 So once we have this basic concept understood how the brain learns, we have this very big question that's in front of us. There are such a thing as ages, the age of a person, the chronological age, are you 1, 2, 50, 60 years old? The stages, these are cognitive stages of development that occur from a psychological perspective, and then there's prior experiences. So here's a big question for you. What plays a bigger role or what is more indicative of potential to learn? Your age, your stage, or your prior experiences? It might surprise you to learn that prior experiences are definitely the most important indicator of your potential to learn something new. What you already know influences what you can know. And the least important of all of these things is actually your chronological age. This is why some people, some small kids, for example, who've been exposed, have had a lot of prior experience with reading materials, are really prepared and ready to go and able to learn to read maybe at three or four years old. Whereas other people might be seven, eight or nine, and just because of the lack of prior experiences are not able to do the same task. So we know the prior experiences definitely outweigh your chronological age when it comes down to being an indicator for what you're able to learn. This then begs the question, you know, how should learning be designed in our schools? Why do we divide kids by their ages, for example, rather than their prior experiences? A big question here. And the importance of prior experiences really comes into play when we talk about the concept of constructivism or what's really happening in your brain, neuroconstructivism. That is that we have neural networks in our brain for basic and core concepts and we build off of that. So what we know, our prior knowledge gives us a scaffolding upon which we can build and learn even more complex things in the future. And this brings us to basic premises. Number one is that, you know, learning occurs throughout the lifespan. You can and do learn until you die. But it's fundamentally incorrect to think about learning as development being in parallel with age. It's actually more in parallel with prior experiences. So the greatest determinant of learning outcomes in the future is what you already know, what you can scaffold upon to build this new or more complex knowledge. Now we want to turn to a connected idea that's considering growth mindsets. Many of you might have heard this idea, but I just want to put this into the context of mind, brain health and education. The concept of a growth mindset is related to one of six principles that we have about human learning. And a principle is something that is true across all cultures, age groups and independent of prior experience, which is very interesting, right? One of those principles is the brain is plastic. Basically, it's highly plastic, it's neuroplastic throughout the lifespan and you can and do learn throughout the lifespan. So it's thanks to this plasticity that we can actually justify the concept of growth mindsets. And it's thanks to this principle that we understand that all kids can and do learn. They might not learn at the same pace, but they can and do learn. And that learning is fluid and not fixed. And it's this last point, the fluidity of learning that justifies the concept of a growth mindset. Somebody who has a growth mindset basically looks as failure as an opportunity to grow. I can learn anything I want to. Challenges help me grow. I like to try new things. This is very, very different. This is a mentality that says, you know what? I am not limited to my biology. I did not inherit genes that determine who I am. I can be more than my biology. This growth mindset is contrasted with somebody with a fixed mindset who thinks that, you know, failure is the limit of my abilities or I was just born this way. My dad's bad at math. I'm bad at math. Or the overall concept that my potential is predetermined by what I inherited. The main idea from Dweck's work is that students who believe that their intelligence could be developed, those who had a growth mindset, outperformed those who believe that intelligence was fixed. So just believing, just accepting, just buying into this idea of growth mindset, which we now can substantiate with neuroscience in the factual establishment of plasticity is pretty exciting. So these are some of the ideas we want to talk about in module two, looking forward to seeing you in class.