Socrates' teaching brain: The Meno experiment

GOLDIN, A.P.; HOLPER, L.; BATTRO, A.; SIGMAN, M.

San Diego, CA

Conferencia; Biennial Conference of the International Mind, Brain and Education Society; 2011

The International Mind, Brain and Education Society

Two thousand four hundred years ago Plato wrote ?Meno?, the famous dialogue between Socrates and a young slave of Meno. To prove that ?nobody learns from a teacher? but only remembers (anámnesis) Socrates gave a remarkable lesson of geometry, perhaps the first detailed record of a pedagogical method in vivo in history. Socrates asked Meno?s slave fifty questions requiring simple additions or multiplications. The boy answered mostly by yes or no. At the end of the lesson the student discovered by himself how to duplicate a square using the diagonal of the given one as the side of the new square. This dialog between Socrates and Meno´s slave has been considered ?without ever being submitted to explicit proof? as one of the greatest icons and landmarks in the history of education. The teacher is Socrates, one of the greatest teachers of antiquity; the pupil a young slave. Paradoxically, Socrates maintains that he is not teaching at all when he is asking his young pupil about the duplication of the area of a given Square. To determine empirically the plausibility and universality of the dialog, we presented an almost literal version of the Socratic dialog to 58 educated adults and adolescents of the XXIst century. Only minor aspects of the grammar of the dialog were changed to make the questions more fluid. To examine the effectiveness of the Socratic dialog to generalization, after concluding the dialog we posed participants the same question which drives the dialog (how to double the area of a square), but changed its scale. Our results indicate that a contemporary replication of the Socratic dialog on geometry with an ignorant Greek young slave of the time of Plato shows remarkably similar results in free thinkers of the XXIst Century, reflecting human cognitive universals that go beyond time and cultures. It is now evident that the Socratic dialog is built on a great intuition of human knowledge and reasoning which persists more than twenty four centuries after its conception. All facts which Socrates thought every person ought to know are known by our participants. His intuition about which errors were likely to be made still persists even in well educated people having all the necessary arithmetic tools to understand (and avoid) the mistakes made by the Greek slave. While our results demonstrate the universality of the Socratic dialog they also emphasize its educational failure, at least in absence of directed attention to the key elements of the dialog. In fact, after following strictly every single question including Socrates ?diagonal argument?, almost 50% of the adolescents and 30% of the adults failed to learn the simplest generalization when asked to double the area of a square of different size. Our observation of a lack of generalization in a strict Socratic dialog is in itself a challenge for further research aimed to determine what contextual elements may be necessary to generalize knowledge. In this meeting we will also show physiological data of ?the slave? and ?Socrates? while going through the dialog, as at present we are conducting NIRS experiments on it.