Picturing the Brain

Two of society's most inspiring and daunting missions are (1) educating our children so that they flourish as adolescents and adults, and (2) understanding how the human brain endows us with such remarkable capacities of learning, thought, and feeling. These missions converge when we think about the growth and development of the student's mind and brain, because the mind is what the brain does. Everything a student learns, from facts to skills to emotional regulation, is manifested by how the brain changes in response to experience (brain plasticity). We have known this in principle for a long time, but the invention of new noninvasive brain imaging methods, especially magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), has allowed us for the first time to directly visualize and measure the structure and function of children's brains, from infancy through young adulthood.

The convergence of education and neuroscience has been termed "education neuroscience," and this convergence has been both promising and the focus of debate. The debate centers on how neuroscientific knowledge about learning in the brain can inform teaching practices and educational policies. Knowing, for example, that emotional experience enhances memory via the amygdala or that motivation enhances memory via interactions between the subcortical reward system and the hippocampus does not (and frankly, should not) alter how a teacher plans or delivers a lesson. Without knowledge of this neural circuitry, effective teachers already know that students learn best when engaged via emotion and motivation.