they're not identical. So what was fascinating here is that the greater number of ways you can symbolize something, three, for example, the concept of three, the greater number of ways you do this, the easier it will be to retrieve that for later, for future use. OK, so if I only teach you three by showing you the number three, the number three, the number three, the number three, you don't really get it. This has to do with basic psychology and mental schema, right? Like, if the only dog you know is a poodle, then, you know, that's it. That's all, you know, I say dog and that's it. But if you know, you know, German shepherds and if you also know stuffed animals and if you've also seen Pluto on TV, if you the greater way, a number of ways you understand dog, the easier it becomes to now use that information in new contexts. So what was fascinating about the symbolic understanding here is that there's a neural physiological underpinnings, they're networks that are distinct for these different types of representations of concepts. And so one of the bigger messages of the book is that oftentimes as teachers, we say, well, that kid just doesn't get it. He doesn't have those core concepts in place. Why is he in my class? He doesn't have that prerequisite understanding. And one of the things that is really big about the book. And if you look at the cover, you'll see this kind of an attempt at showing this hierarchy of symbolic understanding and this hierarchy of patterns. And one of the main problems we have in school is if a kid is missing one of those core building blocks, it's literally it's a physical thing in the brain. We're missing something so you can't scaffold off of previous knowledge. And, you know, that's lost. So part of the idea is to build up from the most fundamental ideas to the larger ideas. And this goes with for symbols and the other four pillars as well. OK, patterns. How is that different from symbols? Patterns are your brain is always, always comparing what it knows with what the new things out in the world, not just when you're in a classroom, but in life in general. You know, how is New York different from Keith, though? You know, you're always looking for things that are novel and things that show patterns. So what is the pattern of something that I already know? Well, I typically used to do my grocery shopping in this way. And now I have to do my grocery shopping in another way. So there's patterns in life. There's patterns of activities. But there's also patterns and things like sentence structures. You know, what is what is the basic pattern of a sentence in, you know, simple past tense in English? OK, when you're teaching this to somebody else, well, here's our basic structure. OK, but when you deviate from the pattern, when is it acceptable and when is it not acceptable, at least grammatically speaking, right? And so your brain is always looking for what it knows and comparing it with what is new. So the first thing it does is what is the pattern here? What do I already know about this? And so we have patterns and things that are configurations in series in the rules or the regularity that surrounds our world. And so if we don't. So initially, it's a natural thing for your brain to look for what it already understands, which are patterns of understanding from the past, OK, and then it builds off of that. We also teach this in school a whole lot. We ask kids to look for the patterns. It's very interesting. They'll give you a circle, circle, square, circle, circle, blank. And they'll ask what comes next because you're training your brain to look for patterns. And that is basically part of all of education. It's the way we teach almost everything in education is based on, you know, that kind of prior knowledge or what is what is to be expected. So yeah, oh, yeah, it's it's one of these crazy ones that jumps out at you in nature more than anywhere else in the world. But it's but definitely exists within school structures as well. I've got a quick question. I think maybe 10, 12 years ago, I think Kurt Fisher, one of his earlier lessons, he taught me that we probably notice incongruencies absolutely more quickly than, you know, congruence after all these studies and writing a book, you agree with that? Do we see why is that totally? And that is it's a fundamental process of your reign. It's called cognitive bias. Basically, the bias that's pretty much embedded. For example, I'm going to give you a terrible example, but I think that it's very illustrative that the face, you know, the best is your own. You see it in the mirror all the time. You know what you look like, right? You are accustomed to you. OK. There's a beautiful sub branch of neuroscience called cultural neuroscience, which looks for patterns of why people react and, you know, is human learning generically the same throughout or are there things that have heavy cultural differences? And within these studies, it's really fascinating. Maybe some would say sad, but we're disturbing finding that people are to a certain extent innately racist because it's much easier to recognize. We we live in our world and have to have these social interactions all the time. And we are we do this mainly by understanding each other's facial expressions and tones of voices is the way that we communicate social contagion. And so one of the fascinating findings, Joanne Chow is one of these great researchers in this field is that people recognize emotional states more accurately on faces that are identical to their own or that are similar to their own. You are a white man. You recognize facial expressions better on white men and people misinterpret intent and emotional expression. Oh, that man looked at me really. He's looking really angry. He looks, you know, crazy on people who are different gender and different race. We immediately attribute this to being negative. You know, they to being something negative or fearful. Why? Because your brain wants to protect the body. It's protecting itself. It's better to be safe than sorry. I'm going to I'm going to be afraid and be alert and run away as opposed to maybe being hurt because being empathetic takes a lot more brain power as well. But the idea here is the patterns that we have in our world. If you live in this social vacuums of everybody looking the same, everybody dressing the same, being the same, it's very hard for you to get out of that culturally and to accept others who might have other patterns of life. Patterns of the way they get dressed or types of jobs that they have in their day or whatever. Those things clash with your own understanding. There's a beautiful idea in theory of mind. It's that we know ourselves by understanding the other. The more others I know, the better I define myself. I define who I am by my constant comparison to the other. Who am I? Well, I don't do that. I do do this. OK. So by looking at your understanding of things, the patterns that you're aware of and then understanding how you can sort of clash with that, I think it was getting to this very fundamental idea now. And if you look online, there's a wonderful codex, a bias codex. There's a lot of different ways that the human brain is looking for the patterns. And when it doesn't find it, it's going to jump at this one, jump at that one. And so attentional bias is also called out, for example, in just simple perception. If I have words on a book, if you're reading a book to your child and one word is really big, that is attentional bias. It's trying to get you to pay attention to that one big word or the word that's in red or something like that, right? So naturally, your brain is looking for this normal pattern of words. And when something is different, this is what is going to call our attention to it. And that's that's part of the way the brain works. The same thing about racism and the same thing and all these other things, it's bias, basically, is looking at novelty and patterns and what sticks out. It tends to go to, there's a whole other word here. It's the heuristics, the shortcuts in your brain are based on the patterns that you've formed. So patterns are heuristics and bias jump out with novelty. Cool. The next one, though, again, if you're just hearing this for the first time, they might sound sort of similar. We just talked about patterns and now we're talking order. How is order different from patterns? Very, very interesting. Order is basically the fundamental elements of patterns. You're absolutely right. All of these symbols, patterns, order, categories, relationships are all related and they all have overlap. But they are distinct in the sense that order is talking about sequences, purposes, formulas, right? How A squared plus B squared equals C squared is very similarly patterned in the brain looking for things like grammatical structure in the brain. So formulas, structure, organization, cycles of things, cycles of understanding, right? And systems thinking, all of those things fall under order. Order is different from patterns in that sense that patterns are the ultimate expression of order. But order can be seen at other levels. For different levels, yeah. OK. And this is something that can be taught, should be taught. What's the connection with schools? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Well, in understanding, for example, the sequences or structures of things, understanding we do teach order all the time. That's pretty much one of the go to places for teachers. We teach in schools, we say you have to have an essay that has an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. OK, if you switch the order of that, you've messed up education in general, right? And product is not the same, right? Yeah, yeah. The order is spread out throughout education systems. OK, thank you. Now, next one is categories. What's that about? I love this one because it's one of the easiest to illustrate. And I'm not sure I'm a bit older than you, but but as contemporaries, I don't know if you remember Sesame Street or Big Bird. Of course, yeah. Big Bird used to sing this song. One of these things is not like the other. Yeah, yeah. OK, yeah. So this is this is one of the. Remember, we talked a little bit how your brain is seeking out patterns, right? Well, a more sophisticated understanding of that is how do you actually categorize those different types of concepts? So do you remember a Big Bird would say one of these things is not like the other? Can you find it before my song is done or something like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You sing the song and he'd show you four things. And one thing would, you know, it'd be like, I don't know, spaghetti and an apple and then cereal and a tennis shoe. Right. And then one of these things just doesn't belong here. And now it's time to play our game. It's time to play our game. For, you know, jumps out to you as an adult. Well, this is kind of crazy. What's the tennis you're doing there with the other food? Right. Because you've categorized, you know, some things it's food and the other thing is clothing. Well, what's so fascinating with doing this is that when you did your your doctoral thesis, your PhD, you probably also saw that you had to find categories of information. The whole idea of the five pillars came up about when I decided, OK, let me just figure out what the categories are. So here's OK, these are symbols, patterns are OK. This is something you do from the youngest child all the way through the highest levels of studies is you're always trying to figure out what are the categories when when I ask you, what's your profession? Well, there's a bunch of categories there, right? If I say or if I say to my kids, what kind of dog do you want? There's subcategories, right? I want a big dog. I want a little dog. I want one with long hair or short hair or whatever, right? So everything around you can be categorized. Basically, categories are very subjective to the user, how you decide to categorize things. Now, within schooling systems, we spend a whole lot of time trying to help people see similar categories. So the kid who saw the spaghetti, the apple, the cereal and the tennis shoe, who now decides the tennis shoe does belong, the tennis shoe belongs with the apple and the and the cereal, because those are the things that go together in my morning. I have to put on my tennis shoes, I eat my apple, I have my cereal for breakfast. Spaghetti is a dinnertime thing, you know? And so the kid might have a totally different categorization of understanding. But the idea is we I do think it's a problem. We talk about divergent thinking when I encourage kids to innovate and think differently. And we slam them for thinking of categories that aren't the same as what we expect. So anyway, that is the relationship to to school situations with categories. So my question for you now then is stereotypes are a form of categorization, right? Absolutely. Now, so how inevitable and how evil are stereotypes? I mean, typically in normal conversation, if you say a stereotype, then you're talking about some something with a negative connotation. But can you explore that a bit for me? Well, actually, negative and positive. I just had a student in the class of Harvard last semester write this fantastic essay that had to do with, I guess, it was the curse of giftedness. So and the other was the the negative nature of the positive stereotype of Asian Americans. So it's basically the negative nature, how it's so bad on Asians to be categorized as the perfect minority in the United States. They're the perfect. They never break the rules. They're always the conformers. They they they do the right thing. They do. How bad that is to the individual because I know he's born, you know, Korean American and here he is. And all of a sudden he's been categorized as being X type of a person. So categories, you know, typically you're right. Then when we have those kinds of stereotypes, they typically are negative. But you would think calling somebody gifted or Asian wouldn't be a negative. But to the person themselves, the reason they're negative is because there's a it comes with baggage of expectations. This is how that person is without even knowing the individual, right? And so this type of stereotyping that you're mentioning is a really huge problem in terms of then your brain seeks heuristics because it's a faster way to process information. Right? Yeah. But if you've just lumped all Asians into one category or all kids who are gifted in one care, you are missing human variability, which is the key idea in the uniqueness of how each individual approaches information based on their baggage of their past life, not necessarily, you know, these external traits that we tend to stereotype on. Were you getting to another idea there with stereotypes as far as it being a negative way to categorize? Whether they're negative or positive is kind of a philosophical question, perhaps. And I was just wondering where you were on this. Heuristics are inevitable. OK, so your brain, to learn something new, it takes energy and that's called cognitive load. There's a there's a lot of energy that goes into learning something new. So every time your brain is, you know, given a new stimulus, new information, new ideas, a new person or whatever, the go to place. The first thing your brain says is, OK, is it worth the energy to learn this whole new thing? Or can I just use my shortcut? And so if we use heuristics all the time, which are these general stereotypes, as you're mentioning, it saves us energy. So it's a lot less energy to just always think that, you know, Asian Americans are this way than it is to actually appreciate the subtle differences between humans. And so it's a matter of energy, believe it or not. And so your brain, your lazy brain, that it wants to save energy. It's the most energy hungry organ in your whole body. And so it's always trying to save energy. And it does this in one way by using heuristics. And heuristics are these shortcuts of categorization that may lead to stereotypes. Very nice. Moving on. Now, the last of the five is relationships. Now, again, it sounds like there's some overlap. And I'm sure you're going to tell us about that. But what is this about relationships? But definitely, there's overlap of all five of them, as we said before, and it's not like there's a hierarchy within the five pillars. They're all equally important and they all are equally influential on one another, right? But relationships in and of themselves is a fascinating concept because nobody lives their life in a sort of a vacuum or a void of a singular understanding, right? Everything is always related, right? So but within schools, these things, these come up in things like proportions, right? In math, we teach kids what's the ratio of teachers to students? What's the ratio of number of people and number of votes we need to get people across the river or whatever it is? And so we do proportions. There's also things that have to do with correspondence. How does one thing correlate to another, right? Magnitude. How does the weight of something turn into this number? So the relationship would turn into a symbol, right? So the magnitude can be expressed as a symbol. So what are the magnitude measurements, approximations? How do we estimate things, quantity? All of those things express relationships. And so the relationships always within school settings, vocabulary and adjectives are always being said, well, which is the biggest, which is the tallest, which is the longest, which is how, you know, what is the farthest? What is the smallest? All of these terms allow us to understand our world in a very different way as well, right? It's all the proportional to the relationship of everything else we already know. What is this new object now? Is it smaller than, you know, my babies, my new baby sister is smaller than me, OK? But I am smaller than my dad. You know, and so there's there's always this relative nature of understanding relationships based on your own personal reality. But definitely it comes into play all the time within school settings because we're always trying to ask, even in your, you know, high school literature classes, they're they were asking you, OK, so what is the real relationship between, you know, Romeo and Juliet or or the nun and whoever, Horatio? I mean, you're you're always being asked about relationships. And these can be human relationships or these can be object object relationships. But how are these things connected to each other? And can we express that in multiple ways? Sounds very high level academic as well, because that's pretty much what academics end up talking about, right? Absolutely. Can you speak to that a bit? Sure. Like, for example, when you do one of the in stages of research, right, you have to come up with a great research question. You have to understand what literature exists on it. Then you do some kind of experimentation. You analyze it and then you come up with conclusions, right? But in order to do that, you have to constantly be looking at the relationships. So first of all, what do you want to know? OK, let's put that into a clearly articulated research question. OK, now in order to answer this question, let's figure out what people have already said about it. So let's get the literature. What does the literature already say? But what most people do is look at a very tight, narrow band of understanding of your question. So if you say, you know, I want to understand why some kids learn to read faster than others. OK, I want to I want to know if bilingual kids read faster or slower than others. And if it really makes a difference in their their school in long term, OK? So you want to know something. So we can say how and to what extent is being bilingual influence reading speed? Or and accuracy, you don't want to do both of those because it's two different research questions. But anyways, you could choose one or the other. And then you go down the stream of looking for literature and each of these little bandwidths of literature, going to look at literacy skills. We're going to look at bilingualism. We're going to look at specific language comparisons. We're going to look at psychological influences people. We've got all these little things that are a literature view. But the idea is when I analyze this, I have to look at the relationships between all of those things. How do the relationships between age of bilingual bilingual skills, learning versus the comparison of languages versus all these other things. What are the relationships? What really had the biggest impact on that kid being able to learn to read or write well. So the idea is it's huge in schools. It's huge in all research that we do is understanding the relate. And you'll you'll hear this all the time. The relationships, is this really is this a causal relationship or is this correlational? Did this just happen to happen? Did these things happen to occur at the same time? Or did one really cause this to happen? Typical example in Ecuador when it rains, there's this. Crazy idea that people say, oh, yes, I felt the earthquake last night. Oh, I did too. Well, I knew it was going to happen because it rained so much last week. And I was like, what is this? Oh, rain equals earthquake. And I'm like, no, that's not really. But but for they they have a heuristic going on where they think that, you know, it's always going to happen. Rain is going to be earthquake, even though when it pours and there's no earthquake, they don't say anything. But the idea is that people don't understand the relationship. They think the relationship is a lot of rain causes earthquakes. When they might be correlational, sometimes when it rains a lot, there is an earthquake, it's correlated. But it's one doesn't cause the other understanding. Relationships is huge in research. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. That was great. I've got three questions. You talked about transdisciplinary type of education. And you said that if young children are taught in this way, then they don't have to kind of learn it explicitly later on in life. Now, what does that mean? And why is it better? Oh, I think it's just it just like we said this kind of Sesame Street thing has been in crane, you know, 57 years old. And I still remember one of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn't belong here. Really interesting that how repeated exposure or prompting can set a pattern for life, a habituated internal review of something that you're going to do all the time. This is what we talk about when we mean metacognitive development. I mean, do you know how you actually know anything in the world? Well, most of metacognitive development occurs thanks to these habituated conversations or repeated things you hear or good structured feedback, for example, use a great teacher likely give certain types of feedback continually to your students. And that becomes the voice in their head. The next time they're faced with the same problem, they'll say, oh, what would Mr. Murphy say about that? OK, yeah, OK. And then they correct it themselves. So your own development, your own skills as a learner are shaped by the repeated ways that you have input and feedback from from guides. So one idea, one of the big thoughts here is if from the very early years of life, you know, two, three, four years old, you begin asking kids, oh, wow. So what are the symbols? Do you see what patterns are there there? You know, what kind of categories does that fall into? Oh, is that the same order that we did things last in the last time we were together or whatever? Just by calling those out explicitly, it becomes that voice in their head where they're asking themselves, what are the patterns, symbols, relationships, order categories here in my environment? Now, that kind of habituated perception of the world is huge. And one of the bigger reasons or one of the big why why this is important is because that is a much more natural path for your brain than teaching math, language, science, art, PE and their own little silos. It's all disjointed. Yeah, it's disjointed in that way because your brain is actually looking for patterns in the world. Your brain is actually looking for what order and the relationships. Your brain is not looking for how we teach language or how we teach math or other skill sets. And so if you habituate kids to think like this any ways, they will have a benefit, even if their schools are still teaching in these siloed ways of school topics, they will still have this mental benefit that they have automatically looked for. As they're looking at the math problem in seventh grade, they'll look at this and they'll see, you know, what is the order here? OK, and how is that similar or different to the order of a good sentence structure? And how is that similar or different to the order of how I do a layup and basketball? How is that? I mean, they will begin to do this, habituate these types of thinking for themselves, which is far more beneficial than just siloed off thinking. This this really puts the book and the purpose of the book into perspective. Oh, I hope so. And I hope you do this with your with your with your all the kids in your life as well. I mean, I think it's really fascinating because it is actually intuitive to the kids. I remember yanking around my three little ones when we lived in in in Switzerland. I would take them to a lot of children's museums because we're trying to build a children's museum on the environment when I was living there. And we would go to all these science museums and we'd visit these things. And, you know, the kids would run around and their questions were almost identical. You know, they would look at for the symbols, for the order, for the patterns, the relationships, there, why questions were all around those things. And so just by habituating, well, don't you see how do you see how this exhibit and this other one were doing pretty much the same thing? Ah, they could be in the same category of of end purpose, even though they were totally different ways of doing the exhibit, right? And so it would just help them think better. I would definitely do that in daily life, even, you know, breakfast. So all parents should basically have this like this list of five pillars on the on the wall and like in the kitchen somewhere. Until it becomes habituated and believe it or not, kind of crazy because that's what I was trying to practice with. I think how hard is it to do this? And it's not hard at all. In fact, within about a week, your brain automatically just clicks into that. Your brain adapts to what it does most. So if you're just constantly prompting it to consider symbols, patterns, order, relationship, categories, if you're constantly thinking about that, give it about a week and you are naturally seeing all the patterns. I see the patterns here. I see the symbol you're naturally seeing that. And it's a wonderful way to sort of change your perspective on the way, you know, our world is around us. It's a more natural thing for your brain. And it helps us understand the little ones better, too. Right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, cool. Thank you. So you mentioned that if the teachers are using these pillars, that they become learning scientists. In your book, what does it mean? I think that we do a whole. So let's let's, you know, first things first, define the term. Educators are learning scientists. Anybody who does the learning scientist, which can be neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, but especially teachers, we are all learning scientists to a certain degree. But what almost every other profession does, except for teachers, is to document our practice. So what's fascinating is that teachers do more experiments in a day than most neuroscientists do in their entire life because teachers are always hypothesizing on what this kid needs. They do an experiment. They have an intervention. They gather evidence and data. They figure out whether or not that worked or not, and they tweak it. And then that's it, right? So on a daily basis with 20, 30, 40, 100 kids, they're doing multiple experiments. What they never do is write it down. They don't document what they did. So part of being a good learning scientist is learning to document and learn from our mistakes, right? What work? So we recommend to teachers that they do they just make a simple journal for themselves. And I think it has, you know, five columns. What am I going to do today? What did I actually do? Did it work? Why or why not? What do I do next time? And just basically if you just ask yourself that at the end of your day, you become a better teacher because basically you're just becoming you're more methodological in the way that you approach this art we have. Well, what's the science behind it? You know, can I document and say this actually did have an impact here or it didn't have an impact. So by habituating the use of the five pillars, that's another way to structure this kind of reflective practice on the part of teachers to become learning scientists. You have a framework around which you're, you're, you know, you're, you're mounting all of your different interventions, right? You're just reminding people that one of the simplest ways to actually use the five pillars, I'll tell you, the radical way is just change your entire curriculum and only teach symbols, patterns, order, relationship. That's totally radical. You could try that. But the most subtle way and there is a middle ground, but the most subtle way is simply as a methodology is that teachers just simply ask as they're normally teaching as they're pointing out the way that they normally teach things. And they'll say, OK, but OK, but look, what are the symbols that we're using here? OK, what are the, you know, patterns you're seeing on this? Tell me, you know, what do you see here as far as the order of this? For example, in the in the class at Harvard, we'd have them do a semester long project and it's a big research thing and they have to do a lot of research. But many of them have never read a scientific article before and they kind of freak out initially. So what do we do is we will show them two, three, four peer-reviewed articles. So we'll say, OK, what's the pattern you see here? What do they all do? OK, they all seem to have an abstract. They all have the introduction. They all have. OK, so they basically dissect it. OK, so we let them do that first. And then we say, OK, so so what is the order that you see all of these things done? Well, they usually have the abstract and the introduction and they talk about the method. OK, so they do that. So they figure out how all these things work. Same thing when we say the references have to be in APA 7th edition and they all freak out with that. And we say, OK, here, here's a reference in APA. Tell me about this. What do you see here? Well, they put the author's last name first and just the initial. OK. We have them dissect their own understanding of it by using symbols, patterns, ordering, relationship and categories. And they get it. They just get it. They get it by habituating by disaggregating each of those. The bigger idea, what is an essay? What is a research project? You know, how do I make a reference of any question that a kid might ask? If you just have a methodology of breaking it down into those five pieces, that allows for a much easier, a more comfortable entry point to anything that anybody learns. OK, and then this is going to definitely help teachers, right? Because we were talking about learning scientists, right? So it's a teacher. If you're teaching anything, just have in the back of your mind or over the part of your computer to remind yourself, have I asked about symbols? Have I asked them to identify order or relationships? Have I talked at all about the categories of what genre of writing is this? What type of thing? What's the difference between chemistry and biology? How are they the same and how are they different? Just the basic Venn diagram. They're both sciences, but what do they have in similar? What are they different? Helping people just habituate an approach to any learning through the pillars is much more efficient. It's a very efficient way to sort of help yourself get your mind wrapped around new ideas, new concepts. Culture, culture. Let's say I drop you into a culture you've never been in before, right? And the only thing I tell you, only thing I arm you with, get the most out of this experience and come back and tell me all about it. If I just ask you, identify the symbols, the patterns, the order, the relationships, the categories, you would write a novel. You could tell me all about the culture because all you always compare and contrasting, you're looking at the symbolic representations of certain things in different cultures. I mean, you can look at all kinds of things that way. Cool, cool. Thank you. Now, you were talking about perhaps replacing grade levels and I guess grouping students more into levels that are level matched. Well, the idea, yeah, and this isn't my idea. I'm just hearkening back to the wonderful research of Benjamin Bloom in the 50s and 60s and 70s. It really pointed, especially in his latest work in 1984, just really points to the idea that there's a 90-90 rule, really kind of interesting idea, right? He was pretty convinced 90% of the kids in my class can get it. They can just get it. They can get whatever it is I need to teach them. If they have enough time, why? Because different people are entering my subject at different entry points and I need to have enough time to get that prerequisite knowledge up for that kid who might have entered in with less information, less life experiences, less knowledge to shore up his prerequisite understanding so that we can all reach the same goals. The kid's not stupid. We're just not giving him enough time to fill in that gap because we haven't structured lessons that way. 90% of the kids can get it if they're given the possibility of dominating at least 90% of the content. The idea would be have we designed learning in such a way as we can fill in those prerequisite knowledge pieces and that is a huge problem that we have in education and I think no place better. Maybe you would probably agree with me, I'm not sure but in Japan, you teach English for many, many, many, many, many years and also throughout college yet we have a population that barely speaks English which is really fascinating, right? And so what has happened to these kids? They've all basically passed and passed and passed by the skin of their teeth and they have technical understanding of written language, really good at deciphering information there but they haven't had a lot of opportunity to speak and they haven't filled in that prerequisite gap ever and so they barely pass with good speaking skills, maybe a good writing skills but forever and ever. So let's say you have a C student and all you've done is advance that C student all the way through school. Well, by the end of it, you do not have a professional speaker because they never, ever dominated 90% of any grade level, right? And so the idea would be this radical idea rather than I'll just put it back to you. Can you justify to me why we put kids into school by their birth date? Historically, there's a really crazy and kind of sad reason that we do this around the turn of the last century when we decided to oblige everybody to go to school. Everybody can go to school. In the United States, we had a tax that was introduced, horseman said, can we do finance public schooling? So everybody gets an education and everybody said, yeah, better educated people are better workers, let's educate, okay. So you went from having this kind of one room schoolhouse where you'd have the 14 year old sister alongside the nine year old brother, both learning to read, but they would get their skills up together. They didn't divide by age at that stage. They divided by level of understanding of that concept. They both needed the same thing so they would be together. That's one room schoolhouse, right? But then you had this influx, this huge influx. Everybody had to go to school now. When you had all these people coming, they said, well, how do we organize this? What is zoo? How do we do this? Well, height, eye color, age, age is a good one. Let's divide everybody by age, okay. So for the past 150 years, 170 years, we've divided people. We've started schooling by your birth date, but that's crazy because some of those kids had parents who read to them and nurtured them and are already ready to read at three years old. And some of them have had absent parents who parked them in front of a television or did nothing to them, have had no language stimulation whatsoever. There's something called a 30 million word gap, which Rizzley and I found in, I think it was 2003. Really tragic, kids from lower socioeconomic status or from backgrounds at risk, which when parents didn't go to college, right? They are exposed to 30 million words less than their peers when they start school at about three and a half to four and a half years old. And so they start behind and stay behind because they've never. So why is it that we think that that's okay? It's crazy. We haven't given that scaffolding to allow kids to start at their level so that we can all reach the same goals. And so this is an older idea of Benjamin Blooms is basically, can we harken back to the space where instead of sorting out kids by their ages, we sort them out by their level of understanding with a clear hierarchy that's provided by the five pillars, basically, can they, have they dominated the hierarchy necessary, the core level prerequisite knowledge before they move on? That would be a smarter way to do it. That would have fine success for many more students than we find right now. We're nearing the end of the interview, but I'd like to throw one more question in here before the last one comes up. I mean, I think most people could listen to that and say, yeah, Tracy's right. And then so naturally, why aren't we doing this? How difficult is it to implement? I mean, why don't we just go with it? I'll answer your question with an analogy. We know that the best way to learn new things when it's hard to understand the new concept is to think of something you do know. So analogies are a fantastic way to teach. So my analogy is a gynecologist. This goes to, this is Socrates idea. Socrates thought that the teachers were basically midwives and that they should actually just, pull the knowledge out of you. I thought that was a nice idea. But we have bastardized this terrible, I mean, this is terrible. We've taken that in and turned it on its head in modern society in which we have now, we do what's best for the gynecologist and not what's best for the patient. We make a patient lie down to give birth. How stupid is that? But it's convenient for the doctor. It's really convenient for the doctor. It's not convenient for the person giving birth. Well, the reason we have grade levels is it's super convenient, easy to organize, to do division by ages. You can plan, you know, you're a city population, you can plan how many schools you need and how many classrooms you need for these things, right? This is also why we have curriculum siloed off into math, science, language, because we can pretend to divide learning up into these blocks of time when that's not really how your brain is learning about the world, it would be much better to sort of integrate these things. So changing school by saying let's not have the curriculum structure we have and let's not divide by ages. Well, it's so hard to do because the people in charge do not find it easy to do it. It's not that it's, it is a superior way to do it, to mix things up the way that we're suggesting, but it's hard. It's hard because we've not done it. Your brain adapts to what it does most. But why do you do it this way? Well, we've always done it this way. No, no, why are you doing it this way? Nobody can justify it. And what we saw, especially with COVID, with now households having to learn together, brothers and sisters being together in homes or whatever, we saw, again, this revisiting of how learning is definitely, definitely not based on your chronological age. That's the least important. If I had chronological age, cognitive stage, and then your prior experiences, prior experiences tops your age every single time. But we haven't learned to appreciate that when we design educational experiences yet. We're getting there, we're getting there, but I think that it's, there's a lot of evidence stacked up against the silliness of doing this way. And many people have shown a better way to do it, like before we used to have standardized tests. And then all of a sudden we couldn't have them during COVID. And so university says, oh, great, we no longer require the SATs. They've been wanting to get rid of it, but they didn't know what to do. So when school said here, we'll give you an e-port fully instead that tracks a kid throughout his lifespan instead, they said, that's much better. So there's ways to do it. It's just that we haven't been forced to doing it yet. And so we haven't, but there are creative ways to get around this. And I would hope that we would do it. It'd be beneficial to more students, more people would find success in school if we did that. I certainly agree with that. Let's try to keep that one of the higher priorities. So my final question for you today is about advice that you might give to teachers based on the concepts that are in this book of the five pillars. So two things. One is just to habituate a way of thinking. And this begins with yourself. Can you begin to think about your world in terms of all the symbols that are around you or the patterns that order the relationship with categories? If you're able to do that and you can commit yourself how easy it is to actually do that, can you then integrate those conversations, simply those hints into your own lesson plans? It doesn't take a whole lot of effort, but it does actually really bring your brain back around to what it would naturally be trying to do as it tries to categorize information coming at it from the rest of the world. The second piece of advice would be more broadly speaking to work as learning scientists. I think that the quantity and echo chamber of information that teachers are exposed to keeps them doing the same thing over and over again without better results. Whereas if they would open themselves up to evidence-informed practices, to listening to other perspectives, to challenging themselves and to accepting that they are in charge of the most complex organism in the universe, their kid's brains. If they can accept that and sort of celebrate that complexity, I think we'd all be in a better place. And so I hope teachers embrace the complexity, begin to be learning scientists themselves and habituate the use of the five pillars in their own thinking. Okay, thank you. Wow, we went way over, didn't we? Are you okay with that? I'm okay. I have another appointment that starts in 20 minutes, so I'm good. Wow, so much, it's a lot of good stuff in there.