 In terms of brain function and learning, Punkage described earlier how the learning that takes place in classrooms is fundamentally about memory formation and that one way of understanding the difference between surface and deep learning is to think of it as short-term versus long-term memory. And certainly that's a way of understanding learning from a neuroscience perspective. But a prerequisite for memory, for learning, is attention. To form a memory, information first has to get into the system and be encoded properly. This is about selective attention, something teachers know a bit about already. In terms of young learners, it's helpful to understand that the brain is very much still developing. So the frontal cortex, for example, is still myelinating. The myelination process is associated with how efficiently information is transmitted through the brain. The nerve fibres, the axons that connect one area to another, are still being insulated. The efficiencies of information transmission are still developing, not only in the early years, but well past adolescence into the early 20s. In addition to understanding what's going on in the developing brain of a young learner, I think there are several other helpful lessons that neuroscience can offer teachers and be really empowering. First, it's critical to understand that the brain is a complex network of parts. If one part of the brain is selectively engaged or compromised, there'll be knock-on effects for other parts. So while different brain areas might be responsible for their own particular function, basic perception, language, or memory, how well these areas function depends on the integrity of the other parts of the system, a bit like a railway network. So while there are specific parts of the brain that regulate attention, the capacity to pay attention doesn't involve just that brain part, but many parts. Everything is connected to everything else. Mood, for example, is a very potent modulator of attention. People who are depressed can be quite poor at regulating their attention. People whose prefrontal cortex is compromised due to a stroke or head injury will have impairments of executive control, which means difficulty regulating their own behavior. And certainly young learners are still developing executive control. So they can often be more easily distracted because of this still developing top-down control. A person with compromised or still developing executive control will find it very hard to stay focused on the here and now. They are much more likely to be distracted from the task at hand by their internal thought processes or by extraneous sensory events in the external environment. This can impair the encoding of information, which is what you need to learn something new. In terms of attention, cognitive neuroscience, which combines behavior and brain studies, tells us that there are different kinds of attention, and these different kinds of attention run on completely different circuits. The analogy of crossing the road is a good way of understanding this. You know you need to check that there are no cars coming before you cross. This is voluntary attention. You engage in particular behaviors to check what's happening in the environment, and once you determine it's clear, you engage in decision-making processes and step out to cross the road. If at that moment there's a loud sound, like the honking of a horn, that's a kind of circuit breaker. That's the environmental monitoring system, which we call salience. Now those two forms of attention run on completely different circuits. We know from brain imaging studies that those can be impaired independently, so damage can affect the voluntary system, but leave the bottom-up environment-driven system untouched, or vice versa. So another way neuroscience can be really helpful to teachers is knowing that there are specific neural circuits involved in regulating attention and neural markers of a person's readiness to encode information. When looking at brain activity in learners just before they're about to engage in a task, that pre-tasked brain state is quite predictive of whether that person will later encode and remember that information. Metacognitive and mindfulness training tasks can be very helpful for putting learners into that ready-to-learn state, allowing them to encode information so they can retrieve it later on. Another understanding of brain function that can be useful for teachers is that the brain fluctuates in its readiness to take on information. For attention, it's important to provide chunks of information during periods when the brain is in an up-state rather than a down-state. Again, most teachers already have an intuitive sense of this and use this to identify whether or not a student is focused. But neuroscience allows us to track these up- and down-states in brain activity and correlate those optimal states of learning with later recall. Techniques like EEG can give us a physiological readout of things like readiness that would not be apparent from observation alone.