 Hi, this is Tracy Takahama Espinosa. Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you a little bit about mind-brain education and getting rid of neuro myths in teacher practices. Mental capacity is hereditary and cannot be changed by the environment or experience. Totally a myth, right? We know now that you are born with a set of genes and they can be potentiated based on your environment. So based on this balance of what you inherit and what you do with it, what your environment does is important. We have a real problem though with correlation and causation here because somebody who might be born into a certain socioeconomic situation, for example, and that fellow doesn't even graduate from high school, and then he has a kid who also doesn't graduate from high school. So we think that while that kid is inheriting that father's genes, maybe he's just inheriting his circumstances. He went to bad schools, nobody motivated him to go to college or whatever. It's not that his genes caused him to have that level of intelligence. It's actually the opportunities that were more influential there. So this is definitely a myth. Intelligence is fixed at birth and not fluid. Totally unsubstantiated. We know none of us would be in education if we actually believe this, right? Intelligence is fluid. It changes throughout the lifespan. Most people use about 10% of their brains. Not true, as we mentioned before, based on old technology. We used to think that. We used to say, get in the brain scanner. Okay, name all the animals you can think of that start with the letter D. Okay. And then we take this kind of a neuroimaging and we'd say, look, he's using 10% of his brain to do that. When it might have been 100% of what was necessary to say the word dog, right? So now that we can see throughout the whole process, it's not just in singular take, but it's over time, we can actually see how those networks work together to come up with that word dog. We can see that we're using a lot more than 10% of our brain. The left and right hemispheres of brain are separate systems for learning. Not true. Brain parts work in isolation from each other. Not true. It's not that you have like spatial abilities and creativity in one side and then logic and math in another. Just not true. Okay. That some people are more right brain and others are more left brain is not true. There's actually nothing that you do that only uses one of your hemispheres. Okay. Your brain will shrink if you don't drink six to eight glasses of water day. Okay. It's intelligence speculation because so much of the brain is made up of water. You think, okay, that makes a lot of sense. It's just not true. Our brain acts like a video camera. We store and make a memory of everything we see. Just not true. We store memories that we have paid attention to. So the combination of attention and memory leads to learning. But if you have not paid attention to something, you will not be able to store it in long-term memory. Drugs make holes in your brain. If this was used metaphorically, it's okay to give pep talks to kids about this. But there are some commercial ventures that literally sell people the idea that drugs are making holes in their brain. And they actually show, you know, doctored up pictures of holes in brains. Not true. Not true. If you had a hole in your brain, you'd be dead. Individuals learn better when they receive information in the preferred learning styles, as we mentioned before. Not true. Used a lot to promote and sell products, but it's just not true. The theory of multiple intelligences is validated by neuroscientific research. No, it's not. Good old Howard Gardner even accepts. This is a psychological theory applied to education, but it's not validated by neuroscience. Okay. Drill and kill promotes learning, repeating, repeating, repeating. It's important to repeat, to reinforce connections in the brain so that you can retrieve information quickly. But drilling all the time does not mean, that does not lead to more meaningful learning. It can lead to a type of mindless repetition of information, a mindless memorization of certain things. But it doesn't mean you know it. A squared plus B squared equals C squared. Okay. You can say that over and over again, you can memorize it, but it, and you can drill it until you remember the formula, but it doesn't mean you understand it. It doesn't mean you learned anything. High stakes testing are an accurate measure of what a student knows. Unfortunately, we've put a lot of money, a lot of stock, into wanting to measure how people grow and learn. And unfortunately, they are not always the best measure of what people really know.