Going deep into Socrates' teaching brain: fNIRS, transfer and the Meno experiment

GOLDIN, A.P.; SIGMAN, M.

Erice, Sicilia

Conferencia; Seventh Course of the International School on Mind, Brain and Education; 2012

Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture

Learning and teaching are entangled operations. One of the first descriptions of this process is the ?Meno? dialog reported by Plato 2400 years ago and considered a greatest icon and landmark in the history of education. We presented an almost literal version of the dialog to educated people. While our results demonstrate that the Socratic dialog is built on a great intuition of human knowledge and reasoning, they also emphasize its educational failure, as strict following of the dialog does not lead to abstract learning. Deepening, students that failed to transfer showed different fNIRS prefrontal hemodynamic responses during the dialog.