Neuroscience

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How Emotional Connections Can Trigger Creativity and Learning

March 15, 2013 | 11:15 AM | By
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Scientists are always uncovering new ways into how people learn best, and some of the most recent neuroscience research has shown connections between basic survival functions, social and emotional reactions to the world, and creative impulses.

Students’ social and emotional reactions to learning are imperative to feeling motivated to learn and to their ability to creatively solve problems, according to Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who wrote Musings on the Neurobiological and Evolutionary Origins of Creativity via a Developmental Analysis of One Child’s Poetry [PDF]. Her research tries to understand why emotions are so important to learning by examining what happens to brain functions.

“Neuroimaging experiments show us that we use the very same neural systems to feel our bodies as to feel our relationships, our moral judgments, and our creative inspiration,” said Immordino-Yang, a professor at USC’s Rossier School of Education and an expert on the neuroscience of learning and creativity. Her whose work focuses on how neuroscience can help teachers understand the ways students learn best, and to that end, she’s created a free online curriculum for teachers.

“Help kids know how to make meaning and sense of what they are learning so they can see who they are.”

The neuromechanisms responsible for feeling and managing the body’s physical survival and consciousness have been co-opted to also manage social survival. “Survival in the savanna depends on a brain that is wired to make sense of the environment, and to play out the things it notices through patterns of bodily and mental reactions,” Immordino-Yang writes. “This same brain, the same logic, helps us make sense of and survive in the social world of today.” To make something relevant to a learner, it should inspire an emotional reaction in the person, triggering these survivalist parts of the brain that indicate something is important.

[RELATED: Teaching Social and Emotional Skills in School]

“The way that we make meaning out of situations, and the way that we feel and evaluate things, is plated on the same neural platforms as do the basic job of managing our viscera,” Immordino Yang said. When a topic strikes a chord with a student it feels meaningful because the part of his brain firing is the same part that keeps him conscious and alive. It’s also the part of the brain responsible for novel, creative or new ideas.

“Creativity is representing some kind of relevant problem in a new way and making people Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Big Ideas, Teaching Strategies, creativity, inquiry learning, Neuroscience, science, social emotional learning

Why Sleeping May Be More Important Than Studying

January 11, 2013 | 10:40 AM | By

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Getting enough sleep is an under-valued but crucial part of learning. Contrary to students’ belief that staying up all night to cram for an exam will lead to higher scores, truth is, the need for a good night’s rest is even more important than finishing homework or studying for a test.

A recent study in the journal Child Development showed that sacrificing sleep in order to study will actually backfire. The study followed 535 Los Angeles high school students for 14 days, tracking how long they slept, as well as how well they understood material being taught in class and how they performed on a test, quiz, or homework.

“Although the researchers expected that extra hours of studying that ate into sleep time might create problems in terms of students’ understanding of what they were taught in class, they were surprised to find that diminishing sleep in order to study was actually associated with doing more poorly on a test, quiz, or homework,” Science Daily wrote.

“Reduced sleep … accounts for the increase in academic problems that occurs after days of increased studying,” said UCLA scientist Andrew Fuligni. “Although these nights of extra studying may seem necessary, they can come at a cost.”

In another study by a research team at the University of York, researchers found that sleep even helps boost language acquisition skills in young children. ”Children’s ability to recall and recognize new words improved approximately 12 hours after training, but only if sleep occurs,” said Dr. Lisa Henderson, a lead researcher on the study. “The key effects were maintained one week later, suggesting that these new words are retained in long-term memory.” The study, published in Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Big Ideas, Culture, Neuroscience, sleep

What Kids Should Know About Their Own Brains

April 5, 2012 | 12:15 PM | By

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Neuroscience may seem like an advanced subject of study, perhaps best reserved for college or even graduate school. Two researchers from Temple University in Philadelphia propose that it be taught earlier, however—much earlier. As in first grade.

In a study published in this month’s issue of the journal Early Education and Development, psychologists Peter Marshall and Christina Comalli began by surveying children aged four to 13 to discover what they already knew about the brain. Previous research had found that elementary school pupils typically have a limited understanding of the brain and how it functions, believing it to be something like “a container for storing memories and facts.”

Marshall and Comalli’s questionnaire turned up the same uncertain grasp of the topic, which the researchers attributed to several factors. First, while parents and teachers talk often with young children about parts of the body and how they work, they rarely mention this most important organ. (A 2005 study by another group of scientists found that young children hear very few instances of the word brain in everyday conversation.) Secondly, children can’t observe their own brains, and so are left to guess about what’s going on inside their heads—not unlike the state of ignorance in which adults dwelled for many centuries before the founding of neuroscience as a scientific discipline. And finally, most students aren’t formally taught much about the brain until at least middle school. Marshall and Comalli believe such instruction can and should begin much sooner.

A 20-minute lesson about the brain was enough to improve knowledge of brain functioning.

To that end, they designed a 20-minute lesson about the brain and delivered it to a group of first-grade students. Even this brief intervention, the psychologists report, “was enough to improve their knowledge of brain functioning as assessed three weeks later”; a control group of first graders, taught for 20 minutes about honeybees, showed no such improvement. Marshall and Comalli’s neuroscience lesson was especially focused on teaching children about the role of the brain in sensory activities—that the brain is not just “for thinking,” as many kids assume, but also for seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Big Ideas, Teaching Strategies, learning styles, Neuroscience

Discovering How to Learn Smarter

February 2, 2012 | 1:00 PM | By

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By Annie Murphy Paul

It’s not often that a story about the brain warms the heart. But that’s exactly what happened to me when I read an article last month in the Washington Post. It’s about how teachers in many schools in the D.C. area are foregoing empty praise of the “Good job!” variety, in favor of giving students solid information that will do them some real good. That information concerns how their brains work and how their intelligence and skills develop, and it’s knowledge that should be made available to every child in the country.

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck conducted the groundbreaking research showing that praise intended to raise young people’s self-esteem can seriously backfire. When we tell children, “You’re so smart,” we communicate the message that they’d better not take risks or make mistakes, lest they reveal that they’re not so smart after all. Dweck calls this cautious attitude the “fixed mindset,” and she’s found that it’s associated with greater anxiety and reduced achievement. Students with a “growth mindset,” on the other hand, believe that intelligence can be expanded with hard work and persistence, and they view challenges as invigorating and even fun. They’re more resilient in the face of setbacks, and they do better academically.

Now Dweck has designed a program, called Brainology, which aims to help students develop a growth mindset. Its website explains: “Brainology makes this happen by teaching students how the brain functions, learns, and remembers, and how it changes in a physical way when we exercise it. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Big Ideas, Brainology, learning styles, Neuroscience

Scratching that (Incessant) Technology Itch

November 16, 2011 | 12:02 PM | By

Lenny Gonzales

Our love-hate relationship with technology is the subject of research psychologist Dr. Larry D. Rosen’s new book iDisorder. From his perspective, “tech gadgets and applications are turning us into basket-cases suffering from versions of obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention-deficit syndrome,” according to a recent HechingerEd blog.

Rosen also spoke at last year’s Learning & the Brain Conference, along with Dr. Gary Small, author of the book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. (Yes, the similarity of the titles are noted.)

The two authors bring their own experiences and perspectives to the table, some on opposite spectrums, but some quite similar. This MindShift article, How Technology Wires the Learning Brain describes Small’s point of view about one specific tactic he agrees with Rosen: scratch the technology itch in intervals, then set it aside.

Here’s that original post:

Kids between the ages of 8 and 18 spend 11.5 hours a day using technology — whether that’s computers, television, mobile phones, or video games – and usually more than one at a time. That’s a big chunk of their 15 or 16 waking hours.

“The technology train has left. You have to deal with it, understand it, and get some perspective.”

But does that spell doom for the next generation? Not necessarily, according to Dr. Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor at UCLA, who spoke at the Learning & the Brain Conference.

“Young people are born into technology, and they’re used to using it 24/7,” Small said. “Their brains are wired to use it elegantly.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Big Ideas, Culture, Digital Tools, Teaching Strategies, brain research, Neuroscience, text

How Technology Wires the Learning Brain

February 23, 2011 | 9:45 AM | By

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Kids between the ages of 8 and 18 spend 11.5 hours a day using technology — whether that’s computers, television, mobile phones, or video games – and usually more than one at a time. That’s a big chunk of their 15 or 16 waking hours.

But does that spell doom for the next generation? Not necessarily, according to Dr. Gary Small, a neuroscientist and professor at UCLA, who spoke at the Learning & the Brain Conference last week.

“Young people are born into technology, and they’re used to using it 24/7,” Small said. “Their brains are wired to use it elegantly.”

“The technology train has left. You have to deal with it, understand it, and get some perspective.”

The downside of such immersion in technological devices, he said, is that they’re not having conversations, looking people in the eye, or noticing verbal cues. “These are important ‘technologies,’ so to speak, that have evolved over centuries and are tremendously powerful.”

But that’s not the headline here. Small’s main point was this: “The technology train has left. You have to deal with it, understand it, and get some perspective.”

Video games, for example, aren’t just about repetitive tasks – many of them have built-in social components that allow kids to communicate. Texting isn’t about using a gadget — it’s about connecting with someone else.

“Texting is an expression of what it means to be human,” Small said. “We love being connected to other people. It’s a very compelling emotional urge, and it’s hard to give up moment to moment.”

That’s why one well-liked teacher Small knows gives her students a five-minute texting break in the middle of class. Educators also use texting in class as a means to gauge understanding of the subject and take instant polls, for example.

It might seem odd, but Small suggests also carving out time for face-to-face emotional exercises and in-person conversations to counterbalance all the inevitable gadget-communication.

“We can train empathic behavior,” he said.

TECH AND CREATIVITY

Is technology making us less creative? Parents and educators have been worried about this issue, wondering whether hours of playing video games will zap their inclination to write or paint or sing.

Small said the Internet trains our minds to have a “staccato” train of thought, jumping from idea to idea, like we do from Website to Website. Is that the most creative way to think? Do we have time to sit back and be thoughtful?

There is an undeniable Pavlovian response to certain stimulus – and the Internet happens to be the medium for gratifying the urge.

On one hand, we’re trained not to think deeply about subjects when we text quick snippets, Tweet short thoughts, or click on a simple thumbs up or thumbs down on a link. We experience information overload and have no time for reflection or problem solving.

On the other hand, technology trains the brain to be nimble and to process new ideas quickly. We become more open to new ideas, and communicate more freely and frequently.

“The brain is complex,” he said. “The answers are not straightforward.”

IS THE INTERNET MAKING US SMARTER?

In a study called “Your Brain on Google,” Small and his peers tested the brain activity of two groups — “Internet-naïve” (mostly 65 and older who had very little experience online) and “Internet smart”– while reading a book versus conducting a Google search.

In the “Internet savvy” group, there was twice as much brain activity in all parts of the brain while they were conducting a Google search than while they were reading a book. And in the “Internet-naïve” group, after a week of Googling subjects online, there was a significant burst in frontal lobe activity, which controls short-term memory and decision-making.

Small’s conclusion? “Google is making us smart,” he said. “Searching online is brain exercise.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Big Ideas, Teaching Strategies, Neuroscience, text, video games