Learning & the Brain Part II: Gabrieli

John Gabrieli: Educating the Brain: Implications of Neuroscience for Learning and Learning Disorders

John Gabrieli, a neuroscientist from MIT and Harvard spoke on "Educating the Brain: Implications of Neuroscience for Learning and Learning Disorders." He began with comments about how natural is for neuroscientists to be gathering with teachers as both groups are often focused on learning and memory. He then posed a question around which he built his lecture: "What do we need to know from brain science about learning and memory to be prepared for the future?"

How Do We Study Brain Functioning
From this beginning, addressing an audience that was 75% teachers and 25% neuroscientists, he went on to give a brief description of how they study brain functioning today. "We give a task which is followed by neural activity, marked by increased blood flow or oxygenation to the most active parts of the brain for that task which show up in bold contrast to less active parts of the brain for that task. This is all measured and recorded by fMRI. From this basic method, along with single case examples, they have discovered that the hippocampus, inside the temporal lobes, with one section on the left and one on the right, is in part (though not alone) the seat of memory. He discussed the case of H.M., an epileptic with an entirely normal memory, who had his first seizure at age 16. At age 27, in an effort to control his seizures, H.M. underwent a bilateral medial resection and ended up with anterograde amnesia due to damage to the hippocampus. He lost the ability to remember anything for more than a few moments.

The Stages of Memory
Memory goes through three stages: 1) encoding, 2) storage, and 3) retrieval. Gabrieli finds the moment of encoding to be the "magical moment." He gave us all a small test, asking if we remembered what direction Lincoln was facing on a penny, or if we remember what was above and what was below him. Of course no one does remember something like this. He told us that suppose we say that on average a person handles a penny three times day. Despite the fact that we hypothetically from age 5 to age 30 have handled a penny about 30,000 times, and yet we don't remember this simple information. This is because most of our experiences in life are simply not encoded in the brain: "Only a tiny percent of what we experience is remembered." Consequently, the moment of encoding is indeed something of a magic moment.

Encoding is the Magical Moment
In order to study what is going on in the brain in that moment, a long series of studies were initiated. People were put in an fMRI (imaging) machine, and showed a large number of scenes and the subjects were asked to say if the picture was indoors or outdoors. Next, after the fMRI stage of the study, these subjects were shown some of the same scenes and asked if they had seen them before, or not. The researchers tracked how sure the subjects were about whether or not they had seen a scene before. The study was aimed at investigating what was remembered and what wasn't remembered, and what parts of the brain were most active when a subject remembered a scene correctly, in comparison with failure to remember a scene. Greater activity in encoding, the more likely they found, the subject was likely to remember the scene, with the simple conclusion that greater activation at the moment of encoding predicted subsequent memory. The hippocampus was to be found of central importance. Also significantly involved in encoding were the medial temporal lobe and the prefrontal cortex.

Learning is Driven by Beliefs
He moved on to discuss mechanisms that enhance learning and memory: 1) knowing how to learn; 2) motivation to learn and 3) emotions influence and activate learning. Knowing how to learn is responsible for a student knowing they have learned enough to remember something, or if they have to continue studying in order to able to remember the thing they are trying to get into memory. This is related to the capacity to investigate your thoughts. The ability to gage the state of learning is driven by beliefs, and in this process there is increased activation of the left medial prefrontal cortex. Subjects were asked, when seeing a picture: "Do you think you'll remember that or not. Most fascinating results indicated that one's beliefs about learning and memory were predictive of remembering. If you believe you will remember something, you are far more likely to remember it. Thus in this way, our beliefs about our own capacity to learn and remember highly influences our actual performance in learning and memory. Here we have a rigorous scientific study supporting what we knew about the influence of teachers' attitudes towards students and their academic capacity or lack thereof. This also supports the idea of "intentioning," or imagining ourselves having succeeded in some endeavor we are beginning, hoping for success. In intentioning, the goal is to provide the brain with help in forming the belief that they can and will be successful, which then leads to actual success in the area around the intentioning.

Who is Left Behind: Implications of the Role of Beliefs in Learning and Memory
The implications of this series of studies are vast. A large number of children from disenfranchised sectors of our population are quite automatically considered less intelligent than others in the mainstream. Faced with teachers who have low expectations of them, they would be hard pressed to develop the belief that they can learn and remember, and thus they underperform. This phenomenon is based on beliefs, and confirms with neuroscience, the landmark study conducted by Rosenthal and Jacobson (1966). In that study teachers were told that a small group of students within their classroom were exceptionally bright, even gifted. by the end of the year, that group of students who in reality were no different in terms of intelligence than other children in the classroom, had excelled far beyond what might have been expected had the teacher not been led to believe that they were indeed especially gifted children. Thus we can see a teacher's beliefs translate quickly to students' beliefs about themselves and their ability to learn and to remember, and this in turn, predicts how much they will in fact learn and remember. Our ability to learn is highly influenced by our thoughts about whether or not we can learn and remember. The medial frontal cortex is particularly important in this aspect of learning, and it is activated in essence, by beliefs.

The Second Ingredient for Learning: Motivation
The second essential ingredient for successful learning and memory is motivation. Motivation to learn rests on the activation of the nucleus acumben, in the midbrain. Scientists have known that when monkeys or rats are given the opportunity to press a lever, for which they are rewarded with food, they get very excited and the "reward center" of the brain (the nucleus acumben) is flooded with dopamine. It appears that the very act of anticipating a reward, acts as a great motivator. As teachers and students we all know that being motivated to learn, feeling like we have an important purpose, has an enormous impact on our ability to work at learning and memory. A study designed to evaluate the role of motivation in learning and memory was conducted with subjects who were told they would get $0.50 for participating and learning some task. Fifty cents is not much of a reward these days, and in fact nothing lit up in the brains of the subjects who were being promised $0.50. However when subjects were offered $5.00, in anticipating the reward they grew excited and were far more motivated to learn the task they were given and consequently they did much better than those offered only $0.50. Motivation to learn turns on the medial temporal lobe and the hippocampus, preparing the brain for learning. A tangible reward is not the only kind of reward that inspires us to learn. We all know how efforts to please a favored teacher, can motivate children's (and our own) learning.

The Third Ingredient for Learning: Emotion
The third ingredient for learning is emotion, focused in the amygdala. Gabrieli likened the amygdata, an emotion center, as the "Vice President" of the memory system. "The amygdala makes the memorandum for memory." If shown an upsetting picture, subject are far more likely to remember it than if shown a neutral picture. We remember powerful stuff far better." Thus the amygdala enhances memory, on the basis of learning. In the study in which people were show neutral to disturbing pictures they asked people to rate their experience of intensity at looking at the pictures. Items that were most intense were likely to be remembered. This makes total sense when we consider ourselves in the context of our evolutionary history. As living creatures we are always on the outlook for danger and safety and it is far more important that we have a high level of learning and memory in the face of danger, or 'high intensity" in order to avoid the danger in the future. Our highly active memory for danger serves a protective function, and no doubt through our ancient history, those who remembered danger would have higher fitness, that is would live to give birth to and nurture more children and grandchildren.

The Developing Brain: How the Child Differs from the Adult
Gabrieli then went into a discussion of the development of the brain. He noted that different parts of the brain are specialized for specific visual tasks. The back of the brain is selectively specialize for what we see in the world. When we look at shapes using the lateral visual cortex is particularly activated. When we see faces the fusiform facia responds. By age then, teh functional parts of the brain that we use to respond to shapes is as developed as it is in an adult. But the response to faces and to places is far less developed in a ten year-old, it is 1/3rd less developed compared to how it will be later. Another part of memory and learning that keeps developing from childhood to adult status is how we know where or under what conditions we learned something we learned, called "source memory." This apparently also keeps developing beyond childhood.

Learning to Read: Difficult for Every Child
In the finale to his talk, Gabrieli moved on to learning disorders and the special problems of the human brain. Our brains evolved to speak and hear, and to be audio learners. We were not evolved to read, and the act of learning to read is very difficult for children. There are two kinds of learning involved in learning to read, the first being phonology or the sounds of speech. The second is orthography, or how to map something from sight to sound. This is a complex task that children have to master in learning to read.

He described dyslexic children who were "at risk" educationally, and having great difficulty learning to read. They were given special classes for only eight weeks, and their performance went up dramatically, and stayed up through the whole school year. Most fascinating in this story is that they found that the remedial training actually changed the structure of the brain, demonstrating the plasticity of our human brain.

How are We Going to Make Neuroscience Applicable to the Classroom?
Gabrieli ended with questions: "How are we going to make neuroscience applicable to the classroom?" and "How close are we in using brain science to help in the classroom?" He answered his questions by telling a story of 64 children, at risk for failure in reading, who were accepted into a special program. From neuroimaging the researchers were able to predict how the children would do throughout the year. This suggests that brain structure itself determines student performance. However I traveled back in my thinking, to remembering the Rosenthal and Jacobson (1966) study on the importance smaller on the importance of teachers' attitudes to children's classroom performance, and to Gabrieli's comments on the importance of the belief that we can learn effecting our learning and memory.