Publish at November 04 2019 Updated January 29 2025
This is the question posed by Eduscol to Véronique GASTE, spécialiste des troubles de l'attention (TDAH) and to Grégoire BORST, psychologist and spécialiste des sciences cognitives. The lectures and slideshows are online. This article is a partial summary of Grégoire BORST's talk and invites you to cover it, along with some additional resources.
Author of numerous books and articles, Grégoire BORST intervenes regularly in front of audiences of teachers to share what his discipline knows about our learning, attention and problem-solving mechanisms. He also sometimes exhibits his research in schools, as was the case at Lycée Diderot, Paris, in January 2019.
&To study the functioning of the brain is to be interested in several aspects. Grégoire Borst cites four of them:
Grégoire Borst warns us to beware of the noises about the brain. And first of all, the idea that the Internet would be a much more powerful brain than the nôtre. In terms of number of connections, we are still well above the Internet with 100 000 billion !
It also calms the enthusiasm of those who announce a man augmented by a chip... To those who are agitated about this prospect, he replies: "I'll put it where it is, the chip.
Finally, it undermines Piaget’s model, which sees evolution as a succession of stages, which would accumulate as the child grows. Teachers continue to be trained with Piaget's theories when neuroscience has long since abandoned them...
For Grégoire Borst, the context, the environment are essential. In adapted experimental situations, very young children show that they have an intuition of their own probabilities and that they can count very quickly.
We had seen with Kahnemann, in an article on systems I and II that our brain had two speeds. Grégoire Borst proposes a rather similar distinction, bringing in his insights as a psychologist and neuroscientist.
First of all, our brains are capable of almost mécanic functioning, which is effective in 90 % of cases. It is the system of automatisms. It is fast, efficient and treats the new with previously acquired mechanisms. However, Grasse Borst warns us. This operation brings back the unknown and the new to the old. It goes towards the easy way. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, he shows us that this brain is partly responsible for our appetite for false information that confirms our beliefs: "Among the flood of information received, it [the brain] looks for what fits its habits, its beliefs. This is what we call the “confirmation bias”. »
The brain can also function in a slower mode, articulating a reasoning, organizing its ideas, confronting logics. This is the système réflexif. But this second systemème is more expensive in energy. It is also rarer because it is slower to mobilize.
Finally, Grégoire Borst is interested in a third mode of functioning: the system that directs or inhibits our attention. It reminds us of the oft-cited experience of marshmallows that we have had occasion to expose.
A marshmallow is presented to a child. He can eat it right away. He can also wait, in which case he will get two. The children who last the longest are statistically the ones who will have the best results a few years later. This variable is less important than the social origin of the children, but more important than the intelligence quotient. However, the scientist points out that this aspect is absent from the educational objectives, although it is essential.
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Grégoire Borst continues with a couple of experiments he is hosting live with his audience. The first experiment is a classic, also cited by Kahnemann in his book Système I, système II. Words are read to people. These words are written in different colors. The participants have to name the color and are timed. Then the exercise is repeated. This time the words are names of colors that do not coincide with their color. The time is counted again. The « cognitive conflict » causes a slowdown in performance !
The psychologist then asks a question that you think you can answer spontaneously. There is a trap from which one only gets out by slowing down, by calling on the reflexive system. Then he asked an extremely simple question. The participants, the vast majority of whom were wrong about the first question, answer... If the teacher starts with tricky questions, exceptions, complex situations, the students will also hesitate, and will not perform as well as if the list of questions is ordered differently.
.Thus, our brain is constantly seeking to create automatisms, which are less energy consuming than structured thinking. These automatisms are our best ally in most situations, but also the cause of many errors and cognitive biases. The conference proposed by Eduscol invites us to be more flexible between the automatic system and the flexible system, and to stop jumping without restraint on the marschmallows!
Illustrations: frédéric Duriez
Resources
Frédéric DURIEZ"L'attention, how ça works", October 2016
https://cursus.edu/10947/lattention-comment-ca-marche
Le Figaro: « Fake News, our brain looks for what joins its habits, its beliefs » - interview with Caroline Beyer, 5 May 2019
On vicariance
Alain BERTHOZ - Vicariousness, the brain creator of worlds - Éd. Odile Jacob, 2013
https://doc.handicapsrares.fr/index.php?lvl=notice_display&id=11511#.Xb2RJnjQjcs
Alain BERTHOZ — course at the Collège de France — 2010 « Plasticité et vicariance, le cerveau émulateur ».
https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/alain-berthoz/course-2010-01-20-16h00.htm
On plasticity;
Catherine VIDAL, « La plasticité cérébrale : une révolution en neurobiologie », Spirale, 2012/3 (n° 63), p. 17-22. DOI: 10.3917/spi.063.0017. URL: https://www.cairn.info/revue-spirale-2012-3-page-17.htm
In addition:
Gr. BORST - learning, lecture given at Lycée Diderot, Paris, in January 2019
https://www.ac-paris.fr/portail/jcms/p2_1862969/conference-de-gregoire-borst-apprendre-a-apprendre
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