Education Made Intelligence Artificial Long Before AI
AI and the unravelling of the educational system
The Patrick Dempsey: #0107
I write weekly articles for educators who are ready to get unstuck from outdated curriculum, resistant institutions, and a career that was built for a world that no longer exists.
The Land of a 1,000 Pines
I was back in Oregon last week for an AI workshop. I hopped in a rental car Monday morning and started the hour and fifteen-minute drive from Portland into McMinnville on my way to Linfield University.
Almost immediately, I was triggered—not in the popular safety-warning way, but my brain was activated in a very unexpected way.
And I learned more about learning in the next hour than I had in my entire doctoral program.
Here’s what happened.
NPR 🤮
Four months ago, I had visited Oregon for the first time to give a keynote at Linfield University. Since it was my first visit, and I had no idea where I was going, I took an Uber from my hotel to the university.
The whole ride the driver had on the local Oregon version of NPR.
I am not an NPR listener. Not making a political statement. It’s just the hushed tones, the classical music, the pretentious production that says if I have listened to this segment I am somehow more intelligent than the huddled masses—that just really triggers me 🤣.
So I’m listening to this program for the whole 75 minutes. All the different segments as they apparently do. The interviewer-host guy who is way more enthusiastic about mundane, banal things than anyone should be.
We finally get to the campus. I’m so relieved to finally get out of the car. Not least because it also smelled really weird. Don’t you hate that? I mean, by the time you’re in the Uber it’s too late and you just have to sort of deal with it.
Anyway, I do the keynote, thankfully get a different Uber home, and never think about that experience again.
Until last week.
There . . .
I’m driving the rental car to Linfield for the workshop.
I’m sitting at the first traffic light on the same route I had taken to the university four months earlier as a passenger in the Uber. And at that light, the entire NPR episode started to replay in my head.
I instantly remembered the first segment. I could hear the interviewer, I recalled the content, I remembered being so annoyed.
And that followed for the entire hour and fifteen-minute drive.
My brain was cueing them at major intervals—getting on a major highway, getting off, passing a shopping center, taking a left turn. Each one triggered an almost exact memory, near total recall, of what had been playing at that moment four months ago. The different segments. The different angles. At the exact spots.
I was completely fascinated.
I needed to learn more.
The car had lane-centering, and I’m a really good knee driver. So, I got my phone out and started talking about it with Claude and found some crazy information about what science actually says about how memory works.
And Back Again
I got to Linfield. It was an absolutely picturesque spring day in Oregon. Quintessential small college campus on a sunny May day before graduation.
I did the workshop. It went great.
On the way back to the hotel, I took the reverse route. I was thinking about this whole experience and the research I was still doing. And I was waiting for the replay to start—to start hearing the segments again, but in reverse order.
Nothing happened.
I couldn’t remember the segments. I couldn’t pick up the trail. I couldn’t even recall the last one—the one that was playing right as I pulled into the university four months ago and that I had recalled 4 hours ago. Driving the same road in the opposite direction and the whole thing was blocked.
Now the research was getting really interesting.
Scuba Steve
Here’s what I learned.
In 1975 Godden and Baddeley gave scuba divers a list of words to memorize. Half learned the list underwater. Half learned it on land. When tested later, each group remembered significantly more in the environment where they originally learned.
That study established the principle of context-dependent memory.
Where you learn something becomes part of the memory itself. The environment isn’t the backdrop. It’s part of the encoding.
The biological reason why was confirmed in 2014 when John O’Keefe and the Mosers won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering what they called the brain’s inner GPS. Place cells and grid cells in the hippocampus automatically map physical space and use those coordinates to encode and retrieve memories. Your brain is literally pinning information to locations in the world around you. 🤯
Bringing this back to the classroom, research has shown that students perform statistically worse on exams when tested in a different room from where they learned the material.
Which means . . .
Artificial Intelligence
What I found interesting—even before I understood the science—was just sitting with the fact that I had retained an hour and fifteen minutes of content I never tried to learn, never reviewed, never thought about again, encoded onto a route I had driven exactly once . . . 4 months later!
And then I started thinking about classrooms.
Because classrooms are the opposite of that Uber ride in almost every possible way. They are purposefully stripped of everything the brain actually uses to encode information. The visual signals. The physical movement. The sensory variation. The emotional texture. All of it is intentionally removed.
Which means, we’re not measuring human intelligence in schools.
Rather, modern education measures how well a student’s brain has adapted to an environment specifically engineered against how human brains actually encode and retrieve information.
Let’s just let that sink in. 👆
The classroom is not a neutral container. It’s a deliberately context-stripped space. We removed the visual signals and the physical movement that our brains actually developed to attach information to—and then we measured what was left and called it learning!
And all of that is but a sketch of how essentially every aspect of how we do school, teaching, education, and learning is contrary to actual human development.
Seven Things I Learned About How Humans Learn
This week for my faithful paid supporters I’m unpacking the seven most surprising things I learned about how humans actually learn and why almost none of it happens in a standard classroom.
I appreciate you.
