Seventh International School On Mind, Brain And Education
2012 July 30 - August 4
Teaching: A New Frontier
of the Neurocognitive
Sciences, Education
and Culture
Directors: Antonio M. Battro and Kurt W. Fischer
Program officer: María Lourdes Majdalani
Academia Nacional de Educación, ARGENTINA
One Laptop Per Child Association. Chief Education Officer.
Going deep into Socrates’ teaching brain: fNIRS, transfer and the Meno experiment
Learning and teaching are entangled operations. One of the first descriptions of this process is the “Meno” dialog reported by Plato 2400 years ago and considered a greatest icon and landmark in the history of education.
We presented an almost literal version of the dialog to educated people. While our results demonstrate that the Socratic dialog is built on a great intuition of human knowledge and reasoning, they also emphasize its educational failure, as strict following of the dialog does not lead to abstract learning. Deepening, students that failed to transfer showed different fNIRS prefrontal hemodynamic responses during the dialog.