Wider than the Sky

We have, it is said, learned more about the human brain in the past few decades than in the whole prior history of humanity. Certainly more has been written about the brain recently than in all our prior time as a literate species. This column has focused on the subject three times in the past decade, but there is something new under the sun, or the neuroscientist's tools, annually, even monthly. As Emily Dickinson observed, 

The Brain - is wider than the Sky -
For - put them side by side -
The one the other will contain
With ease - and You - beside - 

So let's consider learning and the brain from a few different perspectives. 

First is a look at the practice of neuroscience itself - our slowly improving efforts to get between our own ears. Sam Kean's The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons reveals that most of what we've learned comes from observing brains gone wrong, linking traumas and strange afflictions to brain regions at work. He cites both the most famous and the lesser-known cases, taking us through large regions and odd byways of the mind, from the familiar (depression, concussion, PTSD) to innumerable outlier syndromes, showing that almost anything can go wrong with the brain. We can lose our ability to form memories, recognize faces, or stand up straight. We can believe we are made of glass or that we're surrounded by doubles of everyone we know. We can use our visual cortex to hear and our auditory regions to see. We can also "see" perfectly well, but lose the ability to realize that we are seeing. All further proof that "it's all in your head" is not a put down, but a not-so-simple fact. 

What did we understand about the brain before neuroscience? Jonah Lehrer believes that some creative geniuses had an intuitive grasp of our mental processes. In Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Lehrer discusses writers, painters, and musicians from George Eliot to Igor Stravinsky, relating each to our new learnings about the brain. Walt Whitman, he argues, anticipated psychologist William James and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio in perceiving that emotions are bodily as well as mental functions. Cezanne abandoned Impressionism for more fundamental observation, painting the world as it appears before sight has resolved it into named and familiar objects. Making stock as the basis for his recipes, French chef Auguste Escoffier stumbled upon the now-familiar fifth taste element, umami. And writers such as Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, of course, delved into the processes of memory and consciousness as skillfully as the psychologists and neurologists. As a lab student under Nobel Prize–winner Eric Kandel and a Rhodes Scholar in literature at Columbia University, Lehrer has unique credentials as a bridge-builder between the arts and the sciences. 

Brain study and teaching, however, have goals both complementary and conflicting. Neuroscience delves into the micro-levels of the brain: its 350-plus named parts, 13,000 proteins, and various electrochemical functions. Teachers, on the other hand, work with the whole child, especially the whole child's whole brain. Knowing the brain sites related to a student's reading, organizational, attentional, or other difficulties, or the general role of excitatory and inhibitory transmitters - dopamine, cortisol, and the rest - may be intellectually fascinating, but applying these insights to daily work with students requires stepping back from the details to consider larger brain concepts. 

Where in the brain do the interests of neuroscientist and teacher converge? Often just above the eyes, in the frontal lobes, commonly described in metaphors: the brain's CEO, director, conductor, or control tower. Whether teaching about words, numbers, chemicals, laws, events, creatures, or concepts, we hope to enhance students' ability to organize, evaluate, and apply learning. Among the books on the executive functions, I have most enjoyed Elkhonon Goldberg's The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind. Brief, clear, and innovative (Goldberg suggests that the old left-right brain distinction is better understood as the difference between taking in new information and working with familiar content), the book's special strength is Goldberg's story of his own frontal-lobe efforts to escape the Soviet Union: "an existential decision that required an executive solution." 

How can we apply such knowledge in schools? First, considering how much we have to learn despite our recent discoveries, it makes most sense to proceed carefully. In Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, John Medina first offers this caveat: "I speak several dialects of brain science, and I knew nothing from those worlds capable of dictating best practices for education and business. In truth, if we ever fully understood how the human brain knew how to pick up a glass of water, it would represent a major achievement." 

Medina therefore advises such familiar ideas as improving memory by repetition, avoiding stress, and sleeping adequately. Only slightly more abstruse, he shows that multisensory teaching is more effective than single-sensory teaching (although vision usually trumps the other senses), that boredom sets in about every 10 minutes unless the brain is offered novelty, and that different minds are differently wired. But his most important reminders are that emotion is essential to learning and that we evolved to learn while moving around in a varied and stimulating environment. As he puts it, "Cutting off physical exercise... to do better on a test score is like trying to gain weight by starving yourself." The best school uniform? "Simply gym clothes, worn all day long." 

School head Rick Lavoie is another author whose insights are based primarily on years of careful observation. His book The Motivation Breakthrough: 6 Secrets to Turning On the Tuned-Out Child is even more likely than Medina's to change the practices of classroom teachers. Lavoie focuses on two key insights derivable both from brain science and from simple awareness: that emotion is at the heart of the ability to learn, and that different people are motivated by different things. (I have discussed his work with reference to adult motivation in "Merit Pay? On Money and Motivation," Independent School, Fall 2012.) The student who is motivated by interaction with peers may leap at the chance to engage in project work and loathe a solo research assignment. The praise-seeker can work tirelessly at a class presentation to show his or her stuff. The so-called introvert may delight in computer or library time, but cringe at being asked to share work aloud. 

Psychology provides a parallel lens to education, as both use research to affect broad behaviors. In Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry, former American Psychiatric Association president Jeffrey Lieberman offers, like Kean, an overview of mental illness and health from early times to the present moment. His story is one of progress, from moralistic concepts of mental illness to early physical ideas and more cerebral theories to today's "pluralistic psychology," which blends neuroscience with interpersonal approaches. 

Although some of the book, such as the struggles over the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual's several editions, is a bit technical, a humane, holistic approach to the subject runs through Lieberman's writing. As he puts it, "Mental illness is a medical condition - but it's also an existential condition.... Every other organ in the body requires a physical stimulus to generate illness, but only the brain can become ill from such incorporeal stimuli as loneliness, humiliation, or fear." The same, of course, is true of every student's distinctive way of learning or struggling with learning. 

Finally, there is the possibility that our brains, especially those of younger people, are changing even as we study them. A number of researchers, from Sherry Turkle to Nicholas Carr, have discussed the effects of technology on our intellectual and emotional capacities. The latest entry, and one of the best, in this field comes from an exceptional source: Susan Baroness Greenfield, neuroscientist, Alzheimer's researcher, corporate CEO, member of the House of Lords, etc. Her book Mind Change raises the same question she did several years ago on the floor of Parliament: "What assessment has Her Majesty's Government made of the impact of digital technologies on the mind?" 

The answer she received then was "very little," but fortunately she has continued to pursue the issue, discussing both fundamentals of brain development and the specific implications of social networking, video games, and the broad topic of "surfing," or obtaining a large proportion of one's information online. Her case is both grounded and based on a clear hypothesis: "The human brain will adapt to whatever environment in which it is placed. The cyberworld of the 21st century is offering a new type of environment. Therefore, the human brain could be changing in parallel, in correspondingly new ways." 

Greenfield's arguments are carefully balanced. Rather than issue dire warnings, she simply points to current research and suggests that we probe more deeply into contentious areas before handing our young people over to media that seem to have mixed impacts in areas as disparate as information retention, complex thinking, and social mores. From facial recognition to empathy to factual recall and complex thought to aggressiveness, she provides cautionary but tentative observations. 

Just as the parents of the baby boomers could not have imagined their children's inner and outer environments, we cannot predict what today's students will know about the mind in the coming years and how their learning will change them. Clearly, as educators at the intersection of brain science and its practical application to learning, we are living the faux-Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times."