How the Brain Works: The brain had to evolve

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This week, we’re bringing you another tasty snippet from the CEN resource on How the Brain Works.  Here we reflect on the consequences of the often forgotten but completely fascinating fact that our brains weren’t designed or made, but have slowly and organically evolved over millions of years…

 

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THE HUMAN BRAIN IS THE PRODUCT OF EVOLUTION

…BUT DOES THAT MATTER FOR HOW IT WORKS?

The instructions to build the brain – written in DNA – turn out to be more detailed for parts of the brain with a longer evolutionary history of retaining the same function. There’s been more time for biological trial and error to figure out the instructions to build specific structures tuned to specific functions.

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Longer evolutionary history also tends to mean these instructions (or similar versions) are shared with other similar animals lying on the same branch of evolution’s family tree. In our case, that means in the branch of: vertebrates (backboned animals); sub-branch: mammals; sub-branch: social primates. A lot of the build plans are similar across similar species.

The general plan for building a body with a brain goes back a long way, perhaps 450 million years; the plans for brain cells – neurons, with their connections, electrical properties, and neurotransmitters – still further. As we’ll see, one bit of the brain is particularly enlarged in humans – the outer layer or cortex. In evolutionary terms, this greater amount of cortex is a recent addition. Therefore instructions to build components within the cortex are less detailed, and they depend more on development for their sculpting. By contrast, other bits of the brain, such as those responsible for the emotions, look almost identical in humans and chimpanzees.

 

~ EVOLUTION INNOVATES AT THE PERIPHERY ~

First, evolution tends to innovate at the periphery. The new things that mark out a new species tend to be in the structure and function of its body (including the movements it can perform), its organs, and its sensory equipment. When it comes to the brain, the innovations are less specific, but tend to involve tweaking the general build plan used in this branch of the family tree: some parts of the brain grow bigger, some smaller, but the types of structure are the same. Evolution modifies the existing plan, more here, less there; it doesn’t build a new brain piece and add it in.

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Take bats. They can navigate in the dark using sound. But there is no special new part of the bat-brain for navigating using sound. The ability to emit ‘ping’ noises, and enhanced hearing to differentiate the echoes that come back, are innovations. The bat brain uses similar types of brain structures to other mammals, but develops in them the ability to combine sound information to guide flight and not bump into cave walls.

What are the specific innovations in humans, separate from other social primates? We stand upright. We have hands and vocal articulators (lips, tongue, vocal cords) evolved to allow precise movements and speech production. Rib muscles that allow us to generate a smooth flow of air over the vocal cords to produce speech (this works fine so long as we’re not laughing). One particular part of the brain, the cortex, has grown bigger, giving us more thinking power. More on this later.

 

~ EVOLUTION ONLY IMPROVES WHAT IT ALREADY HAS ~

Second, evolution only improves what it already has. Over generations, the build plans for the body and brain can be changed and improved, but they are modifications of previous plans. This means solutions aren’t necessary the best ones. As the joke goes, a tourist asks, ‘How do I get to London?’ and gets the reply ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here.’ A desktop computer may be better suited for solving some problems the human brain faces, but evolution has committed to doing things with neurons, with whatever limitations that involves. Evolution can only improve what neurons can do; it can’t switch to silicon.

 

~ YOU DON’T HAVE TO USE SOMETHING FOR WHAT IT WAS MADE FOR ~

Third, you don’t have to use something for what it was made for. The visual system was designed to recognise the physical world (objects, scenes) and social stimuli (faces, bodies) 1. But – once human culture had invented reading – each new generation of humans could then use the visual system to learn to read. This point has a second part: but if you use it for something different, it may not work perfectly.

screenshot-2019-02-12-at-14-51-09So, the visual system has been designed to recognise objects from whatever viewpoint: a coffee cup is a coffee cup if seen from the left, the right, or upside down. But in English, we asked children to learn that p, q, b, and d are all different letters, corresponding to different speech sounds. To the young child’s visual system, these all look like the same object (a round bit with a tail) viewed from different angles. It takes months, maybe years of learning to overcome the brain’s preference to interpret what it sees in terms of movable objects, and this is why children learning to read in English often mix up their b’s and d’s, and their 6’s and 9’s.

Lastly, when it comes to big changes in brain structure evolution always takes longer than you think. The brains of humans 5,000 years ago, even 50,000 years ago, looked pretty much the same as our brains now.

Jo Van Herwegen. Neurodevelopmental disorders and classroom practice

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Jo Van Herwegen presented a CEN seminar looking at the translation of research into Williams and Downs syndrome learning difficulties to interventions in the classroom. In the video, she gives a short summary of her talk.

For those interested, you can find out much more about Jo’s research, publications and opportunities to get involved with her research on her Child Development and Learning Difficulties Lab website. You can read her blog here and also stay up to date with her research by following her on Twitter

Teachers and educators on what research means for them: Harry Fletcher-Wood

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We are delighted to welcome him to the CEN to answer some questions for our blog.

What is the importance of formal evidence, beyond what teachers know works in their classroom?

As a new teacher, I improved a lot through trial and error, and trying what colleagues were doing.  This was powerful: you get rapid feedback from students if you’re boring them or they don’t understand what you’re talking about, so I was able to refine some aspects of what I did.  But there are some things which we are unlikely ever to discover through trial and error: for example, the phenomenon of desirable difficulties: making tasks harder for students (and so seeing worse immediate performance) can increase what they retain in the long-term.  That’s pretty counter-intuitive: without evidence, I’d have been reluctant to believe this or act upon it.  More broadly, learning from trial and error is slow: students come to school because they wouldn’t learn everything we’d hope in eighteen years of trial and error; I think evidence helps students in similar ways – teachers will keep getting better, but acting on evidence can accelerate their improvement.

What enables teachers to take a more evidence-based approach?

I think it’s getting used to questioning what you’re being told, and finding good sources of evidence. The intermediaries are key here: as a history teacher, I didn’t have the training or experience to critically analyse papers in experimental psychology; nor did I have the time.  We need to make this easier for teachers by providing clear, actionable summaries which remain faithful to the underpinning research.

Can you give any specific examples from your experience of how an evidence-based approach has changed practice for the better?

A few years ago I was designing a new history curriculum for Key Stage 3 students.  I’d begun to read around how much students forget, and why.  So instead of designing a curriculum which rattled straight through the topics, I designed it so that we kept revisiting key ideas, key periods and key disciplinary approaches.  Students began Year 7 with a chronological world tour, giving them a rough sense of how Ancient Roman life differed from the Middle Ages, for example.  The next year, we did another chronological course, focused on British political history.  The next year, something similar based around war.  The evidence convinced me that, rather than relying on teaching it really well first time, I needed to design my curriculum to revisit the key ideas from different perspectives.

More recently, as part of the programme I lead for teacher educators, we’ve written a curriculum for teacher educators, designed to offer both a structure and material they can use to help teachers understand how students learn, and adapt their teaching accordingly.  We’ve rooted it in cognitive science.  I’ve seen teacher educators design their entire professional development programme around this, helping teachers understand the evidence and teach accordingly.

I am a teacher who wants to know more about the research evidence; where should I start?

I got into the evidence via Twitter and blogs.  I’ve shared some of my favourite people to follow and blogs here and a list of some of the most useful and interesting papers I’ve read here.  I’d also recommend attending a ResearchED conference: they bring together teachers interested in research and researchers interested in sharing what they’ve learned with teachers: so you end up with a good combination of accessibility, usefulness and rigour.

Are there specific areas of teaching or learning where we need better evidence? Where are the research gaps? 

I’m fascinated by how we take good ideas and make them work in the messy reality of individual classrooms.  I’d love to see more research which offers teachers the underlying ideas in a promising area of research, supports them to develop their own ways to act on them in the classroom, and rigorously measures the results.  The biggest gap isn’t exciting research or determined teachers, but bringing those two together in ways which respect both the evidence of the researcher and the wisdom of the teacher.

For more from Harry, as well as the links already mentioned, you can follow him on Twitter

How the brain works Part 1. In the beginning….

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brain_fillerWe’ve been busy at the CEN writing a guide to how the brain works. Yes seriously. How the brain actually works. Not how we think it could have or should have but how it actually does. The guide is intended to give a general audience a decent gist. There’s no show-offy long anatomical names or world record breaking facts, just a best-estimate summary of the brain’s modus operandum. (That’s the last Latin you’ll get.) You can dip into the full resource whenever you like – it’s here howthebrainworks.science and over the next few weeks, we will also be presenting some of the main ideas in bite size portions. We all love a brain-teaser, so where better to start than with some puzzles?

Why can I forget what the capital of Hungary is, but not that I’m afraid of spiders?
Why do I find I have learnt things better after a night’s sleep?
Why do children learning to read and write mix up their bs and ds?
Why does my mind go blank when I’m stressed in an exam?
Why do I learn a new language so much more easily when I’m 5 than when I’m 50?
Why do I sometimes go into a room to get something, then forget what I went in for?

Hungary Capital MapThe answers to all these questions don’t lie in psychology. Even though psychology has some great theories about how the mind works and how we learn, there are some answers it’s less hot on. Instead, the answers lie in the particular – and sometimes peculiar – way our brains work. Our brains didn’t have to work this way. There are other ways you could do things. Our brains work the way they do because of their particular biological and evolutionary origins.

Think of it like this: if you were GoogleAmazonApple Inc. and you were building a robot that learns, you could design your device so that it didn’t have any of these properties. The robot could store Capital-Cities and Animals-I’m-Scared-Of as similar types of memories. It need not forget either. You could build your robot without emotions like ‘stress’ or ‘anxiety’, which on the face of it seem to detract from learning performance.  And, battery life permitting, you could build a robot that didn’t need to sleep to achieve efficient learning.

Figuring out how the mind is generated by the brain has turned out to be pretty tricky. When we look at human behaviour, what we see is often a fluid, smooth, glistening, dynamic interaction with the world. It can seem unified from the outside. When psychologists have taken this outside-looking-in approach, they have constantly run into the same problem: what is one thing in psychology is many things in the brain. For example, ‘keeping something in mind’ seems like a single thing, but there are many different memory systems at work in the brain. In this resource, we’ll come across many cases of ideas from psychology that turn out to be many things in the brain, among them: the self, attention, learning, concepts, people, language.

Much of psychology describes activities – things like ‘problem solving’ or ‘drawing’; these describe what happen on the outside rather than the actions of many mechanisms at work on the inside. To bring about an activity, lots of bits of the brain work together, different subsets work together for different activities and there is fluid interaction between brain, body, and external world.

Sad to say, ‘looking inside your mind’ doesn’t necessarily get you much closer to how the brain works, either. Take that voice in your head, the one that you use to reason with before you make a decision. ‘Should I have that extra slice of cake or not? Well, I only had one slice of toast for breakfast, so maybe it’s okay.’ The voice (psychologists call it the ‘phonological loop’) is generated in the side of the brain, the bit next to the ear. Guess what? That’s not the part that makes decisions. The bit that makes decisions is the front of the brain. When you listen to the voice in your head, you’re listening to the commentator, not the decision maker.

Psychologists are rightly concerned with consciousness, the mental life – the ‘you’ that you experience, your awareness, the thoughts you have about yourself. Here, neuroscience hasn’t really helped out. We’re still at the stage of seeing which bits of the brain become more active when we have certain experiences. The story, though, seems to be headed in the same direction: one experience is lots of bits of brain interacting with each other.

So, have some sympathy for psychologists. Building detailed links between psychology and neuroscience is a big challenge and will take a while. Luckily, we don’t need to worry about that too much to understand how the brain works…

To begin to understand that, we need to go back to the beginning, a few million years ago…

Adult literacy across the globe: challenges and opportunities

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At this week’s CEN seminar, PhD student Cathy Rogers presented findings from a recent report into adult literacy she co-authored with Dr Victoria Knowland and Prof Michael Thomas. The full report will be published here as soon as it is available.

How teaching informs research informs teaching informs research…

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alice-bowmer-violin-photo-croppedWe’re always especially pleased to hear from people with one foot in teaching and another in academic research, so today we are delighted to introduce Alice Bowmer who absolutely fits that bill. Alice is a freelance researcher and music teacher. She teaches violin to children aged 6 to 18 and is an honorary research associate at UCL Institute of Education.  Her current research looks at the impact of music and arts training on early cognitive and motor development. You can find her most recent publication here

Welcome Alice! Give us your take on how research and education inform one another.

“I started a violin teaching practice 10 years ago in north London and my research evolved from a desire to understand more about how my students were learning both musically and in other key aspects of their development. After a few years of study, I realised that understanding more about how the brain functions and how children develop was giving me a unique insight into many aspects of the practical work I do with my young students.

As an example, in musical learning it’s quite common for students to memorise a tune with an incorrect note, which becomes really difficult to change. From my research into cognitive development, I saw that to correct a note in this way is actually a really complex skill. First the student has to know that the incorrect note and corresponding muscle movement exists, then, they have to focus their attention at exactly the right moment as well as produce a new movement and learn to hear a new sound. And this correction might have to happen hundreds of times to over-ride the incorrect sound and muscle memory already in their long-term memory. I realised that to make a change is not as simple as just telling the student about the mistake. One simple thing I often do to support this problem is to sing the new, correct note (whilst the student is playing) a split second before they reach the incorrect note, which I’ve found helps them to intercept and correct it themselves in the future. Today, I am really grateful that I can utilise a combination of research and teaching practice to come up with effective strategies to support my students.

Recently, my research partner and I have been designing projects that support teachers and researchers working together. One of our aims is to examine how different types of instruction affect a variety of outcomes for children, in part, by working with teachers to learn about what they do in the real world. In a current project we are designing and analysing preschool music and art curricular, with a secondary focus to support children’s executive function skills. We have found that developing research projects together in this way gives teachers the opportunity to consider how their activities might support particular cognitive processes in more detail and researchers the ability to look at outcome measures through the eyes of different teaching practices.

Unfortunately, we’ve also found it quite challenging to find funding that supports this sort of research design. So far, our way of tackling this problem has been to work within a very limited budget (which is not really sustainable) or to work with an organisation that find funding to deliver the intervention strand, whilst we find funding to support the research. But again, this relies on those two streams coming together in a close time frame, which is not easy to organize.

In sum, I think the teacher/researcher collaboration provides many possibilities, particularly in the realm of educational neuroscience because a collaborative process can help to draw out the practical applications of brain research in a really tangible way. However, for this to happen successfully we need more funding bodies to support research that tries to get at multiple aspects of what happens when children are learning new skills.”

 

Identifying different types of cognitive ability in scientific thinking…

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PhD student Selma Coecke shares with us a summary of her recent CEN seminar titled: An undefined form of fluid intelligence: how its trajectory differs from conceptual development in the context of science 

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Intelligence tests measure two forms of cognitive process: verbal – representing declarative knowledge – and nonverbal -aiming to eliminate the influence of socio-cultural knowledge.
However, my research demonstrates that there are multiple cognitive processes in the context of scientific thinking.  Spatial-temporal cognition for example, is one of these and it consistently explains unique variance in science beyond verbal-nonverbal distinction.
 
Furthermore, although it is often considered part of the verbal domain, scientific vocabulary is another unique measure.  It lies at the interface between the verbal and nonverbal as it draws heavily on imagery. During this talk I explained how my data demonstrates that neither verbal nor nonverbal abilities are unitary. Spatial-temporal cognition in particular, may be a good candidate independent component of fluid intelligence.  This form of thinking appears to satisfy three major requirements: it has a (1) unique predictive/ecological validity, (2) capacity to support abstract thinking, (3) unique qualitative and quantitative characteristics. 

Using research in the classroom: Teaching in a multi-linguistic classroom

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roberto-filippiWelcome to our series in which we ask researchers to tell us how their research is of use and relevance for the classroom. Today, we are delighted to welcome Roberto Filippi, Associate Professor at UCL Institute of Education.

What is the focus of your research?

My area of research is second language acquisition with specific focus on the effects of bilingualism (or multilingualism) on cognitive development across the lifespan. This has become a very hot topic in recent years, mostly due to the increased multiculturalism in our societies. According to some reliable estimates, more than half of the world’s population is fluent in two or more languages – more than three billion people!  We can safely say that bilingualism is not an exception and studying multilingual speakers offers a unique opportunity to understand how language develops and what its interactions are with the rest of the cognitive system.

What led you to this area of research? 

Being the father of two bilingual children, I can’t deny that I have a strong personal interest. I began studying bilingual children more than 10 years ago in a London primary school in which the large majority of children were bilinguals. I directly experienced the challenges that teachers face everyday, but also the advantages that a multicultural / multilinguistic community can offer. Building a bridge between science and education was a very rewarding experience, an experience that I wish to continue even more here at the UCL Institute of Education.

Could you summarise your findings?

A decade of research in this area has shown many positive effects of second language development. I should say that studying bilingual / multilingual speakers is not an easy task. Second language learning occurs everyday and defining someone as “bilingual” does not explain the complexities of this phenomenon. Nonetheless, our studies try to take into account the many variables that might affect our findings like, for example, our participants’ linguistic experience, age of second language acquisition/exposure, levels of proficiency in both languages and socio-economic status.

Our studies have shown that bilingual children who learnt two languages from birth and bilingual adults who started to learn a second language much later in life, enjoy the remarkable ability to filter out sound interference when attending to a task – in our case the comprehension of speech. A possible interpretation of these finding is that bilinguals have to deal with two languages in a single mind. They need to filter out interference from the non-target language (i.e., the language that is not in use) and activate that target one (i.e., the language that one wants to speak or listen to). As a result of this intense and daily “brain training”, bilinguals may develop a stronger resilience than monolingual speakers to environmental distractions. Remarkably, in another study in which we used modern neuroimaging techniques, we found that the ability to control verbal interference in bilinguals is associated with a specific area of the cerebellum. This may indicate that the bilingual brain has a different functional and structural development compared to the monolingual brain, even in areas that were largely unexplored, such as the cerebellum.

What do you think this means for teachers in the classroom?

We are continuously bombarded by visual and auditory stimuli that affect our concentration. Our attention skills are very limited and prone to distractions that may impair our performance in everything we do. Classrooms are very noisy environments in which children need to learn in the presence of many environmental distractors. If our studies confirm that acquiring two (or more) languages early in life may enrich a capacity for filtering out distractors and learning more efficiently, I think we will offer educators and policy makers additional scientific evidence that multilanguage acquisition is beneficial for cognitive development.

If you could give one tip to teachers based on your work, what would it be?

Never discourage parents from raising their children in multilingual environments. Unfortunately, there are still cases in which educators advise multilingual families to raise their children as monolingual, to avoid “mental confusion”. This advice comes from early research showing that bilingualism was detrimental for a child’s cognitive development. However, this research has proven to be flawed. Decades of more rigorous and controlled scientific studies have not supported this view at all: there is no evidence that second language acquisition can impair development.

Therefore, I think it is the responsibility of the scientific community to provide research-based evidence and actively engage with education professionals. We need to work together to give our children everything they need.

You can read more about Roberto’s research in these papers; on bilingual advantage of language interference in adults, in children and on control of language interference.
Teachers and parents might also be interested in the many resources available on the Bilingualism matters website and the book Raising multilingual children.

Integrating tech into teaching

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melpicMusic teacher and researcher Melissa Uye-Parker tells us about her recent tech-based classroom intervention study.

 

In this seminar at Centre for Educational Neuroscience, I presented my research that explored the design of a technology professional development and how it could be implemented to support teacher technology adoption.

Three teachers, T1, T2, T3, took part in a 6-week technology integration programme. Through participation in constructivist-framed activities (encouraging reflection, peer-collaboration, mentor support) the teachers each trialed a new technology into their lessons. Along with their peer-mentor, the teachers reviewed and reflected on their lessons through video recordings.

The results produced three distinct profiles of teacher. T1, who considered herself as a proficient ICT user, lacked the confidence to integrate technology into her teaching. She did not engage with the non-compulsory aspects of the programme.  T2, who considered herself as lacking in ICT skills, was able to use her knowledge of teaching to support her ICT integration. She also did not engage with the non-compulsory aspects of the programme.  T3, who considered herself as proficient in ICT and teaching, demonstrated the highest instance of pedagogical strategies. In additional, she engaged fully with the program. For T3, this was an effective intervention.

The study also found assessing that the role of the mentor and the video-guided analysis of the project contributed to its success. Building on the findings of this study, the following recommendations were made for further developments of the programme: technology professional development programmes must be able to develop teaching skills as well as their technological skills. The level of reflection was higher for the teacher with a secure knowledge of their teaching skills.

Headteachers share their thoughts about research: Jo Pearson

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jo-pearson-photoIn this regular series, we hear from teachers and heads about their views of educational neuroscience. Has ed neuro helped them with their teaching? How? Are there problem areas? Are there gaps where research should be focused? Today, we are delighted to introduce Jo Pearson, Head of Oldham Research School and Teamworks SCITT (School Centred Initial Teacher Training) and TSA (Teaching School Alliance). Welcome Jo!

What does educational neuroscience mean to you?

Educational neuroscience for me means finding out about how we learn, how we retain knowledge and the ways in which I as a teacher could adapt how I teach to support my pupils to learn better.  As someone with a history degree who trained on a one year PGCE a long, long (!) time ago this is an area that was not in my own prior knowledge or training.  Not knowing why some pedagogies worked better than others or indeed why some bits are harder to learn than others is both frustrating and professionally disempowering.  As somebody who is in charge of the learning of others, I really want to be able to have some knowledge about how this happens.

How do you keep up to date with the latest research?

Being a research school is a huge advantage because we get to spend lots of time with the EEF, the IEE and other research school leads. The opportunity to talk about and share research and its implementation in the classroom is so valuable and has been brilliant professional development.  I also subscribe to the cognition-in-science google group; I’m not a science teacher and some (lots!) sometimes goes over my head but there’s also some really brilliant examples of research in practice.  Lastly, I subscribe to lots of email lists; NFER, Evidence in brief from the IEE, Shanahan on literacy….

Is there a specific research-informed idea that you feel has had a positive impact in your school, one which others could potentially try?

We’ve really used it to unpick effective planning and assessment. Cognitive load theory has helped in thinking through planning across the long and medium term and on a lesson level. We’ve identified aspects of curriculum content that have a high intrinsic load, analogue time for example or fractions. As staff, we unpicked why; in these cases it was because the prior learned knowledge seems to contradict the new knowledge (3 not being just 3 but 15 or even quarter; the idea that 1/4 is smaller than 1/2 when everything you knew before said 2 was smaller than 4). This has helped us to think about the time we give to these topics, the frequency with which we need to return to these topics and the prior knowledge we need to unpick when we teach them in our long term planning and has also helped us to identify the points at which scaffolding and modelling can really make our teaching more effective at lesson level. Extraneous load theory has helped us to review our classrooms and teaching materials, especially for hard to teach content and finally our work on germane load and metacognition has helped us to plan explicit points at which we can support the six aspects to self-regulation in our pupils. Just having a shared definition of what we all mean by the term ‘learned’ has been very powerful.

How do you get teachers and students involved?

We use our newsletter, our training programmes and our own staff development programme to build staff knowledge and support changes in practice that help to make this more than just the latest fad.  It’s really important that they know this is not about us giving our personal views and preferred practices; it is about us reporting what the evidence from well-designed projects, gathered over time, suggests is a better bet.

Are there areas where you think research should focus next (ie what are the important gaps in our understanding)?

Marking is an obvious one; we know that we don’t know that much yet but it absorbs such a lot of staff time. It would be great to know more.

Thank you so much Jo. Do check out the hyperlinks to find many more resources. We would also recommend the resources of The Learning Scientists, the EEF Toolkit for an overview of evidence-levels for various educational interventions, and for those who are members of the Chartered College, their regular magazine Impact is consistently excellent. We have also recently published our own CEN resource for anyone who would like to get a better gist of how the brain actually works; if you want to find fascinating answers to intriguing puzzles like why children get their bs and their ds muddled up, look no further.