Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

out:
    In fact, if dopamine has been released with glutamate, your brain will learn whatever it is paying attention to at the time – and there is very little you can do about it.
    (Curran 2008)
    So, create the environment where the right levels of dopamine are produced in their heads and they can’t do anything but learn. And how do you do that? There are two good ways in which we can hit the dopamine production button in our heads, and one bad one, the use of which can do more harm than good. A quick and easy, yet wrong, way to produce dopamine in students’ brains is through stress. Simply cultivate an environment of fear and anxiety and you will have the dopamine levels up in no time. The trouble is that dopamine produced in this way has the same effect on brain cells as painting by numbers using a bucket of paint. You simply flood the brain with this chemical in a way that can ultimately lead to a failure to produce dopamine leading to psycho-emotional conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome. Such a high stress environment also generates high levels of the stress hormones leading to the sorts of harmful subconscious learning we talked about in chapter 10 and causes us to produce steroids that can kill off brain cells in the hippocampus, a part of our brain linked to the creation of memories and, hence, the neurological equivalent of sawing off the branch you are sitting on.
    So, if high levels of stress as a way of producing dopamine are out, what does that leave? The ‘good’ two ways of producing this neurochemical are:
    1 Reward
    2 The anticipation of reward.
    That’s it. Simply (1) doing things they like doing or (2) knowing they are about to do the things they like doing, is enough to get just the right amount of dopamine being delivered to just the right places in their learning brains. In other words, you can create effective neurochemistry by ensuring they are enjoying your lesson, either through the nature of the work and the challenge itself and/or through the opportunities they have to experience enjoyment, opportunities that may or may not be linked directly to the subject matter they are learning but do have a direct impact on the process. These could be activities like telling a joke, having a laugh, doing physical exercise, working in groups or teams, having an element of surprise or novelty, listening to music in an appropriate way. In fact, youget the dopamine right by simply employing that old elusive perennial, having fun (more of which in the next chapter).
    Such experiences in the classroom hit the ‘reward’ element of dopamine stimulation but what about the ‘anticipation of reward’ side of things? What this means is that if you get point one right – they enjoy your lesson – then point two will fall into place naturally. Just by walking into your classroom or seeing your face, their brain is receiving the message, ‘This is where the good stuff happens’ and the dopamine is starting to flow. You have created a virtuous circle of 4-(2-aminoethyl)benzene-1,2-diol-related learning just by being so damn good at what you do and the world will be eternally grateful.
    What’s more, and this is another reason why this particular chemical really is the teacher’s friend, an appropriate surge in dopamine levels actually improves our memory for what was going on in the 15 to 20 minutes or so
prior to
that surge taking place. The brain likes doing what it likes doing. It is, in the words of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in the seminal book
Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience
, ‘genetically programmed to seek out pleasure’ (Csíkszentmihályi 1990). It makes sense then that, when it finds itself in the throws of performing an act that is causing it to experience all the pleasurable feelings associated with dopamine, it does all it can to remember what brought about this experience so it can repeat it. Just by saying to the class, ‘OK people, put your pens down, whose turn is it to play their favourite track today?’ you may well be improving their memory for the 20 minutes of binomial fractions they were just working on.
    The teenage brain is especially susceptible to dopamine and craves it and all the feel-good factors it brings. This means the teenage brain is also particularly susceptible to risk-taking, dangerous behaviours, falling in love and addictive substances. Research also shows that children with ADHD can become hyperactive as a way of self-medicating with