HOW WE LEARN by Stanislas Dehaene is subtitled "Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now." Dehaene, a professor of experimental cognitive psychology at the Collège de France, has clearly taken steps to make his material approachable and memorable, including providing several colored diagrams and images which illustrate brain and neural development. However, HOW WE LEARN is not a light and easy read. Dehane begins on a more theoretical level with Part One (What is Learning?) and offers seven definitions; continuing to Part Two (How Our Brain Learns) where he devotes an entire chapter to the role of nurturing.

As an educator and librarian, I struggled with finding a target audience for this text amongst my peers, primarily due to its scholarly nature and somewhat limited practical applications. For example, I do think they would be interested in his comments on grades; he says: "Grades alone, when not accompanied by detailed and constructive assessments, are therefore a poor source of error feedback." Other colleagues would likely disagree with his clear favoritism for explicit teaching over constructivism (or discovery learning) with further comments like, "The most efficient teaching strategies are those that induce students to be actively engaged while providing them with a thoughtful pedagogical progression that is closely channeled by the teacher." These ideas are developed in Part Three, the Four Pillars of Learning: Attention, Active Engagement, Error Feedback and Consolidation. Overall, I am pleased to see so many positive reviews and hope that Dehane (and the many other scholars he cites) will next turn attention to how one makes remote learning more effective, especially in these uncertain times. As Dehane notes, "Numerous studies, both in humans and animals, confirm that stress and anxiety can dramatically hinder the ability to learn." For those seeking more detail, HOW WE LEARN contains over 50 pages of notes and bibliography, plus an index.

This book was fascinating to me, as there was a lot of information, but it was laid out in a manner that wasn't boring to someone like me that isn't too interested in things that have to do with Science.

"How We Learn" ought to be a text studied for a degree in education, and would be great for new parents as well.. Dehaene draws conclusions from the latest brain studies done on infants and children and argues that education requires more one-on-one interaction between the instructor and the student (or parent and child) and less lecturing--and no grades! Frequent testing and consistent error feedback are essential for learning to take hold but grades are simply demoralizing.

I particularly found the organization of the book helpful. I learned about the neurological function of sleep in memory retention, what is true and false about brain plasticity, the grim realities of trauma and addiction, the affect of music education, the benefit of bilingualism from an early age, and the enormous potential of the small child's mind. In fact, I'll never look at small children or even tiny babies in the same way again after reading this book. When I go to bed, I'm also going to make it a habit to dwell on the positive aspects of the day, or something neat I have learned during the day, just before I go to sleep, in order to maximize the chances that my brain will hold onto it better. Adults can't learn as easily as children, but we can still learn quite a bit with the right techniques.

Machine learning, on the other hand, has a long way to go. As the author points out, some human person must input massive amounts of data in order to get AI to do a few things. We're the opposite: with a few pieces of data, we can do massive numbers of things.

I received an advanced readers copy from the publisher and was encouraged to submit an honest review.