Principles of Brain-Based Learning

By: Eric Jensen

Not everyone agrees on these principles or on the strategies that can be inferred from the principles. However, these are the principles that drive Jensen’s work.

• Malleable memories

  
  Memories are often not encoded at all, encoded poorly, changed or not retrieved. The result is that students rarely remember what we think they should. Memories are strengthened by frequency, intensity and practice under varying conditions and contexts.

• Non-conscious experience runs automatic behaviors

  
  The complexity of the human body requires that we automate many behaviors. The more we automate, the less we are aware of them. Most of our behaviors have come from either “undisputed downloads” from our environment or repeated behaviors that have become automatic. This suggests potential problems and opportunities in learning.

• Reward and addiction dependency

  
  Humans have a natural craving for positive feelings, including novelty, fun, reward and personal relationships. There is a natural instinct to limit pain even if it means compromising our integrity. For complex learning to occur, students need to defer gratification and develop the capability to go without an immediate reward.

• Attentional Limitations

  
  Most people cannot pay attention very long, except during flow states, because they cannot hold much information in their short-term memory. It is difficult for people to maintain focus for extended periods of time. Emotions, meaning making, ultradian rhythms and glucose uptake all affect attention span. Some brain mechanisms facilitate attention by processing the desired areas and others facilitate attention by inhibiting unwanted inputs. Adapting the content to match the learner provides better attention and motivation to learn.

• Brain seeks and creates understanding

  
  The human brain is a meaning-maker and meaning seeker. The more important the meaning, the greater the attention one must pay in order to influence the content of the meaning.

• Rough Drafts

  
  Brains rarely get complex learning right the first time. Instead they often sacrifice accuracy for simply developing a “rough draft” of the learning material. If, over time, the learning material maintains or increases in its importance and relevance, the brain will upgrade the rough draft to improve meaning and accuracy. To this end, prior knowledge changes how the brain organizes new information. Goal-driven learning proceeds more rapidly than random learning. Learning is enhanced by brain mechanisms with contrasting output and input goals.

• Input Limitations

  
  Several physical structures and processes limit one’s ability to take in continuous new learning. The “slow down” mechanisms include the working memory, the synaptic formation time for complex encoding and the hippocampus.

• Perception influences our experience

  
  A person’s experience of life is highly subjective. Many studies show how people are easily influenced to change how we see and what we hear, feel, smell and taste. This subjectivity alters experience, which alters perception. When a person changes the way they perceive the world, they alter their experience. It is experience that drives change in the brain.

• Malleability/Neural Plasticity

  
  The brain changes every day and more importantly, we influence those changes. New areas of brain plasticity and overall malleability are regularly discovered. It is known that experience can drive physical changes in the sensory cortex, frontal lobes, temporal lobes, amygdala and hippocampus. In addition whole systems can adapt to experience such as the reward system or stress response system.

• Emotional-Physical State Dependency

  
  Both emotional and body states influence attention, memory, learning, meaning and behavior. These states become more stable over time and will resist change. For example, the longer one is angry or depressed, the more comfortable he or she becomes with that state. This has profound implications for the social and behavioral role of education.