Collaborative Learning

4

The science of shared expertise

In the early 1990s, a group of neurophysiologists at the University of Parma in northern Italy made an amazing discovery. For years, the researchers had been observing the brain activity in macaques, a type of small brown monkey found throughout much of the world that is frequently used as a model for neurobiological research because its brain architecture is very similar to our own.¹ The Italian scientists had set out to study the brain cells – known as neurons – responsible for controlling hand movements, which they would monitor using electrodes attached to the monkey’s head as it reached for pieces of food.

The team’s experiments were pretty standard neuroscience fare, but they led to an insight that has ...