The Science of the Brain May Define Customer Need

This weekend I attended an education conference sponsored by One Laptop Per Child. One of the presenters made an interesting comment “we know how to educate children...the technology (computers) is satisfying different needs". Traditional education begins worldwide at five years old and focuses on memorization as the principal methodology. Why do we start at five years old? At that age the brain is capable of reading, as discussed by Stanislas Dehaene in Reading in the Brain. Basically our experiences showed us when humans could begin to read and science confirmed this conclusion about four thousand years after we started reading.  

The next speaker up talked about teaching and the fact that humans are the only animals capable of teaching. In fact humans demonstrate teaching skills at 2-3 years old, as confirmed by scientific research described by Antonio Battro. We learn to teach before we learn to read. This development path suggests that in teaching young children we should perhaps be focusing on their own abilities as teachers more and rely less on their ability to read.  

If you think about the true objectives of teaching they are arguably to encourage creativity, foster better reasoning and develop collaboration skills. This method of teaching is what OLPC develops through the use of its computers. The computer is satisfying the higher level needs of creativity, reasoning and collaboration of the young "teachers" which may go unsatisfied in a memorization approach to learning. Now for the big inter-disciplinary leap…at least for me...to entrepreneurship.  

Many of us traditionally focus on science and technology as a means to satisfy a customer need. However, as the example above shows, science highlighted the human need. The research on the human brain shows that teaching abilities precede reading abilities. We have built an education system to satisfy a need perhaps based on the wrong premises, as shown by the pure science. Education should be encouraging the teacher in all of us more and the reader less (or maybe later).  The point here for entrepreneurs is that with the continued research into the human brain, science will be defining or at least giving us new insights into understanding the customer need. Now we should be following this science of the brain not only for its application value but also for its value to give us more profound understanding of the customer. Effectively, understanding customer need has now moved beyond an emotional or psychological approach to include the development of the human brain.

Note: (1) One technique for finding breakthrough ideas is to look at where different disciplines intersect. The three disciplines examined here are pure science (biology), education and entrepreneurship. I do not assume that there are any great thoughts here but the post may illustrates the potential power of the methodology; (2) for parents with children that have reading and dyslexia issues Reading in the Brain may be helpful.

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