A Neurological Case for Designing Performance Arts
into the Core of Christian Education in the
Post-Gutenberg/Neo-Google World
DMIN 546 – Contours of Leadership in Emerging Culture Academic Essay
Instructor: Dr. Byoungchul Joseph (BJ) Jun
George Fox Evangelical Seminary
Submitted May 2, 2012
Richard Alan Melheim
1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Précises...... 2
I. Introduction: Designing for the New Brain...... 3
II. Patterns, Firings & Wirings...... 6
III. Teaching with the Arts...... 8
A. Why Teach with Music?...... 8
B. Why Teach with Movement and Motion?...... 13
C. Why Teach with Visual Art?...... 19
D. Why Teach with Theater?...... 22
IV. Memory and Meaning-Making in the Micro and Macro...... 26
V. Why Brain-Based Learningon Arts-Based Platforms at the Core of Education?...... 34
VI. Conclusion ...... 37
Appendix
A.The Quotelopedia: My 275 Favorite Quotations on the Arts...... 40
B.Practical Application: Bible Song Manual...... 1-21
C.Preschool Incubators Project Sample Curriculum...... 1-46
Précises
Back in 2005, before I knew Len Sweet personally, I attended a conference where he said, “There was once a day when the church saved the arts; and theremay be a day when the arts save the church.”[1]
I believe today is that day.
In this paper I will propose an approach to teaching that embraces the arts at the core of all Christian education. I will begin with a neurological argument for the use of music, movement/dance, visual arts and theater arts as the best strategyforteaching the human brain in the post-Gutenberg/neo-Google world.To bolster this argument, I will thenoffer a quick course on the molecular, cellular, and structural basis of memory and meaning making in the human brain. I will conclude with a case for including these arts at the core of all Christian education.
In Appendix A, I willshare a link to 275 of my favorite arts-related quotations.
In Appendix B, I will unveilapractical application ofmy learning theory in the form of a manual for a children/family ministry that I call “Bible Song” Sunday School.
In Appendix C, I will post lessons from my latest experiment - a model for arts-based preschool education - thatI will begin testing in rural, urban and suburban settings in Florida and Minnesota in the summer of 2012.
-RAM
I. Introduction: Designing for the New Brain
“If the child is not learning the way you are teaching, then you must
teach in the way the child learns.”[2] – Rita Dunn
Over the last 50 years, technologies have not only transformed the delivery systems for information; they have also transformed how we learn, what we learn, when we learn, where we learn, why we learn and how we absorb, retain, use, and relay information. Nicholas Carr, in his provoking book “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains”[3] argues that the Sumerian writing system, the printing press, the radio, the television – each new technology humans have employed en masse – have literally changed the structures of our brains: “Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system, itself.”Each successive media we have embraced has literally rewired the circuitry of our brains.[4]
Flannel-Graph Preacher in a Facebook World
2005 was a watershed year in the history of human technology. It came and went without much notice in the church. Among America’s teenagers, it marked the year when raw time spent on television was surpassed by raw time spent on the internet. For all practical purposes, the television era ended and the internet era began.
The “one way” information exchange that traveled from the classroom teacher to the student in the lecture hall in the GutenbergWorld (“Sit still while I instill”), and from the television to the couch potato in the more recent world (“I will delivery entertaining information for 7 ½ minutes as you watch passively and listen”) have given way to many rich and varied interactive teaching approaches that work effectively in the multi-verse of relational/conversational living dialogues of the Google World.
TheGoogle generation will not sit passively in a desk and watch your “show.” They have no patience to park in a pew or doodle in a desk to absorb a one-way stream of information being taught or preached. They require a much more EPIC[5] learning environment or they won’t stick around. “If I’m not engaged in the conversation… I’m out of here!” is the new mantra.
Sadly, when it comes to preaching and teaching, much of the church has yet to enter the television era, even though most of our youth have already left it.
To reach and teach this new mind, achange in teaching philosophy and practice is being slowly implemented in many of the nation’s classrooms. But for the most part, this tectonic shift in educating the changing brain has yet to be understood, embraced or even acknowledged by the church. Much of the church continues to live with old models, old methods, no technologies, and an old world understanding of what “good” preaching, “proper” teaching, and “effective” education looks like.
Changing Brains, Changing Approaches
Educating the post-Gutenberg brain will require executing new technologies and strategies. The methods, models and materials that may have worked for the Gutenbergers are proving woefully inadequate for the Google generation. Fortunately,recent tools for discovering the world inside our heads have made learning about learning much more clear and comprehensible over the last five years. Through the advent of more precise brain scanning tools – particularly fMRI and PET Scans – we are now able to watch the brain grow, change, think and learn in real time. With these new technologies, tools and understandings in hand, education itself has been given a gift: a window into the learning brain
What “new” technology and tools appear to be most effective for preaching, teaching and reaching the Google generation? Which methods, models and media can we manipulate to capture the minds and hearts of the tech-savvydenizens of this internet jungle?
I’d like to suggest a new set of brain-enriching tools at the core of all education.
The arts.
How’s that for new?
Bear with me as I begin with a brief look at the neurology of learning, itself.
II. Patterns, Firings & Wirings
Your brain craves patterns and searches for them endlessly. In the absence of adequate sensory input, it will even make its own. – Thomas B. Czerner, MD [6]
If you have ever seen a person doodling patterns and shapes on a notepad during a lecture, you know the statement above is true. If listeners aren’t finding any relevance in what the teacher is presenting – if they see no patterns or connections to their own lives – they will create their own patterns. Literally. The brain loves patterns. It organizes itself around patterns. It is constantly searching for patterns to store, patterns to retrieve, and new patterns to connect with existing patterns in its memory array. The brain hungers to make sense of the world. To do that, it needs to recognize patterns. Once the brain is efficient in recognizing a set of patterns, it begins to do amazing things.
Read this if you can:
I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg! The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mind! Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a word are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed.
It wsan’t a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt![7]
Because you are familiar with the patterns of words and letters, you don’t even need to see the letters in the right order for your brain to take over and fill in thegaps of the lines above. It does the work for you… all because of patterns.
Patterns that connect the new to the known create a needed by-product when it comes to learning: Meaning.
The brain is hungry for meaning. Starving to understand. Voracious in its effort to make sense of the world. To create a memory and turn that memory into meaning, it must connect new stimuli, sensations and experiences to old stimuli, sensations and experiences. It must connect new meaningful input to old meaningful patterns.
How do you set up these complicated patterns to fire and be retrieved when you want them or need them? How do you teach something that will be meaningful today and be remembered the rest of the student’s life? That’s the trick.
For a moment, let us exit the world of the classroom and enter the world of the arts.
II. Teaching with the Arts
“Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth.” – Pablo Picasso[8]
Before we begin designing an optimal, meaningful system for learning, it is important to understandwhat learning isnot. Contrary to popular belief, a new thought, fact, or memory is not a bit of information. It is not stored like you store words on a page, letters in a book, or data on a hard drive. Perceptions, thoughts and meaningful memories are sets of electronic signals passing through the brain and body in a synchronized firing – a simultaneous array of electrochemical waves. Like a movie coming over Netflix, a memory is a firing of energy in integrated meaning-making patterns.
So, how does one go about inputing meaningful, retrievable patterns? Let’s look at four optimal tools that together can make all the difference in the world.
A. Why Teach with Music?
“Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind”.– Gioacchino Rossini.[9]
Twenty years ago the University of California at Irvine did a study on the effects ofmusic on small children.[10] One group of 3 year-olds was exposed to piano lessonsand singing daily, the other was not. After eight months, the musical preschoolersscored 80% higher in puzzle making than the non-musicians. 80%! They foundthat music trains the brain for higher forms of learning. Music is math. It expandsthe potential for understanding special intelligence – and nearly everything else.
Music has been an effective teaching tool since the dawn of our race. The oldest musical instrument found to date is a 35,000 year-old flute.[11] The Bible contains 1150 references to music and dance as meaningful expression of the human spirit.[12] Effective educators know intuitively that music has the ability to change the mood in a room, change the learning environment and create both attention and retention. According to Plato: “Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other.”[13]
Nattiez’s semiotic research on music (1990) suggests that meaning exists when perception of an object/event brings something to mind other than the object/event itself.[14] Music does this all the time. There are songs that can make you laugh, smile, long. Even without words, a single strand of a sonnet can make you weep. How is it possible that music conveys meaning with such power?
The OPERA Hypothesis
In a recent paper published in “Frontiers in Psychology” magazine, my friend Dr. Aniruddh D. Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego explained the power of music neurologically by proposing what he calls his “OPERA Hypothesis.”[15] According to Patel, mounting evidence suggests that music “works” because it builds complex overlapping patterns in at least five integrated ways. Music engages the brain with:
(1) Overlap: there is anatomicaloverlap in the brain networks that process an acoustic feature used in both music and speech(e.g., waveform periodicity, amplitude envelope), (2) Precision: music places higher demands onthese shared networks than does speech, in terms of the precision of processing, (3) Emotion:the musical activities that engage this network elicit strong positive emotion, (4) Repetition:the musical activities that engage this network are frequently repeated, and (5) Attention: themusical activities that engage this network are associated with focused attention. Accordingto the OPERA hypothesis, when these conditions are met neural plasticity drives the networksin question to function with higher precision than needed for ordinary speech communication.Yet since speech shares these networks with music, speech processing benefits. The OPERAhypothesis is used to account for the observed superior subcortical encoding of speech inmusically trained individuals, and to suggest mechanisms by which musical training mightimprove linguistic reading abilities.[16]
Patterns, Firings and Wirings
A second reason why music works so well has to do with one element the human brain craves: Patterns.
If you have ever caught yourself unconsciously tapping rhythms with a pencil on a desk or tapping your foot on the floor when you were nervous, anxious or bored, you know how a pattern-starved brain controls the body. Your brain was simply not getting enough patterns, so it created its own. Music is all about patterns. Chords are full of patterns. Rhyming words contain patterns. The melody is a pattern that activates the right hemisphere of the brain. Rhythm and harmony are patterns that activate the left hemisphere of the brain. The beat of the music travels deep into the sub-brain (cerebellum) and actually starts to synchronize your heartbeat and breathing in a pattern.
Finish these jingles:
“Flintstones. Meet the Flintstones. They’re a…”
“Come and listen to a story ‘bout a man named…”
“One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock…”
If you are an American over 40, you were most likely able to fill in the blanks above with “modern Stone Age family” and “Jed” and “Rock” without any trouble at all. How was that possible when you may not have given the slightest thought to the “Flintstones” or “Beverly Hillbillies” or “Happy Days” in recent years?
How? One of the reasons music is so “sticky” is because music feeds the brain what it craves. Overlapping patterns. Precision patterns. Emotional patterns. Repeated patterns. Attention-grabbing patterns. Music is OPERA, and opera is music.
Another reason music works has to do with the business music does with the brain, the body and the environment.
The No-Brainer Whole-Brainer
Music is a “no-brainer” educational tool precisely because it is a whole-brainer.
The moment a melody begins, the Auditory Cortex (analyzing the sounds, perceptions, tones) hooks up to the Motor Cortex (movement, foot tapping, dancing), which hooks up to the Sensory Cortex (tactile feedback), which hooks up to the Prefrontal Cortex (creation of expectations, violation and satisfaction of expectations), which hooks up to the Cerebellum (movement, emotional reactions), which hooks up to the Visual Cortex (reading music, watching performers or people around you), whichhooks up to the Corpus Callosum (connecting left and right hemispheres), which hooks up to the Hippocampus (creating memory for music, experience and musical contexts), which hooks up to the Nucleus Accumbens and Amygdala (emotional reaction to the music).[17]
All of theseareas of the brain chatter and link up with one another while the music plays, increasing nerve connections between multiple parts of the brain and body and codifying them into retrievable memory patterns.
Musical Cheesecake
According to Steven Pinker, music is not only patterns. It is not only an OPERA of overlapping connections. Music is also an mixer of a magical elixer of brain drugs. Musicwashes the brain with pleasure chemicals: “Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once.Music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties.”[18]Pinker suggests that melodies are pleasing to the ear for the same reason that symmetrical, regular, parallel, repetitive doodles are pleasing to the eye. They exaggerate the experiences of being in an environment that contains strong, clear, analyzable signals from interesting potent objects.[19]
They exaggerate their own patterns while connecting to exaggerate existing patterns.
Neurons firing in synchrony with a sound wave find and release pleasure drugs in the brain and give a feeling that your brain and body are part of – at one with – something outside of the self. The feeling that you are part of a greater whole – of a choir, of a dance, of a tribe, of a movement – that feeling is a drug in and of itself.
If the brain and body crave these musical patterns to such an extent that they will create them when they are absent, if music causes a flood of pleasure drugs throughout the brain and body, and if songs that have been buried for decades can come effortlessly to the surface at the mere mention of the lines that precede them, why wouldn’t the educational systems architect build musical patterns into the very DNA of every curriculum, lesson and learning experience?