 Hello, my name is Tracy Tokahoma Espinosa. I'm a professor here at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador, and it's a real pleasure to be with you today to try to share some of the information related to Mind-Brain Education Science and its connection to the environment, to what is social learning across the lifespan, and to try to see how this information impacts the way you work in your fields. What I want to do today, if it's okay, is to divide this presentation into two parts. To begin with, take a few minutes to try to give you some background information about the field of Mind-Brain Education Science, and then in the second part actually go into some more detail about the chapters that apparently you guys have already read, and try to then from that point on do a Q&A session with you live in the following weeks. I hope this works out for you. Please let me know if there's any way that we can also correspond via email, which is in the PowerPoint presentation that you'll be receiving. Thanks. Okay, to begin, basics. What is Mind-Brain Education Science? Initially, we were looking at the history of the field and it sort of emerged all around the world, and we find that these are generally, they can be people from all of these different fields. They can start off as teachers who want to integrate neuroscience into their work. They can be psychologists who want to bridge neuroscience and education. While Mind-Brain and Education Science has three larger fields or three parent fields of neuroscience, psychology, and education, each of these fields has actually several sub elements. So in neuroscience, you can look at issues of nutrition. You can also consider different aspects of the biological sciences that have to do with sleep patterns and how that impacts learning. When you look at psychology, you can also look at things related to stress, stress in the workplace, how do people actually react or actually learn throughout the lifespan, given good or bad levels of stress, and the other parent field of education. How do we actually learn? How do we actually teach so that people actually take in the information the best way possible across the lifespan? So what we want to do now is I'm going to give you a little bit of background information of where the information comes from. And from there, we can actually go into more of the specifics or some good examples of actually this field and what it could mean in your own profession. Basically, there have been concepts. This is the premise of the whole idea that there's been a lot of information out there that's just not high quality. Anything with the word brain in it is kind of sexy these days, and everybody sort of buys into it. So there's a lot of commercialization of information that just doesn't stack up against the weight of evidence that exists in the field. So the main idea is that the reason it's important to actually put parameters around the field, give it some standards and actually talk about its real applications, is to try to, number one, get rid of a lot of the myths that are in the field or myths about how the brain actually learns and its implications in the everyday workplace, and then actually bring in good information. What are some standards we can use to sort of guide our own practice? How should we actually apply information? And how do we know good information from bad? So that's the basic reason the information of the field is actually taken off from there. One of the ways to actually sort of categorize the quality of information in the field is to use what was promoted by the OECD nations, 33 countries that agreed upon certain categorization of information in education. These go from things that are well established, information that is of high quality, good evidence, lots of studies, to information that is just probably so. It sounds likely, but we don't have full information or there might be some contradictory information, to things that are intelligent speculation. It seems obvious on the surface level, but when you actually dig, there really is no good quality information there to back it, and then pure neuro myths. So what I'm going to do right now is sort of give you an example of each of those areas so that you can try to begin to categorize those concepts on your own. At the end of the day, I mean the objective would be that hopefully at the end of this lesson, people feel that they have the core competencies of the field. They have dominated the basic vocabulary of mind brain education science, that they're able to apply this in their daily life. They can judge the quality of information and hopefully gain the attitude that this is actually valuable. It's a very valuable filter through which we can actually use to judge information, to use information, to apply it and to actually maximize the learning potential that we all have throughout the lifespan. Okay, so premise, there's huge implications for the field of mind brain education science, even though it has these three parent fields that carry over into the bio, psychosocial, environmental areas, and that hopefully at the end of this session and during the Q&A that we'll have, you will be able to tell me or give me concrete examples in your own areas that actually apply this information. The reason, if I have to ask you why do we want to do this? We've always just existed with neuroscience, psychology, education, environmental studies, health. They've been separate fields. What is the point of uniting them? The main idea is that there are problems in society today that are just so complex that after years, in some cases hundreds of years, we haven't been able to resolve these problems. The belief that if you can join and have an interdisciplinary approach to problems, you are more likely to come up with a long-term solution. So the idea here is that yes, maybe neuroscience can give us a lot of ideas and maybe psychology on its own gives us a lot of ideas. Health studies gives us a lot of ideas all by itself, but the real idea is that there's power in numbers. One plus one is really three. I mean you have a good idea here, a good idea there, but once they're joined together you actually have something much more powerful than you would have looking at these fields by themselves or approaching a problem in a simple linear fashion. So the idea is to try to help you or encourage you to be more interdisciplinary in a manner of approaching problems. Okay, to begin with we know quite a lot about how the brain learns, but we don't know very much about how to teach or how to coach or how to train or how to guide people to take advantage of that. So given that premise we try to find a balance here. In MBE we're trying to look at a balance between teaching and learning and we're also looking at a balance of input from all of the different parent fields. The information that you've seen in the book is based originally on, it started off as a PhD dissertation, which was a grounded theory development. There was a meta-analysis of the literature for 30 years, including over 4,500 documents, which gave me an idea of what would be a new model of how we should actually approach the teaching and learning aspects of education, but this kind of grew when I incorporated a Delphi panel. The Delphi panel is a group of experts who were mentioned continually by peers in the field. People said, you know, I would reference this fellow. This person is actually great. And 39 names came up a lot of the time in all of these thousands of articles. So I invited those people to participate in this panel. 20 of them accepted straight away and then I had input from six others, sorry five others after the fact, who actually read the final document. But this meant we had input from people from all of these different parent fields and also from seven different countries from around the world. So the ideas that we're sharing today are not just sort of an American or Ecuadorian or whatever concept. They actually are accepted and shared perspectives from professionals from all around the world. When the Delphi panel chimed in, we actually modified the model a bit and actually came up with this different categorization of different information. One of the things that happened after post Delphi panel was actually comparison with the literature that exists in the field. And what was quite sad was that about 80% of what teachers are given as great information or in services actually was poor information, low quality, had no evidence behind it. But it had the word brain in it. It was quite sexy in itself. And so different concepts were very much shut down by the Delphi panel. Things like brain gym and baby Mozart and some other things like that were actually really, well, there were several scientific articles that were presented to actually say why these things should not be incorporated into our daily fare. And so that was part of the surprising information. It was confirming what we'd suspected, but it actually, it's a call to be much more cautious, to be much more skeptical consumers of information that's thrown at us about what works and what doesn't work related to brain issues. Some of the surprising findings that came out of the study included things that many people from some fields, softer sciences like psychology, had always stood next to concepts that they truly believe in but which hadn't had a lot of hired science behind them now do. For example, the great impact of affect and learning. I mean, how you feel, whether it's a stress level or whether it's a motivational level has a huge impact on how well you can learn. So we know that creating good learning environments, whether it's in the workplace or in a school has a huge impact on whether or not people actually end up dominating new information. We'll look at some of those specific examples in the second part. I'll be sharing with you the list of all of the people who participated on the Delphi panel, but they were an even mix of people from neuroscience, psychology, and education. All of them were very active participants and it was quite, it's a wonderful group. It's an intellectually generous group of people who very much wanted to share and do believe in bridging these fields. We looked at a lot of issues. We looked at things related to neuroimaging, to neurotransmitters, chemicals, neurogenesis, plasticity, theories of consciousness, belief about intelligence, new learning theories, neuroethics. Is it correct? Now that we can have brain scans that actually will tell you, this person is dyslexic, is it ethical then to oblige people to put that information up front or will that label actually cause a longer term problem? And an issue that or an area that I'm sure is of most interest to your group is related to mind-body connections. Things related to sleep, physical exercise, nutrition, as well as environments where a person works. How do all of those things impact a person's ability to learn across a lifespan? We looked at school subjects, but we also looked at things that impact your life skills, affect, empathy, emotions, motivation, attention, executive functions, decision-making, facial recognition, interpretation, memory, social cognition, spatial management, time management. All of these things were based on solid studies that we found and actually gave us hints as to how we should actually approach teaching or learning in exchanges. The panel looked at 11 different issues, including the name of the field. This is why we don't call this brain-based learning or we don't call it brain anything. The idea is the concept of joining and not making the brain the dominant issue, but saying you have mind, brain, and I see in your class, health, and education. The idea that all of these things are on an equal footing was very, very important to the group that it should not be neuro-psychology because neuro is a sub-element of psychology, but rather these were this new field as an evenly-based field with equal input from all of the parent fields of study. We looked into the academic roots which historically where does this field come from. We defined terms, we looked at the overarching research, practice, and policy goals which I'll be sharing with you in just a second. The general history of the field, who are the thought leaders of the fields, what would be logical steps or filters through which we can pass information to say this is good information, this is not so good information. Organizations and the societies that are new in this field, you guys obviously know. I did my masters at Harvard and loved it too bad they didn't have MBA at that time, but there are different institutions around the world that actually now have degrees in this area. The main focus was on actually categorizing different concepts and how it is that they are either given, they're well established, they're probably so, they're either intelligent speculation or they're just myths. And then the idea would be at the end of the day what do you do with this information, how do we enhance communication between the fields to make sure that this interdisciplinary exchange can actually turn into real-life professional exchanges in society. We used the information on the beliefs in the neuro myths that helped develop into things that were going to be the new principles or tenants. Principles are things that are generally universal structures in the brain, how the brain actually does process or use information, but tenants are things that are equally true, however there's a huge variety in the human span of things in the spectrum. So for example, nobody will deny that sleep is important for learning, but how much sleep is very debatable. With the average person you get a beautiful bell curve and most people need about eight hours of sleep. However, some people between four and a half and 12 is not rare, I mean that is actually accepted. And so if you can't prescribe that you need eight hours of sleep to actually be able to learn well or that your employees, let's say that they're working night shifts, is this an intelligent way to go about doing things? Well, if you want them to learn new things, probably not. If you want to be alert, there's some debate there. But the effects on memory, well does it have anything to do with the context of their job? But doctors, doctors with strange shifts that work three days in a row, how important is it to understand their personal sleep patterns and how does this impact their ability to work well in the healthcare profession? So from the principles and the tenants, you actually come up with a set of guidelines. How could we actually approach on new teaching and learning experiences in the future? To put this into context, I want to close by just letting you know about those four categories again. What's well established, an example, a concrete example has to do with plasticity. The brain is highly plastic. It changes throughout the lifespan. We know that most of these changes are happening on a microscopic level and that has to happen before you'll see a change in behavior. So you might be trying over and over and over again to make something clear to a student or a kid. For example, if any of you ever taught someone to read, you'll watch that you can spend weeks and go over the same thing over and over and try different ways to get information to this kid's heads. You can go through phonoms, you can go through sentence patterns, you can read aloud to them, you can try all kinds of different things and feel that you're not making any progress. But then one day, all of a sudden, the kid reads. Now that didn't happen just then. That happened over several, several, several intentions of trying to create these connections in the brain. So we know that the plasticity of the brain is actually just another word for saying learning. Your brain learns, that's a demonstration of plasticity. On the other extreme, we know that plasticity has to do with damage. There are people who have experienced damage to their brain, who have fully recuperated and actually used or recruited other parts of their brain to do things that were typically associated with one area, which is why we don't ever talk about localizationalism anymore. It's not left brain, right brain. There's hugely intricate systems in the brain, and if we can learn to appreciate that the brain is not that simple, we can actually come up with a lot of more creative ways to approach learning. So the idea of plasticity is something that's well-established. Nobody doubts that anymore. Proven in human beings, not only in animals, and so we say that well-established issues include plasticity. Something that's probably so has to do with a concept of sensitive periods. We will no longer say there is a critical period for just about anything, and definitely not for academic subjects. Critical periods, the only two that were highly debated by the Delphi panel included learning your first language and or mobility, walking in early ages. There are very few examples of this. Nobody is going to offer up their kid and let's do an experiment and let me isolate him for eight years and see if he actually can learn language after that period. We don't have a lot of cases. There's cases of feral children, but they're around 200. We don't have enough information to actually make that generalization. But one of the things that the Delphi panel wanted to be very clear about is that there's no critical period for any academic subject for learning a second or third language. There's no critical period for learning certain math concepts. The emphasis is rather on the stages, the process, the developmental and constructivist way that we actually build upon prior knowledge. So the order of steps of learning a skill is far more important than the age. So we know that we believe highly it's probably so, but we don't have conclusive evidence because you can't discard a few things because there's just not a way to isolate or experiment for them. The third category are things that are in intelligence speculation. For example, gender differences. In all the studies that exist, there are only four, five if you include total size, physical differences in brains between men and women and there's not one study that shows that that translates into changes in behavior. You do have a ton of studies that talk about hormones and very well established that differences in hormone levels actually have an impact on behavior and of course the brain controls hormones. However, the physiology of the brain is not to be blamed or is not to be credited with differences that are in the brain. There's a couple of wonderful research books out that I can recommend that actually really sum up the information there. The reason it's intelligent speculation is because you look at the outside of a person, you look at men, you look at women, you say well they look different from the outside therefore things must be different on the inside in their brains. It's intelligent speculation but it's just not enough evidence to say that that's true. Then there's categories of things that are myths just pure myths right brain left brain learners how many brains do you have? You have one brain. You can have hemispheres but there's not even just activities isolated to single hemispheres. There is almost there's nothing you do in your in your life in your daily fair that involves just one hemisphere. It's a highly intricate system. It's very easy to sell the concept of right and left brain because it sort of compartmentalizes ideas and let's you know teach to the right brain and all this other stuff but that's just well only neuro myth, neuro myth. Okay so those are the four categories. Once they were categorized by the Delphi panel I took that information and I went back and I used information from the best evidence encyclopedia and the What Works Clearing House to actually do total number of case studies or a number of people who actually participated in studies in these areas to confirm what the Delphi panel had said or how the Delphi panel categorized these different concepts and those are the things that we're actually going to look at in the second part of our talk. To close I just want to leave you with a few things that are challenges. We have lots of problems in society and things are very very complex and the days are over where we specialize that you are a chemist or you are a health professional or you are just a you are someone who works as a preschool teacher or you're somebody who is a biologist whatever it is. Your days are numbered if you think that's all you do. There are no problems in society that can be answered through a single lens so the idea of using mind-bren education, mind-bren education and health, the idea of looking at this interdisciplinary approach is actually much much more powerful than exist in past days where we thought that we had to be very very linear in our approach. Now we know that if we don't look at this through a variety of lenses we're missing a lot of information so we have to nurture ourselves from the other professions and the second point is that there's a lot of things out there that are being said and sold that are just not true and this impacts our profession in a very important way that we have to learn to filter that information. In standards what was agreed upon by the Delphi panel is that standards that exist in the existing parent fields of neuroscience, psychology, education, your case health these should be anything that goes through MBE, MBE, HBE, the idea is that anything that is accepted in the field of mind-bren education, mind-bren education, health should stand up to the standards of each of those separate fields as well as the general standards of the new field which means that we're not just saying standards in one field and standards in the other in the intersection as an event diagram the intersection are the standards no we're saying the standards in one the standards plus another and the standards plus another are equal to the standards that have to be met for a concept for something to apply in the new field so this is much harder it means it's a much more stringent way to judge information. We also know that in research goals the concept the idea to do research and I understand you guys are all going to be doing research projects when you see that there's a very clear guidelines some things that establish a working understanding of the dynamic relationships between how we learn how we educate how the brain constructs new learning and how the brain organizes and processes information there's some very clear guidelines about what would qualify as a research project in these areas additionally there's practice goals we want to be able to align learning and teaching and how human beings are organ biologically organized to learn there's several practice guidelines what do we actually do on a daily basis that actually applies these concepts the future the future is you guys I mean what can you do we have to extend a hand to people outside of our own field of formation and we actually have to look into joint research projects which I hope you will do in this class you have to cross disciplines and you have to be open to information that might be outside of your field but to be able to do that you have to dominate a vocabulary that's very different now you have to be able to learn to speak the language of mind-brain education which expands our vocabulary in a lot of different ways educators have to learn to talk about the brain and neuroscientists have to understand that feedback loops don't just have to do with chemistry but they have to do with things that happen in a classroom so we have to be able to learn to use each other's vocabulary in that sense we're going to close here for this first part and what we'll look at next has to do with breaking down the information that you've reviewed in the book so far and after that we'll do a question and answer session thank you very much hello this is Tracy Takahama Espinosa and today we're going to look over the first a few chapters of mind-brain education science which is a comprehensive guide to the new brain-based teaching which I have to say the title was kind of a compromise there we wanted to get away from the words brain-based for anyways we've we've kept it in here for this purpose what we're going to do is actually look over in the table of contents you'll see that there's some very important information the preface that I want to talk to you about then we're going to jump to chapters one which actually is trying to define the field chapter two which actually goes over what is the evidence-based information in the field and how we actually categorize information that applies or doesn't apply in the field and then we're going to look at some of the the historical information in chapter three exactly where does this information come from it's not a new field but it just has a very different label now in chapter four we're going to look through the science and the myths actually trying to get away from the neuro myths that have plagued information in the popular press in chapter five we're going to actually look at the research and actually look at who is studied why they are studied and how the different studies are conducted in this new field of mind-brain education and chapter six we're going to look at human survival skills and different life skills so there's some things that the brain actually does to preserve itself which are survival things and there's other things that the brain does related to life skills like being able to memorize things or to pay attention to different information in chapter seven we look at the laboratory in the classroom really trying to understand certain specific key areas in teaching and learning such as language and math and actually how we can apply the new information to those specific content areas chapter eight is evidence-based solutions in the classroom so how we can actually go about filtering information and chapter nine we look at the conclusions basically what is it that we now know and where should we go from here in order to actually continue to develop the field starting in chapter sorry in the preface i'd like to call your attention to the preface you can skip the introduction if you don't have a lot of time but in the preference i think it's quite important to acknowledge that the information we're presenting is is trying to actually reach a type of standardization is trying to say what is good information what is poor information how do we judge that information so that we can be better practitioners especially in education where things are done so much on a individual level it's very very hard to say that this thing works for all children it might work for this child but not for others so we need to actually try to find ways to better uh make judgments about that kind of a practice what we um what is vital to understand is that we're talking about the mix of education cognitive neuroscience and educational psychology which ends up being mind-bren in education um science in this uh in these terms now we also look at what is um the subfield so when we're talking about education we're talking about a lot of things like educational practice methodology content of subject matter age group knowledge how to teach older kids younger kids classroom management skills differentiation planning assessment um terms of educational research philosophy and technology all of these different points are considered in this education element in neuroscience we're looking at the nervous system brain neurons synapses neurotransmitters neural networks sensory systems motor control learning memory condition arousal mechanisms we're talking very specifically about cognitive neuroscience and a key thing to remember is that the studies in this field are only um they can be started off with animal studies but they are only focused really on results found with real human beings so for example you can find a lot of information in animal uh neuroscience that says yes there's differences in the brains uh between sexes uh or between a well a male moth and a female moth yeah you can actually see some differences there and same thing in rats but you can't find that in humans so the whole idea is to actually focus on human uh studies here and in psychology there's a lot of different issues in consciousness perception emotion personality behavior cognition uh interpersonal relationships what is uh very important to realize is these lists are not conclusive there's a whole lot of other information and if you look at how different fields uh overlap there's a lot of other things that should be taken into consideration for example you'll find that there are subfields in neuroscience that are quite important as well so for example if you have um in neuroscience you might have a branch that says okay what are biological studies what is information that we can actually glean from the biological sciences and there you actually cross over with a lot of things related to health and nutrition so areas that you are all very involved in are actually very important um as well in mind brain education science they're just not um broken down in um such a a fine way here um in the initial pages here or in that particular diagram but they are included okay in chapter one we're actually looking at a celebration basically saying finally let's give this new uh field a name that's actually it's culminating in the birth of something that actually um happened all around the world um at more or less the same time which is kind of a very interesting um spontaneous uh kind of a movement where many many different places around the world Japan Australia UK United States there were many different researchers who were actually looking into this field and actually sort of declared that it existed um around 2004 or five six um in earlier years Kurt Fisher at Harvard claims that there's a lot of pre-evidence in the 1990s that were leading up to this 2001 when they're planning the mind brain education um degree in Harvard itself and so this has been talked about for a long time but it hasn't actually it didn't actually occur until this um 2004 five six time um what's important to realize is that one of the things that has stopped or made it so slow to reach the actual birth of this new learning science was that each of these different fields psychology neuroscience education we can add the health sciences here as well they all have their own epistemology they all have their own philosophy I have a very deep history and all of those things um really have a huge influence in the way of um that you change your lens with the way you look at different problems so you'll have a neuroscientist who's always looking for things that are related to cells at a cellular level and you'll have a psychologist who's always looking for things on a behavioral level and then you'll also find that you know in education we're looking at group things sometimes and how our schools run so since they have all these different lenses they're approaching problems differently and this is something to be celebrated it's not something that is to be limited it's actually a positive thing we can actually join these visions but the very interesting perspective here is that we're mixing some very young sciences psychology is only about 125 years old right neuroscience was only really established around 1989 so cognitive neuroscience is a very young field so we're mixing 225 year old fields with a 25 year old field which is nothing compared to things like philosophy or biology which have been around for thousands of years so we're actually looking at something quite new which has taken a long time to actually take hold which has been part of our problem in the field as people sort of wondered whether or not it was a subset of something else and the other thing has to do with the commas the mind comma brain comma education and you've added health to this whole fix the idea is when you have fields that are joined in that way you don't have one that's superior to another there is such a field as neuropsychology which means the neuro is a subfield of psychology and there's educational neuroscience but that means education is a sub element of neuroscience the idea with the MBE balance is that all of these things are actually treated equally and there's input on an equal level from all of these different areas to take this even further when you actually include health into this discussion it's very important because the dynamics really lend themselves to that when we see and later on we're going to look at the mind-brain connection there's a huge connection there between how what is done to the body actually changes very much the the mind's potential okay that's so much for chapter one in chapter two what we're actually trying to establish is that what we're looking at are not suggested popular curatols one-size-fits-all type of things for different for the field of education or for any other field we're actually trying to say that there's a lot of good evidence that should be looked at and always taking into consideration and then there's a lot of junk out there that we actually have to just get rid of so the idea is to take these old questions how do we learn best what is individual human potential how do we ensure that children learn live up to their promises learners all these things are very very old these are questions that we've philosophized for over thousands of years and so right now the idea is actually trying to come to grips with a new way to approach this with a new type of vocabulary as i mentioned earlier in chapter one you have a difference here between for example you have between neuroscience psychology you have things that are in life and natural sciences you have biology and genetics you have nutrition issues um psychopharmacology you have a lot of things that are actually also highly related to the information here but you also have things that are on the outside related to society societal values um anthropological or cultural anthropological issues that should be taken into consideration within psychology you also have the range looking at time it may basically so you have issues related to genetic issues but you also have developmental psychology across a lifespan what can and should be learned by human individuals um there was a big there has been a very big discussion about well how come this isn't just brain-based learning or why isn't this just called educational neuroscience or educational neuropsychology or just plain old neuroscience and the debate um actually came to head with the delphi panel that um that around in 2008 which made it very clear that it was there was a need to actually establish this as a separate field because without it um other fields dominated in their in their lens the lens with which they began to look at a problem how does a child read well if it was a neuroscientific lens there's a lot of analysis going on about information we now know about dyslexic brains and so the focus was uh overly dominated by that and where psychologists were saying well that your shirt changing actually a child's own um general aptitude is feeling is motivation for learning to read where we can't let that go and educators were saying wait a second just tell me what actually works in the classroom give me some better tools so um the choice was made to actually um decide that this is its own field it's not something that's a subfield of other fields okay the other point that's very important in chapter two is to distinguish that there is a we know a lot i mean well we don't know a whole lot but relatively speaking we know far more about learning how the brain learns versus how to teach there's been a whole lot of studies going on and basically all psychology has actually looked at that it's whole history over the past 125 years is how do we learn best how do we learn behaviors and um what's very important in serigene blakemore and ordo frith in in in the uk have really pointed this us really out really clearly every animal can learn but very very few teach or teach each other and none but the human being tries to learn better ways to teach or to make uh to take advantage of the potential of the human brain to teach better so there is a discussion also as to whether or not this is a discipline or professional field that actually still continues that whole debate still continues today and then the idea is where is it actually applied how is mbe science actually applied so one of the concrete examples and we'll look at this later on in chapter eight relates to actually um information how do you join information from the different fields so if you know that there are for example different neural pathways for a representation of three when it's written out is as an arabic number when it's written out in letters or when it's a roman numeral or whether or not it's just actually represented in a physical manifestation like balls um that those are different those are stored in different places in the brain now that's a curiosity but it also should tell us something about how to teach the concept or the concept of three okay there is a lot of conceptual debates in the field and these are actually also discussed a lot in chapter two and um methodology actually um processes how should information um be judged whether it's good or bad or not and so there's suggested processes that an educator might take versus a psychologist versus somebody from um from the neurosciences so if you're a psychologist um you've got a theory about uh teaching and learning then the idea is okay now is there also evidence that this is something could be put in practice in a classroom and is there evidence in neuroscience for this and if you can find that all three fields support the information then you can actually have a very high rate of confidence in the information that you're sharing if you find that it's only supported in one or two of the three fields then we realize that that information is probably suspect still and that we have to be very careful um about that the rest of chapter two actually shows how neuroscience can inform pedagogy how pedagogy can inform psychology how psychology can inform neuroscience so basically we've got these six pairs here of how each of the different fields can in practicality enrich the other um through good content information so that's what chapter two actually uh sets out to to do is to actually justify why this new field is needed and why it's actually and how it can be applied um and the end of chapter two we actually look at something just sort of the old question we're not telling people a lot of new information there is a lot of stuff out there that we've known forever but now we can say with great confidence that there exists information in neuroscience and in psychology and in education which gives us positive think well if we can find learning interventions that apply all of those things then we would actually be better off so for example there's five well-established concepts one is that the human brains are as unique as as human faces that is they have similar parts but they're no to a like we also know that all brains are not equal because context and ability influence learning so people are not all born to address all of the same kind of problems with equals to success this is actually very sad uh to people who are formed in psychology in the 70s who were told that you know give me anybody and I can shape them you know with the right modeling and with the right kind of stimulus I can actually turn anybody into anything well we just know that's not true anymore and the third point is that the brain is changed daily by experience although most of these changes are at a microscopical level and you don't see that manifested in behavior until far later the fourth point is that the brain is highly plastic this means that it can adapt it is adjustable your brain can change and this is important for people in therapy for example in psychology who can go through many many years trying to unravel certain patterns in their brain but then they actually come up to understand well yes you know we can make new links and this can take years so it's kind of an appreciation of why why this actually happens in the fifth point we realize that there is no no new learning that does not pass through the filter of old learning so basically your brain the first thing it does is double does a double check with anything it already knows so this gives us great direction great ideas about how we should actually teach and we know now that it's why some of these teaching interventions are more successful than others because they are more authentic they relate to a child's past experience the whole concept of constructivist learning is based on this idea that we all learn from our past okay that's chapter two in chapter three we look at some of the older problems some of the things that have plagued education for a very long time and then try to see if there's any new way to take a look at these things so basically if we go back to the history of education this is actually one of my favorite chapters because it's very very interesting to see how a mind brain education science is actually quite natural when you look at where it came from and how it's sort of developed and how different ideas built upon each other we know that from the Egyptians to the Greeks things being pretty much the same there was a lot of core information which is very very interesting and a lot of things that were seated in religious practice or in a lot in philosophical studies so this is a key concept to it one of my favorite findings in this research was to realize that Confucius actually said you know thousands of years ago we should differentiate education or basically teach according to the student's ability this is something that's quite an old concept now we realize but it's something that now is very much in the forefront of information because we now know that we can't treat all people the same and we do need to be able to differentiate education we keep all the same objectives but we have to either evaluate or use different activities that actually reach that person due to their very unique brains there's a great focus between the 10th and 17th centuries on the senses and learning and perhaps the first the first scientist Alhazen was was was acknowledged as being perhaps the first scientist to actually go through and actually practice and actually preach about a scientific method in the 1500s fabulous fabulous time to actually start to document in a in a more long-term way and to try to uniformly identify parts of the brain this was done by Da Vinci and Aless also Andreas Vesalias also did a lot of work in this area and it was very fascinating to find that Christopher Ren one of these most famous architects right who has to actually be one of the first to to come up with a very very precise rendition of what the human brain looks like a little factory bulbs there everything is very very clearly drawn these drawings have survived and they've actually proven to be very very accurate so what was done in the time was actually back in the 1500s 1600s this actually helped us start to uniformly address different parts of the brain on a philosophical and educational level this whole concept of I think therefore I am by René Descartes in the 1600s sort of gave way to a more educational philosophy of are we looking at the brain-centered human being if the person doesn't think then they definitely don't exist so this was actually taken and it's still debated today right in the 18th and 19th century finally for the first time at the end of the 1800s in the United States we actually start to have formalized education so beforehand we would teach we would be more individualized because you'd basically teach whoever was in your classroom in the one one-room schoolhouse everybody mixed together but then starting in the 1600s 1700s 1800s we start to have a more uniformity and education and by the end of the 1890s most countries around the world the United States Japan China began seeking a basic type of educational structures started obliging and saying well this would be a minimum level and this is how we will advance kids so actually we're no grades in American classrooms until around the 1890s when we started to actually have to promote people so this is a another very interesting concept related to neuroscience there is a old and outdated concept called localizationalism which basically means that x is located in y part of the brain and if you lose it that's the end of it so the ideas if you had and this was spun by the discoveries of Paul Broca and Carl Wernick in the 1800s in which they discovered that certain parts of the human brain were related definitely to language so in terms of language production or language perception and understanding so in unifying those ideas we they realized that when a patient had a stroke for example in Broca's area then they suffered a certain type of language loss now this type of aphasia then led people to this over-generalization of the concept that well once you've lost that place or that piece of your brain that piece of your brain is only thing related to language therefore it's gone therefore you'll never speak again so it's taken a good 150 years to actually kind of get out of that mentality of localizationalism and to accept the idea that actually there can be rehabilitation of different parts of the brain thanks to plasticity going into the 1869 or or less Francis Galton who spread this basic concept of learning and intelligence and is this nature or nurture this whole debate which still remains today and what is most important that emerged also at the end of the 1800s which is a very important debate this chapter includes some pictures related to brain mapping originally Brodman's areas which were actually developed trying to uniform the way we related to different parts of the brain and trying to understand what they were important for now this is also promoting the idea of localizationalism if you don't have something in your motor cortex you're not going to be able to run or walk or whatever or talk so the idea here is now we look at these areas and we agree that they are incredibly important for certain functionings but they're part of intricate systems it's not just that single piece or part but that it's actually the whole system that we have to look at by the end of the when we reach into the 1900s and 1950s Donald Hebb made a very important statement a very good concept that had to do with what are now known as the Hebbian synapse or the idea that neurons that fire together wire together this idea is basically summarizing the concept that if you do two things together simultaneously then they will be strengthened so this sort of takes a concept from psychology you know Pavlov's idea if we ring a bell and the dog comes running and he starts to salivate and we give him food well then eventually you just ring the bell and he'll start to salivate so we've connected two ideas in the brain so there's a reaction the idea that Hebb had in 1949 was basically it was very similar to this that if there's enough if things happen together they will actually stimulate the firing of neurons that are near them okay very very important to mind-reading education science is the work of Jean Piaget who made a point of identifying different stages of cognitive development he gave broad ranges of ages related to this but it was basically showing that the human brain and the human being developed certain things throughout their lifespan which ranged from these basic simple these six stages from simple reflexes to first habits then secondary circular reactions coordination of circular reactions tertiary circular reactions and internalization of schemas this idea led to basically the stages of cognitive development that he he has made very famous and that are still used today the sensory mortar stage the pre-operational period the concrete operational stage and formal operational stage these generally coincide with certain ages though there is great flexibility but this is still used very much as a marker today some of the different concepts that sort of have shown that Piaget was not only right but he was actually very very much on target when he talked about certain mental constructs that student that kids develop throughout their lifespan so the the concept of serration or transitivity classification de-centering reversibility conservation all of these concepts and moving away from egocentrism all of these things are very very important in in the development throughout the lifespan and each of these has now actually began to be studied in the neural scientific field in mind brain education science where we can actually show how the brain is changing in these different stages from here we move on to the social historical and psychological concepts in child development where Lev Vygotsky plays a very big role we talk about scaffolding or actually putting a child into situations where just a little bit harder than he can actually do on his own but in the context of other individuals who can actually model for him there's a huge concept so in the first instance Vygotsky was very important and related to the zone of cognitive of proximal development but then he was also very well known and actually something that's still being discussed today has to do with this concept of an inner voice the question of whether or not you can think without words for example or is your world defined by the words you have to to think about it in and so this whole idea about whether or not a child for example in in studies on bilingualism which I love you can actually see parts of the brain that are being used to think about words even though you might not see a production actually use semantic use of the words orally you can actually see the brain using different parts of the brain to come up with this so are we actually thinking in words even though we don't have the words coming out of our mouth it's a very very interesting concept also in this chapter we're looking at um Alexandra Luria's influence who was phenomenal in his documentation of the mind of a knownist someone who actually had a near perfect memory and how tragic that was how tragic it was to actually have a perfect memory and how important it is to actually forget so this actually links to some other concepts and later on that we'll see in the book related to memory and the importance of forgetting for example that um what Daniel Satcher has written quite a lot about in the 60s and 80s um there was this big move based on the fact and unfortunately on rat studies which was a wonderful start but actually got things going in the wrong direction for education or educational publications uh Rosenweg and and his colleagues published some studies that actually showed in coordination with Mary and Diamond who's now at Berkeley that uh when a rat was put in a cage with lots of toys and stuff like that then we sacrifice the rat and we open up the brain and we see these got a lot more dendrites than the rat who was in the empty cage and when sharing those results everybody got all excited and said well this speaks a lot to enriched environments we need to give kids more enriched environments um this was never the intention of the original authors however who actually in later studies basically said sorry wait this is being misinterpreted um the authors said said that enriched or what looked like enriched initially in the laboratory environments are actually more like normal i mean rats live in you know tremendously entertaining sewers and so they're in brains or the normal situation would be to have all of these activities or these spinning wheels or whatever so what this actually showed was not that enrichment is good for your brain but rather that deprived environments are bad for your brain so despite this however there's this great million-dollar industry that still works on creating enriched environments this is something that's really um discussed and debated a lot in the mind brain education field right now because um enrichment can only be defined um in relative terms to the individual so i take three newborn kids and i put them in a enrichment class and um they come in three of those kids come from you know really depraved environments and this is a wonderful experience for them and and i bet they do grow they benefit from that experience and let's say three of the other kids um basically the environment is the same so they're not gaining and they're not losing but then i take some other kids out of uh tremendous house environment where they've got a lot of stimulation and people talking to them in great toys and i take them to this enrichment class which has less uh things to do less people around them and that's actually a negative for the kids so saying that enrichment yes enrichment is good but how do we define that i mean how do you know what is enrichment from one person to another that's very very difficult problem that we still have the pre-mind-bearing and education science stage was actually in the in the early 70s late 60s um and actually i think Dartmouth should be applauded in this they actually had an undergraduate degree in educational neuroscience in 1968 um and they actually founded the um well the school itself in 1990 so they had um actually a wonderful program going from the from the get go in the 70s we start looking at uh very elaborate studies related to attention and memory which are very important and then we find that there's also in the 60s is a start of a focus on emotions and learning which was very very huge um this was the first time that we actually realized that there are things such as an affective filter hypothesis or things go through um a judgment call from your emotions before they actually go into um a cognitive realm and so the attention to this area was very important um but it was very young um in the earlier stages in the 60s and 70s um but this quickly grew and it's still growing today in one of the greatest people in this field um i think Antonio de Masio has he's got a prize student to Mary Helen in more than your yang who's doing amazing work in this in this area today and doing a lot of wonderful research related to affect and learning then we started to see um actually the emergence of what would be a new field we started looking into psychopharmacology and seeing a lot more information related to treating quote-unquote problems or learning problems through drugs or through the interaction or understanding or our our our infantile understanding really of the brain at that time say yes we need to we can actually control kids for example with attention problems by actually controlling the balance of neurotransmitters in the brain so this began to be more and more um of interest um in the 70s um some very pioneering institutions began to merge in the 70s the Japan Society for Neuroscience also in Australia there were some very big movements going on there and then the miracle happened we actually got tons of funding put into brain studies in the 90s um we have always had since the 70s we've had neuroimaging techniques um and this goes back to the basic fundamentals of the brain you can measure brain activity either through electrical or chemical um changes or you can do it through um physiology i mean basic changes in the physical structure of the brain so what we had known since the 70s was related to measuring electrical information this was popular in the 70s it was even founded though much earlier in 1929 believe it or not um we actually have other information related to CAT scans also in the 70s PET scans in the 70s and then we started to have far better and higher quality imaging with functional magnetic resonance imaging in the 90s um there started to be writings um in mind brain education science 1981 the very first thesis in this field was entitled neuroeducation brain compatible learning strategies was written by Odell in 1981 i don't think he even realized what he was getting into there but um it was a good start and um one of probably the most um guiding books at the time was written by Leslie Hart human brain human learning in 1983 which is when he made this suggestion that it would be silly it's very silly of educators to pretend to design educational experiences this would be like um somebody who doesn't know the brain shouldn't design educational experiences because this would be like asking somebody who doesn't know what a hand looks like to design a glove when this made a huge impact on educators of the type um at the time sorry Howard Gardner who did some of his first work in the Boston's Veterans Hospitals in the 70s actually one of his first books related to the shattered mind uh shattered brains that he found in in the Boston Veterans Hospital actually helped establish this idea that there were different islands of abilities that that could be combined or retained even after there was damage to the brain so this broadened the idea about what intelligence was in the human brain and where it could be found there were also other theories in the 80s about connectivity, cognitiveness, constructive as models that began to become popular in the 80s and there were several new organizations that started to be born around this time there was a declaration of the birth of neuroscience between 84 and 1989 when the first books were published in with these with this name um then there began to be a huge interest on the part of educators educators began to look at the brain a lot more seriously um in the 80s in the early 90s again pushed by the decade of the brain it sort of was a false false hope for a lot of educators who thought well well now that we can finally see the brain we can finally figure out how this whole thing works and we will be able to teach better this is still yet to happen I mean we're still working on this there were two huge categories of studies that came out of the decade of the brain one was a module or domain specific theory so these were related to theories about how we read or do math or pay attention then there were other global theories relating to theories of intelligence these were big things that came out of the discoveries that were happening in the 1990s from there there began to be hints at international cooperation by the mid 1994 1995 there was a lot of looking across the Atlantic to Europe and and back again to see if we could actually join efforts with different institutes for example the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany was very very instrumental in pushing some of these great ideas and so there was they were joined together by the James McDonnell Foundation which was very interesting I'm sorry Startleover's Carlos in the 1990s there was a great effort emphasis now on international cooperation because now we're having better communication abilities we were also having far more cooperation so for example the James McDonnell Foundation headed by John Brunner now actually tried to link what happened in St. Louis to things that are happening in Oxford which was a huge thing things occurring in the Max Planck Institute and in Germany were also shared in the states and then we're also looking not just across the Atlantic but also towards the Pacific and trying to find better information from researchers who were doing a lot of work in in Japan so by the time the 1990s it was coming to close there began to be some skepticism at the early 1990s with you know decade of the brain everything was good good to go anything that had brain in it was believed but then we realized this is not the whole the whole piece of information that we need and Brewer himself actually know do you know this is a bridge too far this is way too far to connect those ideas of education and neuroscience laboratories are far different from classrooms and so we began to have a lot more skepticism which was very healthy for the field because it tried to keep it honest and then there was a there was a big effort made to try to actually come up with some real tools what can we tell teachers about the brain so that they can actually be better equipped in the classroom um types of best practice elements came out these were very nice but they were they were again still a little bit lofty it wasn't until actually Bradford Brown and Cawkins book um How People Learn um by the National Research Council that we are actually able to get actually some high quality information out there to teachers so it's actually very relatively recent in the past decade that we've actually began to count on um higher quality information uh during this time in the early 2000s we actually started to see a lot of development of different interventions for example fast forward or avo these types of reading interventions were were new and they were based on this new cooperation that you could find in the field um at the time um from here we actually move on to see what dangerous things started to coming that started to come out of mind brain education science but not from the science itself but basically because uh of lack of communication a lot was going on that was high quality information in academia however this wasn't reaching teachers and so popular press started to fill in the void and started to have these uh teaching and with the brain and mind types of books which sold like crazy at the time um same thing learning the brain conferences all these things started to pick up pace because people uh were desperate for the information they were looking for it they were willing to pay for good information about this about the brain and learning and this was something that um there was sort of a wake-up call that we have to start to judge the quality of information with a more stringent set of rules because it was sort of getting out of control there was a lot of junk going out there there was a lot of uh teach the right brain kind of thing and boys need fire to start a class or whatever and they need to pass around a candle because of their their basic instincts there was a lot of junk going around so um this actually made a call for a lot the formalization of several new academic programs in the field um harvard spent several years planning to finally launch their master's program in the mind brain education field in 2001 um there was other things going on or uh however in Cambridge as well as in Germany as well as in Denmark um and these programs have actually continued to grow around the world so many master's programs now in education have this slant of actually including neuroscience and psychology in them in the 2000s there was continued misinterpretations of information um for these were basically blamed on great over generalizations about information in the brain there were a lot of books called rate right brain children a left brain world or right brain styles for conquering clutter and reaching your goals or boosting your brain power in a couple weeks or making yourself smarter these are just very very good popular titles that marketing people were very very adapted and adapting to a population that's desperate for more information um at the end was fascinating in the 1990 in 1995 Japan was taking the lead in neuroimaging technology and in 2001 uh Hideki Koizumi uh through the Hitachi Medical Corporation launched a new type of imaging as we mentioned before you could either measure your brain either through electrical or chemical changes or physiology well they said how about we look at this from a different angle what if we measure this with blood flow so basically the idea is when a certain part of your brain is is more active blood is flowing more to that particular area of the brain and so they devised a way that was very non-invasive you can actually sit and watch people learning to play a song and a guitar with us on their head you can this is the closest we can get to actually being in a real classroom so this uh this type of technology which is bound to take off in the next decade is what's going to allow us to actually do comparisons of what happens in your class versus my class and who's learning what and exactly what parts of the brain are being stimulated by this so um this is actually a very exciting time given technology um the official birth of the new discipline um was sort of happened all around the world more or less around the same time as we mentioned before around 2000 starting around 2004 there was these sort of crescendo of all of these different efforts that had been taking a place around the world in Japan in Australia in Holland in other parts of the world not just in the United States and there was a formal announcement of this structure or this new idea of an international mind-run education society in 2004 they actually had the first meeting in 2007 and actually this whole thing took off around the world around that same time the year was a mexican society for neuroscience and education which actually took off in parallel in india and england all around the world this was actually picking up as a phenomena so the new challenge now given where we're at today is still communication there it's still very hard for neuroscientists to talk to educators in fact i was at a conference recently where in the most condescending voice possible a neuroscientist told the audience which is made up mainly of teachers well look we've done all the hard work all you have to do is go and apply it and it's like this sigh went through the audience of how dare they they have no idea what really goes in a classroom what really happens with real people in real jobs and in real places and you know their theoretical information you know things that they're doing on experiments and on rats have nothing to do with my own students for example so there's still this problem of communication however the international mind brain education study is growing and there's a lot more people who care about this good communication between groups and have spent a lot of time to actually try and facilitate exchanges between researchers in these areas so you have people who are crossing the border these are teachers going into neuroscience or these are neuroscientists delving more into psychology or these are psychologists who are going back to the classroom and by pulling it all together now you've got a new society of people who are actually agreeing that the best way to look at problems is through this multiple lens it's not just through a purist point of view from their own profession so anyways the idea is to actually see how we can get neuroscientist, psychologists and teachers to actually work together on real problems a final point in this chapter is to realize that there is a huge a huge debate going on in neuroethics now that we're starting to know more about the brain now that teachers know more about the brain now that the brain information is now more prevalent in society shouldn't we be worried shouldn't we be scared that you know yes i can look at a brain and know that it's got dyslexia is that legal should i ask for brain scans of my students before i let them into my school because i know that's a lot more work a lot more investment a lot more resources that are going to go into that kid or is that unethical or if i know that a joe average college student who takes riddolin who doesn't have a hd is actually going to perform better on an sat than one who didn't take the drug and just because he has the money to pay for it should he be able to pay for it so anyways these questions still have yet to be answered and they are very very important for all of us to look at the idea was that we went from kind of looking at the global global person and and then we went back to having interdisciplinary vision where that's where we are right now again trying to look at this from an interdisciplinary perspective additionally we went from thinking that everything was behavior then to everything is definitely biology and the key point here is there is no such thing as this biological determinism i mean you are not only your genes although there's a lot of argument now saying that the lot is determined by your genes in fact the way you are reacting to different information is based on what you were given in your genetic makeup so there's a lot to be discussed still about whether or not i mean that debate isn't been closed what's more important nature nurture and teachers will inevitably tell you it's gotta be it's gotta be that you're upbringing it can't just be your genes because we believe that we can change people so there's a huge there's a huge there's a lot invested in believing that that the the brain is malleable and can be changed by experience so we have to actually put all these try to try to put all these pieces together to see how this impacts our own profession there's a great number of societies and tons of conferences that go on related to this field around the world these days uh highly recommend that you attend some of these there's one in Ecuador in 2013 we're hosting the international mind brain education society conference here in Galapagos and in Quito and hope you guys can make it to that okay that would be the end of chapter three and we're going to now look at what we have in chapter four which has to do with getting rid of the myths that plague the field of mind brain education science chapter four is related to sorting the science from the myths and establishing goals and standards in the field and so there's always been this debate should this be a new field or is it a subfield of something else and so basically um one of the things that called attention to to the fact that it has to be its own unique field is that in some fields for example education um we put a lot of stock into qualitative analysis uh perspectives um understanding visions of individual people whereas in neuroscience they put a whole lot of stock into things that are quantitative that are measurable and what mind brain education science is trying to do is to bridge those two and so what is uh what do we actually try to use as a guiding quote I would have to say comes from Einstein he said that everything that can be counted does not necessarily count and everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted this is a huge point to keep in mind when we try to judge information just because a teacher can't prove that this particular thing worked in their classroom um because they haven't documented their practice very well that's something we have to be you know self-critical about we've been very poor in documenting what happens in our class on everyday uh experiences but we have to realize that we need to begin to document a bit better but also the neuroscientists have to actually bind to the idea that you know what our observations are valid and there's a lot of good information that can come from that okay um following this uh in this chapter we actually look at uh things that have to do with policy um things that have come out of this if we know for example that uh it's a bad idea uh given mind and body balance for teenagers to start school so early because we really realize that the serotonin balancing doesn't kick in there until a little bit later what are we doing well we are establishing schools with a structure that's helpful to the parents to get to work on time but we're not really doing it to maximize learning and so some of the other issues that are coming out of uh mind-bound education science have to do with looking at issues of sleep and eating patterns exercise patterns and things that happen in our schools okay to determine what was a myth in mind-bound education science there were four categories of information that came from the OECD countries which i mentioned in the first video first things that are well established second what is probably so third things that are intelligent speculation and fourth things that are actually neuro myths each of these categories was uh then compared with what would be acceptable evidence from the literature that things actually occurred or not and actually judging whether or not they had limited effects or actually negative effects on learning so these were concepts that we took that were categorized as neuro myths most of them had no qualifying studies or they had very very poor poor studies or there were no discernible effects or there were no qualifying studies or they potentially had negative effects and so basically the neuro myths are the things we want to stay away from okay these are the things that are so bad that they poison our schools okay as we mentioned before the things that are well established um these are the types of categorizations that exist well established are things like plasticity probably so are things like um sensitive periods versus critical periods intelligence speculation has to do things like gender differences and popular misconceptions are those things that are just neuro myths things that are attractive easy to sell but they don't have any science behind them so having decided um given those categories the um the Delphi panel came up with their decisions about what was good information or bad information and from that um there was a generate there was a very important discussion generator which had to do with the goals in the field so in this new discipline of mind renegotiation science what are the research goals and so basically some of the research goals that were established were to um establish working understanding of the dynamic relationship between how we learn how we educate how the brain constructs the meaning and how the brain organizes processes and so how do you do that well you can study brain mechanisms and the relationship to learning or you can study relationships between human development and biology the brain i think these pages you know 86 onward are very important for those of you who are doing um research projects and trying to actually decide or judge the quality of the topic that you've chosen if you can meet these parameters uh then i think that you're in good shape for actually choosing a good topic the field also or the Delphi panel also looked at what were the practical goals of the field and this is meant to do what to align learning and teaching about how human beings learn and how they're organized biologically organized for learning so that we can make sure that we are actually taking advantage and maximizing the potential of every human being so there's some just suggested how is there as well and finally policy goals basically we're looking to continually encourage the pursuit of neuroscientifically substantive beliefs founded in educationally inspired research questions so this means that it should go from the classroom back to the lab it shouldn't start in the lab and then go back to the classroom because there's been a lot of poor information that's happened in that direction okay and then how do you do that well you actually have to talk to each other in order to make the thing work you actually have to have better communication this led to some basic standards or suggestion of what kind of standards should exist and the idea was that it is not this little intersection of the standards that exist in neuroscience and psychology and education but rather the sum of the standards in each field which makes each of the pieces of information very very stringently judged um anything that you see in mind-reading education science that is actually legitimate actually has gone through the ringers so you know that this is actually very good information if it comes out that way okay this chapter is basically focused on page 91 related to myths myths like the humans humans only use 10 percent of their brains or myths that the human brain has unlimited capacity those are two you know opposing myths but people still believe both of them some people still think that their brain differences by race there are not everything important about the brain is determined by the age of three after that is just all downhill there is something very important to recognize and that relates to nutrition if a child is malnourished for those first years of life you have very little raw material to work with however an excellent book on this topic the myth of the first three years of life is is crucial to read for those of you who still think that if a kid has had a bad start he will always go down the wrong path that's just not true other myths include things like the brain works in isolation there's different pieces there's left hemisphere right hemisphere things that happen or that some people are more right brain and other people are more left brain those are just pure myths additionally left and right hemispheres are separable systems for learning there's almost nothing that you do on a daily basis that only involves one hemisphere brains are objectively they objectively record reality sorry it's not a tape recorder and there's a lot of filtering that goes through past experiences emotions so no it's not objective memorization is unnecessary for complex mental processing it's absolutely the opposite we need memorization for complex mental processes the brain remembers everything that's ever happened to it no even though you have these great movies with the hypnosis who they can bring you back to places unless you paid attention there is no memory that was formed there so no it's not that you can always remember or recall everything optimal periods of learning are connected to neurogenesis that's just backwards teaching can be timed with synaptogenesis if you can tell me when synaptogenesis happens i'd be really happy to know this is neurogenesis is the generation of new neurons in the brain right synaptogenesis is when there's new connections as we mentioned before synaptogenesis occurs when there's new synapse this one after what can be repeated experiences so the moment that you have this new connection this is an example i gave in the first video when a kid learns to read all of a sudden in that moment he just learns to read is it just that second where you really learned no it's because you've been building up that connection over time so anticipating when synaptogenesis is going to occur is very silly because it's actually the opposite learning is defined by synaptogenesis so you can't teach and time it to synaptogenesis that's just silly and that's a great book title and it sold a lot but it just isn't real brain cells cannot be replaced sorry they can be but don't tell anybody it's not a like free license to go and do drugs or whatever it's neurogenesis doesn't happen with frequency it's kind of like menstruation it's more or less once a month it's only been identified in two parts the human brain half of the brain cells die immediately anyways half of that half 25 percent actually try to connect on existing synapses so it's not new at all so only about 25 percent of new cells in the brain actually go on to even have a potential to be new synapses so don't don't mess with your brain try to try to take care of it the brain is not immutable learning foreign languages disrupts knowledge of students native language that's ridiculous i have three children they know four languages each and three perfectly fluent and uh they're pretty balanced kids uh children are born blank slates and all we have to do is just pour information into that that's something that we kicked out in the 17th century um brain and mind are separate this is a very philosophical question but i asked my students in neuropsychology to reflect on the idea can you have a brain and no mind or can you have a mind and no brain and and they always point to the fact that yes oh you can have people who go they're in a coma so the brain is actually saying you know heart beat heart beat breathe breathe breathe but they are not present there's no consciousness so there's no mind attached there incomplete brain development explains teenage behavior this is a good excuse for a lot of things but um even jay geed who's done the only longitudinal study on the development of human brain does not um say that kids are out for a free license um to do whatever they please because their brains aren't fully developed there's a whole lot of factors involved in um teenage behavior um one piece of it has to do with with brain development but other things have to do with um with uh bad friendships or terrible hormones or awful upbringing or other things that go on um in the teenager's body not only the brain um reasoning is contrary to emotion we'll talk about that a little bit later it actually highlights the idea that you cannot make a decision without uh emotions unstructured learning is superior to structured learning um because of neurological functioning it could be that unstructured learning like discovery learning which is very much um popular these days there's a lot of merit to it but there's a whole lot of merit and explicit instruction as well so we can't uh say that the brain is better suited to one or another plasticity is a product of good pedagogy sorry just not true uh you have plastic plasticity with or without good teachers learning occurs only in the classroom we know this is absolutely false uh there's more experiences that actually happen outside of a classroom so you have to balance all these things out a student's history does not affect his or her learning absolutely false because we know that all things pass through um prior memories a student's history does not affect his or her learning which is exactly related to this point you know his um past experiences always influence new learning learning can be isolated from the social and emotional content absolutely wrong we know that uh social cognition is a huge element in learning itself and so these things are all interconnected okay um i always think that teachers we should share the same first rule as doctors um do no harm so at a minimum at a minimum you do no harm and in the best case scenario you're actually forming good critical thinkers who throughout their life are actually finding problems not only answering questions but they're actually finding new ways to look at things so um the point is that many teachers we grab on to information that exists or the the best-selling book that's out there on the shelf and we use the information blindly without knowing or without realizing how much problems are how good or bad that information actually is um we uh have developed a try trying to qualify what is good information or bad information patricia wolf in 2006 wrote a um a treatise basically saying well we actually have to look at the who what when when why of the study and whether or not it has relevance because many people writing these books about right and left brain things they say but i base this on whatever and that's fine but it studies it had absolutely nothing to do with uh with the content that it was being applied for example there's a very popular author out there who sells a book about enriched environments and he the only source he cited in one chapter had to do with nasa and i looked at the study and this was about how plants survived in outer space when they were given a certain amount of oxygen or something like that and he was claiming that this shows that kids in classrooms need light and air to to to do better on well that's probably true that you you know they have no light and they have no oxygen and they probably won't learn that's probably true they probably wouldn't be alive but it doesn't mean that that is a source for saying this is why we need enriched environments so the idea is to actually filter through these things so when we ask the delphi panel they actually came up with very specific um um filters through which you should pass the information which is explained here um also this is a basic chart you know is this a peer review study if it's not a peer review study what do we do about it how is the methodology and sort of analyzing if it is a peer review study so basically trying to determine whether or not the information you are actually using and applying uh can pass the the different um the different levels that we're talking about or to be sure that it's good information okay um also you're asked to actually rethink um the levels of thinking that that are involved in human beings and a new locate blooms stacks on me from 1956 we sort of relayed this out in a different way in a more iterative view to see how you could actually filter information against blooms taxonomy as well and that's the end of chapter four in chapter five we're actually looking what types of information came from the research right and what we actually wanted to find out in this chapter is to actually put into the context um who was actually studied and where did good studies come from so um who is studied and why basically you'll find that when you tallied up all of the different studies that exist in this new field most of the studies happened with kids zero to five now there's a lot of reasons that could occur for example the belief that not a lot of learning passed beyond the early school years might be another reason that that was the main main age group but what was kind of what was very um interesting is to see that the number of studies actually was directly correlated to age so or inversely correlated to age so there are more studies on younger kids and then there's less and less and less studies until you get through adulthood so you'll find that there's far fewer studies um on healthy adults and there are on on really young kids for example and so anyways the idea is that um we feel that this is probably going to balance out eventually but it's actually something to keep in mind because it does help us um identify that there's um maybe skewed information and that we're making over generalizations about all human brains of all ages when really a lot of the studies are coming from really little kids okay another thing we looked at um had to do with different ranges of human abilities so there were studies related to savants people who had had this rare condition where they have this island of magnificent magnificent oh they can also speak well they have an island of ability when they have also just deficits that surround them in every other way so these are going to be people who have mental retardation but who are geniuses on the piano for example we looked at gifted students as a whole and we also looked at autistic individuals um we looked at criteria for what is what would be um highly intelligent versus you know average we looked at students who had um adhd or add to see how information or attentional pathways were different from quote unquote normal people by the way a big thing about normal what is normal normal is what the average person does so the normal people will sleep it's normal for people to sleep eight hours a night but if people sleep four and a half to twelve that's also okay but the most most people will sleep eight therefore we call that normal okay we also did studies or looked at studies that were related to um people with half a brain um to actually see or this is what actually helps us dispel this idea that there is a localizationalism or certain part of the brain does a certain thing we looked at brains related to dyslexia um to actually understand how the reading brain works better because by looking at brains that are different you actually get a better idea of how to summarize or actually to look at the global information about the average as well then we also looked at um in this area what types of dimensions were looked at so we looked at different skill sets in individuals um we also looked at things that had to do with um social cognition or the idea of cognition as a whole how does one know or metacognition or metacognitive skills so theories of intelligence based on the information if any of them had backing or support from mind brain education science we also looked at the link between biological aspects of learning including neurogenesis plasticity as we mentioned earlier uh neurosynapsis which we talked about earlier as well and then very important for your group i'm i'm sure is this idea between of the mind body connection whether or not this link between things that relate to sleep nutrition exercise have an influence on the body um this is a very old old concept um back from the greeks and latin literature you also find a lot of references to an understanding that your brain can't work well if your body is not working well but again your body can't work so well if your brain's not working so well or if your brain tells your body to do something to itself that is not correct so this is a huge area of study um that's very very important because a lot of these things are outside of our own um area of influence for example how long a person sleeps or how many hours a day a person sleeps and and what would actually be good or average or normal or whatever uh how much physical exercise does somebody get nowadays with all the policies that are taking out all those things from school you don't have a lot of physical activity and hugely important is what goes into those bodies has a huge impact on the potential of the brain to learn so these things are all important but they generally outside of the realm of what a teacher or what an employer can tell the people around them i mean you can try to lead by example but it's very very hard to you know police what a person eats the studies were basically now those that's basically who was studied and and and what is it now we're talking about how things are studied how are things studied in mind brain education science basically um the two key things are through either observation or through uh measurement studies of brain activity so observation um we sort of break it down in that way we talk about neuro imaging and basic neural anatomy and anatomical structures so actually a general understanding of at least these core areas of the brain are very very useful for teachers to actually familiarize themselves with um from there we also looked at how different types of studies were conducted um what they actually measured whether electrical or chemical in terms of measuring neurotransmitters and what does the measurement of different neurotransmitters what does that mean about how you feel about learning experiences the importance of emotional states on neurotransmitters and also the concept of control like an emotion will occur but what is your reaction to the emotion so can you train yourself even though like let's say you're a navy sill and you're under water and you're part of the training is that i take off your mask and your immediate reaction to that that emotion is you know the sphere and panic and i need to get out of there well can you dominate your emotions so the idea is understanding what your body is feeling so that you can reinterpret the emotion mentally so there's a lot of studies that are in that area which are fascinating um uh learning circuits neurotransmitters talked about neuro neurological pathways as well there then we looked at different dimensions of things that are studied so theories of consciousness um are also covered in this book but very very very briefly actually telling the types of studies of consciousness that exist and the mention that we had before related to neuroethics and the information that's coming out there the types of questions we have to be prepared to answer soon that's the end of chapter five and in chapter six now okay in chapter six we're looking at human survival and uh life skills basically there are things that we need for school like math but there's also other things that help us survive in the in the world independent of whether or not we know math or not for example whether or not we can memorize things or pay attention to things um so this chapter starts out asking us basically i know how do we know about the world and you basically have to agree that you know or that you can come to an agreement that you probably know about your world through your senses basically um the main thing the main way you learn about anything is through one of your senses or a memory of that sense so if we know that's true then we have to understand basically how that works we also have to know that aside from passing information through sensory input we also pass things through a filter of culture there are things you know um not necessarily it's how you you interpret them how you interpret that sense 8 experience that actually change things so for example when somebody gets hurt and falls down and your sense of humor might be different in one culture to another or your reaction your physical reaction if somebody is harmed in front of you is different given your cultural upbringing okay this chapter looks at importance of affect empathy emotions and motivation and how those are all inextricably linked together so that if you don't have an understanding of emotions or your emotional processes or good emotional intelligence if you're not able to manage your emotions it's very hard for you to understand how you're choosing to make different decisions and your decisions are are directly linked to motivational levels so the more you spend time on something you spend time on things that you are highly motivated to spend time on so if you don't make the connection between emotion emotional states the decisions you make about what you're spending time on then you actually have a hard time identifying what is it that actually motivates you and actually spending that time is what actually helps you learn things better so the link between emotions decision making process and learning process is a very very important area of mind-brain education science this chapter looks into different issues related to motivation external motivation internal extrinsic intrinsic motivation motivational factors that relate to the other so believing that your teacher knows what he's doing has a huge impact on whether or not you actually invest in the learning experience itself which is fascinating looking back at maslow's hierarchy of needs which has sort of been vindicated now in this new look at the need to satisfy physiological needs then safety needs and social needs and esteem needs and then self-actualization needs how that is reflected in the literature and mind-brain education science the second area has to do with executive functions and decision making so how are we in control and this is with a part that we were mentioning earlier about adolescents having that their frontal lobes might not be totally developed and therefore they're not making good decisions well could be but there's an awful lot of other things that are going on that are related to bad decision making that are not just physiologically related the third area has to do with facial recognition and voice interpretation it's fascinating to realize that the human brain interprets and judges very quickly almost instantaneously whether or not we believe or trust someone by their look on their face and also by their tone of voice this has huge implications in social cognitive social cognition and also in the way we approach our classroom interactions or in our work interactions with others your words might be right but if your face or your tone of voice is is delivering a different message that actually overrides the semantics okay next area has to do with memory which is the most studied area of the human brain given all of the different studies that are possible reading attention whatever memory outranks them all by far and this has been a huge area of study and the second area that has the most studies is attention which is not not surprising because both memory and attention are vital to learning so without memory and without attention you have no learning the next section has to do with the specific field of social cognition how we understand the other this has a lot to do with this concept of theory of mind and the idea that you can best learn about yourself in the context of others so you need to know others in order to know yourself the next section has to do with spatial and sequential management how things are ordered this can be the word order in a sentence or in a formula or also order of steps that you take in processes the next area has to do with time management and temporal sequential organization skills these were terms that were brought to life by Malavine in 2002 aside from time management these are things that help you get through life you know people who have a poor estimate of time are really going to be at a loss for for survival skills in the chapter six we'll be looking at let's see in chapter six we look at i'm sorry in chapter seven we're now looking at the laboratory in the classroom or the most studied academic fields and basically the concept of this chapter the main focus of this chapter is understanding that the of the the role of diagnosis i mean it's not that we are doctors but it's a similar situation a kid comes to you and they've got a gap between what you want them to know and what they should know and so you have to analyze that gap to be able to understand how to teach or what to teach towards so understanding where a kid is having trouble or diagnosing his problem is the key is the key to actually better interventions and in the in terms of mind brain education science this is where precision comes in for example it is a crime for somebody to say a kid has a language problem unless they can be precise and say what part of language is it in a humor interpretation is it in spelling is it in writing is it in receptive skills is an expressive skills unless you can actually break that down you're not doing that child any service you're actually just labeling him with no good reason because unless you can find the sub element that has gone awry you are not able to treat that problem with any success for example a sub element of language is reading and in reading we found that there's at least 12 different uh neural pathways that are involved in the reading brain if teachers would just understand that there are these 12 different subsystems they would then be able to treat the child much better because they would be able to target the area that the child has difficulty in as opposed to just forcing him to read out loud when basically that might not be his problem maybe his problem has to do with an internal sentence processing or sequential ordering of the of the word so actually analyzing and understanding what the child doesn't know is your best bet and actually treating that problem um there's many sub skills that are related to reading and teachers have to become more aware of these things there's certain new language interventions that exist now that um I mentioned earlier fast forward ravo wiggle works these are things that are based on information in neuroscience that are being experimented with today but each one of them acknowledges that they are only dealing with a single piece for example of that reading puzzle which means that unless the teacher knows what they should be treating that kid for they might be treating them wrong if they do these interventions so you have to first diagnose and then choose the intervention the exact same process occurs with math we know that there are also at least 12 neural pathways related to mathematical skills as well once those are broken down the ideas can we help make sure that kids know each of those pieces um to be able to do the math better there are just a few uh interventions that are out there um trying to use the neuroscientific information to actually better some of these skills for example the number race is one of them but they they also acknowledge this is just to deal with one type one sub element of math so it shouldn't be over generalized um there are some studies in science the concept there's a lot of interesting information that shows that teaching science through analogies is highly highly successful other information related to art creativity how do we stimulate those areas better well the main thing has to do with breaking them down into their sub elements and then looking at the pieces that correlate with that in the neuroscientific literature um music is also included here in chapter eight we look at evidence based solutions for the classroom and actually trying to figure out what is the usable knowledge that actually comes from this um one way to do this is go to the from the classroom and back and this is actually figuring out what is it that great teachers do and these uh basically make up the core principles um that we have in mind brain education science great teachers know that each brain is unique and uniquely organized these are based on things that we have uh that have a lot of evidence behind them right so starting here on page whoa whoa so basically if we look at the principle starting on page 206 you'll get information which is very very interesting because principles are basically the pieces of information we have about the brain that serve pretty much the same way for all teachers not specific to age groups and not specific to culture these are basically pieces of information that any teacher could apply to their classroom after seeing the principles starting around page 220 you actually look at a different set of information which has to do with things that are tenants these are things that are important to all learning experiences but they're actually relative to the learners so there's a lot more human variance in this for example if we say that good learning environments are key to learning that's great but what do you consider a good learning environment what do you consider a secure place to learn or intellectual freedom there's a lot of leeway there the same thing related to sense meaning and transfer these are related to individual experiences in a constructivist way so it's very hard we know that while these tendons are true we have to know the students before we can actually say how we can apply this the same thing is that there's different memory pathways given what the past experiences of individuals are so we can't generalize those too much same thing about natural attention spans of individuals how long is an attention span event depends on the individual as well we can say in rough terms between 10 and 20 minutes is about the outside stretch for a middle school kid to be able to pay attention however different kids have different ranges the social nature of learning given a choice most people would not choose to be on a deserted island and live their lives by themselves most people choose to learn in a group situation so how do teachers take advantage of that we also know that there are different huge impact of mind-body connection that we mentioned in the earlier chapters so policies related to food or sleep or exercise within a school setting are very important the belief that there is orchestration or midwifing is goes back to our acceptance that there's a huge range of human potential and that not everybody fits in the same narrow range of average so we have to be able to deal with all different kids in our class and orchestrate their integration we realize that active processes in the classroom are very important that kids who do things actually actually actually have a better memory of those same experiences so actually getting them to actually participate in activities helps learning experiences the idea of metacognition and self-reflection and skills is hugely important but you also have to develop these individually how does a kid learn how he learns tell me johnny that was great you answered that question perfectly how did you get that answer so having a child reflect on their own processes is very important in in learning as a whole we also accept that learning occurs to the lifespan there is no critical period for any academic subject as we mentioned before you can learn math or learn to read or learn a foreign language at any other point in your life the only thing that's really important is that the order of the processes that you learn not the age at which you learn them okay in the conclusions in chapter nine we look at the conclusions and what we're basically trying to set the stage here is to actually encourage this concept of a a research practitioner a teacher practitioner somebody who's actually involved but actually is documenting their practice and this can be not only in the teaching profession but any of the professions that we're mentioning that that could be involved in the health profession for example people being able to document their research and being able to judge the quality of their information that's out there so that they can actually choose what is integrated into their own work or within their own colleagues or the students that they deal with a second point that's hugely important to emphasize is that we're leaving an undeveloped list of vocabulary just looking at the way the delphi panel had to define learning on page 233 this huge long massive definition is related to the idea that it's very hard to satisfy everybody's understanding of that concept so the idea what does the word learning mean it's a very very large long and cumbersome definition because we don't have a refined vocabulary left yet Shashank Varma and McCandless and Mark Schwartz tried to work together to actually identify why there were problems in vocabulary between neuroscientists psychologists and educators and health professionals and you know at some point you have to agree to disagree but the other idea is that you should actually try to see if there is a way that we could come closer to being able to to share enough of each other's vocabulary that we can actually work closer together to close i'll just read this last paragraph of the whole book it says to close it's worth remembering the start of this book i mentioned the insightful work of Rona de la Cessia Vanessa Christof and Christina Hinton these researchers and pioneers in mbe science noted three main characteristics of those people who will move the discipline forward first we need people who are willing to share knowledge outside of their parent discipline second we need people willing to adapt their language to a wider audience and third we need people who realize that connecting information across different fields and viewing problems with an interdisciplinary lens will end up not only nurturing their own perspectives but those of others as well and for the benefit of all these new roles for educator psychologists and neuroscientists and health professionals i would add require a level of initiative that's never been asked or requested for of anyone before while everyone may want better communication more collaborative research and shared language someone has to be the catalyst to get the ball rolling and this is an invitation to do so this means that you now armed with this information environment brain education science will hopefully be open to taking a leading role and actually getting people to share information for looking for joint research projects to try and go across cultures to actually extend hands to other people around the world to actually do comparative research on these different things i hope you feel empowered to do that and please let me know if there's any way that i can be of help in your in your research in the future again my email tracy.tukahama.com at gmail.com always open to your comments and queries thanks bye bye