 And we're going to start, but now that we know that everybody's cameras are good and everybody's mics are good, I do want to ask you when you can come in, if you would come in. Okay? Today, we are going to do the section on neural myths, and these are very, very cool. It's one of my favorite things, because to me, this is the number one big step to take in order to eliminate or increase or enhance the probability of good teaching and learning in any setting, in schools, in coaching settings, in any setting. The myths really are all over the place. In this particular semester, we created a whole new bundle on the neural myths, so I hope you can go deeper into some of the videos that are there. What we want to do today is we want to look at why neural myths exist, first of all, right? Why is it so hard to get rid of them, all right? Then we want to use, we want you guys to be more, we want everybody to be a little bit more serious shoppers, you know, very critical consumers if you go out there and you're tempted to go into a class or into a conference or to buy a book, because they really are populated with a ton of myths, okay? Then we will go over some of the myths, the most common myths that are out there. Most of you are pretty familiar with them, so we're not going to harp on them, but what we do want to do is go deeper into them, you know. Why does this still persist? You know, or where did such a myth come from? Because we want to see patterns that exist. For example, how many of you raised your hand or put a yes, how many of you have heard of this, you know, we use 10% of our brain thing? Lots of hands raised, lots of hands raised, okay. So almost all of you have heard, you know, this somewhere in the media somewhere, you heard of, you know, we use only 10% of our brains. But that is so wrong, and you know it's wrong, but where does it come from? Where does it come from? And that's what I want to do today with you guys is to talk about the myths, but also look at where these myths might originate from so that we can keep our eyes out for new myths, okay? So in the case of the 10% thing, it has a lot to do with neuroimaging. Back in the day when we first started doing all these great neuroimaging and having better machines out there, unfortunately, they would just be sort of a snapshot. They would tell somebody, name all the animals you can think of that start with the letter D, and the people would start to say something, and then here's an image that we get there. And obviously, it looks like a very small part of your brain is being dedicated to that. And so they'd say, oh, look, there's only 10% of your brain or less is being used for language, when maybe that was 100% that was needed for an adult to think of the word dog or whatever, right? So we have these misconceptions. So most neuro myths actually have roots in something that's true, but they have a lot of over-generalizations or people stretch their usage way beyond what the evidence is showing. So we want to look for the criteria there. We want to look at the common neuro myths, but we want to understand where they really come from, okay? So big idea here, we want to know where they came from, why they emerged, and then how can we actually get rid of them? And there's some initiatives that I see some of you already taking. Daniella Brave Woman in Romania is now learning all about learning styles and realizing, ah, my school district shouldn't have spent millions of dollars on this in the first place, right? This is kind of the revelation that came with the UK government realizing, oh, we shouldn't have invested a decade of money into brain jam or stuff like that. So we're coming to realize some of these things don't have as much evidence behind them as necessary, but the real problem is in education, we have this very long wait to see if anything really impacts or changes things. So Quinn and Skye and Mashal and Mia, I see your hands were raised. Were they raised for the first question, or did you want to say something else? Good to go? First question, okay. Okay, good, okay. So my premise, as you guys always know, is that I think that we all need to know a little bit more about our own brains, like we live with it and we just sort of presume things about our brain, but we really need to know far more and actually appreciate this wonderful complexity of the brain as opposed to sort of shunning it. And I think one of the things that was best said by Leslie Hart some years ago is that teachers or anybody who presumes to instruct other people any type of a trainer, you really can't design a learning experience if you don't understand this organ. So we really have to be a bit more open to this. Obviously, you guys are because you're in the class, so that's all right. So I want to hear about what you know or don't know. So if you've never heard of a one minute paper, it's a methodology designed in Stanford some years ago. It's really wonderful for putting your finger on the pulse, especially of small groups because it's easier to share. But I would like you to take a piece of paper or if you're typing notes or something like that on a Word document, whatever, fold the paper, up or down, inside out, left or right, whatever. But just on half of the paper, I'd like you to list down something you know about the brain and learning. And hopefully, yeah, now that you've been in the class a whole two weeks, a whole lot, but list a few things that you say, okay, this is fact. This is something I can actually say, I know for a fact there is a lot of evidence that this exists, right? And on the right side, I want you to list down things that you have heard of that you suspect could probably be a neuro myth or you're pretty sure they're a neuro myth, but you're not really sure where they came from. So can you take a few seconds, maybe one minute or less and just jot down at least one idea on both sides of the paper, okay? Something you know, and then something you're not sure is a myth or not, or you're sure it's a myth, but you're not sure why, okay? Any brave souls who would like to turn on their camera and tell us, maybe you don't need to tell us what you know, but do tell us the other thing. What is something you're not sure of or that might be a myth? Go ahead, Quinn, and then come on in. Sky, go ahead, Quinn. Quinn froze. No. Sky, there you are. Uh-oh, they're all gone. Kelly, go, go for it. What is something that you've heard of that might be a myth that you want to clarify or something like that? What is it? So I've heard that men are more visual learners than women and women tend to be more emotional and intuitive. Good, that's a terrible myth, thank you very much. Okay, so let's write that down in the chat box. It has to do with emotions. Men different from women. Type it in, finish typing it in there. Go ahead, CJ, what is something you've heard of? Come on in. Go ahead and turn your camera on. All of you who have your hands raised, fire in us, Andrea, come on in and let's talk. Go ahead, CJ. I think it's something like 5% of your brain is going for what you know, or I guess, all the things that you could know. 5% is what you know, 10% is what you don't know, and the other 85% are things that you don't know that you don't know. Oh, I like that, I like that. It's mathematically correct at least. Okay, got that. Will you put that into the chat board too, please? Okay, go ahead, Andrea. Okay, okay, great. So put that into the chat box, please. So different types of intelligence and when the limits on extending different types of intelligence. Put that in the chat box, okay? Go ahead, Ferdinand. Mine is the one that I read in the bond though, that it's a myth, but I'm curious why. And it's different people learn better through different channels, like some people can learn better through reading and singing, and some people better through listening. Okay, so the learning styles myth, okay? So put that into the box. And actually, Daniela's gonna help us with that because she's actually done a lot of research in that area recently. Go ahead, Kay. Mine was that we actually see the world the way it really is. That's a myth that I now have learned. Okay, so put that in the chat box. This whole subjective reality. What do I really know? Or how do I know? It's actually even a little bit different than that because I was not aware that when we see things, the different pieces of the image are stored in different parts of the brain. I thought we saw everything as a whole. Okay. You see an apple, your brain stores the entire apple as an image, but that has turned out, I have learned not to do so. Okay, great, okay. So you're not saying that's a myth. It's not a myth. What you're saying is a myth is that we see the world as it is. That's what you think is a myth. What I think is a myth is that people think. Okay. Okay. But it deconstructs it and then puts it back together again. Okay. It might be different. Terrific, go ahead and put that in the chat box. That's great. Shasia, go ahead. What's the one you think is a myth or what's the one you've heard of? I was sure about neuroplasticity because my mom learned how to use the iPhone at a stage like around 55. And I'm not sure about the 10% of your brain and also I'm not sure about the multi-tasking. I mean, is it a myth or is it not? Okay. So do put those, all of those are different ones. Put them into the chat box, please, okay? All right. And Daniela, go ahead. So you've invested a lot of money on this. Okay. And the first part was separate from the other thing. One was the learning styles, but the first one you said had to do with a dominant or domain area that you are a math person. Is that what you mean? Okay. Oh my goodness. Okay. Let's see if we can get you some good information then as ammunition that you can use to sort of maybe smoothly change some of those ideas. Thank you, Daniela. Can you put that in the chat then? But put both of those things because I think we need to talk about, especially learning styles, that's the last slide that I put because I think it's the most contentious and it's the one that many, many, many training sessions are built around, teacher training, coaching, all these things super, they always talk about and throw about learning styles and that's the one that is the most popular right now. That's why I put that at the end to talk about it in more depth because it's one that we really have to weed out pretty quickly. And Cameron's worried because he said, oh my gosh, that's my lifestyle. What are you doing? Okay. Cameron, what did you, what do you think? Is your microphone on? I think it is. Can you hear me? Yeah. So similar, yeah, similar to Daniela, I'm very curious about the learning styles part and also the connection to maybe a separate myth around Gregory Gardner's different sources of intelligence. I mean, one thing that's very big now Howard. Leadership Development is teaching people to Howard Gardner, sorry. Yeah, but one thing that's very big right now, Leadership Development is encouraging people to focus on their strengths and helping them understand that they do have different spikes and so intuitively I like this concept of different forms of intelligence and that we don't all have to be graded everything. Mm-hmm. So part of me is almost disappointed. How about if I tell you that believing in multiple intelligences is good and it is not the same thing as learning styles. That's your first little hint that will give you hope and faith and all this. But remember, this is called the theory of multiple intelligences and Howard Gardner was very clear to make note. This is a theory of multiple intelligences devised by a psychologist to be applied in education and it's a theory. He goes, and I don't pretend that there are neurophysiological underpinnings for my theory, which is fascinating. But now we're able to see that there are, as Daniela was talking about, domain area intelligence like people who seem particularly gifted for math or language or whatever. You can actually see those networks being different from other ones. Okay, so we will consider, we will look at this and we'll untangle learning styles from multiple intelligences and we'll also talk about why one is okay to believe in and the other isn't. Okay, Quinn, you've gone in and out and in and out and in and out and I have to keep enabling microphone. You're enabled now. You're enabled your video if you wanna come back in. Mashal, Anika, Mia, you haven't talked yet. Mia, can you come in here if you'd like and tell us one thing or at least some myth that you'd like to get clarified? Anika, yes, go ahead. Mia, come in. Mia, okay, so you don't have video though today. Okay, so go ahead. Okay, so that would be a myth that has to do with critical periods for learning. Okay, so can you put that in the chat box? That's a really big one. Critical periods for learning, good. Anika, go ahead. Yeah, I was told when I was in my school that there's something as a myth, not a myth. Yeah. And there's a lot to this in the historical nature of school systems. The French, the Dutch and the Germans always do this thing around just before fifth grade. They divide up all the kids and decide who's fit for college and who's not and all the rest of it. Unfortunately, there's some late bloomers out there who might have problems there. I would just answer, I'm going to answer your, I'm just gonna give you a short idea to think about but do put this in the chat box. One of the best structures I've ever seen, one of the best countries, how they manage different people and different strengths or weaknesses as we're talking about in different subject areas is Finland has decided that 100% of their students are special needs. And what does that mean? It means that they recognize that everybody at some point need something. And so maybe at the beginning of this school year you need extra mass support but by the end you're all caught up and then maybe next year it's gonna be language or whatever but everybody will learn eventually but they have their different paces and so they, when they are asked by the OACD surveys because they say what percent of your students are in special needs, they write 100%. Because they deal with everybody like, so that's my response, my short response to what you're saying but do put it in the chat because it's really interesting to see how do you nurture gifts if somebody seems really strong in an area, shouldn't we give them extra things at the same time, how do you take care of the average or everybody else? So please put that in the chat, okay? Was that what, and was that, can you say what it is that you're, say the whole thing that you're gonna put in the chat then? What would you call it, is a myth or what would you call the observation? I think it seems that harder you're asking that. Okay, great. And that's very similar, yeah, that's similar to what Daniela was saying as well, saying domain areas of talent as opposed to other areas that might be weaker. Okay, great, thank you. Michelle and Quinn, you made it in. Okay, go ahead, Michelle, what is yours? Quinn, you go ahead while she's fixing her. Can you hear me better now? Super, that's perfect now, go ahead. Excellent, sorry for the technical issues. So it looks like the two that I was gonna mention already mentioned, but going hand in hand with the idea that your brain is fixed and that it cannot generate cells as that brain damage is permanent. Good. The brain can prepare itself with practice and it can develop new, I understand probably, new neural networks, new connections and start to repair some of the damages. Excellent, so brain damage is not permanent, but also let's attach another myth to that, which is also really prevalent and really awful, is that people presume that if you were born with a difficulty, like you're born with dyslexia, for example, okay? So therefore, it's in your brain and we can't do anything about it. There's a presumption that if you have a congenital, if you're born with something, then it's fixed. Or if you have brain trauma or whatever, that's fixed that you can't, there's this lack of understanding of plasticity, okay? Good, good, very good one. Michelle, do you wanna try again? Go ahead. No. Oh, okay. So I've heard of a really weird myth, it's fixed at the border. Oh, okay. Yeah, so I've heard of a really weird myth that you have to drink six to eight bottles of water at a drink. Yeah, good. I think it's a really weird myth and it's something that my grandmother told me. Right? It's something for you. Very good, that's a great one. And that also comes from, again, when we talk about what are the roots of that? Where would that come from? Think about that. Can you put that in the chat, please? And I think that we're missing Marie and Skye. Did you guys already say something? Or did you post something? Yeah, sure. Okay. Marie and Skye, can you come in here, please? Yes, go ahead, Marie. Do you wanna turn your, yep, do you wanna turn your camera on? Yes, please, start sharing, there you go. Good, you're in the dark a little, but you're okay. Okay, a neuromint, what's the math class that kids can actually, be in a lesson for 90 minutes for 85 minutes and have that kind of attention stand? Which we're discovering, really, we can't. You know, it's a lot less than that. And yet, we expect them to be productive little beings for, you know, in great time for 80 minutes at a time. So hopefully, as more of this neuroscience knowledge gets out, you know, we start reorganizing the importance of, you know, of taking grades, of exercise, and the fact that, no, we can't concentrate for 80 minutes at a time. That's terrific. And there is something, I think you would probably know this as a great teacher, but you can readjust this, that if you, as a good teacher, you would know this already, but if you are able to change person, place, or time, you can really extend kids' attention spans, because basically, just droning on and on and on and teaching at a kid isn't going to work, right? So we'll look at techniques and stuff like that a little bit later, but I think that's an excellent myth. The myth of extended attention spans in kids. There's things you can do to extend your own attention spans, but 80 or 90 minutes, nobody goes there. So you have to change activities to do that. Good point, Marie. Thank you. Can you put it in the chat as well? The myth of long attention spans for children. Type that in, okay? Mirela, go ahead. The idea, I don't know if it's a myth. I think it's a probable truth, but anyway, I'll put it in as well. The idea that the brain learns with novelty and variety. It's a myth. You think that the brain learns with a novelty and variety? Yeah. It's actually got a whole lot of evidence that the brain needs novelty and patterns. It searches for novelty and for patterns naturally. But let's talk about that. Put that in the chat so that we can see why it could be that it seems there is evidence or you find that there's evidence against that, okay? Do list that down because that is important. Skye, did you want to come in? Skye, you've come in and out so many times and you are enabled, so please come in. Very, very interesting, yeah. And you're getting to a bigger point that we have a lot of big public policies that are built up around presumptions about things that are good or bad for kids in learning environments such as schools or all-day school or whatever. So, yeah, very interesting point. Do put that in. Type it also into the chat box if you can, okay? What I wanted to contextualize this in the modern day, I wanna remind you of the welcome video that you had about the context of education or learning environments. There are different expectations of schools, remember that, right? Now we have to really up our game all around and we have to move away from this idea of teaching in silos and all the rest of that that has a lot to do with the attention span questions that we were having coming up, right? And we're out to do bigger skills, soft skills, things that are lifelong learning skills as opposed to just teaching math or language where it seems to be a big emphasis there and also this betterment of the group. So, there's then changes in education and there's also changes in the expectations of teachers that we talked about which means that if the teachers don't get away from the myths, you get kids who actually have self-labeled based on what their teacher said. They will say, oh, my teacher says, I don't have a math brain. Even though inside of those cells, they were thinking, gosh, I love math, but my teacher tells me I'm not or whatever. So, we have to really look at this idea of we cannot pass on these myths to the kids, right? We also talked about way before we talked about the evolution and technology of the brain and so things have changed a lot and now we have a lot better information about what is going on in the brain but to make that bridge all the way over into teaching, we have to bridge educational research with neuroscientific research. And so, as I was mentioning to Daniela before you guys came in, there are now more longitudinal studies that are actually saying which of these kinds of interventions actually have a lot of, they're not doing anything to make a difference for the students, right? So, now that we have this data we're able to compare things also on an international scale and with different methodologies that we're using. So, we're coming up with better ideas about what enhances or influences teaching and learning. But as we mentioned yesterday, remember, teaching is something so young compared to the study of learning. So, we've learned a lot about how we learn but we haven't learned enough about how to teach. And so, if we get to this and we talk about getting rid of the myths in mind brain education, we look for this idea of truths, they're not really truths. If I were to ask you, do you guys think that there are such a thing as truth in science? And any science like neuroscience or learning sciences, do you think there's truth there? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's no, actually, we don't talk about truths in science. We talk about more evidence or less evidence, right? So, you can have something that is, for the lack of evidence, we don't believe it. For a lot of evidence, we say, okay, this is a truth in the field, okay? So, based on those things, we can come up with things that are, that are just not true, those would be the myths, right? And the things that are true, we have to decide then, what are we gonna use as teaching tools? And what's very interesting in the studies that I've been working with and trying to apply based on the OECD criteria things that are well-established or probably so, probably true, or things that are just intelligence speculation or things that are total myth. In doing a study that I conducted in 2008, and I'm repeating it actually this year, we compare the information that experts say is things that are things that have lots of evidence or things that are neuromists, and then we compare them with the literature. What is really well-established? How much evidence needs to exist for us to say, this is true or this is false, okay? And in doing that, when I did this with this group of experts, we found that a lot of things, of 76 things that teachers typically used in class, like kids need to drink water or people are right-brained or left-brained or boys and girls learn whatever differently. We found when we put those statements in front of them, they were able to produce evidence that showed that there were only really five well-established concepts. And most of the information out there was not very good. And most of that, not very good information, were the types of things that sold best in teaching training programs or that were parts of conferences on coaching or whatever, okay? So it's very, very dangerous. We know that what's out there is not so good. So really quickly, you guys already saw some of these, so I wanna just get a quick answer on the boards. True or false? Making decisions with a cool head and without emotions helps you think better. True or false? Or lots of evidence or no evidence? Good, good, you've only been in that class. You guys are just really good, okay, good. So we know that this is, actually it's impossible just the way the neural circuits, you have senses and all information passes through your senses and it travels up the spinal cord, goes into your brain, it's impossible for it not to make a first stop. First checks is am I in danger? First check with the amygdala which is in charge of emotional memories or help processing that. Then it goes split second, frontal lobe and back to the hippocampus for a double check. But it's impossible to avoid that emotional filter, right? So we know that all decision making is in some way colored by an emotional structure, okay? What about stress? Is stress, does stress impact learning? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Is it always bad? Is stress always bad? No, no, no, no, no, good, okay. So we know that stress influences learning both positively and negatively. This good stress is called you stress and that's like getting people alert, right? Being like on their game focused, right? But high levels of stress are terribly negative. It sort of like shuts you down. You're so worried about self-preservation that you can't think in a higher order way when you have high levels of stress. So we know that stress is both positive and negative in learning situations. The 10%, oh yeah, somebody did bring up the 10%, right? Where does that come from? Where does this idea of this 10% of your brain use come from? Anybody know? I told you at the very beginning, this is a seeing if anybody was listening. Exactly Quinn. That we used to back in the early 80s when we're just starting out here, people ran with this idea. They said, oh, there's 10% of your brain is used because of the neuro-imaging techniques that we had at the time. Now we know better. Now we have things like the connectome project and can see much more. How about the right and left brain thing? Is that one out the window for sure? Are we all, have we rejected this? I hope so. There is really nothing you do that is only isolated in one hemisphere. That would be really, it doesn't happen. It doesn't happen that way. Okay, so it's definitely false. And these brain parts do not act in isolation. All right? Sometimes they say, oh, that language is in the left hemisphere of the brain. It is true at 95% of right-handed people and 70% of left-handed people do have this very important area called Broca and Wernicke's area and the left hemisphere. And that's a hub for language, very important. But we have lots of cases of people who actually have had problems or strokes or whatever and they're able to bilaterally, they cross over. Or there's already people who already have, they use, right hemisphere is dominant in that term and has Broca's areas functions are in the right hemisphere. But we know that there's lots of other parts of language like for example intonation or interpretation of humor. Definitely a lot more right frontal lobe activity. So it's not a left or right hemisphere or left or right brain thing. It's all of these networks working together as we emphasized yesterday, okay? So learning styles. We're getting to what several of you who've talked about before. This gets sold a lot in conferences. So people learn better when they're taught in their correct learning style like some of you are visual and some of you are kinesthetic learners and some of you are auditory learners. And that is just not true. And it's not true for a couple of reasons. What would be some of the reasons that teach that learning styles is a myth? Does anybody know any of the evidence behind why this is a myth? Kelly is talking about recuperation and this is plasticity for next week. You're gonna love this. Yeah, you can reuse other parts of your brain to recuperate other skills. That's good. So about the learning styles, go ahead Cameron. Yeah, I'm wondering on the topic of learning styles I think what interests me most is could it still not yet be a practical and helpful way for teachers to improve their teaching? So by thinking that there might be different ways to reach a learner, I need to make sure that from a pedagogical perspective I'm thinking about different ways to reach the learner. So recognizing that it's a myth, could it also yet still have some level of practical value? Okay, let's- I'm playing devil's advocate. Okay, let's answer the very first question, though the first question was why would teaching to an auditory structure, why would thinking that people were visual or auditory or kinesthetic, why is that rejected especially in neuroscience? And remember the very last slides we had yesterday we talked a lot about sensory inputs. Can you think of a reason why learning styles are just something we have to say that separating people by learning styles is not the most efficient way to teach and learn because of what? Any ideas, Daniela, you got an idea? Those of you with your hands up, if you have an idea about this, come on in and say it, come on in and say it. Makes me think that actually you know so because it's different than to learn this way but actually we haven't practiced enhancing those neural types and actually develop their learning and their cognition. Very interesting. So the reason why I think that some of our students were dreaming when we applied some learning styles and maybe a different learning styles when we applied different learning styles. And we were happy that we had these two students that were combining learning styles but we never thought that they could be the natural approach to learn, applying different styles and not the easiest one of you to apply the dominant learning style in very particular language. I'm not sure I'm studying this now. Okay, have you heard of a concept called the Pygmalion effect? Okay, a bundle we have that's about teacher expectations. Very, very interesting. If you were to tell a group of students going into an exam that this exam has been particularly slanted so girls do better on it, the girls do better on it. And if you go into an exam and you tell people, oh, by the way, Asian students always do better on this test than other students, the Asian students do better on it. This idea of self-fulfilling prophecy when you expect something, when you said, well listen, since we've adjusted and we're teaching towards your learning style, you're gonna do better, you do better. So basically part of this idea is what do we tell the kids? When we're telling them learning styles, why do some kids thrive and some kids don't? It might not be, probably isn't, due to their learning style or to, because learning styles, again, you can have a cognitive preference and say, oh, I am such a visual person, but if I take you to a concert, you will shift and have a different cognitive, you will have a different preference for a different sensory mode. So you will shift that. So the key here of learning styles based on auditory kinesthetic and visual or whatever is it is impossible for you, Daniela, to turn off one of those senses. Your brain actually looks desperately to use every single means possible to get information about the world. So studies, I mean, there are a lot of studies out there that show, and trying to experiment with that. When somebody self-reports, I'm an auditory learner, I'm a visual learner, and they are specifically taught a skill set in that style. They do no better. And sometimes they do worse than when they are just taught to all sensory modes, okay? So this is one of the bigger points here. And so the self-fulfilling prophecy related to the concept you're saying some kids thrive and some kids don't. But the second point is that you can't turn any of your senses off, so learning styles based on sensory mode don't exist. We're gonna jump to Cameron's point in a minute about what does this have to do with multiple intelligences because it has nothing to do with multiple intelligences. They've just been convoluted in the literature. So go ahead, Andrea, go ahead. Excellent, yeah, good point, very good, okay? And then Mirella, did you wanna say something about this learning styles thing before we go back to finish, Cameron was gonna finish the other point about, we're gonna talk about multiple intelligences. Mirella, did you wanna say something? Uh-huh. Can you hear me? Yes. I just wanted to make it very clear the first point that Daniela touched on. But I think it's a really important thing for us to separate means from reality here. When we talk about learning styles, especially in the classroom, it's very easy for teachers to grasp the concept. And it's very easy for a teacher to put that into a lesson plan and go and teach. So I think it's very popular, it's a very popular myth here because for teachers it made a lot of sense. But they were looking towards themselves and not towards students, right? Good point. And I think also Daniela said something that why do these things persist? And one of the things is that it's hard for people to embrace the complexity of the brain. And a lot of people would, she was telling us earlier how easy it is to apply a formula, let's do this test, let's classify a kid and let's use certain methodologies based on that style or whatever. That's easy and it makes teaching sound super easy. But it's not that easy, right? It doesn't ever get down to being that easy, right? Okay, and Mia and Marie, did you want to say something about learning styles? And Cameron come back in here so you can finish your, we can talk a little bit more about multiple intelligences. Go ahead, Mia or Marie. You have to talk a little louder, Mia. It's an excellent point, exactly. So the idea of teaching to multiple sensory modes is excellent, excellent. And I guess, and I'll just jump to the point about what Gardner was saying. He said that the one thing that he has contributed to all of this is that he's reminding teachers to use multiple entry points to the information for their students. Do some things that are visual, some things that are auditory, do some things that, you know, do some things that talk to a math oriented brain or that would speak to somebody who cares so much more about language, but varying those activities, just checking off the multiple intelligences makes no sense at all, but it does remind teachers to think about multiple modalities of teaching the same thing. So what you're saying, Mia, is excellent. And that is highly recommended. Pigeon hauling people into a learning cell is not good. Teaching to multiple sensory modes is good, right? That can only be, it's only like rehearsing the same information through distinct pathways. If you talk about colors, then you paint something, then you spell the colors, and you write a story about it, then you do those multiple repetitions and distinct formats are in slightly different, though sometimes overlapping neural pathways, which makes it easier to recall. If you only put something in your head one way and one way only, you have to find it precisely. But if you have multiple entry points for the same information, the likelihood of retrieval is higher. Maria, did you want to say something, please? Go ahead. Yeah, just quickly, just that probably became debunked as a myth when we started looking at imaging and starting realizing that when people experience something, then the brain fired in all kinds of different directions, automatically, like looking for memories, looking for patterns, looking in all directions with the auditory memory, and that when we start firing all over the place all the time, no, it wasn't just firing in one direction. Secondly, I would slightly disagree that this idea of learning styles made the teaching job easier. I think on the contrary, we just, you know, made it more complicated than we had to do five different lesson plans, a more odd sort of one, and then, you know, let's do the visual one. What do you know, my kid is a kinesthetic one. What did you do for me today? I'm not gonna make a kinesthetic thing. So I think it's just complicated and alive. Probably what teachers always did, which was to appeal to all the modalities we thought even realizing it. So I think sometimes these theories just complicate their lives, that teach and get mailed and all, well, then your lesson plan, I don't see anything about the auditory learner in here. What can I do about the kinesthetic? Wow. Well, I think though, there is some sense to, yeah, I think it's, there is something beneficial though to reminding teachers that they should have multiple ways of doing something. That can be a positive. The negative is saying that you have five, you have to have five different lesson plans. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, you know, but that's it. It helps with being imposed on us in the elementary level. Good point, thank you. Okay, so one of the big problem here is that many of the things that teachers are trained in are many of the things that we hear in training programs are myths. You know, multitasking is a myth. We haven't talked about that enough right now, but the, some great studies and some things that Todd Rose has looked at over in the Harvard Graduate School of Education that you guys should have a look at. You have a certain amount of tension and yes, you can expand that a bit and you can have a bit more working memory, but the point is you seriously cannot, there's no such thing as multitasking and there's several articles that are in the neuro myth bundle that I'd like to ask you to have a look at. Learning styles, language acquisition, old people can't learn foreign languages, that kind of thing, right brain, left brain, that we need to have, all kids need to be in these terribly environmentally rich, stimulated, you know, pay for early childhood stimulation classes as opposed to just, you know, talking or cooking with a kid or whatever, right? The male, female brain things, or blaming a medium like the internet for making you dumber or smarter, all of these things are quite mythical and we have other myths that have to do with general intelligence, right? Mental capacity is hereditary and cannot be changed. Myth, right? The idea of architecture of the brain, how the brain is actually wired up, the more we learn about technology in the brain, the more we can see that we've been incorrect about what we used to presume are now known as the neural networks or pathways. There's also myths about teaching, teaching practices, for example, I don't know if anybody heard of the Mozart effect, but, you know, playing classical music will help people along, right? Or this idea, you know, reine de carte, you know, the people that are born, you know, you're born with an empty slate. All we have to do is fill that up with good information. That's just not on. The idea of multitasking, the idea of brain plasticity as Quinn was bringing up here, it extends much farther beyond than we ever thought before. We used to think things were limited to times. And this one idea of critical periods, I think, is quite important that we talk about. There are, and we talked about, please have a look at the plasticity video. Are there critical periods? This will be in week four. Or are there just sensitive slopes? The only things, after talking to the Delphi Planel about all of this, the only thing that they could agree on that might be a critical period would be for your first language, not for second language, and also for gross motor skills like walking. However, it is unethical to test this. I can't say, you know, Mia, lend me your child for the first eight years of her life and let me put them in a forest and I'll, you know, when they come back, I'll see if they have language. We can't ethically test for these things, even though we have some cases of feral children and stuff. So we can't test for these things. So, but we think that there are no real hard facts. We know what, for sure, is there's no critical period for anything you learn in school. And that is a big deal. I hope that we can talk more about that later. There's also a myth about how the brain is connected in different parts, how emotions influence learning, and that things about language, which I'm very passionate about. If you remember, if you recall our bundles, there's a new bundle on Neuromiths that was just created this year and I actually just updated about half an hour ago, so I hope there's a lot more videos there that you can have a look at. So what we're gonna do is go back now. Annika, Cameron, Kelly, are there myths that we didn't talk about or are there explanations or ideas that we wanna explore further? Annika, please come in here and talk and Cameron do the same. Kelly as well. Annika? I questioned you before about the language map and the myth. And for some people it seems easier to learn and understand. What's the take on this? What's very, very, it's fascinating right now. The more we learn about math and the more we learn about language, the more you see that they share similar pathways. So for example, in understanding symbolic representation, in understanding order, in understanding patterns, in understanding relationships or categories, all those things are involved in language and math, and so you'll see similar pathways, which is what we mentioned yesterday, why people who would have dyslexia, there's a really high probability they'll have dyscalculia just because of these similar pathways for shared things. So for more things, they are more similar than they are different, which is a very interesting thing. Kids thrive in environments, especially everything always returns down to the quality of the teacher, unfortunately, right? Or being told, for example, in Daniela's example, already early categorization of people and telling them you're good at math or you're bad at math or whatever, can have a lasting effect on the individual. The number one thing influencing student learning outcomes is the student's own self-perception as a learner. I can do this. If for some reason they feel along the way that they have, and they're told, you're not good at this, that is a spiral downward. So the first failure leads to additional failures, lead to additional failures. So failure begets failure, but success begets success. And the difficulty is this early categorization of kids are telling them they're good or bad at one thing or another, already stunts the probability that they will do better later on. So telling a kid, oh, you're not so good at art, are you? When this kid was a budding artist, but changing his own self-perception as an artist will lower his rehearsal, he will stop doing it, which means he won't get better at it, right? So the two answers there. One is that the neural pathways are more similar than they are different. Number one, number two, a lot of it has to do with the way we instruct, I believe, much more than the abilities of the individual learners. Because if you do have a potential for one thing, you can have potential than others. There are very different types of talents, though, in each of those fields. Spatial rotation, for example, is something unique to math as opposed to in language. So there are things that are very separate as well. There's a lot of prosody, like in poetry and stuff like that. Unique to language, not in math. But there are multiple overlying pathways as well. So I would have to say, people are not either good at language or math, but they are the backbone to every other piece of learning. So it is important to hopefully nurture both of them. Yeah. But now you can go, but now, ripple effect. Now you can help somebody else know who will help somebody else now. After this course, I will take the math course. Good for you. Same thing. I was the same thing. I always thought I could never do math. And all of a sudden, I had, you know, my dad was a great math teacher, but I never had him as a teacher. But I didn't have great math teachers. But you have the brain to do it. You can do it. You'll be able to do it. Okay. They could be it. It is failure begets failure. The problem is if you had just one person who stopped and said, hey, I know you might think this is hard, but guess what? I know you can do it. I know that, you know, you gotta, let's look at it from this other way. Try it a different way, right? And I bet, you know, you've got the brain to do it. It's not like you're limited or people have this space in math that's blocked off from you. You have access to it. Yeah. Take the math class. Okay. Okay. Cameron, go ahead. So, Cameron. If there's time to just get to understand what the myth is around drugs and alcohol, is intuitively I would have imagined that it would have a negative impact on learning. And I'm curious to hear what the clarification is there. The quick clarification, if we go, you'll see this when we talk about neuroethics. There are actually drugs, neurotropics that are really good for you and they can really help you focus. So it's not like drugs is always bad for you. Drugs can actually help you learn, which is really scary. And we'll talk about this in the neuroethics part of the class. So it's anytime you have an extreme, these are all good or all bad, that's generally a myth. Okay. Okay, Skye, did you wanna say something? And then Skye was here before and then Kelly, you were there and then Daniela. Go ahead. Skye, are you around? Yeah. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, can you hear me? Yep, uh-huh. Alrighty, so I was just wondering about the influence of preconceived notions around certain students. So for example, children who are of single-parent homes or from disadvantaged communities, do you think that the pygmalion effect has come into play here in the self-sufficiency and time people that they are meant to achieve less and therefore will? Absolutely. For the most part? Absolutely. And this is in the research that John Hattie has done. It's also, you'll find a lot of these sources in your bundle. There's a bundle called HOME. It's influences on and there's also a bundle called teacher expectations and learning outcomes. Both of those have examples of exactly what you're saying, self-fulfilling prophecies and it's unfortunate, very unfortunate. It could be powerful, if you turn it around, you say you can do it, but it can be negative on the other side. Okay, we have some very quick questions because we are getting right to our time limit. Kelly, quickly and then Daniela, quickly. Go ahead. My question was around the critical learning periods. I, you had said that that doesn't really exist but I was reading a wrap study that said that if you mechanically blind the mice during like a sensitive critical learning period, they may never learn to see. So are there periods like very early on in development and that just doesn't, by the time you're older, it doesn't really matter anymore or is that not even true in early development? No, that is true. And it has to do with the sensory perceptions which is why motor coordination tends to be there. It's very, very rare that you would blind like us, put a patch on a small child just to sort of see what happens, right? So we can't know with real children. We've done it with kittens, rats, you've done it with other small rodents, but it's not an ethical thing to do with children. But we do believe that sensory perception, if it's not exercised in the earlier years, definitely. And within one year, for sure. And it's shown, there is, I can't remember who showed the study. It's in one of your videos but it does show that a certain, I can't even remember if it was seven months or 13 months but definitely somebody who is not, for example, if you were in a cave and for the first seven months of your life you never saw light, your sensitivity, you would not be able to do sensory input. So certain sensory input channels can be stunted by lack of activation but almost never do we have young children deprived of all sound or all light or all whatever, whatever. You can have huge cases of neglect where they don't get a lot of interaction with anybody or whatever or they tend to spend a lot of time in home or whatever. But we don't have these extreme cases. So we can presume, yes, that those things are definitely, there is a critical period for early stimulation in these sensory areas, in their sensory area. Gross motor skills and language are these key areas but there's almost no evidence of the sensory deprivation in human beings. So you have the rat studies and these are really good to go by but it's very, very difficult to prove that in a human being. So we could say that those things, go ahead. I would say I think there is one case, a documented case of a woman who was pretty much locked in a closet and had really no interaction and they found her as a adult and she never learned to speak. But that was the thing, genie, but she didn't, it wasn't a problem with learning to see or learning to any, she had other types, she had sensory stimulation but she didn't have language. So those three big areas, right? Early sensory perception are things where it's really hard to test because we don't have those cases, right? Then you have gross motor skills like walking which we see in the case of the Romanian orphans who are trained to their beds who didn't move a lot so they really didn't get gross motor skills and then language and you have many cases, not many, you have a dozen cases of these extreme cases like genie, this girl who was locked away in a room and tied to basically a toilet for many years of her life and nobody talked to her, she was just maintained there. So she could see, touch, smell, feel, she had the sensory things. She didn't walk very well, she was very awkward and she didn't ever learn to talk very well. So even after many, many years of interaction she still only reached a very low level of speech. But then again, right after where she's put into another foster home and another foster home and she just never had high quality intervention. Okay, so we're gonna have to stop in one minute. Go ahead, Daniela. My question is. That's not necessarily a myth but there is something called, and it's very, very important, called fossilized errors. And a fossilized error is like a fossil. It's in there, it's like cement, it turns into stone. So a child who learns poor sentence patterns over and over and over and over again, you know how hard it is to break a fossil? You could eventually break that and relearn it but it's much harder to unlearn that than it is to learn a whole new language. So unfortunately, yeah, bad exposure to an early age is a negative. Could be, highly motivated, yeah, highly motivated individuals will spend more time on task so it could be, that could be positive emotional connection to the language could motivate some people more to improve or to spend more time on task, definitely. Never say never and never say all of them and all the extreme cases. There definitely can be exceptions to this but in general, kids who learn something incorrectly will repeat that forever and ever unless they are explicitly taught how to break that. And that's why people can have all kinds of other difficulties that come up with other things, not just academic things but also with emotional traits as well. Okay, just for time's sake and to honor your time, all of you who it's getting later. All right, I'm gonna stop the recording and I'll keep taking questions for anybody who wants to stay in, okay?