Wednesday, May 27, 2020
The how of how isn't surprising; the what of how is surprising.
Via Eurekalert, a mostly unsurprising study on HOWism. The pleasant surprise is the fact that academics are PAYING ATTENTION to HOW!
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found a way to find decode the procedural information required to tie various knots, with enough precision to identify which knot is being planned or performed. To reach this conclusion, Drs. Robert Mason and Marcel Just first trained a group of participants to tie seven different knots, and then scanned their brains while they imagined tying or actually tied the knots while they were in an MRI scanner. The main findings were that each knot had a distinctive neural signature, so the researchers could tell which knot was being tied from the sequence of brain images collected. Furthermore, the neural signatures were very similar for imagining tying a particular knot and planning to tie it.Unsurprising. Each knot has a different sequence in the brain, and rehearsing looks the same as doing. Anyone who learns or teaches HOW-knowledge knows that. Could get interesting if they try an experiment to see if learning solely by planning (virtual) gives the same result as learning by doing with hands. I'd bet the virtual results are inferior, but I wouldn't bet heavily.
Labels: Experiential education, meta-experiential education
¶ 3:38 PM
