Brain Matters - KeynesYouDigIt/Knowledge GitHub Wiki

The Structure and Anatomy of the Human Brain

Opening the black box of the brain

  • Your brain uses 20% of your energy, mostly oxygen and glucose

Brain imaging techniques:

  • X-Rays
  • CAT Scan
  • PET Scan
  • MRI
  • fMRI
  • EEG
  • MEG
  • ERP
  • SPECT

Brain anatomy - Neurons and Subcortical Structures

  • These all happen subconsciously.
  • Most of your brain development happens in utero

Neurons

Neurons are specialized cells that send and receive data (electricity and chemicals) * They receive data on their dendrites * They send data on their axon

Glial Cells

Glial cells are the janitors and truck drives of the brain

Central Nervous System

Your spinal cord carries messages between your brain and body * These are on different tracts * Your spinal cord can also do some things on its own (reflexes)

Brain stem handles your autonomic functions * Lizard brain, in charge of survival and autonomic functions * Reticular activating system changes the level of cell excitation to meet your changing environment * Filters unnecessary sensory data out * Produces your brain chemicals

Cerebellum

Cerebellum handles coordination and movement * Continuously monitors via muscles * Unconscious abilities (driving cars, playing an instrument)

Thalmus

Relays sensory data to your cortex (except smell)

Hypothalamus

Body state maintenance, fight or flight

Amygdala

Alarm system, emotions

  • When the thalamus gets sensory information, it sends it simultaneously to the appropriate area of the cortext and the amygdala for evaluation. If the amygdala senses danger, it triggers the hypothalmus to ready your body.
  • Stores "emotional memories", whereas the hippocampus stores "conscious memories"

Hippocampus

Short-term memory (up to a couple of years)

  • Also responsible for encoding something into long-term memory in the cortex
    • Once this happens, the hippocampus is no longer involved
  • Damage here prevents encoding long-term memories or accessing short-term ones
    • Can still have "procedural memories," which are motor-driven and don't require the hippocampus

Brain anatomy - Cortex

  • These are used consciously

Cerebral Cortex / Neocortex

Occipital Lobes / Visual Cortex

Processes what we see

  • Information sent here is split up between different visual processing areas, then sent to a secondary "visual memory" center to identify the object
  • Tries to make associations with what we've seen before by communicating with other areas of the brain
  • Visual stimuli does not become meaningful until it has been matched with previous associations
    • You can prime your brain to look for something specific (which is why learning objectives are helpful)
Temporal Lobes

Processes what we hear

  • Processes hearing, language, and auditory memory
  • Wernicke's Area handles comprehension of speech and syntax generation
Parietal Lobes

Spatial awareness and sensation

  • Also, maintaining focus, eg. due to a painful sensation
Frontal Lobes

Motor control, cognition

  • Broca's Area: Speech
    • Speech is assembled in Wernicke's Area and executed with Broca's
  • Prefrontal Cortex
    • What makes us human ("least stereotyped, most flexible lifestyle of all animals because of this")
    • Makes associations and synthesis
    • Emotional regulation

Brain hemispheres

Almost nothing is done entirely with one hemisphere- they work in concert.

  • "Dichtomania" is a pop-cultural obsession with the differences between right and left brain functions
  • They control opposite sides of the body
  • They communicate via the corpus collosum

Some specialiazations:

  • Melodies are more easily discerned with the left ear (right brain)
  • Right brain has more negative emotions, left brain has more positive
  • Right hemisphere decodes external information (body language, etc.) to give information context, Left hemisphere decodes content

Teaching to both sides of the brain means giving content a context.

How neurons communicate

  • Neurons communicate with both electrical and chemical signals.
  • Bioelectrical signals use ions: sodium, potassium, calcium, and chloride
  • When a neuron is active, the action potentials between them change, and the ions jump. This happens through a path of neurons, like dominos.
  • Neurotransmitters:
    • Are excitatory or inhibitory
    • Include dopamine, seratonin, endorphins, and ~100 others
    • Are generated inside the neural cells
    • Are encased in vesicles prior to transmission
  • When an action potential reaches the end of an axon, it opens up some vesicles, and the neurotransmitters are sent across a synapse. More action potential, more vesicles are opened.
  • Neurotransmitters are shaped for specific receptors on the receiving neuron
    • These will trigger the opening or closing of ion channels
    • This turns the chemical transmission back into an electric one ("electrochemical process")

Types of Neurotransmitters

  • Amino Acids: Glutamate, glycine, aspartate, GABA
    • Inhibit and excite
  • Amines: Epinephrine (adrenaline), Norepinephrine (noradrenaline), dopamine, seratonin
    • Modulate and bias the behavior of amino acid transmitters
    • Like hormones. Hormones act far from the brain to increase your heart rate, etc. As neurotransmitters, they act on site.
  • Peptides: Endorphins, Substance P, vasopressin, cortisol
    • Create sensations, like thirst
    • Opioids mimic neurotransmitters and fit into the same slots
    • Create reward pathways to encourage repeat behavior

Addiction

  • A neurotransmitter is created in your brain, a drug is produced artificially
  • Drugs can mimic neurotransmitters, but have different overall effects
  • Often attempt to regulate neurotransmitter levels back to normal

Brain Development from Birth to Adolescence

  • Pruning: Some neural connections are lost, others are strengthened
  • Brains aren't done "fully installing" until 20-25
  • Myelination of neurons happens from the inside out, and speeds up the potential of a neuron by up to 100x
    • Full myelination happens around 30
  • Drug abuse, especially alcohol, is very damaging to ongoing brain development
  • Movement increases blood flow through the body, including the brain. The brain carries oxygen, which is good for your brain.
  • Sleep improves retention and performance more than just time does

From Sensory Input to Information Storage

  1. Sight/sound/smell/taste/touch are input to your sensory memory
    • Some things are not transferred, and are forgotten
  2. Some things are processed and transferred to working memory
    • Some things are not transferred, and are forgotten
    • Rehearsal sends working memory to working memory
    • Long-term memory is retrieved into working memory
  3. Some things are elaborated on and organized into long-term memory
  • Memory is what enables us to learn by experience
  • A memory is an entire network of neurons that fire
    • Hebb's Law: Neurons that fire together, survive together and wire together

Sensory Memory: Getting Information Into The Brain

  • Largely unconsciou, lasts a fraction of a second (except sound, which may last up to 20 seconds)
  • A sensory buffer
  • 99% of it is discarded
    • Novelty can get past the sentry- you pay attention to the unusual
    • Habituation: When you become accustomed to a previously novel sensation
    • Intensity of the sensation matters
    • Movement draws attention
  • A sensation is turned into a perception- it's a sense imbued with information
    • Does this with pattern recognition
    • A neural network "checks out" sensory stimuli to see if they form a familiar pattern. If they do, it has meaning. If it doesn't, it's held on to for a short period (due to novelty), but then likely discarded.
    • Sustained attention to something you can't comprehend isn't just boring, it's impossible. No match is made, so students discard it.
    • You cannot reconstruct or reactivate a neural network if it never existed in the first place
  • Emotion drives attention, attention drives learning
    • Your amygdala determines the emotional response to the data
    • Your thalamus sends sense data to your amygdala (emotional) and appropriate cortex (rational) at the same time, but it gets to the amygdala faster

Working Memory: The Conscious Processing of Information

  • This is what allows to you consciously integrate perceptual information with what you already know and reflect on it
  • Without rehearsal, you hold onto something for about 18 seconds
  • You can only process one train of thought at a time, especial with the same sense
    • Cocktail party effect: filtering out to get the most relevant data.
    • You can do two things at once if one of them is automatic
  • Chunking- grouping elements together in familiar patterns
    • Hacks the 5 +/- 2 limitation of the brain
    • We can't increase the limits of our working memory, but we can increase the size of each chunk
  • Students need to make the connections themselves- you can't give someone your connections
  • Rote rehearsal is good for procedural skills, and builds up automaticity, which is what allows you to do something else while you do a familiar task
  • Elaborative rehearsal is good for understanding meaning
  • Metaphor, simile, and mnemonics help make meaningful connections to students
  • High emotions can trigger a stress response, which heightens some body functions and reduces others.
    • When an emotionally impactful thing occurs, that moment gets stamped into your memory
    • You can create emotional moments with students through simulations,role-plays, field trips, guest speakers, debates
    • Your brain does not distinguish between physical and psychological danger
    • When you're flooded with cortisol from stress, your cortex shuts down and you are unable to synthesize new proteins to create new neural connections

Long-Term Memory: The Brain's Storage System

  • Synapses that fire together tend to keep firing together. The more often that happens, the more efficient it becomes
  • Each neuron may be responsible for a single detail, which gets used by many neural networks that use the same detail
  • When a critical mass of neurons in a network fire, all of the rest of the neurons in that network fire too
    • The network needs to already exist!

Declarative Memory

  • Conscious memory
  • Reflective
  • The hippocampus registers a pattern of neurons, and knows how to fire the same ones in the cortex next time. Over time, the hippocampus pattern fades, and the cortical network takes over.
  • Consolidation is when the passage of time allows you to replay a network enough to lock it in to long-term memory
  • Focusing on one thing allows consolidation to occur, otherwise the consolidation of the first neural network is disrupted
    • This is a good case for intervals
Episodic
  • Recalling where and when information was acquired
  • Faces, music, facts
  • When you recall these things, you actual reconstruct them by activating the neural network. This makes it highly inaccurate. We fill in any details that escape us (refabrication). It can become just as vivid as the original experience, but mostly fictional.
Semantic
  • Words, their associated symbols, rules definitions
  • Very accurate
  • Independent of time or place

Procedural Memory

  • Unconscious memory
  • Reflexive
  • Building a physical procedural memory takes your prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and cerebellum. As automaticity is developed, these diminish and the motor cortex and and cerebellum take control.
  • Building a non-physical procedural memory uses the visual cortex, and the neural structure changes to make recognition faster.
Skills
  • Routine actions
  • Hard to recall without performing them
Priming
  • Unconscious influence of past experience

Matching Instruction to How the Brain Learns Best

  • The brain is a pattern-seeking device in search of meaning, and learning is the acquisition of mental programs for using what we understand

Principles:

  • The more elaborately information is rehearsed at the moment of learning, the strong the memory becomes
  • The more modalities used to rehearse, the more paths that are established for retrieval
  • The more real-world examles given for a concept, the more likely it is that the concept will be understood and remembered
  • The more information that is linked to previous learning, the stronger the memory will become

Making Curriculum Meaningful Through Problems, Projects, Simulationso

  • Solve authentic problems
  • Use projects that have aligned outcomes
    • Useful when answering why something is so, or whether one method is better than another
  • Use simulations of real things
    • Useful when an authentic solution isn't practical
    • Debrief afterward to constrast with the real thing
    • Big numbers are hard to comprehend because have few things to attach them to

Three Levels of Learning

  1. Concrete Experience
    • Seeing a dog
    • You experience things, and connect them to the experiences you've already had
    • Strongest links happen here
  2. Symbolic or Representational Learning
    • Seeing a picture of a dog
    • Most effective when tied to a previous concrete experience
    • Seeing a representation strengthens the original network
  3. Abstract Learning
    • Reading about dogs
    • Words and numbers

Using the Visual and Auditory Senses to Enhance Learning

  • The visual component of memory is the most strong
  • You can aid understanding of abstract concepts with visuals
  • Visuals the students create are more useful than visuals that are provided to them
  • Music is held in the brain over a period of time to decode it since it happens sequentially
  • Rhymes and lyrics are easier to memorize- good for pure abstractions
    • A piggyback song is when you change the lyrics to a known song

A Toolkit of Brain-Compatible Strategies

To store semantic information, we need to use elaborative rehearsal strategies.

  • Writing is nature's way of showing us how sloppy our thinking is
  • Write summaries of what they learned
  • Have students write story problems for other students
  • Writing shouldn't be recitation of read facts ("creative plagiarism"). It needs to engage their thinking.
  • Quick write/quick draw- have the students write what they know on one side, draw what they know on the other
  • Write your questions
  • KWL- What I know, what I want to know, what I learned- Start a learning j ournal at the beginning of an activity

Mnemonics

Mnemonics help remember the facts for you to think critically about. They give your brain a framework to attach new information. They show improved performance over rote practice.

Types:

  • Acrostic sentences - Please excuse my dear aunt sally
  • Acronyms - FACE
  • Rhymes - I before E, except after C
  • Phrases - The principal is your pal
  • Keywords - Picture a word that sounds the same being associated with it
  • Loci - Mind palace, picture the content and sequence being in your house and walking through it
  • Narrative chaining - Telling a story to remember content and sequence

Active Rehearsal

The person doing the work is the one growing the dendrites.

  • Peer teaching
  • Think/Pair/Share
  • Turn & Talk
  • Memorizing passages
  • Student-led reviews
  • Games
  • Hands-on activities

Final Note

  • Provide as much experiential learning as possible
  • Build on prior knowledge
  • Rote rehearsal for procedural memory, elaborative rehearsal for declarative memory
  • Space the repetition of your practice
  • Teach facts in the context of concepts
  • Connect information to its real-world application
  • Keep the students psychologically safe
  • Emotional events are remembered longer