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Education, Magic and the Brain

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

We know that neuroscience can explain magic. This compelling post from mindhacks talks about ways that magic can give neuroscience stuff to study.

I believe this is a really good model for imagining the relationship between education and neuroscience. Yes, neuroscience can inform what we understand about education, but what can education teach us about the brain? What can our students teach us about the brain? How can we structure class rooms to be places where kids help us learn about the brain?

Posted in Brain, Education, Uncategorized | No Responses »
Tags: Brain

Know Thyself

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

It turns out that journaling for even just two minutes about something emotionally important can significantly improve our sense of well-being and our health. Maybe we should do it more? Maybe we should encourage it in school? Check out the study “Effects of (very) brief writing on health: The two-minute miracle“

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Tags: Education, jouranling, Spirituality

Is Google Making us Stupid?

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

There is no question in my mind that the internet has changed the way that I think. But is it for better or for worse?

Two interesting perspectives.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Illustration by Guy Billout

“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.” Read the rest…..

And the rebuttal:

Response to Nicholas Carr’s ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’

By Trent Batson03/18/09

Criticism of the Web most often questions whether we are becoming more superficial and scattered in our thinking. In the July-August 2008 Atlantic magazine, Nicholas Carr published “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google). Like other critics, he sees change as loss and not as gain. But, his own criticism is superficial and misses the humanizing impact of Web 2.0. Read the rest…

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Tags: Education, Technology

The Unexpected is Key to Human Learning

Friday, March 20th, 2009

Surprise!

Any body who has ever worked at camp knows that good experiential education surprises people and challenges their expectations.

Any body who has ever worked at camp also know that there is plenty of bad experiential education which tries to surprise people and fails.

Here is a cool article about some of the underlying neurological mechanisms at play in this type of learning. It also seems to be the same mechanism which helps us believe that we can win money at casinos.

The human brain’s sensitivity to unexpected outcomes plays a fundamental role in the ability to adapt and learn new behaviors, according to a new study by a team of psychologists and neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania.

Using a computer-based card game and microelectrodes to observe neuronal activity of the brain, the Penn study, published this week in the journal Science, suggests that neurons in the human substantia nigra, or SN, play a central role in reward-based learning, modulating learning based on the discrepancy between the expected and the realized outcome.

Read the rest….

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Tags: Brain, Education