Recent news that university research on decoding brain signals has led to an implanted device that appears to boost the ability to remember facts in some individuals seems the stuff of science fiction.

How does it work? Think of it as a pacemaker for the brain. The device was developed by a team led by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson University and is still in laboratory use only. It delivers an electrical signal to probes in the memory making areas of the brain.  What’s notable is that a signal is sent only when needed to stimulate a foggy brain. It’s similar to the way in which a pacemaker kicks in only when the pumping action of the heart needs a boost.

The work is based on brain signal research that documented how the brain’s readiness to remember can waver.  For many of us, going for a run or downing a strong cup of coffee is enough to perk up our sluggish brains.  For more severe cases, drugs such as Ritalin are sometimes prescribed.  For older people, especially those facing progressive dementia, the findings and the developing technology are especially appealing.

As interesting as this new device sounds though, the scientists told the New York Times http://nytimes.com that unfortunately the device’s ability to help people remember facts didn’t translate to an improvement in general cognition. That, they say, will be much trickier and the focus of work to come.

So, for now and into the foreseeable future, the job of helping students to actually learn – to remember (encode) information, recall it, and apply it – still rests primarily with skilled teachers.

— Marie Felde

 

Teachers who believe one “myth” about the brain and learning tend to believe a whole set of common misconceptions, a study in Frontiers in Psychology recently reported. The study included nearly 4,000 participants. It found that teachers tended to be significantly more accurate in their knowledge of how the brain learns than the general public, but many still didn’t have all the answers. Those who had taken more neuroscience coursework, read more science manuscripts, had a graduate education or were younger also tended to be more accurate. Below are some of the most common conceptions the study described as false that many of the teachers in the study endorsed.

To take the full assessment yourself, see Appendix A for the 32 survey questions at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5554523/

Most common “neuromyth” misconceptions by teachers:

• Individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style (e.g., auditory, visual, kinesthetic)
• Listening to classical music increases children’s reasoning ability
• A common sign of dyslexia is seeing letters backwards
• We only use 10% of our brain
• Children are less attentive after consuming sugary drinks and/or snacks
• Some of us are “left-brained” and some are “right-brained” and this helps explains differences in how we learn

‘We were surprised to see that these ‘classic’ neuromyths tend to cluster together, meaning that if you believe one myth, you are more likely to believe others,’ explained McGrath,” Source: http://neurosciencenews.com/neuromyth-belief-7273/

For the full report:

“Dispelling the myth: Training in education or neuroscience decreases but does not eliminate beliefs in neuromyths,” Kelly Macdonald, Laura Germine, Alida Anderson, Joanna Christodoulou, and Lauren M. McGrath in Frontiers in Psychology. Published online August 8 2017 doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01314

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5554523/

–Kathleen Scalise

To follow up on our recent post about fake (and damaging) neuroscience related to learning and the brain, we remind educators that there are a number of excellent resources aimed at helping them and their students find fact-based information about the brain — how it develops, how it supports learning, and how it makes sense of the world.

Today we offer web links to two long-established non-profit foundations that provide highly useful information.  Along with the grounding in neuroscience basics, educators will appreciate the highly accessible information and insights focused on the latest in neuroscience-learning research and the attention given to classroom resources for teaching about the brain.

BrainFacts.org is a website co-sponsored by the Society for Neuroscience. Under a section titled Thinking, Sensing & Behaving, recent articles feature “The Early Stages of the Brain,” “Alcohol and the Brain,” and “Do Hurt Feelings Actually Hurt?”  The In the Lab section, offers an entire section titled For Educators. It includes a guide to helping students see how neurons send messages in their brains through hands-on activities that let them build simple or elaborate circuits.  Just one example among many.

Another useful site is produced by the Dana Foundation; you’ll see a tab For Educators, right at the top of its site.  Click on it and you’ll be able to access primers on neuroscience basics, briefing papers with in-depth looks at timely brain-related topics of general interest, and a link to its lending library of resources for teachers.   Recent articles available at the click of the mouse looked at the brain’s emotional development, searching for effective interventions in dyslexia, and even a piece on how tossing a football or running stairs can help students study for a test.

These are just two resources to get you started fighting fake science and growing your knowledge about learning and the brain with real facts.

 

– Marie Felde

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.

http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/neuromyths.htm

Stress takes many forms and new research shows physical stress generated by the Zika virus is a culprit in the devastating brain microcephaly seen in some countries. Previously, scientists confirmed transmission of the mosquito-borne virus Zika between mother and child leads in some cases to microcephaly, or reduction in brain size and head circumference of infants. The new study from Nature Neuroscience just coming out on January 21 finds that what Zika actually does is induce physical stress in the endoplasmic reticulum, or collection of tubes inside cells that make and move proteins and fats for the body.

Stress from the Zika invasion throws off the regulation of a key protein response for survival of certain neurons during brain development. The neurons in this case are “projection neurons,” or brain cells that have such long extensions they project all the way to distant regions of our central nervous system.

The good news is scientists in the study employed a chemical to stop the improper protein response from the Zika stressor – and successfully prevented microcephaly in mice. Too soon to say what scientists will be able to do for people. The report is helping scientists better understand brain response and function to the virus stressor though, see link below to an abstract of the report.

There are many interesting resources for teachers to better understand the important function of the endoplasmic reticulum in cells, such as https://study.com/academy/lesson/endoplasmic-reticulum-lesson-for-kids-definition-function.html. But note that while interesting to teachers who want to know more about new findings on key issues of brain development, this is not the best context in which to share brain development information for K-12.

Abstract for Nature Neuroscience report on “Stress-induced unfolded protein response contributes to Zika virus-associated microcephaly”:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29230053

–Kathleen Scalise

Now that welcoming in the New Year is over, it is time to think again about sleep and the brain. Researchers in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry will report later this year, just out in prerelease online, that those who habitually sleep less have more difficulty disengaging from the negative (Volume 58, March 2018, Pages 114-122). Called repetitive negative thinking (RNT), this well known brain trend is often found associated with disruptions in sleep. Of interest to classroom teachers who work on teaching students the skills of positive self-talk and less mind-defeating negative imagery (see “Sleep to Learn Better,” Why Neuroscience Matters in the Classroom, p. 144-151), subjects short on sleep in the study spent more time dwelling on the negative. Mean sleep time for the selected subjects was just over six hours per night. Shorter habitual sleep duration was significantly related to slower disengaging from negative stimuli (r = – .33, p = .02). This remained true even when controlling for other mental health symptoms such as anxiety and depression (r = – .32, p = .02). The new study had a small sample size (52) and all adults, so interpret cautiously. But it is yet more evidence to encourage good sleeping habits for the brain.

–Kathleen Scalise

See link below for the online report already available:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005791617300629

A picture may be worth a thousand words – but a real object may be worth even more. New research reported this week in ScienceDaily Neuroscience News suggests something teachers already know from the classroom: Real objects are even better at getting our attention than pictures and visuals. The researchers found that the human brain responds differently to the “real stuff,” things we can hold and manipulate as compared to photos or pictures of the same. The real objects are more memorable.

They “exert a more powerful influence on attention,” the researchers said, because “images are not as relevant” to the brain for action. Not only that, the effect disappeared when either the object was placed out of reach, or behind a large transparent barrier. This is something every teacher has observed on museum field trips. Put it behind glass and the kids lose interest. So when students can only look and not feel or use, it makes a difference.

About those hands-on activities and manipulatives in the classroom … yes, it is more trouble to acquire and arrange objects and materials than to provide a lecture or even pictures and visuals. But going hands-on may be even more helpful than we knew. The work will be reported in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science. See the news report at the first link below, or for some free hands-on activities that are easy to setup in the classroom, such as games or the free image of a “Shape Wheel” for Kindergarten pattern matching, see the second and third links below.

–Kathleen Scalise

Link to ScienceDaily report:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171214181821.htm

A few links to hands-on games and activities for kids:

https://www.education.com/activity/offline-games/

https://teachingmama.org/15-hands-on-math-activities-preschoolers/

 

New neuroscience research just out yesterday describes a part of the brain that plays a central role in how sensory input is prioritized in brain: We “learn” in part based on task relevance. The Journal of Neuroscience reported on December 11 that researchers at Duke University along with Oxford, Stanford and Ghent in Belgium have new evidence on such decision making in the human brain. Part of our frontal lobe (the “lateral prefrontal cortex” or LPFC) appears to be prioritizing what the brain pays attention to, based on what we find has truly been relevant and irrelevant previously. The mechanism appears to allow the brain to consider both how demanding the task is likely to be, and what brain resources it will require, along with what we will gain, or how relevant the result will be.

Their evidence involves that researchers can disrupt the process by momentarily interfering with how this part of the brain works, using the so-called “Stroop” test well-known in psychology.

For the full technical report, see the first link below. For a fun free “Stroop for Kids” that you can use to try it out and talk about the brain in the classroom, see the second link below, thanks to the University of Washington. Reminder: Why would we want to talk about the brain in the classroom? Remember, many children and young adults don’t really know much about how their brain works. They can be reassured and may improve their learning in the the classroom and their classroom experience if they better understand a little about how the brain is made for learning (see “Brain Awareness Motivates Students,” p. 187, in the text Why Neuroscience Matters in the Classroom, 2017).

Link 1: JNeurosci, “Causal evidence for learning-dependent frontal-lobe contributions to cognitive control”

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2017/12/11/JNEUROSCI.1467-17.2017

 

Link 2: Link to Stroop for Kids:

https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/words.html

 

Link 3: “Brain Awareness Motivates Students,” p. 187, in the text Why Neuroscience Matters in the Classroom, 2017:

https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Matters-Classroom-Whats-Measurements/dp/0132931818/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1513113160&sr=8-1&keywords=why+neuroscience+matters+in+the+classroom

Critical periods in brain development – often called “sensitive periods” – are of great interest to educators. Scientists have found that for some types of skills and knowledge acquisition, the human brain may have built-in cycles, or “sensitive periods,” when more effective learning is taking place. These can be age-related and involve natural developmental processes, although much is yet to be understood about such phases.

New research reported in Nature Neuroscience this week (2017 Dec;20(12):1715-1721. doi: 10.1038/s41593-017-0002-3) discusses how “critical periods are crucial for proper brain development.” Problems during these developmental stages, the scientists report, can cause neurodevelopmental problems with lifelong consequences. They describe that understanding how critical periods are regulated within the brain is therefore of great scientific relevance. A new piece of the puzzle is now added: for critical periods in vision, certain brain circuits in the thalamus are playing a central role in regulation. If the same holds true in people, scientists report this may be highly relevant to improve vision in people affected by amblyopia, the most common cause of decreased vision in a single eye for children and young adults. When the eye and the brain aren’t working well together, the cause can be any condition that interferes with focusing during early childhood. Eye alignment, clouding, absence of eyeglass correction for near- or far-sightedness. Any of these can block the experiences the eye and brain need during this critical period of brain plasticity in vision.

–Kathleen Scalise

Death and Life in the Fire Triangle

It might seem hard to believe that young teens would not immediately understand how throwing firecrackers could alight a forest fire. After all, oxygen+heat+fuel equals the so-called “Fire Triangle.”

So, as many have asked about the Oregon Eagle Ridge Fire in the Columbia River Gorge last month, “How in the world could they not know what could happen?” Reporters interviewing the teens who may have been involved in starting the fire indicated the teens had little understanding of the consequences.

It is impossible to say exactly what was involved in this particular situation. But scientists do know that learning and recall are greatly enhanced when information, especially in the areas of science and mathematics, can be tied to relevance. In other words, when teachers present information in a way that has meaning to student lives, it sticks. Conversely when it does not, it is less used and less remembered. The learning becomes “inert” and of little use.

This finding in neuroscience and cognitive psychology is helping to shape school curriculum. In fact, in a surprising and rather eerie coincidence, just in August my colleagues from Oregon State University and I were in the process of discussing how wood science curriculum can help students and teachers. I am preparing materials for teachers to assess student learning on the topic. In this case, the assessment task is titled, “Death and Life in the Fire Triangle.”

Our state is in the process of aligning science curriculum with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). These educational goals were developed over three years by a 26-state consortium to describe key scientific ideas and practices that all students should learn by the time they graduate from high school. In addition to Oregon, the standards were adopted by California, Washington, and other states.

My goal was to connect the curriculum with local relevant issues. In writing a book for teachers about how neuroscience matters in the classroom, the evidence is abundantly clear that learning often becomes inert and of little use when it is not connected to a student’s experiences. And, for Oregon, what better connection to make than with our amazing natural environment.

High school students are supposed to know the material the fire task covers. When they complete the 30-minute task, this provides information about what students actually know and can do.

I can already tell you most students in Oregon – and other states – won’t be able to complete the assessment successfully. Oxygen, heat, fuel. The fire triangle. The standards focus on a learning goal about matter and how reaction rates change when temperatures change. It is notable that the fire triangle has been updated in recent years to a fire “diamond.” In the diamond, a fourth aspect of the equation has been added: chain reaction.

Sadly the relevance now is all too clear. The teachable moment for the fire diamond: Changing the temperature with fireworks ignites a chain reaction. The forests burn. And, we damage a natural treasure beyond compare. This is an example of science education relevance that suits how students learn.

– Kathleen Scalise