Ray Kurzweil, American inventor, futurist, and author of many best-selling books, predicts that in the 2030s, human brains will be able to connect to the cloud, allowing us to send e-mails and photos directly to the brain and to back up our thoughts and memories. This will be possible via nanobots — tiny robots from DNA strands — swimming around in the capillaries of our brain. Regardless of the probability and possibility of this prophecy, it’s imperative that understanding the structure, function, and development of the brain is pertinent to our future evolution. Educational neuroscience is an emerging or rather an already emerged discipline that tries to implement the research findings in neuroscience into the domain of education.
Every second, millions of bits of sensory data are transmitted to the brain. But the brain is hardwired to admit only a fraction of these data. Priority is always given to change in the existing pattern. Each of us can experience that something new, different, or unexpected is retained in the memory for a longer period. So if a teacher is relying on the same pedagogical methods over and over again, by the very structure of the brain, she will not succeed in transacting the information to the student’s brain.
Debashish Chatterjee, in his book Can You Teach a Zebra Some Algebra, speaks of one of his teachers who used to tear down the teaching note every day after class. When asked why, he replied: "If I don’t tear off the notes, I will tend to repeat what I know today in tomorrow’s class. That will put me and the whole class to sleep."
Prefrontal cortex or upper brain is where memory construction takes place. The lower brain is meant for breathing, digestion, flight-fright responses, and other involuntary actions. Amygdala is the switching station of the brain, controlling traffic flow between the upper and lower brain. But whenever an individual is in a state of stress, the new information does not freely pass through the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex. Instead, the information is passed to the reactive lower brain. So when the students are highly stressed by fear, frustration, alienation, anxiety or boredom, learning seldom happens.
Another important and often less understood feature of the brain is neuroplasticity. It’s the capacity of the brain to make new neural connections. There are approximately 86 billion neurons in the brain. Learning changes the structure and function of the brain. The research on London taxi drivers done by a team of neuroscientists of University College London led by Eleanor Maguire is a classical study. It was found that London taxi drivers, who had to memorise thousands of streets and landmarks, had a substantially larger hippocampus. Hippocampus is the area of the brain where navigational memory is stored. The research team empirically proved that the larger size of the hippocampus was due to intensive use. Another study in blind people revealed how the visual cortex of the brain got rewired to do a different function.
In our classrooms, we often stereotype students based on their intellectual capabilities. This kind of perception building harms the students’ performance. In a study by Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), children who believed that they can improve their potentialities with effort performed much better than the students who didn’t believe so. The latter category develops a fixed mindset gradually which deteriorates their skills and talents further.
Video games are often considered antagonistic to education by parents and teachers. Nevertheless, video games present a model for best teaching strategies. The four factors that make video games appealing are a desirable goal, achievable challenge, instant feedback, and acknowledging progress. The same strategy can be implemented in classrooms to make the learning process more desirable.
Whenever an individual resolves a challenge, dopamine, the pleasure drug of the brain, is released. Making a correct prediction is another dopamine elevator. Dopamine makes you curious about ideas and fuels your search for information. Experiencing accurate predictions and the resulting satisfaction leads the brain to remember the related actions and behaviour and seek more opportunities to repeat them. Dopamine reward response can be used to motivate the brain for new learning.
It is a time when the nation is debating on the paradigm shifts in the New Educational Policy. Moreover, the entire world is curious about how education would be, in the new normal world. Lots of prophecies and predictions are being made. But the disruption caused by COVID-19 and the rapidly changing technology leaves us totally in the dark regarding the future of education. The greatest challenge is that we have to prepare children for an unpredictable world. Like educational neuroscience, more interdisciplinary approaches have to be evolved to equip the educators and teachers to face this challenge.
