The Four Pillars of Learning according to Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene

Learning is a complex process but it does follow some universal principles. Here are four that every educator and learner should know in 2024

AI-powered: a brain and columns in the background

How do we learn?

When I started planning webinars for my followers, I thought really hard about what topic I wanted to address. It just so happened that a very special book was lying on the table right in front of me. It was How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better than Any Machine… For Now by Stanislas Dehaene.

Stanislas Dehaene is a cognitive neuroscientist from France, professor of Experimental Cognitive Psychology, and researcher at Collège de France with a special interest in reading, numeracy, and consciousness. In his excellent book, he proposes a framework for understanding how the human brain processes and acquires new knowledge. His work is so influential that I was inspired by it when I designed the cognitive sphere of my Learning Cosmos conceptual framework. According to Dehaene (2020), cognition basically has to do with the following:

1. ATTENTION: The ability to selectively focus on specific stimuli in the environment, and to filter out distractions.

2. MEMORY: The ability to encode, store, and retrieve information from long-term memory.

3. LANGUAGE: The ability to use and understand spoken and written language, which is essential for communication and learning.

4. EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS: The cognitive processes that allow us to plan, prioritize, and perform complex tasks. These include problem-solving, decision-making, and flexibility.

These cognitive processes are at the heart of learning. They’re so vital that:

We can compare the cognitive sphere to Earth’s conditions to support life, such as the presence of liquid water and breathable air.

Me, the Learning Cosmos

In fact, if there’s any universal formula for learning, we should probably look at Eric Kandel’s work. Kandel won a Nobel Prize for his work on sea slugs and the neurophysiology of learning. He is cited in Dehaene’s book and in Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa’s work as well. He actually contributed to the field of Mind, Brain, and Education with one of its principles:

Learning requires attention and memory

Eric Kandel

I always tell my Language and Cognition as well as my MBE students that if we’re not paying attention, we’re not taking in the stimuli from the environment. If we’re not taking in these stimuli, we’re not making memories. If we’re not making memories, there’s nothing to retrieve later on. In short, inattentive students need to attend to the materials at a later time to be able to learn – and that might be more difficult since they’ll probably need to do it on their own.

What are the four pillars?

Back to Dehaene’s work. He claims that the universal basis for learning can be categorized into four pillars that should work together to support learning and cognitive development. By understanding how they function and how they interact with each other, we can better understand how the brain processes and acquires new knowledge. I like the pillar analogy because, as I mentioned in my EdYOUfest talk, we need pillars to support a structure. You can think of a house, a tall building, or a bridge. With structures supported by just a few pillars, however strong they are, remove one and you’ll likely undermine the whole structure.

The four pillars of learning are:

1. Attention

2. Active Engagement

3. Error Feedback

4. Consolidation

Attention

Dehaene starts by saying that attention is the solution to an environment of information saturation. Indeed, just think about the overwhelming amount of information we’re exposed to on a daily basis. One example and interesting fact he mentions is that Artificial Intelligence got better when it learned to pay attention. Searching for patterns in big datasets is a truly herculean task. Machines have a lot of processing power, sure, but even so, if they have nothing to pay attention to, they’ll end up doing a lot of unnecessary things.

According to Posner, as mentioned in the book, we have three major attention systems:

1. Alertness

2. Orientation

3. Executive Attention

They basically tell our brains when to, what to, and how to attend to things respectively. So it’s not enough that you got your students’ attention. It needs to be sustained and directed. Think of alertness as the notification bell you get from social media or the alarm clock that goes off when you need to do something. Orienting is like the beam of a flashlight in the dark or the spotlight of a theater. Executive attention is like the control board.

Since attention is a scarce resource, we shouldn’t just know where to direct it but we must also learn how to suppress unwanted information.

What can that tell me about my class?

• Remove unnecessary distractions from your classroom (too many posters on the wall for instance)

• Call your students’ attention when something is vital. Telling them that you’ll share something important is a good strategy but might not be enough.

• Check if your students are paying attention. Ask Concept Checking Questions (CCQs) sometimes

• Share attention with your students (social interaction) and use cues to direct their attention to things (look or point at what they need to attend to)