Here’s a headline to get your attention: Action video games decrease gray matter, study finds. The article opens with this alarming sentence: “A new study suggests that playing action video games can be detrimental to the brain, reducing the amount of

This article is the first in an occasional series where I’ll introduce people who will be speaking at an upcoming Learning and the Brain conference.   Dr. Sapna Cheryan, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, has been

Because working memory is so important for learning, and because human working memory capacity isn’t as large as we wish it were, we would LOVE to be able to increase it. If we could make working memory bigger, then all

Does even a short bout of exercise immediately after learning help form long-term memories? A recent article, published by Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, suggests intriguing—even surprising—answer to this question. From a different perspective, this article also offers useful insights

Why do adolescents learn and remember specific information more easily than younger children? We have, of course, many answers to this question. For instance: working memory increases during childhood, and so adolescents have–on average–greater working memory capacity than younger students.

If you’re attending Learning and the Brain’s “Merging Minds and Technology” Conference in November, you’re probably interested in Mona Moisala’s research. After all, Moisala wants to know if media multitasking influences distractibility among 13-24 year olds. That is: does switching from

Does neuroscience education help reduce a teacher’s belief in neuromyths? According to this recent study: not as much as we would like. In some cases, neuroscience education does help teachers. For instance, 59% of the general public falsely believe that

Research findings that support later high-school start times have been more and more common in recent years. (See also here.) And teachers I know are increasingly vocal about letting teens sleep later. And yet, when I talk with high school

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a skeptic about gender differences in learning. Although they certainly do exist–I think particularly about differences in 3d mental rotation–I often think they’re overstated or overemphasized. At the same time, my emphasis