All you need is love

Dr. Andrew Curran MB BCh BaO MRCPaedsI MRCPaedsUK MRCPCH DipCH DRCOG

It is extraordinary to me that the last 15 years of brain research, all those billions of dollars spent in laboratories has shown to me one single important message. It can best be set out as follows:

If a child is in an environment where they are understood as an individual human being then:

Their self esteem will be improved and:

If their self esteem is good they will gain self confidence and

If they are in an environment where their self esteem is good and they have self confidence, they will feel engaged with that environment.

And what does all that add up to? Well, love as it happens.

The billions of dollars of research have shown some central points about brain functioning during learning which feeds directly into this thought. Firstly our main learning neurochemical, dopamine is controlled predominantly by the limbic system. What is the limbic system? Why, our emotional self in its broadest sense. Our limbic brain evaluates what is going on all the time and decides what we will pay attention to and what we will ignore. The more emotionally engaged we are with something, the more attention we will pay it. Attention as a function is also part of the dopamine system.

So now we are paying attention to something, how do we learn from it? Again dopamine comes to the fore as the main learning neurochemical in the brain (which makes sense really. If you use the same neurochemical to pay attention to something as you use to learn with, then you are killing two birds with the one stone!).

Dopamine gets a helping hand from a couple of other neurochemicals, glutamate (which is all to do with excitation!) and a very long named chemical called gamma amino butyric acid (GABA for short) (which is to do with inhibition), but without dopamine learning cannot occur.

Dopamine sets in motion the processes that grow connections between nerve cells in the brain. These connections are called synapses and they allow signals to pass between nerve cells. These connections build up into patterns of nerve cell firing called Hebbian assemblies or templates and it is these templates that are the underlying fact behind everything we do with our brains.

So if we get someone emotionally involved in what we are doing, we get their attention. If we get their attention, then they will start to learn. So far so good. But how can we start that initial process of dopamine release that produces the results we want?

The answer to this is surprisingly easy (and obvious to every village wise woman since the dawn of time). As I have said dopamine release in the brain is predominantly under the control of our emotional system, the limbic system. So what turns on our emotional system? Well, stress will do that, but stress also turns on things that interfere with expansive learning such as steroids (that actually can destroy the nerve cells you learn with in the hippocampus, a brain structure essential for learning) and the big stress hormones, adrenaline and noradrenaline (which, through their action on the amygdala, will drive memory into unconscious memory through the corpus striatum). So learning through high levels of stress is not fundamentally a good thing.

So how can we get our limbic system to produce dopamine exactly where we want it in the brain, and without too much adrenaline, noradrenaline and steroids? The answer is through reward and the anticipation of reward. Nature has set our brains up so that these simple concepts will optimise our brains for learning (which makes lots of sense in evolutionary terms – it is a good idea to learn well things that bring reward!).

.Reward in us humans is a complex thing. What rewards me may not reward you. And this is why models of learning such as Multiple Intelligences are so important. Find out what a persons intelligences are, and you immediately have an in into what will get their attention and optimise their learning.

So we have now come full circle. If you understand someone, they have good self esteem and good self confidence when they are with you. They are then perforce emotionally engaged with you and what you are doing. Learning will then be optimised for that individual (which doesn’t mean that everyone can be an Einstein, but it does mean that an individual human can better reach his or her maximum potentials). It all comes back to that simple four letter word. Love an individual human for themselves, and they will learn from you.

The final question that I would ask you is this – what are you taking into the classroom that is preventing you and your pupils making good emotional contact? Change that, and you will immediately have improved your pupils’ potential to learn.

And, perhaps most importantly, you will be having fun (and there’s nothing wrong with that!).

Andrew Curran is a paediatric neurologist working at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool.

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