All Humans Learn in Exactly the Same Way

Video Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome to this week's "From Theory to Practice" where I take a look at the research so you don't have to. Today, we're going to do something a little different. Rather than looking at a research study, I'm going to share with you something that I teach that is, hands down, the most controversial thing I say. 

Sometimes when I say this, you can hear people gasp in the audience, and that thing is: All human beings learn in exactly the same way. Now, you yourself may have been jolted by that, but I promise you, once we dive into it and take a look at what this really means, you'll see it says a whole lot less than you think, and it doesn't really change a lot of what we do.

In fact, there are huge debates right now going on between people saying, "We all learn the same. No, we don't." The joke is there is no debate. Everyone is completely right. We're just saying two very different things. Now, a bit of fair warning: if you were to take a class with me at university, we'd spend at least 90 minutes on this topic. I'm going to try and do it with you in about 10 minutes. So necessarily, this is going to be a little loose and we're going to lose a little bit of nuance, but hopefully we can get the main points. 

Input vs. Process: The First Conflation 

The reason why I say everyone is right in this "we learn the same/we don't learn the same" debate is because we're simply conflating different ideas. 

Nine times out of ten when people have this debate, they're conflating input with process. To see what I mean, let's use a less charged example. Here's a statement: All human beings digest in exactly the same way. I'm sure none of you are having problems with that statement. Why? Because it's self-evident. We all have the same digestive system. Nobody has three stomachs and chews cud, nobody spits out acid and then absorbs nutrients through their skin. We all have the same process by which our biology extracts nutrients from foods and excretes waste. That's process. 

Where human beings differ is input—what foods can we put through that system, feed through that process. For example, some people with lactose intolerance cannot ingest milk. Now that doesn't change the process. It doesn't give them a whole new digestion system. It just means what triggers that system to do its process is different for different people. Some people can't do gluten, some people can't do proteins. It doesn't change the process. It simply changes the input. 

Now from this, we can see that the idea of input covers both the stimuli (in this case, the food) and any ideas of support—what we need to get that food into the system. For instance, I have a baby right now. She doesn't have teeth, so she can't chew food like I can. Does that mean she has a whole different digestion system? No. That just means she needs support in order to get the system moving. In this case, we mash up food and basically serve her soup. 

Due to cancer, some people might lose their esophagus or some of their intestines, meaning sometimes we have to bypass certain steps, like we might have to inject food directly into the stomach or remove waste directly from the small intestines. But again, these types of support do not change the process. 

Knowledge of Process Does Not Dictate Input 

Here's the important bit: Knowledge of the process does not in any way dictate input. You could know everything about that process and have no clue what needs to go in, because one does not dictate the other. 

To be fair, the process can constrain the input. For example, our stomach is only so big, so we can't fit, say, an entire watermelon in there. So there are certain constraints from that process, and those constraints might change the input. In this case, let's just chop up the watermelon and get it in piece by piece. But again, outside of those basic constraints, the process itself doesn't dictate what food people should eat, how they should eat it, or what support a person needs to move through that process. 

And also, once you understand the process, that will also give you some universal patterns. Again, these patterns say nothing about the input—what should we be eating, how do we need to be eating it—but those universal patterns will give us additional constraints that we can use to think about input. 

As an example of a universal pattern: Every human being takes in a hamburger and outputs waste. There isn't a human being in the history of the world that inputs waste and outputs a perfectly formed hamburger. So again, this is a universal pattern of the process that might influence how we think about inputs, but again, it doesn't dictate what we put in. 

The Learning Process for All Humans 

So now let's bring this back to learning. When we say that all human beings learn the same way, what we're talking about is a basic process. If we define learning as any semi-stable change in behavior done in a directed and intentional fashion (and I've never seen a definition that goes outside of those bounds), then we can start looking at the system and say, "Cool, by what process does that occur? How does information enter into the system? How is it adapted and embodied? How is it brought up and applied later?" 

Importantly, if we all have biology, then this system should be the same for everyone, and in fact, it is. We've never seen any human being with a different learning process. For instance, biological replay, whether that's hippocampal or muscular, is the way biology instantiates information. That's true for everybody across all time. If that didn't happen, you wouldn't have our biology and you wouldn't be a human being. 

But the inputs change. The things we put into the system that allow the process to function will necessarily change between different people. For instance, if I have a student who's blind, I cannot show him or her a picture or a photograph. We need a different way to get information in. Or if I have a student with ADHD, they need higher valence stimuli. But once that stimuli enters the system, the system—the process—does not change. It's the same process for all of us. 

And again, we have that same idea that input is not just the stimuli (what I'm going to teach you), it's the supports—what steps might be missing in your process that we need to externally bolster for you? So for instance, all human beings have a limit to the amount of information they can consciously think of at one moment, but that limit changes between different people. Some people have a very small limit. They can only think about a couple things at once. So for those people we offer supports, we start to externalize information so they have access to it out here without needing to store it here. 

Now again, that support doesn't change the process of learning. It simply makes it easier for people to go through that process. This is that first conflation, the idea of input versus process—pedagogy, teaching, which is very different than learning. How do I move people through learning? And what is that learning process? 

Learning Constraints and Universal Patterns 

Go back to the food example. Remember we were also talking about this idea of constraints. There's a certain size to our stomach, which dictates what we can put in. The same is true for learning. There are certain constraints in the system that dictate how much we can take in at one moment, how much we can integrate during a day, how much we can lock down at night when we sleep. 

Those constraints are very real, but they don't dictate the input outside of some very vague boundaries, like "don't teach for more than eight hours a day." The pedagogy is still completely different. It's just we've got a couple of walls placed around it. 

And the second thing we were talking about was this idea of universal patterns. There are universal patterns to the learning process. Everyone starts with learning how to basically move their muscles, and the output is eventually sprinting. There's not a human being in history that's started with sprinting and then used that to make sense of how to move their muscles. 

Or take a didactic example: Everyone starts with basic information and outputs things like deep, critical, or creative thinking about that information. No one in history has started with inventing a new way to do heart surgery and then using that to make sense of what the heart is or how the heart works. So there are also some universal patterns to the flow of this process. But again, none of that dictates the input—what should we be learning, what do kids need in order to move through that learning process? That changes person by person. 

So that's our first big conflation—process versus input, learning versus teaching. The two are dissociable, so you can comfortably say we all learn the same way, but we all need different things to move through that learning process. And those two statements are not contradictory. They both make sense. 

Structure vs. Function: The Second Conflation 

Now, I said nine times out of ten, that's going to be the conflation—this idea of process and input. But what about that tenth time? One time out of ten, what's that other conflation people make? This is a bit more rare, so I'm not going to go as deeply into this one, but this is the conflation between structure and function. 

Some people say we all have a different brain, therefore we all must learn differently. And that's the structure-function conflation. As a simple example, think about the wheel. If I compare a modern tire to an old wooden wheel, structurally the two are very different. You can completely say, "Yeah, these two things are not the same." But functionally they serve the same purpose. They rotate so as to easily move heavy weights. 

Let's bring it back to biology. All human beings have very different fingerprints, but functionally they all serve the same purpose—to help us grip and make tactile sensation of the world. The specific differences at the minute level do not impact the functional outcome at a larger, what we're going to call "utility" level. 

So bring it back to the brain. Yes, at a small enough level, we all have very different brains, but do these minute differences at the structural level impact the larger functional level? Absolutely not. There are universal patterns in every human brain at the larger functional level that do not require identical mimicry at the minute level. 

Now, to be fair, there are some people missing massive structures in their brain. For instance, Michael Shader—this man had a stroke which killed the entire language network in the left side of his brain. But what did he do? For years, he did nothing but try and practice, drill, train, and after several years, he was able to start speaking fluently. 

Now, the process he had to go through to learn how to speak was the same as everyone else. He started with individual words, built those into sentences, into larger themes. And the way his brain came to process language is exactly the same as everyone else. He had a specific part of his brain processing words, another part processing tones, another context. But all of this processing was happening in different parts of the brain than typical human beings. 

So if all we were doing was comparing structure—brains—then yes, Michael Shader speaks differently than a normal person. But once we consider function, it doesn't matter what part of the brain is doing it or what specific cells are involved. What matters is that the function—the ability to input and understand words, muscularly form new words and output the sound—so long as that function is being done, then the specific structure becomes irrelevant. 

You can say we all have very different brains and we all learn via the same process, and those two are not contradictory statements. Think about your own students. If you have two kids who are killing it at math, they are both wonderful at calculus, and you gave them a test and they both got a hundred percent on this test, but then you image their brains and you find out that the first student while taking this test is using the inter-parietal sulcus, which we know is linked to math—that's what we want to see. But the second student is using the occipital pole. This part of the brain shouldn't be involved in math. 

So does this mean we fail student B? No. We don't care what structure is being used so long as the functional output is there. So this conflation between structure and function, it's a little more rare, but that's another conflation you'll hear when people start talking about this. 

Learning Disorders and Final Thoughts 

Now there's one last thing I want to point out to you: this idea of learning disorders. People think that if you have dyslexia or autism or ADHD, that somehow that changes the system. Again, it does not. It might change the input, but the process—the universal patterns by which people take in, embody, and utilize information—stay the same, which is another reason why those processes can never be used to dictate input. 

But I just want to share a final quote with you. This comes from Dr. Bruce Pennington. He's the author of the textbook "Diagnosing Learning Disorders: From Science to Practice." In this book, Pennington spends hundreds of pages talking about the different inputs different types of students need, the different structures their brains use when processing this information. So he's looking at differences across the board, but at the end of the book, he says this: 

"Children with learning differences do not appear to need a qualitatively different instructional approach from typical learners. They may simply need more of it, broken into smaller steps, with more chance for practice and review." 

Basically, he's saying we all learn exactly the same way, but we may all need different inputs to move through that process. 

Thank you all so much for watching. I hope that made sense and you got something good from this. If you like what you saw, you can give us a thumbs up and subscribe below. It'll make sure more people get a chance to see this on YouTube. Otherwise, thank you all so much. I hope you're well and I'll see you in the next one.