So What’s The (Brain) Buzz? What’s all the buzz in the popular media about the convergence of evolution, neuroscience, and psychology with education? The revolution began with advances in functional imaging technology enabling researchers to map specific patterns of neurological activity in the brain as it occurs.  Emotions, effort, senses, fear and memory can be watched and traced through the neurological highways of the brain. We can also see the brain change and conform in response to experiences and environment. And the technology shows us how it is possible for us to orchestrate brain change within ourselves, using a mouthful of a technique known as “self-directed neuroplasticity.” As a result of the unprecedented clarity of this brain imaging, scientists and educators are rethinking many of the 20^th-century assumptions about intelligence and how individual learning takes place. 

Why care?  In the same way good nutrition creates healthy bodies, healthy brain development requires our purposeful nurturing throughout life.  With knowledge, we can make active choices between proper nutrition for the brain, such as enriched and stimulating environments, and junk food, such as too much TV.   Your intelligence is not a static characteristic, assigned to you at birth, but an attribute that’s shaped all the time, through the experiences of life. For instance, there are ways to appropriately stimulate newborns, better prepare preschoolers for academic life, enhance our multiple intelligences, create efficiencies for all learners, deal with adolescents (without tearing our hair out), increase memory and its longevity, better understand neurological differences, such as ADD and impairments, such as Alzheimer’s, and much more.  

Like the many “facts and findings” of nutrition, breaking news about brain research can be just as confusing – and even conflicting. Can we get through a day without hearing that yesterday’s news about caffeine is contradicted by yet another study?   So too, the results of brain research applied to education can fall from fact to fiction when it’s exploited for a marketing gimmick, for instance. We believe that the implications of our new understanding about how we effectively wire and connect our minds are significant --  and worth the contemplation required to sift fact from fiction.

How do you begin your exploration?  Check out the web sites listed here. You are also invited to check out the titles (click here to see a list) we are making available in partnership with the Mark Twain Library. And from time to time, we will make available articles, reprinted with permission, from the best and the brightest neuroscientists and educational theorists on topics such as multiple and emotional intelligence, the nurture/ nature complexity and maintaining the mature mind --  that is, something for learners at every age.   Let us know topics of interest to you within this broad field.  With expressed interest, REF is eager to invite experts to encourage this community conversation! 

To contact the Redding Education Foundation about the Brain Learning Connection initiative, please email Kate Ebbott at info@reddingeducationfoundation.org or call 938-8383. We would be happy to put your name on a list of people interested in gathering for coffee and conversation.