Mind and Brain

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Mind and Brain

• Presented by Sarah C. Bradshaw

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Contributing Sciences

• The fields of neuroscience and cognitive science
  are helping to satisfy this fundamental curiosity
  about how people think and learn.

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Neuroscience

• is the study of all aspects of nerves and the
  nervous system, in health and in disease. It
  includes the anatomy, physiology, chemistry,
  pharmacology, and pathology of nerve cells
• the behavioral and psychological features that
  depend on the function of the nervous system
• and the clinical disciplines that deal with them,
  such as neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry.

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Neuroscientist Questions

• How does the brain develop?
• Are there stages of brain development?
• Are there critical periods when certain things
  must happen for the brain to develop normally?
• How is the information encoded in the developing
  and the adult nervous systems?
• How does experience affect the brain?

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Cognitive Science

• Cognitive science is the study of the mind.
• It is an interdisciplinary science that draws
  upon many fields including neuroscience,
  psychology, philosophy, computer science,
  artificial intelligence, and linguistics.
• The purpose of cognitive science is to develop
  models that help explain human cognition --
  perception, thinking, and learning.

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Caution

• one must be careful to avoid adopting faddish
  concepts that have not been demonstrated to be of
  value in classroom practice.
• concept that the left and right hemispheres of
  the brain should be taught separately to maximize
  the effectiveness of learning.

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Caution

• Also, the notion that the brain grows in
  holistic spurts within or around which specific
  educational objectives should be arranged.
• there is significant evidence that brain
  regions develop asynchronously.

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Three Main Points

• 1) Learning changes the physical structure of
  the brain.
• 2) These structural changes alter the functional
  organization of the brain in other words,
  learning organizes and reorganizes the brain.
• 3) Different parts of the brain may be ready to
  learn at different times.

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Some Basics

• A nerve cell, or neuron, is a cell that
  receives information from other nerve cells or
  from the sensory organs
• then projects it back to the part of the body
  that interacts with the environment.

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Some Basics

• Information comes into the cell from projections
  called axons.
• The junctions through which information passes
  from one neuron to another are called synapses.

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Synapses

• Synaptic connections are added to the brain in
  two basic ways
• The synapses are overproduced, then selectively
  lost
• Synapses addition

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Synapses Overproduction

• a fundamental mechanism that the brain uses to
  incorporate information from experience.

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Synapse Addition

• .the process of synapse addition operates
  throughout the entire human life span
• this process is not only sensitive to
  experience, it is actually driven by experience.

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Experiences and Environment for Brain Development

• Alterations in the brain that occur during
  learning seem to make the nerve cells more
  efficient or powerful.
• Studies conducted on complex-environment and
  caged animals show
• That the complex-environment animals were
  smarter because they had an increased capacity
  in the brain that depended on experience.

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Experiences and Environment for Brain Development

• Also, rats that are caged, but provided with a
  changing environment that encouraged play and
  exploration were better problem solvers.
• the interactive presence of a social group and
  direct physical contact with the environment are
  important factors

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• Can the Brain Change Without Learning?
• Page 119

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Role of Instruction in Brain Development

• Language and Brain Development
• Language provides a particularly striking
  example of how instructional processes may
  contribute to organizing brain functions.

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Language

• Very young children discriminate many more
  phonemic boundaries, than adults, but they lose
  their discriminatory powers when certain
  boundaries are not supported by experience with
  spoken language.

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Language

• Native Japanese speakers, for example, do not
  discriminate the r from the l sounds that are
  evident to English speakers, and this ability is
  lost in early childhood because it is not in the
  speech they hear.

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Website

• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vFcb8nT0QC6ofeature
  related

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Memory and Brain Processes

• Memory is neither a single entity nor a
  phenomenon that occurs in a single area of the
  brain.

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Memory Process

• Declarative memory
• ... memory for facts and events
• Procedural or nondeclarative
• memory for skills and other cognitive
  operations

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Memory

• The book states that when a series of events are
  presented in a random sequence, people reorder
  them into sequences that make sense when they try
  to recall them.

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Test

• I am going to give you a list of words
• Then, I am going to ask you a question about the
  list
• (this was a study discussed in the book)

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• Sour, candy, sugar, bitter, good, taste, tooth,
  knife, honey, photo, chocolate, heart, cake,
  tart, pie

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• Was the word sweet in the list?

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Hmmm..

• Ever discussed a shared event with a friend and
  one of you remembers something and the other
  argues that it never happened?
• This is due to the brain using inferencing
  processes to relate events.

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Or.

• Page 125

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Memory

• classes of words, pictures, and other
  categories of information that involve complex
  cognitive processing on a repeated basis activate
  the brain.
• Memory processes treat both true and false
  memory events similarly and, activate the same
  brain regions, regardless of the validity of what
  is being remembered.

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Conclusion

• 1) The functional organization of the brain and
  the mind depends on and benefits positively from
  experience.
• 2) Development is not merely a biologically
  driven unfolding process, but also an active
  process that derives essential information from
  experience.

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Conclusion

• 3) Research has shown that some experiences have
  the most powerful effects during specific
  sensitive periods, while others can affect the
  brain over a much longer time span
• 4) An important issue that needs to be determined
  in relation to education is which things are tied
  to critical periods and for which things is the
  time exposure less critical.