Focus on nexuses of complexity: Education

Being human in the time of neuroscience and artificial intelligence involve carefully exploring the nexuses of complexity where valid ideas are nevertheless in tension, manifesting subtleties and challenges that must not be overlooked. Each page expresses the existing tension(s) between ideas and within each theme, which emerged in the collective discussions, and are then complemented by insights from NHNAI network researchers.

In France and in Portugal, participants highlighted that advances in neurosciences and AI are expected to be able to identify students with learning difficulties notably though neuroimaging and diagnosis. This will allow teachers, parents and counselors to support students and intervene earlier to prevent negative consequences, such as low self-esteem. A better awareness of neurodiversity and identification of a student’s learning difficulties and/or mental pathologies can also lead to adapting learning tools and systems for the student, as allows personalization and AI algorithms.

However, participants expressed that labeling children with mental pathologies or learning difficulties can also lead to discrimination and stigma, and this would be detrimental for the person. In Portugal, participants underline that a better identification of children with low or high cognitive faculties can lead to overfocusing on cognitive performances, to overstimulate or understimulate them with the belief that there is no possibility of improvement and change.

To avoid reducing a person’s identity to just a few characteristics, we should view these learners’ categories as various ways of functioning rather than as mental disorders, that lead different persons to express unique abilities in adapting to specific contexts and environments. These abilities can evolve over time and vary depending on the situation. Tests and diagnoses, whether provided by a physician or an AI system, offer insights into a person’s cognitive functioning and this information is valuable in understanding the needs and enable to offer an appropriate support. However, information must not be subservient to relationships. Technic and technology will always extract data and provide parameter values, but it does not fully grasp an individual’s complexity, and this includes its inwardness, such as feelings and affect. Global understanding of a person’s uniqueness and depth cannot be grasped if it weren’t through the human relationships and interactions. While machines, tests, and evaluation tools can provide useful data, they fall short in capturing the full integrated spectrum of human singularity and its true complexity in which the individual identifies himself. This also includes knowledge from within the inter-subjective space of interaction. The dimension of relationships, therefore, is essential in an embodied approach to understanding people. Still, this information can be helpful for decision-making, as long as it focuses on helping humans to flourish rather than merely being more productive in a reduced evaluative dimension. Logically, categorization, though indicative, should not lead to an automated decision that could bear discrimination and/or exclusion, but should instead support social inclusion.

Although inclusion is promoted in the 21^st century, it also brings challenges and dilemmas. One dilemma, as expressed by Ruth Cigman (2007; 2009) involves how we handle differences: “We either treat all children as essentially the same, which means treating them as fairly as possible but with the risk of neglecting individual differences. Or we treat them differently, with the consequences that some are better off than they would otherwise have been, but there is a risk of being unfair by devoting more resources or expertise to some than others.” (p.137). Furthermore, individualization can lead to over-adapting environments to meet the individual needs, as seen with current trends in personalization (like AI applications). This approach, taken to the extreme, could potentially hinder collective growth and limit people’s ability to learn and adapt to various contexts. If the environment is always tailored to fit individual needs, humans may lose the crucial skill of adapting to different situations, and to display the effort to develop the adaptation skill, a vital ability for thriving in the world, for adaptation does not rise passively in living organisms. Even genetically driven adaptations are to be included in modified behavior. Therefore, we need a balanced approach that considers the environmental constraints (meeting performance?) but also organic constraints (learning through self-driven effort), and a balance that maintains a general standard of equality while still allowing room for differences and (neuro)diversity, although achieving this balance is no simple task.

In short, we need a holistic approach to understanding people as complex beings, each with a unique personality, history, beliefs and desires. Such complexity cannot be known through simple categories or labels. While these learner categories can offer helpful insights into a person’s way of functioning in a specific period, they cannot grasp all the potentialities of individuals. Nothing is set in stone, humans evolve, change and can express new potentialities to learn. Moreover, categories can lead to uniformization, but there is no single way for conditions like ADHD or Dyslexia (and others) to manifest in individuals.

In past decades, neuroscience often reduced the brain’s functioning to its neurons only, using the computer as a metaphor for brain activity, and through this reduction, of its identity to the execution of a program. This approach, largely coming from cognitive sciences, suggested that the brain operates much like a computer. However, this perspective was criticized as “neuro-centrism” for ignoring the roles of the body and emotions. Nowadays, neuroscience has become more inclusive, recognizing the that the brain’s functioning is closely linked to other organs and the rest of the body. For example, research now highlights the importance of the intestine and microbiome’s role in mental health (Morais and al, 2022) and the influence of breathing and heart-rate on brain activity (Engelen and al, 2022).

Références:

Cigman, R. (2007) Included or Excluded? The challenge of the Mainstream for some SEN children (Oxford, Routledge).

Cigman, R., & Davis, A. (Eds.). (2009). New philosophies of learning (Vol. 2). John Wiley & Sons.

Morais, LH., Schreiber, HL, Mazmanian SK (2020). The gut microbiota-brain axis in behavior and brain disorders. Nat Rev Microbiol. 2021 Apr;19(4):241-255. doi: 10.1038/s41579-020-00460-0. Epub 2020 Oct 22.

Engelen, T, Solca M, Tallon-Baudry C (2023) Interoceptive rhythms in the brain. Nat Neurosci.2023 Oct;26(10):1670-1684. doi: 10.1038/s41593-023-01425-1. Epub 2023 Sep 11.