The Brain Power Initiative was formed to bring together scientists, teachers, researchers and parents to enhance childhood development by recognizing that the capacity to learn can be as critical as what is taught.
Our first annual conference, May 3-4, 2012, in Toronto will explore the advances in science and what they mean for children.
If we can translate the findings of neuroscience into the creation of media, education and programs that directly influence how the brain develops, we have the potential to not just bridge learning gaps or increase literacy, but to alter the landscape of how children grow and learn.
Advances in neuroscience hold the promise of a revolution in childhood development.
Here’s why:
What A Child Learns
When we think of a child’s development we often consider the skills they learn. A parent will watch as their child learns to walk, talk, read and write. We track their psychosocial skills: how well they learn to listen, share and socialize.
The things they learn help us understand how they learn: whether they are intuitive and thoughtful or expressive and social; whether they respond to visual cues or auditory ones.
All these insights help a parent or teacher respond to a child’s development and enhance or develop these skills and to then impart knowledge. Early childhood development (the skills of language and socializing, for example) provide the later ability to learn subjects like math, reading, music or geography.
How The Brain is Wired
But underpinning a child’s development are the changes that occur in the brain itself. When a child learns to read, we see an outward manifestation of how their brain has developed and changed.
What we don’t see is how a child’s brain is “wired” for this capacity in the first place and how it changes over time in a different way for different children. We don’t realize that the brain’s capacity can be influenced by how we teach, parent or interact with a child.
Neuroeducation builds on decades of research into the brain’s structures. Advances in our capacity to “look inside the brain” (through imaging technologies that are increasingly more refined and portable) allow us to look more deeply at the underlying “wiring” of the brain and see how the brain changes as the result of specific interventions.
Learning to play a musical instrument doesn’t only mean that a child has learned that skill. The brain shares changes from one domain or area with another, a process called near- or far-transfer. So, for example, a child learning an instrument will see a “near-transfer” to skills such as fine motor function.
One way to think of this is of paths being activated between one part of the brain and another: learning music, for example, will activate paths that might not otherwise be activated and this could have a direct impact on things that are seemingly unrelated.
Neuroscience started with an understanding of which parts of the brain served specific functions: there are parts of the brain associated with language or smell, for example.
But with advanced imaging techniques, it is now possible to understand how those specific areas of the brain “connect” to others and to see changes in the brain’s structure or wiring. Through this ability, we can now see how learning music, for example, can have a direct impact on memory, attention and intelligence by tracing the ways in which the brain “rewires” itself by creating new neural pathways.
The Neuroeducation Revolution
If you create connections that didn’t previously exist (or that were weak) between one part of the brain and another, this means that the brain can change and that it will grow and adapt in different ways depending on what a child is exposed to, what they are taught, and the media with which they interact.
If the creation of these connections increases a child’s ability to memorize, for example, and if we can influence those connections, we can then increase their capacity to remember.
Neuroeducation refers to creating specific interventions whose purpose is to impact the brain’s structures so there is a positive outcome such as: increased intelligence, improved memory, or a better ability to pay attention.
Neuroeducation is based on the finding that the brain can change and that the connections inside the brain are not “fixed”, a concept called neuroplasticity.
By discovering how we can educate, teach or interact with a child so their brain’s structures are enhanced and improved, it is possible to not just impart skills or knowledge but to increase their capacity to learn in the first place.
The implications of this are far-reaching. Translating this from the lab to the classroom (and back again) could lead to a revolution in how we think about parenting, teaching and lifelong learning.
Join Us
Please join us in Toronto at the first annual Brain Power Conference. We’ve invited some of the world’s leading educators, scientists and researchers to explore how childhood development will be transformed by our growing understanding of the brain.
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