Learning & the Brain

Teachers & Neuroscientists Coming Together: Excitement, Discovery & Collaboration
I just finished attending a remarkable conference, "Enhancing Cognitions and Emotions for Learning." With over 1400 people attending, many of whom were teachers for grades K-12, the rest of whom were neuroscientists or those in related fields of science like myself, the meetings were conducted with a mood of excitement, discovery and collaboration. The neuroscientists were obviously eager for a dialogue with teachers, as the teachers were with the neuroscientists. From the perspective of the brain researchers, they described needing the real "in the field" perspective and experiences of the teachers, as they felt it would inform and propel their future directions and give meaning to their work, far beyond the laboratory. Likewise the teachers were eager to learn about every project, study, discovery put forth by the scientists, as they were looking for anything that might help them with the problems they confront in the classroom on a daily basis.

Cross-Discipline Atmosphere: The Future of Clinical Training & Practice
The cross-discipline atmosphere and goals of the conference brought to mind our goals in training clinicians --to help our students become avid consumers of research, who then apply it to their practice. The similarity between teachers and clinicians was obvious throughout these meetings, and I hope that in the future the group that put that put the conference together will expand it to more directly appeal to clinicians as well as teachers. An aside, the conference was put on by co-sponsors including scientists and educators from Harvard, Stanford University School of Education, and the Neuroscience Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara. This conference has been put on for 16 seasons, but it has always been held at Harvard. This year it was held both in Cambridge and here in SF at the Marriott at SF Airport. In the following I report on meetings I found most impressive or significantly related to the problems I face, both in my lab and/or in the classroom, although my students are all engaged in doctoral-level training and my Research Assistants are college students or those who recently completed their undergraduate degrees. As a clinician I had already been fairly up-to-date in terms of neuroscience research, however I had never spent such a prolonged and concentrated period applying the new findings in neuroscience to education.

Lessons of Neuroscience & Education: How to Structure a Conference
The conference was organized into sections, with major keynote presentations by well-known neuroscientists and educators taking place in the first half, and at the end of the day. In between these large lectures by scientists, smaller breakout sessions, also delivered by prime educators and scientists and covering related though more specialized topics, made room for those interested in a smaller, more topic-specific format. In this way, the conference mirrored the needs of learners everywhere, that is while learning through a large lecture format, a great deal of time was also scheduled for those who learn best in a smaller, more targeted format. In addition, throughout, there was time allotted for audience participation through question and answer periods either immediately following a talk, or in a panel discussion following several talks, tying the talks together.


The Essence of the Conference
In the following, I discuss the introduction to one of the plenary speakers, that was perhaps most salient to me in my role as an educator and scientist. Overall, the fundamental message of the conference was something we based our PsyD program upon, namely that students learn best in the context of close relationships and meaningful activity. Lecture after lecture drove home the point that we can no longer speak of something being primarily "cognitive" or primarily "emotional" but instead, we need as a basis a conceptual understanding of the brain as a whole package, in which cognition and emotion are entirely integrated, and neither one can exist in isolation from the other. I recently developed an online course, "Advances in the Cognitive and Affective basis of Behavior" and in the process it became clear to me that we can no longer speak of cognition and emotion as separate entities or constructs. There is no cognition without emotion, and no emotion without the structure of cognition, no matter what the age or state of the learner. As neuroscience has increasingly influenced the two ostensibly separate disciplines, they have joined completely, as the brain is fundamentally a unified, interrelated constellation of functions, and the important questions are no longer "Where is the area for X?" or "Where is the area for Y?" Instead we are asking: Why is a given function operating where and how it does? What interrelated functions are occurring? There are differing structures and plans for different neurons, and in the end, a neuron serves multiple functions.

Bottom Line the Brain is Social
We are only beginning to understand how complex and multifaceted our neural apparatus is, and perhaps most important, absolutely everything about our brains is, bottom line, social. Thus, today we know that not only can cognitive and emotion branches of psychological science not be disconnected, but social psychology is always a part of the package. Therefore, in educating our children, adolescents and adult learners, and in conducting any kind of psychological science, the link to success is understanding and integrating at every moment and every level, the primacy of the social brain. This reminded me of an article some years ago in the American Psychologist, The Greening of Relationship Science. The author (whose name escapes me for the moment) was prophetic in declaring the future of our field is found in human relationships.

Introduction by Kosik: Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Practice

Taking Neuorscience to the "Bedside"
A striking presentation was not a "talk" per se, but the "opening remarks" by Kenneth Kosik, M.D., from UC Santa Barbara. In this introduction to Gabrieli, Kosik spoke to the overlap in "learning and memory" that brought cognitive scientists together with teachers/educators. Please understand that I am not reporting verbatim here, but putting my own spin on this, and perhaps putting words into his mouth, but only in the interest of conveying what I think he was meaning. He spoke of two cultures meshing, be it physicians and scientists, or in the case of this conference, teachers and scientists. He noted that this time in history is "translational" in that we are taking cognitive science to the "bedside," speaking in the medical analogy. He said that the conference serves to catalyze the issue, the link between neuroscience and teaching.

The Centrality of Single-Case Observation and Narrative
He noted that in medicine some of the greatest advances have occurred in the wake of simple observations of single cases, and the narratives told by patients and physicians. He noted that likewise, in education, so much of what is needed and what is happening begins with single-case classroom observations and narratives told by teachers and students. However, he suggested, it is often believed --and is, indeed, within reason-- that in order to have "proof" of processes and to further develop our understanding of phenomenon, we need to move on to larger numbers and to statistically significant correlations. Here, he commented, the cultures sometimes have difficulty getting together, and the problem is one of method. In education he noted, it is hard to rely on correlations, one has to return to close observation. He pointed out that in other branches of science and social science, for example meteorology and anthropology, knowledge was gained by way of single case observation as the primary method. To further our knowledge in multiple areas, we need massive amounts of single case observation, and he suggested that the field of education is in the perfect position to conduct exactly that, massive amounts of data collection.

Differences in Methods and Time Scale: Problems in the Classroom & in Neuroscience
This Kosik notes, is a problem of time scale, and how to approach problems in the classroom with the addition of neuroscience methods. He pointed out that neuroscience itself has made its greatest advances based on initial single-case observations, for example, the split brain cases. It struck me as he spoke how very true that is; in fact we all learned neuroscience through stories of specific cases or types of cases. We learned through observations of epileptic patients whose corpus callusom, the bundle of axons that connects the two hemispheres, had been severed in the hopes of preventing seizures from spreading from one hemisphere to another. While the treatment in some cases controlled the spread of seizures, it leaves patients with brains whose interconnections between hemispheres had been severed. These cases have allowed us to learn what functions are unable to happen when the hemispheres can no longer communicate with one another. We learned the special functions of the hemispheres, though observations of these single case split-brain epileptic patients. And we all learned neuroscience through the story of Phineas Gage, whose whole personality changed when a tamping iron accidentally went through his frontal lobes and he transformed from a pleasant well mannered man, into a difficult and unpleasant character. Another famous single case is H.M., a patient who, again in a treatment for epilepsy, underwent a surgery that left him with severe anterograde amnesia and is completely unable to commit new events to long-term memory. Phineas Gage, H.M., and split-brain patients are all "single cases" who have changed the state of our knowledge and in differing way have formed the foundation of modern neuroscience.

Hope for the Future: The Teaching School
Kosik went on to describe his hope for the future of the "teaching school" where researchers and teachers work hand in hand all day long, one informing the other (rather like the hemispheres of our intact brains). He went back to the time scale distinctions, and described the plight of the child who has done badly in a paper. It is not a simple matter for him, it is not such a time-limited disaster. His failure at a school task goes on and on, time moves slowly to the child in the agony of failure. It is hour-to-hour and day-to-day for all of our real world cases. The child has to tell his friends and he faces that humiliation. Next he has to tell his parents of his failure, and see the look of disappointment move across their faces. What is happening to that child, minute-to-minute, moment-to-moment? This is the single case observation that science has to address, that we all have to address together. We are now speaking of "personalized medicine" as we increasingly become aware of how a drug works on an individual is related to his genetics, his unique biochemistry. We need to be moving into personalized teaching as much as we are into personalized medicine. Only as we gain more detailed information from our classrooms, will we achieve more in research. This message from Kosik, which I elaborated upon some for purpose of description of his message, was perhaps for me one of the most compelling in the whole conference, and this occurred in the first half hour of the first day of these remarkable meetings.

A Personal Afterthought: What it Means to Me as a Scientist
I am still thinking about the interactions between single case observation and large number quantitative studies. I began my academic life in anthropology and sociology, and so I have never understood the need that some have to turn narrative science into quantitative methods, no matter how awkward and sometimes even useless. Single case observations in my own research have led every time to later quantitative hypothesis testing. But in order to have meaning, the real story begins and returns to the single case observation, whether the case is a child in school or at home, a couple dealing with a difficult child with ADHD, a whole extended family, a class room, a community. As a scientist I have had no interest in turning my interview studies into quantitative grounded theory something. The interviews themselves, read over and over, provide themes and observations about how the world works, and then I can devise a quantitative study based on some small detail observed in the world.

A Case of Philosophical Confusion
Another thing that has baffled me is why so many seem to link narrative and observational studies with postmodern philosophy, in which everything is "subjective." Of course everything IS subjective in one way or another, however observational studies are no less empirical than are statistically based correlational studies, or statistically based laboratory studies. I interpret "empirical" to mean "in the real physical world." When I am engaged in an interview study, I am no less a scientist than when I am analyzing data based on larger numbers. I don't understand the connection to post-modern analysis, with the interview studies that I conduct with so much pleasure. (This is just my personal commentary, no one needs to agree with any of it, and if someone can explain why narrative has come to be so associated with "post-modern" philosophy, I sure wish they would share it with me. Kosik did not move into this more philosophical realm, his message ended with the report above).