5 Tips on Lifelong Learning & the Adult Brain

Learning & the Brain is a conference held in Cambridge, MA. Here are five conference cues as they relate to education.

1. CHALLENGE YOURSELF WITH NEW LEARNING
2. NEUROPLASTICITY & NEUROGENESIS ARE HALLMARKS OF OUR BRAINS
3. CHECK FOR MIS-LEARNING ON AN ONGOING BASIS
4. MORE VISUALS, LESS TEXT
5. MOVE IT! MOVE IT! MOVE IT!

These reminders are straight forward. They are not difficult to act upon. They sound like common sense. It is really just a matter of choice.

For the full text of the article, visit http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2008/12/19/5-tips-on-lifelong-learning-the-adult-brain/

10 Habits of Highly Effective Brains

from http://www.sharpbrains.com/ ...

The LA Times just completed a wonderful 4-part series on how learning and memory work. The NYT re-emphasized the importance of physical exercise for neurogenesis (the creation of new neurons). To put this news in better perspective, let's review some good lifestyle options we can follow to maintain, and improve, our vibrant brains.

1. Learn what is the "It" in "Use It or Lose It". A basic understanding will serve you well to appreciate your brain's beauty as a living and constantly-developing dense forest with billions of neurons and synapses.

2. Take care of your nutrition. Did you know that the brain only weighs 2% of body mass but consumes over 20% of the oxygen and nutrients we intake? As a general rule, you don't need expensive ultra-sophisticated nutritional supplements, just make sure you don't stuff yourself with the "bad stuff".

3. Remember that the brain is part of the body. Things that exercise your body can also help sharpen your brain: physical exercise enhances neurogenesis.

4. Practice positive, future-oriented thoughts until they become your default mindset and you look forward to every new day in a constructive way. Stress and anxiety, no matter whether induced by external events or by your own thoughts, actually kills neurons and prevent the creation of new ones. You can think of chronic stress as the opposite of exercise: it prevents the creation of new neurons.

5. Thrive on Learning and Mental Challenges. The point of having a brain is precisely to learn and to adapt to challenging new environments. Once new neurons appear in your brain, where they stay in your brain and how long they survive depends on how you use them. "Use It or Lose It" does not mean "do crossword puzzle number 1,234,567". It means, "challenge your brain often with fundamentally new activities".

6.We are (as far as we know) the only self-directed organisms in this planet. Aim high. Once you graduate from college, keep learning. The brain keeps developing, no matter your age, and it reflects what you do with it.

7.Explore, travel. Adapting to new locations forces you to pay more attention to your environment. Make new decisions, use your brain.

8.Don't Outsource Your Brain. Not to media personalities, not to politicians, not to your smart neighbour... Make your own decisions, and mistakes. And learn from them. That way, you are training your brain, not your neighbour's.

9.Develop and maintain stimulating friendships. We are "social animals", and need social interaction. Which, by the way, is why 'Baby Einstein' has been shown not to be the panacea for children development.

10.Laugh. Often. Especially to cognitively complex humor, full of twists and surprises. Better, try to become the next Jon Stewart

Now, remember that what counts is not reading this article-or any other-, but practicing a bit every day until small steps snowball into unstoppable, internalized habits...so, pick your next battle and try to start improving at least one of these 10 habits today.

Problems Handling Stress? It's Probably How Your Brain is Wired

Do you know someone who handles stress extremely well, yet another who can't handle stress at all? In a recent press release, scientists have found that our ability to handle, or not handle, stress is linked to the particular paths that chemicals in our brains are used during communication. In other words, we are "wired" to have more, or less, resilience to stress.

Why are some people resilient, able to handle stress very well, while others presented with similar situations, fall apart and may become depressed? Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Center have discovered that the brain cells we use to communicate can work differently from person to person. This difference is linked to our ability, or inability, to handle stress.

Ability to handle stress: Understanding differences is important
It is important to understand these differences so that scientists can further their work towards helping people boost their own resilience, handling stressful situations better and becoming less susceptible to depression.

Although their research was conducted on mice, the brains of mice and humans share many of the same chemical structures. The chemical compound, BDNF, was found to be elevated in both mice and humans undergoing stress. ==

Researchers theorize that if they can control the release of the compound BDNF, they can increase one's ability to become more resilient and cope with stress or depression better. Current brain fitness research shows that by developing mental rehearsals of resiliency, during times of stress the brain can be "fooled" into not releasing BDNF.

At Advance Corporate Training Ltd., we have a series of four Resiliency Skills short courses that can help you "Tame Your Brain". Contact us at train@actraining.com for more details.

Source:
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/534419/

Mind Control in the Classroom

I found this great information online from the following website http://www.oshkosh.k12.wi.us/ . I am very impressed that a K-12 school district is aware of cutting edge research on how to use brain-based instruction to teach.

Learning is Heavily Influenced by Brain Chemistry (Part 1)

Have you ever stressed out your class? Have you ever relaxed and calmed your audience? Have you ever initiated a classroom celebration of success? Do you organize social groupings within your class? Have you ever created a sense of urgency to spur groups to take action? If you can answer “Yes” to any of these questions, then you have influenced the brain chemistry of other people.

Everything you do as a teacher in some way influences the brains of your students. Recent scientific data supports the relationships between talking and changes in the brain, physical activity and changes in the brain, and learning strategies and changes in the brain.

What are states? How do they influence us all the time?

Just as the wind, sunshine, and moisture collectively form the complex atmospheric pattern we call weather, millions of neurons cooperate to form complex web-like signaling systems that represent the behaviors we call states. States create “weather” conditions in our brains at every moment. In your brain, weather usually changes every few seconds. Knowing today’s weather outside does not allow you to predict the weather very far in the future; knowing this moment’s brain weather or state does not help you predict future states more than a few moments in advance. Unlike the weather in the outside world, you have some control over the weather in your own brain.

States combine our emotional, cognitive and physical interactions to make all our decisions. If we put our learners into particular states, we can better orchestrate the conditions that will optimize their learning.

There are a few rules that guide the formation, stability and instability of states. They are as follows:

• States are like weather in your brain


• States run your life


• States regulate motivation


• States precede behaviors


• States are shifting neural networks


• States are always in motion


• States are self-organized
  

States are so strong, in fact, that we rarely unlearn anything. Instead, we create newer, more attractive states to enter (Grigsby & Stevens, 2000), which happens both consciously and unconsciously all the time. If you’re worried that this seems a lot like mind control, I have two things to say:

1) It is. (But we’re being paid to influence others minds.)
2) Most people need some initial support to manage their own states.

The long-term goal is to empower our students to manage their own states. Realizing this goal, though, takes a while. In the meantime, never feel guilty about successfully manipulating the states of others around you.

Highly adaptable and successful learner systems exhibit state continuity and state flexibility, or the ability to stay in the same state or change it at will. Intelligence building is enhanced by managing two key state variables:
1) Continuity – strength and persistence of previous, useful states
2) Flexibility – capacity for variability and responsiveness to context demands

For so many people, school and learning states are negative states because of their experience with frustration, boredom, anxiety or other negative factors. As educators, we should be helping our students turn their learning states into positive, states.

Commonalities attract people with common states. The primary emotions (states) are joy, fear, anger, disgust, surprise and sadness. These six emotions are a subset of all possible states and are the only states biologically “hard-wired” into the brain. With the exception of these hard-wired, emotional states, the expression of other states is culturally learned and far less stable.

Why should you bother managing states in others?

1) Learning is both the package and the process. Our role as teachers is to facilitate learning and you cannot separate the content of what you offer from the social environment it is offered within. They form a complex, unified “package” that is delivered to the learning brain. If you send a package through the mail, what is the most important part of the process? The answer is that the package and the delivery process are essential; one is useless without the other. Neither the process nor the package is valuable in itself. A teacher may deliver content, but unless the learning process is completed, the package is wasted.

2) The human brain is not generally designed to get things right the first time except in cases of trauma. We must get feedback from wrong answers so our brain can eliminate them from its bank of possible future answers. We don’t get smart by hearing or memorizing what someone else tells us. We get smart by eliminating poor choices through feedback-driven trial and error. Learning activities with high levels of both positive and negative feedback built into them further the learning process better any “sit and git” lecture. These activities include (but are not limited to):

Peer teaching
Brainstorming
Competition
Cooperative games
Team assignments
Checking work against a model
Peer editing
Discussion

3) The brain is designed to allow most learning to disappear from memory. Explicit learning and memory systems are governed by a “surge protector” know as the hippocampus. The hippocampus has a small capacity and can be easily overloaded. If content exceeds capacity, it simply “rewrites” new material over old material (Kelso, 1997). This protective rewriting process prevents a destabilization from massive amounts of irrelevant input (a “slow trauma”). So, the phrase to remember as teachers is: Too much, too fast won’t last.

4) Social interaction is mandatory for healthy and cognitively developed learners. After being separated from their peers, same sex companions show a marked and dangerous increase in cortisol levels (Levine et al., 1999). One way for teachers to address this issue is to strengthen social ties by cultivating academic aspects to social relationships rather than separating participants. Research supports:

Direct lecturing does not ensure accuracy. What you put into a learner’s brain is not necessarily remembered correctly or even at all!

Always mix up the media and mix up the partners. Multiple groupings and multiple methods will improve the accuracy of the information you are teaching.

Student feedback is crucial to social engagement.

Social climate influences our brain chemistry and activations which influence our mindset, safety and states which influence our cognition and joy of learning which influence our interest, motivation and recall.

5) State management empowers students. Almost everybody will say, “Yes!” to what you ask if they are in the right state.

If your students are in negative or counterproductive states, only negative behaviors are likely. If you take the time to put them in more positive states first, you’ve got a wide range of options available, and all of them are possible.

6) Learned helplessness causes depression (Alloy & Abrahamson, 1979). Physical activity can prevent behavioral depression and learned helplessness by acting on the serotonin circuits (Greenwood et al., 2003). This research supports the idea that, when done well, games, physical activities, recess and physical education can play a significant part in improving cognition in the school climate.

Ultimately our goal is to empower learners to manage their own states. First, teachers must learn to read learner states. Then they can empower students to recognize or read their own states. Some states are as follows:

Anticipation and Curiosity (“I’m hungry to learn”)
Leaning forward, eyes wide open, not blinking

Frustration, Distress, Tension (“I’m not getting what I need”)
Tightened jaw or neck, expressive foot or hand tapping, closed posture

Confusion, Feeling Lost (“I don’t get it”)
Head turned, wrinkled or furrowed brow, hand touching face

Ah-ha! self confidence, or celebration(“I got it!”)
Deep breaths, smiles, hand in the air, relaxed posture, sharing verbally with others

Boredom and Apathy (“I don’t care”)
Slumped posture, hunched shoulders, eyes glazed over, no focused expression

The Mind Dance

NOT ALL THOUGHTS ARE CREATED EQUAL

Wise teachers throughout the ages have emphasized the important role that our thoughts play in our lives. Given the infinite diversity of thought types available to us, the question becomes, "Which thoughts?"

We can concentrate our attention or let it wander; think about the past, present, or future; ask questions or think of answers; make minor decisions or those with significant impact.

We can direct attention to our feelings, internal dialogue, or mental images; flavor any thought with a positive or negative attitude; electrify a notion with passionate caring; or diffuse it with ambivalence.

We can amplify our awareness with the energy and attention of synergistic dialogue; think about detailed issues or high level concepts; or vary our minds' brain waves between beta, alpha, theta, and delta.

All of these thought types can occur at various levels of conscious awareness and be organized within the context of heart frequencies or mind frequencies.


abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

If the hundreds of thousands of words in the English language can be formed from an alphabet of just 26 letters, imagine how many different thought combinations there must be. How are we to coordinate the mental dance between these various thoughts?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Range of Thought Scale

Focus Daydreaming<-->Concentrating
Awareness Subconscious<-->Conscious
Time Orientation Past<-->Present<-->Future
Decision Minor<-->Destiny Shaping
Question Questions<-->Answers
Modality Kinesthetic<-->Auditory<-->Visual
Attitude Positive<-->Negative
Emotion Passionate<-->Ambivalent
Brain Wave Frequency Delta<-->Theta<-->Alpha<-->Beta
Dialogue None<-->Many People
Detail Level General<-->Specific
Metaphor Orientation<-->Ontological<-->Structural
Frequency Center Heart<-->Mind

This is excerpted from a great online resource. For more information on our ongoing mental dance... visit http://braindance.com/bd.htm by Patrick T. Magee author of Brain Dancing. Loads of free resources and information.

The Beginning

Advance Corporate Training Ltd. (ACT) is a brain-based learning specialist - our logo represents the six key secrets to ensuring learning takes hold in the learner and can transfer back to the workplace. Here are the six secrets and why engaging each one of them encourages higher learning levels.

Personal Relevance
(Association Cortex)
When we associate learning with what we already know, we are more open to a new idea. Info that supports our existing knowledge is better retained and transferred on-the-job.

Kinesthetic Learning
(Motor Cortex)
When we are engaged physically while learning, our brain operates more efficiently and we are better able to apply learned skills consistently.

Emotion & Engagement
(Somatosensory Cortex)
Emotion is often missing in many adult learning environments. When we emotionally connect to the material we learn more and deeper. ACT designs all its courses to engage this cortex.

Auditory Learning
(Auditory Cortex)
When we listen and speak we deepen our understanding. This cortex needs time to engage, so the start of all conversations should be “losable” data.

Visual Learning
(Visual Cortex)
We all need to have visual stimulation to be energized by learning. If we visualize our changed performance, we are more able to achieve it.

Broca's Area
Our ability to communicate clearly and to understand complex concepts is controlled here. Without learning that engages this area of the brain, we know but we don't understand and can't share our knowledge. True learning occurs after we achieve understanding, and performance change can not occur without understanding. This area was identified in 1861 by Pierre Paul Broca to be the “seat of articulation”.

Brain Fitness Basics

Intellectual ability (Brain Fitness) is a complex phenomenon influenced by many factors. In its broadest sense, intelligence is what people use to learn, remember, solve problems and in general deal effectively with the world around them. There are two kinds of general intelligence – fluid and crystallized. Fluid intelligence represents the biological basis of intelligence and measures of this (such as speed of processing and memory) generally increase into adulthood and then decline due to the aging process. Crystallized intelligence is the knowledge and skills obtained through learning and experience. As long as opportunities for learning are available, crystallized intelligence can increase through a person’s life.

The results you can expect from brain Fitness Program::
• An increased general adaptability to new problems in life
• an enhanced ability to engage in abstract thinking
• a capacity for knowledge and learning
• the ability to judge, understand and reasons
• enhanced short-term memory


Some interesting intelligence “facts”

• Those with higher education outscored everyone else
• Those with jobs in technical or professional fields or hold positions in senior management come out as clear winners in the IQ stakes
• Based on country
o New Zealand
o Australia
o Ireland
o United Kingdom
o USA
o Canada
• Brown haired men scored higher than blond men and redheads. Black haired men score significantly lower than everyone else.
• Black haired women scored lower than the rest.
• People who have a political inclination toward the centre or vote green scored highest


Interesting facts about your brain and intelligence

• Your brain has about 100 billion neurons. A typical brain cell has from 1,000 to 10,000 connections to other brain cells.
• The right side of your brain controls the left side of your body, and the left side of your brain controls the right side of your body.
• Your brain weight accounts for about 2 percent of your body weight. But your brain uses 20 percent of your body's oxygen supply and 20 to 30 percent of your body's energy.
• When you are born, your brain weighs about a pound. But by age 6, it weighs three pounds. What happens? Learning to stand, talk, and walk creates a web of connections in your head—two pounds worth!
• Your brain is full of nerve cells, but it has no pain receptors. Doctors can operate on your brain while you're awake and you won't feel a thing.
• In 1984 the political scientist James Flynn reported that North Americans had gained about 13.8 IQ points in 46 years. If people taking an IQ test today were scored in the same way as people 50 years ago then 90% of them would be classified in the genius level.
• A message for action travels from your brain to your muscles as fast as 250 miles per hour.
• Studies show that IQ is modestly related to the speed at which you do some pretty simple things such as comparing two lines to see which is longer.
• IQ is not influenced by family size or birth order. There is some confusion on this matter due to the fact that smart families usually have few children. However there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that you will have a low IQ if you belong to a large family. There is also no evidence that the first born child will be more intelligent than the rest.
• Modern neuroimaging techniques show that to some degree brain size is correlated to IQ.
• IQ has been shown to increase with more schooling, better educated parents and better toys.