How Our Brains Learn
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantham. There's a scene in the 1986 movie Ferris Buhler's Day Off that has become iconic. It's a spot-on portrayal of what it feels like to be disengaged and disaffected. In the film, actor Ben Stein plays an economics teacher who is not about to win any teaching awards. He speaks in a deathly monotone.
In 1930, the Republican controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the anyone, anyone? The Great Depression, passed the anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill. The students in the classroom are suffering from a boredom that verges on the catatonic.
On and on the teacher goes, Asking for responses, but barely expecting any, and indeed, no one ventures a word. Today we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is, class? Anyone?
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