[your amazing brain]

I came across this inspiring video via @ontarioliteracy on twitter:

[meta meta cognition: the wired epileptic brain]

"A rare set of high-resolution readouts taken directly from the wired-in brains of epileptics has provided an unprecedented look at how the brain processes language.


Though only a glimpse, it was enough to show that part of the brain’s language center handles multiple tasks, rather than one.


“If the same part of the brain does different things at different times, that’s a thunderously complex level of organization,” said Ned Sahin, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego.


In a study published Thursday in Science, Sahin’s team studied a region known as Broca’s center, named for French anatomist Paul Pierre Broca who observed that two people with damage to a certain spot in the front of their brains had lost the ability to speak, but could still think.


[...]


During the several days that three patients at Massachusetts General Hospital were medically wired, Sahin’s team asked them to repeat words verbatim, and translate them to past and present tense.


In the space of a quarter-second, a small part of Broca’s area — the only part read by the electrodes — received each word, put the word in a correct tense, and sent it to the brain’s speech centers.


This tested only one type of verbal cognition, cautioned Sahin, and the focus was unavoidably narrow, but it was enough to show that Broca’s area is involved not only in translating speech, but receiving it. That role was considered specific to part of the brain called Wernicke’s area.


More broadly, the findings may represent a general rule for Broca’s area, and perhaps other brain regions: Each part plays multiple roles, rather than performing a single task (emphasis mine)."

NB: Image by Ned Sahin on the Wired site.

[mirror neurons and literacy]

Proof that humans are "wired" to connect with others:

"Scientists have recently been decoding how "mirror neurons" in our brains work. They've realized humans are wired to connect with others, to live vicariously through others' experiences, in much stronger ways than we once thought. The brain doesn't differentiate much between watching someone do something, and doing it yourself - which is why there are so many obsessed sports fans in the world. Most important for teachers, these mirror neurons are also a key to how we learn. Just watching someone read a book teaches us more than we ever realized about the reading process. And we use our emotions to readily connect those experiences to other related tasks (either physically or emotionally). I will never be a gymnast (beyond the contortions I go through to get through airport security screening). But I can connect to the feelings of almost, not quite reaching a goal again and again, and finally succeeding. What teacher hasn't experienced weeks or months of helping a struggling student almost, but not quite, grasp a concept? It makes those breakthrough moments all the more sweet.

Mirror neurons are also the reason modeling in classrooms is so essential. When students see the strategies teachers use to tackle difficult texts, no matter the genre, their brains don't differentiate between their experiences and ours. The teacher's strategies become part of the mix that fires up whenever a student approaches a new text. Likewise, all those whole-class activities to build community around reading and writing early in the year become ingredients in the chemical soup in our students' brains as they read and write on their own. The consequences of broken mirror neurons can also be dire, as any teacher who has worked with an autistic child knows.

What about mirror neurons in staff settings? Simply put, our moms were right - we shouldn't hang out with the wrong crowd, and we need to choose our role models carefully. Mirror neurons imitate and absorb what they see around us whether we like what we're seeing or not. If you're surrounded by negative, unhappy people, it's human nature that you're going to absorb that outlook over time. Sometimes toxic environments or people can't be avoided, but it's important to note when it comes to "emotional contagions," negative environments have more powerful effects than positive ones. If you have a colleague or two who are always resentful or angry, you owe it to yourself and your students to limit your time with them. If you have to spend time with them, even decreasing eye contact or verbal interactions can help limit what your brain's mirror neurons pick up."

Read more here.

[gender and literacy]

Sure women and men are different and sure our brains work differently but I didn't realise how drastically different. In a presentation on boys' writing and ict that I found at the Nottinghamshire Primary ICT Framework site there is a really interesting image of a girl's brain *at rest* and a boy's brain *at rest*:



"In the resting female brain, we find just as much neural activity as in the male brain that is solving problems."

[ur brain on compUtrs]

In the Sunday Times Magazine this weekend there was a feature by John Cornwell: "It's a No Brainer." The article gave an overview of Professor Susan Greenfield's latest research findings detailing the effects of extended computer use on young people's brains.

According to Cornwell, Greenfield is predicting a "nobody scenario" in which teens of tomorrow won't have a secure/stable sense of personal identity (which means lack of morality and inability to think about effect of actions).

"By spending inordinate quantities of time in the interactive, virtual, two-dimensional, cyberspace realms of the screen...the brains of the youth of today are headed for a drastic alterations. It's as if all that young grey cortical matter is being scalded and defoliated by a kind of cognitive Agent Organge, depriving them of moral agency, imagination and awareness of consequences."

Greenfield draws parallels between the degeneration of an Alzheimer's brain and "the implications of these newer threats." For Greenfield (via Cornwell) too much IT (from 6-9 hours a day...ah! sounds like me!) means brains develop differently: "The brain has plasticity: it is exquisitely malleable, and a significant alteration in our environment and behaviour has consequences."

Thanks to the "substitution of virtual experience for real encounters, the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry, a decline in linguistic and visual imagination, and atrophy of creativity, ccontracted, brutalised text-messagine, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complext thinking" ..."the more we play games, the less time there is for learning specific facts and working out how those facts relate to each other." the result: "a failure to build highly personalise individual conceptual freamworks..."

I'm not sure about the seemingly sweeping negativity. Sure computers have changed/added to the ways we communicate but young people especially are still in school all day - there *must* be at least some real-life contact during those hours. A decline in linguistic imagination? I think text messaging is all about imagination rather than a "brutalised" form of language, this is a craft - a different kind of language for a specific purpose (only 140 characters to say what you mean). Sounds like the creation of a kind of code. But more research needs to be conducted before anyone can say exactly what changes are occuring and how parents/educators/society should (or should not) accommodate them. (See Charles Leadbeater: "But the reality is that most young people seem to see it as a way to participate and collaborate, socialise and express themselves.")

Interestingly, the print version of the Times' article has various brain photos but the accompanying online version does not. The images included in the print article are from the Science Photo Library which also has these amazing views of the brain speaking, hearing words and reading words:





As an aside to the article content (science, brain research, teens) the writing style of Cornwell suggests his own kind of ludditism...an inappropriate gendered kind. Baroness Susan Greenfield (Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Fullerian Professor of Physiology, Senior Research Fellow Lincoln College, Honorary Fellow, St. Hilda's College) is described as "the motormouth publicist of science" whose "lower lip pouts as if to blow a raspberry." She is also a "glamourpuss" (though at least an "academic" one). We are told about her "bust up with her Oxford-don husband" and then treated to Cornwell's interpretation of her accoutrements: "she, in laboratory mode, is dressed down in a beautifully cut Russian-red jacket; a sleeveless, artificial-fur-lined silvery waistcoat; charcoal Armani trousers; a fetching beret (hint of Rasta-chic); and patent platform lace-up ankle boots." Further in the article, Cornwell describes Greenfield's "tight-fitting grey-blue trouser suit" she wears to a Birmingham lecture. Just one question: had the scientist been male, would Cornwell similarly draw focus to his "pouting" lips, eyes and clothes?

[synesthesia]

I've just bought The Hidden Sense: Synthesia in Art and Science (Leonardo Book) by Cretien van Campen and can't wait to dig in. I've always wondered what it might be like to hear music but then see colours or hearing a word (hypertext for instance) and smelling something (peaches maybe).



Take a look at the image above. What do you see?

...
...
...

"Someone with number – colour synaesthesia will immediately see a triangle of 2’s – it would stand out because the 2 and the 5 are seen in two different colours."

If synethesia is a

"union of the senses"

does that imply a greater degree of transliteracy (if in fact transliteracy can be measured in degrees or otherwise). Would having synethesia mean readers can experience a variety of modes simultaneously? Images appearing as sounds or text as smells, rendering the whole experience sensory in both the online world and real world?

One of my students, Andy Warrington, on the Digital Cultures module for the IOCT Masters has drawn my attention to this interesting talk by neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran on brain fuctions including synethesia. Excellent: