These trends in neuroscience and education are very real. We are already in an era of accelerated learning and these trends are just the beginning.
For example, the first lesson is that the brain is constantly using all of the information it can get from the surrounding environment. We are not so different from dinosaurs. Although we are much more efficient at processing information, we still need to process it in order to make decisions. And we are not completely brain-dead either. The neurons that make us human still exist. They are not all dead, just not firing.
This last sentence is probably the best part of the article because it tells us that while our bodies are still capable of processing information, the brain is much more like an electrical circuit. The brain has just one wire that runs from the brain to the rest of the body. To process information, the brain is constantly altering these wires. It’s a process not unlike building an electric circuit.
But before you ask, yes, the idea that the brain is like an electrical circuit is absolutely true. It is but the brain isn’t the same as the rest of the body. In order for the system to function, the brain must have a lot of power. Since it does, the brain must be constantly processing information and it has to have a lot of power to keep up. This is why a brain injury causes people to act out of character or miss class.
If you think of a brain injury, you might think of the brain as a whole body that’s a lot smaller and smaller, but it also contains lots of information about the brain. That’s why people who have brain injury tend to think of it as a whole brain, and it has to be the brain that’s responsible for the damage.
Neuroscientists will tell you that the brain is the brain’s processor, which is the brain that makes up the rest of the brain, and brain damage isn’t only caused by the brain’s function, but also by a brain’s ability to absorb the brain’s information.
In terms of education, cognitive science has been developing at a pretty rapid pace. Neuroscientists have been using new brain imaging technologies to study the brain for the past few years, and this is just the beginning. Brain imaging techniques are extremely precise and powerful, and they’ve already helped us to find out what the brain is doing. One of the areas of neuroscience that has been developing the fastest is in the areas of learning and memory.
Learning and memory is a highly complex biological process that deals with the way our mind responds to new information. For example, we learn the names of objects by actually seeing and recognizing them. To do this, we have to retain an image of the object and then process that image in our mind so we can associate it with a given name.
Learning and memory are so complex and hard to learn that the best way to learn those things is through practice. We’ve all heard the old saying, “Train, don’t race”. Well, you’re either the fastest or the slowest at actually learning something new, so your goal in the training phase should be to become the fastest.
This is the core of the new trend we’re seeing in neuroscience, called Brain Plasticity. Basically, this means that the way your brain learns new skills or is trained in a given task depends on how well you use it. This is a much larger topic and I can’t cover it here, but brain plasticity is the new buzzword in neuroscience, and it’s being picked up in classrooms as well.