Monthly Archives: July 2018

This kind of story crops up often. But, given the popularity of “brain training games,” it merits repetition: “brain training” doesn’t work.

Of course, school works. We can train our brains to know new things: the history of the Silk Road, pre-calculus, geology, good pottery-wheel technique. We can’t, however, train up working memory or general intelligence in some artificial way.

Here’s the essential summary:

“We hypothesized that if you get really, really good at one [working memory] test by training for a very long time, maybe then you’ll get improvement on tests that are quite similar. Unfortunately, we found no evidence to support that claim,” says Bobby Stojanoski, a research scientist in the Owen Lab at Western’s world renowned Brain and Mind Institute and lead author of the paper. “Despite hours of brain training on that one game, participants were no better at the second game than people who tested on the second game, but hadn’t trained on the first one.”

To be clear: I hope that some day we figure out a brain training technique that works.

If we could increase our students’ working memory capacity, that would — I think — revolutionize human cognition. But, we just don’t know how to do so yet.

Here’s a link to the underlying paper. And here’s a link to more thoughts on brain-training flim flam.

I spoke at this month’s Signs Summit in Chicago about problems in science communication. Here is the second half of what I said.

(You can find the first half, which focuses on “too much skepticism” here.)

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We live in age that been called the “decade of the brain.” Of course, we’ve been saying that for about 25 years now, so we need a new phrase.

In this era of the brain (corpus callosum!), we can make almost any argument sound more persuasive (occipital lobe!) by throwing in fancy-but-irrelevant neuroscience terminology (ventral tegmental area!).

For instance, Deena Skolnick Weisberg’s team found that people can generally distinguish between coherent and circular science explanations. However: when Weisberg added irrelevant neuroscience terminology to those explanations, readers judged the circular explanations to be much more persuasive.

Weisberg’s team memorably describes this result as “the seductive allure of neuroscience.”

(This research has proven controversial. Some researchers rebut it, whereas others arrive at similar findings.)

The Real Problem Is…

The resulting problem is not exactly that people dress up good teaching advice with needless neuroscience language. (Although that happens.)

The problem is not exactly that people dress up bad teaching advice with needless neuroscience language. (Although that happens.)

The problem is that many teachers respond so positively when we do.

For example: teachers can get absorbed in the differences between alpha, beta, and gamma waves — although this distinction has no practical teaching implications that I know of.

In other words: although some teachers respond to outside experts with excessive skepticism, others respond to fancy brain terminology with inadequate skepticism.

Multi-tasking and Beyond

For example: I once heard an MBE speaker explain that limits in the “bandwidth of the corpus callosum” make multi-tasking impossible.

(The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of our brains.)

This information leads teachers to an obvious question: what can we do to increase the capacity of a student’s corpus callosum, and thereby facilitate multi-tasking?

One answer to that question is: nothing.

Another answer is: its capacity increases as our students mature, so we don’t need to worry about doing so artificially.

Another really important answer is: that factual statement is simply false.

(When I asked for the research supporting this claim, the speaker declined to provide it to me. “You’d need a PhD in neuroscience to understand it” was the extraordinary excuse.)

Although we do have neural processing limits that preclude multi-tasking, the corpus callosum itself is one of the largest and densest structures in the brain. The idea that its “limits” hamper multi-tasking is silly.

This false information, at best, distracts teachers from from the key point: brains don’t multi-task. We need to design lesson plans and assessments that don’t ask our students to do so.

At worst, this falsehood leads ultimately to disillusionment. When teachers discover that this expert was dressing up good advice with needless terminology, we’re less likely to believe experts who genuinely know what they’re talking about.

Reaching for a Solution

Because neuroscience terminology can seduce teachers, it can seduce those of us who explain brain research to teachers. How can we resist its allure?

The obvious answer inverts the Nike slogan: “Just Don’t Do It.” If the medial temporal lobe isn’t practically relevant to our explanation, we can just not mention it.

At the same time, I think we need a strategy to lead teachers away from this seductive allure. Here’s my mantra: “Don’t just do this thing. Think this way.”

In other words: psychology and neuroscience communicators shouldn’t simply give teachers a list of instructions to follow. (Use visuals! Normalize struggle! Interleave topics!)

Instead, we should encourage teachers to think about learning with the helpful categories that cognitive science supplies.

Imagine, for example, that a teacher is creating a lesson plan. She recalls that, last year, this lesson went quite badly. What should she do?

I’m saying: that’s the wrong question. She shouldn’t just do this thing. She should think this way.

So, last year — did class go badly because of an attention problem?

The teacher thinks for a while. She concludes: Nope.

Was it a motivation problem?

Nope.

Was it a working memory problem?

Oh, wow: YES. Absolutely.

Okay, once you know it’s a WM problem, you’ve got a long list of potential solutions — which one sounds most likely?

This approach doesn’t explicitly reject neuroscience terminology. It simply redirects communication away from that set of questions. After all, teachers rarely say “well, that was an insula problem.”

The insula is cool and fascinating. But, we don’t know what to do about an insula problem. We have LOTS of ideas about solving working memory problems.

Two Sentences

In sum, researchers can overcome too much skepticism only by knowing a teacher’s world and work with the clarity that comes from LOTS of daily experience.

And, we can redirect too little skepticism by moving beyond specific teaching suggestions to fostering thinking habits that best shape teaching and learning.

I was invited to speak at March 4 Science SIGNS Summit on Saturday. The question was: what challenges bedevil the field of Science Communication? And, what can we do to fix them?

Here is, more or less, the first half of what I said:

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I began my professional life as a high school English teacher, and loved that work for several centuries.

For teachers, the challenge of science communication is NOT that many (many) teachers are deeply skeptical of outside experts telling us how to be better teachers.

The problem is that many (many) teachers are RIGHTLY deeply skeptical of outside experts telling us how to be better teachers.

I don’t know how it works in other professions. But, oddly, people who have never taught anyone anything feel comfortable telling teachers how to do our jobs better. At any party you attend, someone will blithely tell you to do this one simple thing, and your job will get every so much easier.

Do people tell surgeons which scalpel to use? Do people tell fire-fighters to be more like fire-fighters in Finland, where they’re so much better at fighting fires?

Just Do It

Here’s a true story. (I’m blurring the details, for obvious reasons.)

I once attended a conference (not, by the way, a Learning and the Brain conference) where the keynote speaker presented data on a specific teaching approach. The first question, quite marvelously, went like this:

Now that you’ve shared your ideas and your data with us, what plans do you have to hear back from teachers who try this idea? How can we keep this dialogue going, so you can learn from teachers as they learn from you?

The speaker thought for a moment and said: “We have no such plans. We’ve done the research. We know the right answer. Teachers should just do it. Do it.”

For this speaker, “interdisciplinary” apparently means “I tell you what to do, and you do it.”

“Too Much Skepticism”

For those of us in the field of Science Communication, teachers may seem unreasonably resistant — unreasonably skeptical — of outside experts. We exhibit too much skepticism.

But I suspect most people don’t much like outside experts.

If we, as science communicators, want people to hear and believe what we say, we should practice becoming inside experts.

For example: imagine that I change my focus, and strive to improve education through the legislature. I want to persuade congress to revoke old laws and pass new ones.

My temptation, of course, would be to talk with representatives and senators about brain science. Here’s the psychology. Here’s the neuroscience. Legislators should pass laws that align with that research.

However, I suspect that such guidance would be much more effective if I knew in a gritty, day-to-day way what legislators really do.

To find this out, I should — perhaps — volunteer at a representative’s campaign, or intern at my senator’s office. I should attend committee meetings and community meetings. I might even (perish the thought) try my hand at political fundraising.

A New Language, or Two

One the one hand, none of these activities (the volunteering, the interning, the fundraising) has much to do with brain science.

On the other hand, all of them will help me learn to speak politics. And, if I can speak politics, I’ll be vastly more effective framing science research to persuade legislators to act.

I won’t be an outside expert. I will sound increasingly like an inside expert.

By implication, I’m encouraging two kinds of cross-training.

Psychology and neuroscience researchers can make their guidance more meaningful and useful by spending more time — real time — working with the classroom teachers they seek to guide.

And: classroom teachers can collaborate with researchers as equals if and only if we devote more time — real time — to mastering the complex disciplines that we hope will benefit our students.

This is a big ask. I’m not talking about days or weeks, but months and years.

I wish we had an easier way to accomplish this mission. And yet, for science communication to succeed — for brain researchers and teachers to work effectively together — we really do need this kind of sustained, gritty, determined exploration.

I’m thinking our students are worth it.

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In Part II, I’ll consider the dangers of too LITTLE skepticism.