One unfortunate outcome of the growing interest in brain-based education and the appeal of using brain science to improve learning is that it can be easily subject to misunderstanding, oversimplification, and misuse. There is even a name for this; it is called neuromyth (Scalise & Felde, 2017). Teachers are fascinated by the idea of the “neuromyth.” Like fake news, they may feel they encounter fake science all the time. Now, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has compiled a list of the top six neuromyths for educators. Here’s a new one on us: Myths about bilingualism, Is it true that knowledge acquired in one language is not available to us in another language?
According to the OECD, this myth thinks of knowledge as if stored in different “drawers” in the brain. Go into your English drawer and you will find everything you have learned using English. Go into your Spanish drawer, and find the information you first mastered in Spanish. Not a bit true, say the OECD researchers. For instance, if you learned how to calculate in Spanish, once you learn English and are using it fluently, you are likely still able to calculate in English. Neuroscience is showing that knowledge is not stored in the format of the language we learned it in – it is not like copying a textbook and pasting the information into the brain.
But who would have thought that in the first place? According to the OECD, it is one of the top neuromyths about the brain. See below for the OECD repository of neuromyths.