Scientists Find Learning Is Not 'Hard-Wired'

Ten-year-old Miles Murdough sits in front of brain scans in Dublin, Calif. They show the activity in his brain as he plays the piano.

—Manny Crisostomo for Education Week

Neuroscience exploded into the education conversation more than 20 years ago, in step with the evolution of personal computers and the rise of the Internet, and policymakers hoped medical discoveries could likewise help doctors and teachers understand the "hard wiring" of the brain.

That conception of how the brain works, exacerbated by the difficulty in translating research from lab to classroom, spawned a generation of neuro-myths and snake-oil pitches—from programs to improve cross-hemisphere brain communicationto teaching practices aimed at "auditory" or "visual" learners.

Today, as educational neuroscience has started to find its niche within interdisciplinary "mind-brain-education" study, the field's most powerful findings show how little about learning is hard-wired, after all.

"What we find is people really do change their brain functions in response to experience," said Kurt W. Fischer, the director of Harvard University's Mind, Brain, and Education Program. "It's just amazing how flexible the brain is. That plasticity has been a huge surprise to a whole lot of people."

In contrast to the popular conception of the brain as a computer hard-wired with programs that run different types of tasks, said Dr. Jay N. Giedd, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, brain activity has turned out to operate more like a language.

Interactive Game

Different parts of the brain act like the letters of the alphabet, he said, and by the time a child is 8 months old, the letters are there—the basic connections have formed in the hippocampus or the prefrontal cortex, say—but then through experience, those neural letters activate in patterns to form words, sentences, and paragraphs of thought.

That analogy offers a whole different idea of how the brain develops, both normally and abnormally.

"When I first started, we made the mistake of talking about, 'Oh, the hippocampus is memory; the prefrontal does decisionmaking, impulse control'—and it's sort of a half-truth,'" Dr. Giedd said at a recent Learning and the Brain Society talk.

"I was looking for letters—a hole in this part of the brain, damage in that part of the brain," he said. Researchers do find predictable problems, he said, "but it's not because of everything that lies in that spot; it's because it's part of a word or sentence or paragraph that uses that letter a lot. … The cells that fire together are wired together—and grow together."

Moreover, Mr. Fischer and other mind-brain-education researchers said, helping teachers and students understand how the brain changes in response to experience may be the best way to link neuroscience findings to classroom experience.

Rocky Start

Education watchers have had great hopes for dramatic, instruction-changing findings since the early days of educational neuroscience. President George H.W. Bush declaredthe 1990s "the decade of the brain," but by the end of it, the promise of the research—most of it done with animals—had not translated into clear guidelines for instructional practice.

Miles Murdough plays the piano while wired to a brain-scanning device at the Society for Psychology in the Performing Arts in Dublin, Calif. The scans show how his brain reacts to music.

—Manny Crisostomo for Education Week

In 1997, the cognitive scientist and philosopher John T. Bruer of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, in St. Louis, declared in a landmark essay in the American Educational Research Association's journalEducational Researcher that directly connecting neuroscience to classroom instruction was "a bridge too far." He urged collaboration among cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, and educators.

"All of our outcome measures, the things we are hoping to see, are not neurological changes; they are behavioral changes," explained Daniel T. Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. "We don't measure how are your dendritic connections, we measure how well you can read.

"Trying to leverage behavioral science [for education] is complicated enough," he said. "For neuroscience to get into the mix, we have translation problems. The more distant you get from the level of the classroom, the less likely [the research] is to make a difference in the classroom."

Dr. Kenneth S. Kosik, a neuroscience professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and co-director of the Neuroscience Research Institute, helped found the Needham, Mass-based Learning and the Brain Society in 1999 to bring together experts from those different fields. But he acknowledged that, 15 years after Mr. Bruer's critique, "we still have a paucity of real, concrete findings in neuroscience that we can say will change what goes on in the classroom."

Interdisciplinary turf wars are partly to blame for slowing the development of mind-brain-education science, said Dr. Janet N. Zadina, a former high school teacher turned adjunct assistant professor in neurology at Tulane University, in New Orleans, and the winner of the Society for Neuroscience's 2011 science educator award.

"At first, it was defensiveness; cognitive psychology wanted to claim it, neuroscience wanted to claim it, educators wanted to claim it, and because the fields have been separate, they were all reinventing the wheel," she recalled.

Bridging the Disciplines

In the absence of cohesive collaboration among the disciplines, Dr. Zadina said, teachers, ...

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