What's new this decade is the emergence of a robust, exploding set of literatures in the neurosciences. I use the plural here because brain research now attracts the attention of scientists from at least half a dozen specialties: neurophysiologists, molecular biologists, neuroanatomists, certain chemists and medical researchers, and so on. The big breakthrough, especially this decade, has been the availability of PET scan and functional MRI devices that allow scientists to observe mental activity directly, to take a "picture" of the brain at work. So exciting are the possibilities here that there's been an outpouring of federal funding in support of neuroscientific inquiry. It is the "Decade of the Brain."
With this activity, a veritable flood of discoveries has come forward on the functioning of the brain. These have excited hopes among educators that soon, at last, we'll learn what really happens inside all those student heads and have a scientific basis for teaching.
But, alas, not yet . . . and maybe not soon. When you get neuroscientists together in a room with educators, one of the first things you learn is that there have been a tremendous number of findings, yes, but the meaning of many of them remains in dispute. Another circumstance is that for all the findings, there's precious little theory to connect or interpret them . . . and there's nothing so useful as a good theory, Kurt Lewin taught us. No scientist has yet come up with a coherent set of ideas about how the brain works that would be persuasive and usable for those of us who teach.
For the past 18 months I've been a participant in a series of Wingspread conversations sponsored by John Abbott's 21st Century Learning Initiative, which has brought together scientists with educators to try to make sense out of these new literatures. One of the things that I've observed at these meetings, and that I'm glad for, is that neuroscientists are reluctant to generalize from the findings they have so far, to tell us as teachers what we should be doing.
One reason for this is that much of the brain research that's gone on has been done as an aspect of larger projects on the "high-dollar diseases" . . . studies of brain functioning among Alzheimer's patients, for example, or alcoholics; these aren't studies of college sophomores. And, thankfully, good scientists are reluctant to make prescriptive leaps from disease studies to college classrooms.
An interesting thing to me is that the more you get to know the newer brain literatures, how few surprises there are. So many of the findings seem to confirm what we've already known, or at least theorized.
To take one tiny example, if I look out the window and see a tree, the commonsense idea about what's happening is that a picture of the tree comes in through the retina and an image of it forms straightaway on some screen inside our head, just like photography. Well, of course, it doesn't quite work that way . . . there is no "screen" and, more importantly, the mind's image of that tree is far from a simple reproduction of an external reality: 80 percent of what winds up in the brain's image comes from information, ideas, and feelings that are already in the brain, just 20 percent from outside. The learning here is that when we look at a tree, or another person, or hear an idea, the sense we form of it is highly colored by a whole range of prior experiences and emotional dispositions. What we have from the brain researchers, then, seems just to confirm what we knew before about the power of the mental models we carry around in our head.
The University of Oregon's Robert Sylwester argues that we shouldn't be so surprised when neuroscientific findings parallel what we've found as teachers or educational researchers. If I have 28 students in my statistics class, I have a semester-long opportunity to observe 28 brains in operation . . . the inferences I'd draw just from watching what works with them reflect a form of "brain research." It may not be science and it does have its limits, but there's a "wisdom of practice" teachers develop that warrants respect.
None of this is to say, however, that there's nothing new coming out of the neurosciences. I'll present a few summary findings next. Here I want to note that brain science provides us with new ways — and vocabularies — for talking about learning. As educators, for example, we've long spoken about how student development in college is a function of the intellectual and affective . . . but these "domains" of an earlier psychology are not the way neuroscientists describe things. They pay little heed, too, to the nice distinctions we educators want to make between younger, college-age, and adult learners, or to our preoccupation with "learning styles"; I've not found one of them who thinks of "intelligence" as a unitary, fixed characteristic of individuals, or who thinks of the brain as an "empty vessel" or computer-like machine. To the neuroscientist, learning is a whole-person/whole-brain activity that confounds received categorizations.
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