 I want to go a little bit more deeply now into learning and individual differences, but that general structure will stick with. First, as it turns out, the way the brain lights up, the way the connections are made, everything about the brain, its chemistry, everything, is highly individual. They don't all look the same at all. You've seen probably slides like this that look at what's the difference between a dyslexic learner and, I don't like this word, a typically achieving reader. And you'll see that the dyslexic is burning glucose in very different parts. But it's not that there's less being burned, but the dyslexic reader is reading with a different part of their brain. And you'll see that a typically achieving reader, for reasons that will come back too much later, has a bunch of areas lighting up in the posterior, the back part of their brain, and a much smaller up here, whereas the dyslexic does not have these lighting up and a huge area lighting here. So they're reading very differently with a different part of their brain. And it's good for some things and bad for other things, as it turns out. Here's another example. Over development, your brain is changing. So kids are changing by age. Here is not reading text, but reading emotion. And when teenagers read emotion, they use this part of their brain primarily, that's what lights up. And it's a part of the limbic system, amygdalas, there lighting up. As adults, when you read emotion in a story or on a face, you read it with prefrontal cortex, way up here. Why don't kids use that part? It's because that part is very late developing part of our nervous systems. It's not there in young children. And it only begins to mature in adolescence. So teenagers don't have it to use. So they use old parts. These are much more primitive parts of their brain to read emotion. And you use very sophisticated parts of your brain to read emotion. So individual differences can be just by sheer development by age. This is why, in fact, you find your teenagers seem to be on a different planet than you sometime. Don't you understand I was being sarcastic, I was being ironic, whatever? But you're asking them to do too much. They don't have that sophistication that you do of reading emotions with prefrontal cortex. So we're different by age, by all sorts of variables. And women are a little bit different. It's very small. There now is one of the white-hot things, really, is looking at the difference in emotional reactivity across cultures. And it turns out our brains of individuals from China really react to emotional situations very differently. We'll probably get a chance to talk about that. Secondly, so first, our brains distribute this glucose burning very differently amongst us as individuals. And secondly, we distribute it very much differently according to what the task is. What's the challenge in front of us? So here's one of the classic slides that really was an important moment in cognitive neuroscience. These are four different images, again, college sophomores, and they're all language tasks. Viewing words lit up this part of the brain. Listening to words lit up this part of the brain. Speaking words lit up this part. And generating verbs, that exact task I talked to you about earlier, lit up these areas. This is that signature again, same kind of task, say a verb when I say a noun. What was interesting to the scientist studying was, well, this is all language. But the brain doesn't treat this as if it's one kind of thing. The brain treats it as if it's very different things. And even this one was the one that shocked everybody, that just saying any word lit up these areas, saying a specific kind of word, verbs, lit up very different areas. And now we know a lot about this, about verbs aren't treated by the brain in the same way that nouns are, but nobody knew that. And that this one requires, you said prefrontal cortex, this one requires prefrontal cortex because you have to stay within the class of verbs. That turns out to be a really big challenge rather than saying any verb you want, any word you want. So these things started to say, hmm, language isn't one thing. Language is a lot of things. And there's many more of these now. And the brain treats them as if they're different things. And we as educators have been unsophisticated, as the neurologists were, in thinking that the tasks we present are much simpler and much more homogeneous than they really are. We think we're asking kids to read, but in fact we're asking kids to do a lot of things, reading being one part of it. Or we can ask the kids to stand up and speak. And in fact we're asking a lot of different things and a lot of parts of their brain are lighting up in any of these things. And as we'll see, kids may have a disability in any one of the parts. And we often misread it as a difficulty with reading when it's actually only a small part or difficulty with speaking to an audience, when it's really the anxiety it's nothing to do with the speaking. So this kind of thing has shown us how we have to be much more careful about understanding what are we asking the kid to do, and it will have more parts than we thought. And each of those are areas in which kids can really differ. This one I can do I think really quickly. This shows how you parcel out something that we often think is the same thing like music. But it turns out you don't have a music place in your brain. You have a bunch of parts of your brain that you use to listen to music. So over here you, in the lower parts of the temporal lobe, that's what lights up. There it is lighting up. When you're listening to the harmony of a piece. When you're listening to the melody, different parts light up higher, more centrally located. And when you're listening to the rhythm, it's down here in the cerebellum. So in fact, you're doing a multi-processing all the time when you listen to music. And each of these are separate parts of music that someone could have trouble with and not have trouble with the other parts of music. And I'm going to have reason to talk about my difficulties with one of these later. A new term that's been coming out, and you might have heard in the literature, is neurodiversity. And I like it. It says that basically just, we're different. Our brains are different. It's just a part of who we are. And what I want to do is talk about what are the differences in the nervous system that underlie neurodiversity. That is, the differences amongst us. And in my arguments I'm going to talk about, as others do, not only us, three different kind of parts. And now we're looking at the very simplest part of the nervous system, the spinal cord. You have three parts, sensory neurons, which bring information in. What they call here a relay or an interneuron. And a motor neuron that takes information and turns it into action. Input, interior, output. Skip that one. Cortex up here has that same structure. And you'll notice that, you wouldn't notice. But I would need to tell you that this is always in the back of your spinal cord. Information always comes in the back. And information out to your muscles always comes out the front. And then there's internal states that are there. So everything that happens when you receive information, comes in the back of your nervous system. When you express it, it goes out the front. Very simple. What we're going to look at is these three parts at Cortex. We're going to look at this part of the brain, the back part, which is largely about taking information in. We're going to look at the front part, largely about acting, being strategic on taking action. And middle parts of your brain, which is largely about affect. So first of these, because I want to talk about individual differences. First of these, recognition networks, I'm going to call them here in the back. These perceive information in the environment and transform it into usable knowledge. Take information in. By the way, all these slides are going to be already out. Those of you who have an illuminate already have them. But you can share them quickly with others. So don't worry about taking down stuff that's on the slides. So some of you have seen, and the book does this. So I'm just going to do this as a quick review. Everybody look at the screen. When you look at that, what's going to light up? Visual Cortex is quickly going to light up, because you're looking at it, analyzing it visually, making sense of it. And there it would be, lighting up Cortex, visual Cortex. But your ability to recognize things like that is then pieced out. So that, in fact, recognizing the objects in that image happens down here. Recognizing the color happens here. Recognizing the shape happens here. Recognizing the size happens here. That there's really this wonderful piecing out to specialize your nervous system, so that this part is really quick at recognizing objects. This part of color. And so what you do is it's like you have a beautifully formed committee. And I know that you're in schools, and so it's hard to picture a well-formed committee. But imagine a really high-functioning committee where everybody did their job. And the nervous system is very much like that. It says, OK, you take care of color. I'm going to take care of shape. You're going to take care of what the object is, and so on. And you piece out perception in that way. It's a beautiful way. Motion is on the other side of the brain, but you recognize the motions of things differently, a different place. Let me skip those slides. You can get as much detail as this that you, we can know now that there are places that specialize for written words, for faces, for objects, that they're really, we can look at them and see those parts light up, that the brain is really specializing to be able to do that. Again, for things that I will talk about later, people will really differ in whether they have a big area devoted to words or a big area devoted to faces. We'll actually be in individual differences. In fact, I realize I want to just say it's like a, think of it like the brain is rather like a garden, and that you have tomatoes and lettuce and cucumbers. And everybody has lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers. But some gardens have a lot more lettuce, because they really like lettuce. Some have a lot more tomatoes. They really like tomatoes. And then you have to make some compromises about other things. And the brain is very much like that. Each of you has made some kind of salad-making thing. But some of you have more tomatoes. Some of you have more lettuce. Some of you have more cucumbers. And that's what happens here, that some of you are really good at recognizing some things and not so good at recognizing others.