Occasionally I try to persuade people that neuroscience is fantastically complicated. In other words: we shouldn’t beat ourselves up if we don’t master it all.
Today I spotted a headline that makes my point for me:
Hippocampus-driven feed-forward inhibition of the prefrontal cortex mediates relapse of extinguished fear
Got that?
What’s the Bigger Point?
Neuroscience is simply fascinating. As teachers, we really want to know how neurons work. And synapses. And brain regions — like the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.
However, specific teaching advice almost always comes from psychology. How do teachers help students connect neurons to create memories? Psychology. What classroom strategies support executive function in the prefrontal cortex? Psychology.
At a LatB Conference, you’ll enjoy the neuroscience talks because they show you what’s going on underneath the hood. At the psychology talks, you’ll get specific classroom suggestions.
The best conference experience, in my opinion, combines both.
NeuroscienceNews.com has published its “Top 20 Neuroscience Stories of 2017,” and the list provides helpful — and sometimes surprising — insight into current brain research.
Taken together, these stories add up to 5 important headlines.
Headline 1: Neuroscience can tell us such cool stuff!
Gosh darnit: people who swear more are more likely to be honest, and less likely to be deceptive. Dad gummity.
If music literally gives you chills, you might have unusual levels of connectivity between your auditory cortex and emotional processing centers.
People with very high IQs (above 130) are more prone to anxiety than others.
A double hand transplant (!) leads to remarkable levels of brain rewiring (!).
Forests can help your amygdala develop, especially if you live near them.
When you look a baby in the eyes, your brain waves just might be synchronizing.
Headline 2: Your gut is your “second brain”
Amazingly, fully one quarter of the 20 top stories focus on the connection between the brain and the digestive system. For example:
Traumatic Brain Injury Causes Intestinal Damage
Research Suggests Connection between Gut Bacteria and Emotion
New Light on Link between Gut Bacteria and Anxiety
Your Mood Depends on the Food You Eat
Gut Microbes May Talk to the Brain through Cortisol
This “aha” moment — our guts and our brains are deeply interconnected! — happens over and over, and yet hasn’t fully been taken on board in the teaching and understanding of neuroscience.
Teachers should watch this research pool. It will, over the years, undoubtedly be increasingly helpful in our work.
Headline 3: Neuroscience and psychology disagree about definitions of ADHD
A psychologist diagnoses ADHD by looking at behavior and using the DSM V.
If a student shows a particular set of behaviors over time, and if they interfere with her life, then that psychologist gives a diagnosis.
However, a 2017 study suggests that these ADHD behaviors might be very different in their underlying neural causes.
Think of it this way. I might have chest pains because of costochondritis — inflammation of cartilage around the sternum. Or I might have chest paints because I’m having a heart attack.
It’s really important to understand the underlying causes so we get the treatment right.
The same just might be true for ADHD. If the surface symptoms are the same, but the underlying neural causes are different, we might need differing treatments for students with similar behavior.
By the way, the same point is true for anxiety and depression.
Headline 4: Each year we learn more about brain disorders
Alzheimer’s might result, in part, from bacteria in the brain. Buildup of urea might result in dementia. Impaired production of myelin might lead to schizophrenia. Oxidative stress might result in migraines.
Remarkably, an immune system disorder might be mistaken for schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. (Happily, that immune system problem can be treated.)
Headline 5: For teachers, neuroscience is fascinating; psychology is useful
If you’re like me, you first got into Learning and the Brain conferences because the brain — the physical object — is utterly fascinating.
You want to know about neurons and synapses and the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex and the ventral tegmental area. (Ok, maybe not so much with the ventral tegmental area.)
Over all these years, I’ve remained fascinated by neuroscience. At the same time, I’ve come to understand that it rarely offers teachers concrete advice.
Notice: of the twenty headlines summarized above, only one of them really promises anything specific to teachers. If that ADHD study pans out, we might get all sorts of new ideas about diagnosing and treating students who struggle with attention in school.
The other 19 stories? They really don’t offer us much that’s practical.
The world of psychology, however, has all sorts of specific classroom suggestions for teachers. How to manage working memory overload? To foster attention? To promote motivation?
Psychology has concrete answers to all these questions.
And so, I encourage you to look over these articles because they broaden our understanding of brains and of neuroscience. For specific teaching advice, keep your eyes peeled for “the top 20 psychology stories of 2017.”
According to this new study, bilinguals learn new languages faster than monolinguals.
To reach this conclusion, this research looked at brain wave signatures as participants learned an artificial language.
(Understanding electroencephalogram research is always tricky. Don’t feel bad if you’re not totally clear on what a P600 might be.)
The short version is this. As they learned this new language, neural patterns for bilinguals resembled native speaker patterns relatively quickly. Those patterns for the monolinguals developed more slowly.
Limitation to Bilingual Advantage Research
We can’t be sure that this finding extrapolates to the real world. After all, this particular artificial language has only 13 words in it–four nouns, two adjectives, two adverbs, and so forth.
However, the study does tentatively support a widely-believed conclusion: the hardest language to learn is the second…
(By the way: we’ve posted about the potential benefits and detriments of bilingual education several times in the last year. You can click on “bilingual education” in the tags list on the right to see other articles.)
The hormone/neurotransmitter oxytocin has developed a great brand.
It gets credit for all sorts of good things. When new lovers meet, their giddy glow might result from oxytocin. When mothers hold their babies, oxytocin seems to widen their smiles.
Little wonder, then, that oxytocin has earned the nickname “the love hormone.”
You’ve heard a lot of information about neurons at the Learning and the Brain conferences that you attend. Perhaps a quick review would be helpful to consolidate your learning?
You have perhaps heard of “forest-bathing,” the Japanese practice of taking in the forest atmosphere to boost health.
For many, the idea has intrinsic appeal. (I work at a summer camp in leafy Vermont, and so am immediately drawn to ideas like these.)
Do we see any neural changes as a result of time spent in the forest?
The short answer: living near forests helps
According to a recent study looking at residents of Berlin, the answer is “yes.”
Those who live in or near forests demonstrate more “amygdala integrity” than those who don’t. In fact, forest-living promotes healthy amygdala development even more than living near parks or other green spaces.
The study itself is quite technical, but the headline message is clear: the place where you live can influence brain development.
A Longer Answer: are we sure?
As is always true, we have many reasons to pause before we make dramatic changes in response to this study.
First, the authors conclude that living near forest promote “amygdala integrity,” but they don’t say what “amygdala integrity” means. It’s hard to be opposed to “integrity,” but I wish I knew more about this part of the finding.
Second, we should be cautious when evaluating research that supports our own biases. If you–like me–LOVE spending time in the forest, then you’ll be tempted to wave this study about to support your long-held convictions.
“See!” you might cry, “I’ve always told you that forests were good for you and [**whispering**] your amygdala integrity!”
Research that supports our own pet causes can often take advantage of our blindspots. We should be especially careful in promoting it.
Third, there’s an unfortunate history of people getting excited about “nature is really good for your brain” research.
The New York Times got very excited about a study trumpeting the benefits of walking through a forest, despite real concerns about methodology in that study.
And yet…
…despite these three reservations, I’m inclined to think that the researchers are on to something here. Living in an environment that mirrors our evolutionary heritage might very well be good for our brains’ development.
I’d never met Ben Barres, but this article makes me really wish I had.
If you’d like to know more about him, and his perspective on curiosity, research, meaningful life, and meaningful death, here’s a brief but fascinating video:
Earlier this month, I linked to a study showing that declarative and procedural memories correspond with different brain-wave frequencies.
This week: another study making a similar point. Researchers have found that frontal, temporal, and medial temporal lobes align neural activity at lower frequencies as new memories are formed. (At higher frequencies, neural alignment is weaker.)
Networks and Brain Waves
As lead author Ethan Solomon says,
This suggests that, for someone to form new memories, two functions must happen simultaneously: brain regions must individually process a stimulus, and then those regions must communicate with each other at low frequencies.
I suspect that over the next few years, our understanding of long-term memory formation will move in this direction. That is, we will increasingly combine the study of synapse formation between neurons with the study of frequency alignment among brain regions.
That account will doubtless be more complex. But: if it’s more accurate, that complexity will ultimately be more helpful to us all.
Looking Forward to 2nd Grade
When I was in grad school, Kurt Fischer often said “when it comes to understanding brains, we’re still in first grade.”
He meant that the brain is just so complicated, we have only just begun to understand it.
For teachers interested in neuroscience, this truth has a powerful consequence. Much of what we learn about the brain today will be understood differently next year. It might be quaint in ten years.
As you can imagine, that’s an extraordinarily difficult question–in part because definitions of morality can be tricky in the first place.
In this study, researchers study the neural underpinnings of moral decisions–particularly decisions not to harm other people. The findings are quite complicated–lots of talk about the lateral pre-frontal cortex–but a fascinating glimpse into our moral/neural selves.
