Keep children active, curious, engaged, and autonomous. Passive students do not learn much. Make them more active. Engage their intelligence so that their minds sparkle with curiosity and constantly generate new hypotheses. But do not expect them to discover everything on their own: guide them through a structured curriculum.

as practical activities, discussions in which everyone takes part, small group work, or teachers who interrupt their class to ask a difficult question and let the students think about it for a while.

anymore: what is known becomes boring.

According to this theory, each restored memory is a reconstruction: remembering is attempting to play back the very same neuronal firing pattern that occurred in the same brain circuits during a past experience.

Scientists have responded to this challenge by inventing “reinforcement learning,” whereby we do not provide the system with any detail about what it must do (nobody knows!), but only with a “reward,” an evaluation in the form of a quantitative score.5 Even worse, the machine may receive its score after a delay, long after the decisive actions that

you are much slower when the numbers are close, like five and six, than when they are further apart, like five and nine, and you also make more errors. This distance effect32 is

Set clear learning objectives. Students learn best when the purpose of learning is clearly stated to them and when they can see that everything at their disposal converges toward that purpose. Clearly explain what is expected of them, and stay focused on that goal.

A set of neurons which codes for an event or concept that we wish to memorize is activated in our brain. How is this memory saved? In the beginning is the synapse, the microscopic point of contact between two neurons. Its strength is increased when the neurons it links are jointly activated in short succession—this is Hebb’s famous rule: neurons th

Many neuroscientists are empiricists: together, with the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), they presume that the brain simply draws its