Brain Based Learning and Brain Development – About the Brain

"HIGHER OREDER" THOUGHT PROCESSES ARE: processes such as classifying,

inferring, hypothesizing, generalizing, valuing, relating, and synthesizing.
- It's a myth, they aren't doing it better or faster, in fact they are hurting their
brains. Make them stop and do things one at a time. ~ OUCH!!

1990 - all the wired gagets didn't exist

2006 - in the past 15 years humans didn't change.
Jordan Grafman: Chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of
Nwurological Disorders and Stoke (NINDS) thinks that decades of research shows that
the quality of your output and depth of thought deteriorates as you do more and more
things at the same time. You need mental downtime and to relax. The medial Parietal
Lobes are active when you are not focused on a task. Brodmann's area 10 located in the
anterior prefrontal cortex is used for multitasking. It helps you switch from one thing to
the next thing then back to the first thing again. It is one of the first areas in your head to
develop and one of the first to deteriorate as you age. Kids and folks over 60 don't
multitask as well as the young adult. David E. Meyer director of the Brain Cognition and
Action Lab @ the University of Michigan thinks the ability to multitask / process has it's
limits even among the your adult. When peopole try to do 2 or more related tasks at the
same time or go back and forth quickly between them errors go way way up and it takes
longer often TWICE AS LONG. The bottom line is you CAN'T simultaneously be
thinking about something and do something else / do 2 things at once. You will never
ever be able to overcome the brain's limitations for processing information. Humans can't
do it. Habitual multitasking may even result in a condition that your brain gets so
overexcited that you can't focus even if you wanted to. If you lose that skill and your will
to concentrate it's called MENTAL ANTSYNESS. Parents must set limits for children
using their wired gadgets and time. Don't let them be so plugged in that you aren't doing
what you would normally TOGETHER.

MUSIC AND THE BRAIN

Singing Familiar Songs is Found to Use Spatial Abilities

Left Brain - Right Brain

In Search of . . . Brain-Based Education By John T. Bruer

about the brain | brain based learning | brain

development
Inside the Brain: An Interactive Tour
The human brain is in many ways a fantastic and enigmatic part of the body, and only
within the past few decades have scientists begun to understand its many nooks and
crannies. When the brain is beset with any number of neurological conditions, it changes
in a myriad of ways. This website, provided by the Alzheimers Association, provides an
interactive tour of the brain of a person with Alzheimers disease. The tour contains
sixteen interactive slides, and each slide contains informative text that provides
background material. The first seven slides contain a bit of background information
about the brain, such as what the brain is composed of and how it functions. Rounding
out the site are a selection of links to sites that provide additional information on the
brain, such as the Harvard University Whole Brain Atlas site and the BBCs Interactive
Brain Map.

Another Interactive Tour by New Scientist try this link excellent how the brain works
resource.

The Whole Brain Atlas has your brain in pictures... Each Whole Brain sub-page consists
of a nifty graphic and plenty of medical terms. The folks at Harvard also display the
visual results of brain ailments like stroke and Alzheimer's -- even Mad Cow Disease.
The Whole Brain is one of the first (and best) examples of what the Web can do to help
explain the human body.

How People Learn

Take a Classical Intelligence IQ Test

This IQ test measures several factors of intelligence, namely logical reasoning, math
skills and general knowledge. It also measures your ability to classify things according to
various attributes, and to see analogies and relations among concepts or things. It doesn't
take into consideration verbal, social, or emotional intelligence.

Take a Culture-Fair IQ Test

Scientific American Quarterly

Feature Article: Intelligence Considered: Winter 1998

Multiple Intelligences

Reawakening the creative mind

Australian scientists say they have created a 'thinking cap' that will unleash creativity.
Comment from:
Dr. Neil Greenberg, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
This work emerged from an interesting place run by an interesting guy. Allan Snyder said
"When I have an idea, I try to make it vivid enough so that an experimentalist might
realise it in a laboratory and then the technologists might grab it," he says. "I get the
answer and get out. I'm not a competent experimentalist so why try to do it." According
to comments made after he received the 1997 Australia Prize, after attention for key work
on the development of optical fiber, he was recruited to head a unit at the Australian
National University in Canberra. He said he loves the creative freedom the job provides
and went on to say, "Our society gives more kudos to those who implement ideas,
especially if they make money from it, whereas the person who had the idea is generally
forgotten. That's why I'm delighted to have won the Australia Prize. . . . It's a triumph for
the Institute of Advanced Studies at the ANU that a dreamer can be allowed to prosper."
In the review biographies of Australia Prize winners, Snyder characterized the brain is the
ultimate non-linear device. "We don't passively look onto the world," he says. "Signals
actually change the neural connectivity of our brain as they go in." The work on non-
linear science has prompted Snyder's latest passion: the mind and how it works. He was
recently appointed foundation director of the ANU's Centre for the Mind and says he has
big things planned for the Centre. -- this was in 1997. The Centre has some distinguished
scientists, scholars, & personalities identified as Fellows, but their website has a highly
commercial flavor.

'Brain atlas' maps out how the human mind works

By Cahal Milmo and Charles Arthur 19 July 2003
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_medical/story.jsp?story=425640
At the University of California in Los Angeles, from data collected from the analysis of
over 7,000 brains by a team across six countries over the past nine years an International
team of scientists unveils the world's first "brain atlas". Neurologists and researchers will
be able to access a database via the internet that offers extremely detailed three-
dimensional images of the workings of the brain at a microscopic level. The images have
the potential to transform neurosurgery by allowing doctors to plan operations through
maps that show how each area of the brain is used for vital tasks from memory to speech.

Dr. Pat Goldman-Rakic was the first researcher to chart the frontal lobe of the brain, the
executive center responsible for personality, reasoning, planning, insight and other high-
order cognitive functions. Located behind the forehead, the frontal lobe was once
regarded as inaccessible to rigorous scientific analysis. But Dr. Goldman-Rakic used
various techniques -- drugs, electrical impulses, behavioral responses and other methods
-- to explore and describe its structure.

Scientists have used data from scans of 183 subjects to identify brain areas that
consistently become active in a variety of cognitive tasks, such as reading, learning a
rhythm or analyzing a picture.
These brain images point out the areas most consistently active during a variety of
cognitive tasks.
If the brain in action can be compared to a symphony, with specialized sections required
to pitch in at the right time to produce the desired melody, then the regions highlighted by
the new study may be likened to conductors, researchers at Washington University
School of Medicine in St. Louis assert.
"They appear to be helping to determine which brain regions will contribute to a
cognitive task and when those regions will play a part in that task," says lead author Nico
Dosenbach, an M.D./Ph.D. student. "Every time you move from not working on a task to
working on a task, these areas seem to become active."
The study, published in the June 1 issue of Neuron, highlighted three regions, the dorsal
anterior cingulate and the left and right frontal operculum. The cingulate is found near the
midline of the top of the brain; the opercula are at the base of the brain in both the left
and right hemispheres.
"For years, when you looked at maps of what different parts of the brain do, the opercula
have often been blank," notes senior author Steven Petersen, Ph.D., James S. McDonnell
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience; professor of neuroscience, of neurobiology and of
radiology; and associate professor of neurological surgery. "We have been struggling to
figure out what they do, and now these data suggest the opercula may be involved in the
creation of what neuroscientists call a task set."
Task sets are plans for accessing different parts of the brain to achieve a goal, such as
reading the word "dog," coming up with verbs associated with the word "dog" or
determining the color of the letters in the word "dog."
Much of the human brain's power derives from what Petersen calls "flexible
configuration of processing systems," or the ability to take one stimulus and process it in
different ways to produce different feedback. Different parts of the brain have specialized
abilities that can contribute in various ways to completion of different tasks. They just
have to be lined up to play their part when their abilities are needed.
Other neuroscientists previously have implicated the cingulate in a variety of specialized
cognitive tasks, Dosenbach notes, but the new analysis may change their thinking.
"It's a question of whether the cingulate has specific contributions to make in all these
tasks, or whether it plays such a very basic role that its participation is almost always
required," he explains.
The researchers' theories are reinforced by akinetic mutism, a condition that occurs in
patients who suffer a lesion from stroke or surgery that includes the cingulate. To varying
degrees, such patients are minimally active.
"If you give them a cup of coffee, they'll drink it, but they'd never ask for a cup of
coffee," Petersen explains. "If you ask them how they are, they'll tell you, 'I'm fine,' but
they won't tell you a story."
"They seem to have problems voluntarily entering a task state," Dosenbach says. "They
can do tasks with very explicit instructions, but are much less proficient at what's called
random generation tasks, such as coming up with random words. So there is some other
evidence that the cingulate really is an important contributor to task sets."
The analysis was based on data from eight separate functional brain imaging studies
conducted over the course of five years. According to Petersen, the volume of data
provided by the different studies was essential to making sure that the areas highlighted
in the analysis were contributing at a very basic level, rather than at the specialized level
of a particular task.
"Some neuroscientists were certain what we should have found with this analysis, and
they were concerned when we didn't find what they expected," he says. "But it's a huge
dataset, and the results were very clear."
For example, one brain area thought likely to be active in creating task sets, the
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, did not become active as consistently as the cingulate and
the opercula.
"We're not implying that this region isn't important," Petersen says. "In this study,
though, it just didn't come up as consistently as the cingulate and the opercula."
Although many of the tasks in the eight studies were language-related (reading a word or
naming verbs associated with a given noun, such as "bark" for "dog"), some were not.
Subjects in one study had to tap their fingers in time to a rhythm. Another group had to
judge the orientation of lines. A third group was asked to match short graphic squiggles.
The non-linguistic tasks produced the same results, according to Petersen.
Petersen and his colleagues plan follow-up studies to further understand the roles of the
cingulate and the opercula in creating task sets and to see if these regions have similar
roles in children of various ages. They are also planning to use a new type of functional
brain imaging to look at the connections between other brain areas and the cingulate and
the opercula.
Dosenbach NUF, Visscher KM, Palmer ED, Miezin FM, Wenger KK, Kang HC,
Burgund ED, Grimes AL, Schlaggar BL, Petersen SE. A core system for the
implementation of task sets. Neuron, June 1, 2006.

MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES
Internet Links Exercising Your Multiple Intelligences (M.I.)

The Multiple Intelligence Developmental Assessment Scales (MIDAS)

Memphis City Schools has implementing a Multiple Intelligence type curriculum.

"Multimedia And Multiple Intelligences," by Shirley Veenema and Howard Gardner,

from the November-December issue of The American Prospect explores the idea that
technology does not necessarily improve education. The article continues the series, "The
New Media and Learning," which opened with three articles in the July-August issue. All
articles were originally presented at a conference sponsored by The American Prospect at
the MIT Media Laboratory on June 4, 1996. The conference and articles were
underwritten by a grant from the Spencer Foundation

Sinestesia:

providing valuable clues to understanding the organization and functions of the human
brain when the senses--touch, taste, hearing, vision and smell--get mixed up instead of
remaining separate.

Hemisperes
Brain cells between your left eye and ear control the powers of language, social graces
and reasoning. In general, the left hemisphere of the brain controls language, memory and
emotional control, while the right side is dominant in visual and musical ability. Dr.
Miller began to think of the left side of healthy brains as a bully, suppressing the creative
instincts of the other side."I've wondered whether this dominant hemisphere which
shapes our linguistic perceptions of the world may in some ways dampen our visual ways
of thinking, which is, I think, at the core of great art," he says.

PHYSICAL PATHWAYS - NEURAL MAP

1) UCLA press release, researchers Matthew Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger have
discovered the true source of a "broken heart" and "hurt feelings". Their study involved a
multiplayer game while the subjects were in an fMRI. Some participants were
occasionally excluded, unbeknownst to them, to provide a feeling of being a social
outcast. The MRI showed activation of areas of the brain commonly associated with
physical pain.

2) Pathways of emotion - from cortex to peripheral organs - source

Researchers from Boston University have unravelled the neural pathways that transmit
information about your surroundings to your organs, enabling them to respond
appropriately. Neurons originating in high-order brain structures transmit signals about
the environment relatively directly to low-order structures in the spinal cord. There is just
one structure in the middle - the hypothalamus. The pathway then connects to autonomic
nerves, which originate in the spinal cord, to regulate organ function. Helen Barbas, the
research team leader, says: "The existence of these pathways has implications for several
psychological conditions. For example, these pathways may be excessively active in
anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and obsessive-compulsive disorder - conditions in which
the emotional experience is extreme relative to the situation. Similarly, these pathways
may be abnormally inactive in psychopathic individuals, who lack appropriate emotional
responses." Other research in humans has implicated the prefrontal cortex in these
conditions. When this area is damaged, patients lack emotional propriety and do not show
the changes in heart rate and the skin responses that normally accompany emotional
arousal.

The Problem with Schools

Ken Umbach and Bob Jacob
Kenneth W. Umbach, Ph.D., Policy Analyst, California Research Bureau,
Phone: (voice) 916-653-6002 (fax) 916-654-5829
California Research Bureau site "Learning-Related Outcomes of Computer Technology
in K-12 Education." In brief: (http://www.library.ca.gov/html/statseg2a.cfm)
"This paper summarizes ways in which computer technology and communications have
been found to enhance learning in K-12 classrooms. The paper has been prepared at the
request of Assembly Member Kerry Mazzoni, Chair of the Assembly Education
Committee, to support the work of the Commission on Teacher Credentialing in
developing computer technology training standards for teachers. Those standards will
respond to requirements of Assembly Bill 1023 (Chapter 404, statutes of 1997)."

From: Bob Jacobs

"The problem with our school system as I see it is the way we organize our courses. In
English, spelling and grammar compete with creative writing and literature. These have
little in common. Spelling and grammar deal with the formal rules of language whereas
literature and creative writing deal with the personal expression of ideas. Given the
conflict, spelling and grammar are the obvious losers since literature and creative writing
are so interesting.
I would redesign the school system into three departments:
1. Comparative language
2. Applications
3. Art

I may not be using these words in way that are meaningful to you.

In comparative language students would learn not only the rules of English, but of French
and Spanish, and of art and music, and of Quick Basic and HTML and of course,
mathematics. In other words, interest would be generated in learning how different
languages fill different niches... how some languages are preferable to others in their
means of expressing certain types of thoughts and how their rules demonstrate this. I'm
not sure that many are prepared to teach this course, but it would certainly generate some
real knowledge of language as well as an interest and a meaning in the study of grammar
and spelling. What students today do not learn is translation. Translation from the
language of music to that of painting and then to mathematics.

In the Applications department, students can learn what has already been discovered...
they can read Emerson, and study the works of Dali, and read the works of Lavoisier and
learn about the models which we use to describe ourselves and our world. Much of what
constitutes high school education is in the second department, however the subjects are
now taught in isolated boxes separated by artificial subject matter barriers. Language,
rather than bringing subjects together, serves as barriers to communication across these
boundaries.

In the third department, art, belongs all things which are personal and creative. Designing
experiments in order to solve scientific problems in the laboratory, and learning the
reasoning process by which one designs experiments is here. Creating essays and works
of art which deal with subject matter issues from department 2 are here as well.

A good mix of all three departments would make for more meaningful, quality education.

I guess this is pretty way out because it is so far from our present structure and because
there are so few teachers who come out of college prepared to think in these ways. I
gather that there will be some who will be upset by this separation of form from function.

Patch of brain put to sleep Local snoozing makes for better learning By Tanguy Chouard
6/04
A good night's rest is hard work for parts of your brain, say US neuroscientists. Regions
related to learning show increased activity in sleepers who spent their evening mastering
a new skill, they say. The discovery shows that sleep is valuable for consolidating new
information and is not a simple 'standby' mode. Local brain processing during the night
led to new skills being more firmly cemented, the research indicates.
Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues measured
electrical brain signals in subjects who learned a simple computer game before going to
sleep. The kind of activity that occurs during sleep was increased in a penny-sized region
in the brains of slumbering subjects who had learned the game. Just playing the game did
not have this effect. The researchers conclude that sleep falls on brain circuits that have
been changed, not just used, during the day. And someone with more of such activity in
this area, which is in the top right hemisphere, tends to perform better in the morning,
they report in a paper published online by Nature. This is the first time that waking
behaviour has been shown to affect a specific part of the human brain during slumber.
"It's a very elegant study," says Robert Knight, a neuroscientist at the University of
California, Berkeley.

Night shift
When the brain goes to sleep, its nerve cells synchronize their firing to generate a pattern
called slow-wave activity (SWA). SWA characterizes the long periods of deep sleep,
which are interrupted by short bouts of rapid eye movement when dreaming occurs. Sleep
specialists know that SWA somehow reflects a need to rest. Someone who has been
awake for a long time will display more pronounced SWA at the beginning of the night.
"But the real questions are: what is it in you that really needs to rest, and what for?" says
Tononi. "Is it your whole body or just the brain cells that had something special to do
during your day?" If SWA is needed by local brain regions, he reasoned, one should be
able to increase SWA locally as a result of a specific task. He points out that some
animals, such as dolphins, can send the two halves of their brain to sleep independently,
and carry on regardless.