 Welcome to the Montessori Family Life webinar series. I'm Lorna McGrath and I'm your host. I'm so glad that you have joined us today. If you are returning, welcome back. If you're new and I saw a bunch of new people sign up for this week's session, welcome. We're glad you found us. We have an exciting topic today that we'll get going with in just a minute. So Cheryl Allen is with me today. She works with me at the Montessori Foundation. We work together on the Montessori Family Alliance. And so I'm very glad, Cheryl, you're here today. And she is gonna introduce Tracy to you because she is taking a class that Tracy is instructing. And so she knows Tracy better than I do. So I'm gonna turn it over to you, Cheryl. Well, I'm so glad to have Tracy join us. Tracy is a professor at Harvard since 2014 and the author of many books. I asked her specifically to join us because I took neuroscience of learning with her, which was just enough for me to know that I don't know enough to share. We thought it would be a lot to learn. So she wrote a book called Neuromiths, Debunking False Ideas About the Brain. And as I said, one of many, but this one I think is really helpful to us as teachers and parents because we get a lot of information that isn't maybe 100% accurate. And she wrote this because the president, I think, of the International Mind, Brain and Education Group said this is the most helpful thing to do is give people the correct information because it's hard for all of us because of the way our brain works to take new information that might, we might acknowledge that it's true, but it's hard for us to replace the information that we've had for a long time in the way that we act on a regular basis. So thank you so much for joining us and sharing because we hear Neuromiths all the time. Thank you, Cheryl. And it's great to be here with all of you. I would just love to reiterate what Lorena said at the beginning. If you do have, many times people come to talks like this because they do have burning questions in the back of their mind or things that they've been told during our class with Cheryl, there was a teacher who mentioned, this is crazy, I just got this from my kid's school and it was riddled with a bunch of Neuromiths, things about learning styles or boys and girls or people who might be right or left-handed or things that have to do with 10% of their brain or that they have lizard or reptilian brains. A lot of information that gets strewn around in the popular press have been used, maybe metaphorically to sort of help people understand the brain but people take them literally. And this is a real problem that we have in education. Specifically, the main reason I wrote the book on Neuromiths as Cheryl alluded to is that the International Mind-Brain Education Society was putting out a lot of great information for teachers and parents about high quality information. This is really how your brain learns. This is what we should be doing. But what they were realizing is they were still coming up with roadblocks to implementation, mainly because people were hanging on to some of these mythical beliefs that just sort of clashed with their general understanding of information. And so the president at the time, Daniel Ancer, she said to me that it's the one thing we could do to improve education right now would be to just clear the stage, get rid of all of these neuromithical beliefs about the brain and how it learns. And then it would give us a clean stage to work with and people would be able to approach and take on the good information without these mental conflicts that we often have because we've heard some things for so long, we believe that they've got to be true. And if they're not, this conflict is very hard. We also see research that shows teaching people about neuromiths does not make them go away. So basically being faced with the evidence is one thing, but you have to have your own mental buy-in. And a lot of that has to do with these deep down, deep seated experiences or values. For example, if somebody in the audience has been told since the fourth grade, oh, you're a visual learner, it's really hard for you to let go of that idea that there are no such thing as learning styles. Your brain really wants to receive information from all of its senses in order to understand the world. And so talking through it is part of the idea and also helping you identify where is it that that comes from in your own life? Why is it that you believe that? So that you can begin to let that go and buy into some of the more high quality information. The main reason that we really care about neuromiths is that every single one of them does harm. And I believe that one of the first rules of educators and parents very much like physicians is to do no harm. We need to have good information and we need to protect those around us. And we need to help kids. We know that some terrible consequences of neuromiths is that kids even by the early age of second grade already have self-categorized. I am good at math. I'm a bad reader. They already decide, self-images based on things that they're hearing from us. So what we need to do is to sort of help them have a better understanding of how their brain really works and also the possibilities of what their brains can do and just sort of loving this idea of neuroplasticity and how we can always make those changes. There is no such thing as a fixed state of intelligence and that we can always get better. All of those things are part of this idea of getting rid of neuromiths. And so that would be sort of my introductory remarks. And I'd love to lead off, if possible, with some of you sharing maybe something you think you know about the brain and something you'd like to learn about the brain. If there are things that you're wondering, is this really a myth or not? For example, I've heard women are better at multitasking. Well, guess what? Multitasking is a myth. There is no such thing as multitasking. Your brain can only do one heavy cognitive load thing at a time. So if you wanna dig into that, we can talk about that. Other ideas about people being right-brained or left-brained or other things are maybe explaining a little bit further of this idea of learning styles. Any of those kinds of myths, I'd love to dig deeper but I'd really like to take your lead. So for those of you in the audience, if you do have specific questions, I'd love to jump off on that. If not, I have 70 myths I can share with you but I prefer to just sort of go from your starting point if possible. So, Cheryl, do you have any favorite myths that you wanna talk about? Well, I will say one that I just encountered that I feel like, I thought in Montessori, we don't encounter very much but a former student just posted something on Facebook about how bad she was at math to which I needed to respond. You should not be friends with your teachers if you wanna be a very strong mathematical mind. You need to remember that. She was like, okay. I think that that whole idea, one of the really fascinating things now about this field of mind-brain health and education is that we're now nurturing ideas that we had maybe from education or from psychology and now we now have support from neuroscience. For example, Carol Dweck has been talking about growth versus fixed mindsets since the 90s but it wasn't until she actually laid into the idea of how neuroplastic your brain is that it is possible. Your brain changes every day. So why wouldn't you be able to talk yourself out of this fixed state of I'm bad at math? And so basically getting support from neuroscience has really short up some of the psychological theories that we've had and also sort of worked their way into life. One of the best things that parents can do is to help their kids feel that they have possibilities, that they can do and be whatever they want. You might have heard Lerner in the old days we used to say, nature versus nurture, that was what you were. We don't say that anymore. We now talk about nature via nurture plus free will because we know that it's via nurture because only a small percentage, about 10% of your genes are actually potentiated by the environment you live in, by the schools you go to, by the family you live in. So this means that all the good genes you get aren't even getting an even chance of being used and becoming who you are. It's really a lot to do with the environments that we put kids in. But we also add on this piece of free will because there is choice in big studies on resiliency and looking at kids who have terrible nature and terrible nurture, lousy home life, lousy possibilities but they still come out on top and you wonder where did they get that sense of resilience? Where does that come from? And that mainly comes from usually a single caregiver that makes that kid believe in himself and tell him you have a choice. You don't have to be stuck here. You can be more than that. You don't have to have the math brain you think you were born with. You can change that. So the idea of free will means that you get to choose in part what you are. And so that's a really powerful combination. Nature via nurture plus free will is a new way to sort of look at the potential that individuals have. And so that's a big piece here. I'm not sure if there's any questions coming up that we need to be looking at right now or... There's a comment Tracy. Our people just put in, she put in a myth. At least that's what she thinks it's a myth. I think it probably is too, but you'll tell us. She said, we are all wired differently. And I would say, is that a myth or is that not a myth? Well, that's really telling of all myths. Most myths have some grain of truth to them which is why they end up having a life of their own. But this over generalization of the statement is what really turns things into myths. We know that there are no two brains that are identical. Because the thing that really changes your brain, even if you have, for example, if we say, your brains are as similar as faces. Well, everybody has two eyes and two nose and one mouth. And okay, so there you go, you have similar parts but we don't have identical faces. And even if you had identical twins, your brains are not identical. And why would that be? Because we don't have exactly the same life experiences and life experiences slightly change the neural networks in the brain. And one side of it, your brains would be different. There are no two identical brains, but having said that brains are much more alike than they are different. And so this is why in neuroscience, you can talk about typical patterns of how someone learns to read. Because over looking at multiple studies of multiple people and multiple cultures, you see certain neural networks are always in play. And so we can talk about, we can generalize about curriculum, for example, what could or should be taught because of those types of things. But we know that not everybody's gonna take in that information in the same way. So to a certain extent, the idea that we're wired differently is absolutely true. But at the same time, in general, the typical neural networks for learning to read, for example, or to do math problems is similar. So those are not so drastically different. So both things are true there. And that's why you have this gray area that you have to sort of tip-toe around to make sure that you're clear on what we mean by that. Some teachers, when you say, there's no two brains that are identical, think, oh my gosh, I have to do an individual lesson plan for all kids. Well, first of all, you should be treating them all differently anyways, but the nice of that, you can typically have a general structure to courses which everybody's gonna follow, but understand that different people are taking in that information in slightly different ways because of their prior experiences. In fact, one of the only constants in understanding intelligence is that what you know influences what you can know in the future. So the more life experiences you have, the more connections you can potentially have to other things. And so prior experiences is huge. And this is also very big for Montessori schools, right? When people talk about chronological age of a person, all three-year-olds should start school at this time or do whatever, or seven-year-olds should be able to do whatever, that's kind of crazy. We know that ages, chronological ages, are very distinct from cognitive stages of development, but neither of those is as important as prior experience. The experiences a person has really influences what they can potentially do in the future. And so it's not your age that matters, it's really your experiences that matter when it comes down to learning. I think education, I think of that partially as vocabulary, like that seems very clear to me when somebody knows the vocabulary of something, they can learn, they can learn more about it. That's how I, when I first encountered that, I thought, oh, that makes sense. This is where I see it. Yeah. And that's a huge part of humanness. This is why we always make this parallel. We've always used language as a proxy for intelligence, because knowing the names of things, labeling things. This is when it gets into your mind, this is mental schema, how do you, the more dogs I know, the better I understand the word dog. Well, when we talk about this in terms of human growth or individual growth, the more different kinds of people I know, the better I whittle away at my own self. I know who I am by knowing the other. So knowing a great number of different types of people, people who eat things that are different or speak in a different way or whatever, that helps me understand myself better. Just as, in parallel, by being able to label something, what you call a dog then now grows in your own understanding because you know more dogs. You don't just know the stuffed dog, a German shepherd and a poodle or different ways of understanding help you grow your general base for new learning in the future. Wow. Tracy, we've got quite a few people that wanna talk here. Great. We have someone who has said, is there a good way to trick your brain to think positively? I heard we are wired to have negativity bias. Well, that's another neuro myth that it's very beneficial to air on the side of caution, which can look negative. For example, an innate bias that humans have is that we understand and interact with others more successfully who look exactly like us. Why? Because the face we are used to interpreting is our own. So basically, we are able to read emotional cues far more successfully on faces that look like ours than if they don't look like ours. And so in habituated practice, what there's a horrible study, a wonderful horrible study that shows that if we look at cultural neuroscience, you find that young female white women typically misinterpret older male black faces in their intent. Mainly because it's better be safe and sorry and I'm going to be afraid before I'm going to be empathetic or helpful. And so it's also a shorter circuit in the brain. Fear is a really short neural circuit in the brain. It's really easy to do. And it's mainly because it helps us in survival. It's better to be safe than sorry. So people typically air on the side of these quick generalizations and our biases that are baked in, that's a shorter path of thinking than to labor over something and take it apart and understand this is in part, I don't want to get political, but this is why politicians who make you fearful of things get you to do things faster than politicians who try to make you empathetic towards others. So people make quick decisions based on fear more than anything else. Now you asked about negative versus positive thinking. One of the very interesting ideas here is that while your brain goes into what's called default mode, like when you're not thinking about anything in particular, you generally link ideas together. Well, when you go into a negative spiral, that's called rumination and that's very negative and that's very bad, right? However, you don't have to go there with your negative thinking. Part of the idea is to sort of cut yourself off, give your thoughts a place on a piece of paper and let that live there and not in your headspace where you're only bouncing around negative ideas. The other thing is to give yourself exposure to counter ideas or things that don't go against that. Habituated ways of thinking positively are just as easy to cultivate, but they are part of, again, habituation means that you do this repeatedly so that your natural go-to place is not to the negative, your natural go-to place could be the positive, but you do have to habituate this way of entertaining your own thoughts, not allowing yourself to be pulled down by yourself in that sense. This is also another reason why COVID was really powerful and because people were isolated and in that they spent a lot more time with their own headspace than they did with others. One of the most successful therapeutic things to come out of COVID, believe it or not, is something called talk space that had to do with just letting people talk to other people, which was pretty fascinating and it was so good for mental health because the minute people started to try to express something to somebody else, it wasn't that bad. Once it's out there in the world, it's a lot less of a downer than just ping-ponging in the negative space of your head. This is why we say, talk it out with somebody, let somebody else hear it. It's very interesting that even just by getting kids, nudging them to talk about things. And no, no, I don't want to talk about it. No, but let me know because I want to help. I see you look pretty sad today. What could trigger that? And the second they hear themselves say something so silly as, oh, I don't know, I was just a little bored and then all of a sudden they realize, well, that's not a reason to be down. All of a sudden they hear a different voice when they try to explain it to the other. So we know that this human dynamic, this interaction is really huge for mental health. And so there is no necessarily a greater tendency to go to the negative, except for that self-preservation angle to it. So there might be a little tip there, but you can habituate a more positive way of interacting with the world for sure. All right, thank you. Erin says, does neuroplasticity influence emotional growth as well as academic learning? And she has a second question, which is, does this overlap to the emotional experience and development? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and in multi-directions, right? Neuroplasticity is everything. Your brain cannot not learn. You are on a daily basis creating, you know, 100 more new neuro connections than you are losing. You're always losing connections as well, things that are inefficient, you lose them, but you're continually growing and making new connections between ideas. These are physical things you can actually measure in the development of your brain. So that's one side of it. You are always neuroplasticity is the explanation for all learning that occurs. And that is both emotional as well as cognitive learning. Okay, so self-understanding or information about your own emotive state is also carried there. But another huge piece coming out of mind, brain health and education, is that there is no cognition without emotion. In fact, physiologically speaking, your brain is always, you know, sensory perception. You're perceiving your world and those sensory perceptions go up the base of the brain. And the first thing that your brain does is check for memory systems. Do I already know something about this? And this includes emotional memories as well as at this cognitive level or semantic understanding of things, right? And so basically, the first thing your brain does is try to figure out, do I already know something about the new information because that will save me energy and your brain wants to save energy. So it's trying to figure out the shortcut way. Well, if I already know something about the new information, I'll latch it onto that. And if not, I'll have to forge a new neural connection. But basically all that is to say that there's no way that anything you do can be solely cognitive or solely emotional. It's always passing through both almost simultaneously. And so basically there is no cognition without emotion but also emotions are generally processed cognitively. And so both things are influential. I think another thing that your listener might be interested in knowing is that emotions and feelings are not the same thing. Emotions are a physical state of the body based on chemicals that your brain will say, fear and it'll shoot out certain chemicals and basically those neurotransmitters make you react in a certain way. But feelings are your psychological conditioning to how you react to the emotion. And so this is really great for really young kids. You can always tell them, you know, Tommy, I know right now it looks like you're really angry because Pedro took your ball. Okay, so here's cause and effect and as Cheryl says, I name that emotion, right? But then you tell them, now what do you want to do about it? Because now you have a choice. How do you, how are you going to feel about that? Are you going to continue to be angry and take a slug at him? Or are you going to say, well, I don't know, I feel sorry for him that he has to take the ball instead of ask nicely or something like that. Basically your feelings are things that are habituated responses to the emotional state. And so we as teachers and parents have a really big role to play in helping kids more positively identify emotional states and then how do I leverage that into my new social context? How do I interact with the other based on my feeling about that and being told it's okay. You know what, you're always going to have that emotion. That's just how your brain is going to do it. But you get to choose how you're going to react and that's your feelings. That's a really big lesson for even three year olds to take away and especially for adults to take away is that you are not slave to that emotional state. You can actually do something about it differently. And it's great to understand that your brain is not going to let you get away with not having emotions. You're going to have them. That's life. You know, you're not going to get rid of those but you have to decide now what you're going to do with that emotive state. I love that. I know when we have students come to the peace table to discuss a problem. That's a great time for us to say, hey, this is like, I get it. You're mad. That's your emotion. And how are you going to act about that? About your feelings? That's a very big, that's a big choice they get to make. And when we talk about, you know, back in the 80s and 90s, we would talk about emotional intelligence. Now we talk about social emotional. It's only that it's basically boils down to that is understanding how at all, you know, how your brain is triggering those things based on sensory perception. What's happening in the world? How do I interpret that? The emotion that can be created by that, by the chemicals I'm putting up, then my choice about feelings is really the most powerful element of that. It is. Lorna, you always talk to our class about your pause button. That's right. You have a pause button right here. Most of us don't push it in time. We push it after we've done something crazy or said something ridiculous. So, yeah. We have one of our TA's last year. Daniel Batchelor had this saying, she always has a sticky note up on her computer. It says, does this need to be said by me right now? That's a good pause button for adults as well. It certainly is. All right. Teria, I think it's Teria. I hope I'm saying that right. She says, is this myth, when we are seriously stressed, we turn to our reptilian brain? There's no such thing as a reptilian brain. In 1978, McLean had this idea, let me use a metaphor about reptile brains and hired a thinking versus hired a thinking to help people understand. The signaling that goes up the base of the brain and then checks with memory systems and then goes almost immediately, believe it or not, it's front or low, back and reconfirms in memory systems. There is no reptilian brain. Now, people feel, oh, I'm a slave to my reptile brain. Well, if you want to speak about this metaphorically, you can get away with it, but I hate it because many teachers that I've worked with actually believe that we evolved from snakes and it's like there's just a complete disconnect by using that kind of a metaphor. Now, what's important in what you're saying though is that stress, I want to make a big distinction between stress and anxiety. Stress is typically something that is caused by the outside world on you. I am stressed by what my boss just said to me. I am stressed because this one bully at school is there or whatever, something in the outside world that affects me. When that festers and it doesn't get attended to immediately, we begin to do that negative rumination and that turns into anxiety and that is caused by us. We make ourselves anxious and that is far more destructive. It's a different kind of a balance. You might have similar neurochemical exchanges, but they're in a different neural pathway, different order. And so cutting those things off, heading those things off is very, very important. I also am against this reptilian brain metaphor because it's kind of like the teenage brain idea that your frontal lobes aren't connected. It sort of releases you from responsibility. Oh dear, your brain is like that. That's how you are. Well, no, guess what? No, not all teenagers go crazy and not everybody's reptilian brain dominates their behavior. And so I really am distressed by those kinds of references because they're just not true. They were meant metaphorically initially, but they got misinterpreted in the popular press and also by teacher training programs, which are really unfortunately, they kind of dummy down the information and thinking that teachers can't handle it, which is far from the truth. Teachers can very much handle information, good quality information about the brain, but we tend to use these really kind of cheesy metaphorical references that can actually confuse people. And also they change the implications of the information. For example, if you are slave to your reptile brain, well, sorry, that's the way my life is. I can't do anything about it. Or if my frontal lobes aren't developed, I am released from all responsibility for doing drunk driving or being stupid at school and bullying other kids. That's just not true. Basically, the neural networks can be refined that you can actually have much more control than you think you can be released from when you use those metaphors. So I would get away from that, Teri, if it's possible. But your bigger point about stress is definitely important. Stress is generally triggered from the outside, that we allow it to manifest into that anxious state by just sort of going in circles. One of the best ways out of that, as we mentioned before, is just talking it out. Getting it out of your own head and into the world, it actually frames problems in a different way. Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Back to for a second, too. You would say that some places try to dummy down the information. I always want to share that I think especially for children who have learning differences, which frankly is all of us, but who may have more pronounced ones that they notice. In my experience, learning about the brain is really helpful to them because they think, oh, I can change this and I didn't do anything wrong. And those are huge for them to make growth. Yep, I can agree more. I'm writing a book right now. It's based on a little more than a year's research on what do kids want to know about their own brains? And we asked kids in many countries around the world, what do they want to know about their own brains? And what's fascinating is that what you're getting at right now is this idea that many of them have a sense of loss of control, which is fascinating. They say, I want to know why my brain makes me want to hang out with people that I know are bad for me. Or I want to know why my brain makes me want to play video games and not do my homework. And you think to yourself, oh my gosh, these people have the kids have no understanding that they are in charge of their brain. They get to decide all these things. But what they feel like is a separate entity that controls them. And getting them out of that understanding, helping them understand that they are their brains. They get to make choices. They are the ones who are in church is a huge advancement in their understanding about motivational things, things that are in their environment that they actually have more control over than you'd think. Another thing that we found with this particular book is that the things that kids want to know about their own brains are identical to what teachers and parents want to know about their own brains. It's basically nobody knows very much about their own brains. And just a little bit of understanding there changes their entire understanding of themselves and their possibilities. For example, Cheryl, you were talking about kids who might have additional needs. For example, a kid who's dyslexic. Understanding that dyslexia occurs more or less in the fifth month of gestation and that you are born with a different kind of connections and that you can overcome. We typically teach reading in one way which is not conducive to the way that a dyslexic would like to learn to read. However, you can learn to read if we do something else. And so understanding, okay, it's not my fault. It's not on me, but there is something I can do is really a very positive thing to understand. And so many, many kids are liberated by understanding that. And it's something that we don't talk about enough within school structures. Absolutely right. Absolutely agree. So we had some really good questions and insights from you, Tracy. Is there anybody else we have a little bit more time today? So if there's anybody else out there who has a question or a myth that they would like to Tracy to dispel for you. I'm gonna jump and talk about the most prevalent myth that we really have to get rid of because it's just crazy. It's learning styles that some people are more visual or more auditory or more kinesthetic. This idea of those kinds of learning styles is pretty problematic, very, very problematic actually. And mainly because Paschler's research in 2008 showed that school districts spend a whole lot of money. They invest in learning styles, inventories, and they teach teachers how to teach different learning styles and whatever. The benefit of differentiating instruction is huge. It's really good to differentiate instruction for individual learners, but categorizing them, blocking them off and saying that you perceive the world best through a visual field versus through auditory, it's actually very damaging. And mainly because if I were to tell Lorena in the fourth grade, oh, look, the test says that you're a very visual learner. What does Lorena do for the rest of her life? Sorry, Lorena. Lorena spends every single time she's faced with a new learning situation, she looks for something visual as a cue. She thinks that's how she learns better. So actually, she actually does become better at visual cues because that's what she's habituating her brain to do, but that's not what your brain would like. Naturally, your brain would love to get as much information from as many of the senses as possible when it learns. This is one of the things I love about Montessori Learning that when you do literacy, it's not just the sounds or the visual symbol to the sounds, it's the feel or the shape of a letter and sandpaper or whatever, you have additional sensory networks that go to the same piece of information and that reinforcement benefits learning. And so telling people that they have learning styles is a real crime. I would really hope you guys get away from that. And I know that if anybody's schools do that or universities even do that, denounce them because it's a waste of money when we need money for so many more important things than that. That's my soapbox. Well, and I think if your school can't get away from it, then there's something to be said for presenting things verbally and visually and kinesthetically, but not telling the students that they only learn visually. If you need to, sometimes in our school systems we need to take information, take what they're giving us and then tweak it. I feel like that might be a tweak that would be beneficial. Definitely beneficial, multi-modality learning. This is why, for example, Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligence tried to, at the core of his theory was to remind people that there are multiple ways to show your gifts. It's not that you're either smart or not smart because of math or language, that there's multiple ways. He would have had more, had there been the evidence for other ways of knowing, but this idea of multiple or a myriad of ways of knowing the world are definitely beneficial. Teaching and learning about the world in that way are definitely things that benefit all learners. The more varied ways you have input into your brain, the easier it will be to find it, retrieve it, and use it in the future. So if you, maybe one thing will stick with you more visually, another thing more auditorially, but try, I mean, that is something that teachers should know is that they need to have multi-modality experiences but not to pigeonhole people into one or another as their primary source of information. Absolutely. We have one more question that came up from Jacob. Is there perhaps any myth about foreign language learning? That's one of my favorites. I've written a book called raising multilingual children because I raised my three children. I spoke English at home. My husband spoke Spanish. Most of their life that we, the first six years of their life we were in French speaking Geneva, but they went to German schools and since then they've learned other languages, Japanese, Italian. These, there's a lot of myths about language and mainly because language is an easy target. It's a very visible aspect. So if a kid has a problem in math, people jump out and say, oh, it's probably because, you know, you're trying to do math in French. That's why he's confused. Well, not really. And so there's a ton of myths of multilingualism related to languages. One of the biggest myths is that children can learn foreign languages faster than adults. Believe it or not, adults are better at learning foreign languages if and when they spend the same amount of time on the task. The only aspect of language that they're behind on is pronunciation. They know, they learn vocabulary, grammatical structures. They learn everything else about foreign languages. It's easier for an adult because they have the scaffolding of other languages whereas kids are much better at pronunciation because there's a myriad of factors there. But if you look, I put on in the chat, thelearningsciences.com, that's our website. If you look at the resources, you'll see that there's a whole video on myths of multilingualism there, Jacob, that might be beneficial to have a look at. But if you wanted to talk about brain areas, basically the brain of a bilingual or multilingual person has absolutely identical neural networks to a monolingual. What's actually happening though is if you're brought up bilingual from birth, some of the hubs for language, for example, Broca's area is larger in the posterior area, just slightly larger. But your brain is basically treating all of your languages as language. And this is why the social cues to understand how to disentangle those things is so important. So I'd love to talk to you more about that one because it's one of my favorites. And so I would love to share Cheryl if possible. My email is just my name. It's tracy.tukahama at Gmail. Anybody who does have loose end questions or they did want to get more clarity or more resources on any specific myth, we have whole folders of evidence against each of these different things. So in case you need that as ammunition to go back to your school to say, let's stop doing the learning style inventory. Here's all my evidence. I'm happy to support you in that. And so I thank you for the great questions. And if there are other ones, I'm happy to stick around. But otherwise do follow up with me individually. Cheryl, did you see any other questions that need to be answered right away? No, and we are just about out of time. Tracy, I want to thank you for coming in, spending time with us today. Man, I got to get rid of some of these myths that I've got going on. I have work to do here. The last one, Lorna, that I hope that is not in your repertoire, but I do want to mention is the myth of gender and abilities that boys are better at math and girls are better at language. I hope nobody in your audience thinks that, but that's one of the bigger ones that has really, that does harm. It does a lot of harm in society. So I hope you guys don't find that one. All right, thank you so much. I just want to let folks know that first of all, I want to say the title of Tracy's book again, just because you need to know that look in the chat area. And Cheryl just happens to have a copy of it to show us. So it's neuro myths, debunking false ideas about the brain. So you might want to pick a copy of that up for your personal resources and library or for your school's teachers library as well. That would be an important one, of course, because teachers are with your children a lot. And so let's get the information out to them as well. Bye for now. Thank you. Tracy. Thanks a lot, Cheryl.