Some thoughts on
educational neuroscience
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore
ICN, UCL
www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/sblakemore

Is it meaningful/ helpful to reduce accounts of
educational/psychological events to neural level?
• Brain Gym... E.g. Rub either side of your breast bone, in a special
Brain Gym way called Brain Buttons: “This exercise stimulates the
flow of oxygen-carrying blood through the carotid arteries to the
brain to awaken it and increase concentration and relaxation. Brain
buttons lie directly over and stimulate the carotid arteries.”
• Baby Einstein, Flashcards for toddlers, Classical music for
foetuses, critical periods of brain development from zero to
three…
• Nintendo Brain Training: How old is your brain?
“If you're bored of playing games that don't stretch your brain cells and
you'd like to give your grey matter an extensive workout, pick up
this program… If you want to tone your intellectual muscle, Brain
Training is a fine way to get started”
• Exercise before class

The seductive allure of neuroscience
(Weisberg et al. 2008)
PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENON:
Experiments have shown that people are quite bad at
estimating the knowledge of others: if we know the
answer to a piece of trivia, we overestimate the
extent to which other people will know that answer
too. This is called the “curse of knowledge”

GOOD BAD
Without The researchers claim that The researchers claim that this
Neuroscience this “curse” happens because “curse” happens because
subjects have trouble subjects make more mistakes
switching their point of view to when they have to judge the
consider what someone else knowledge of others. People
might know, mistakenly are much better at judging
projecting their own what they themselves know.
knowledge onto others.
With Brain scans indicate that this Brain scans indicate that this
Neuroscience “curse” happens because of “curse” happens because of
the frontal lobe brain the frontal lobe brain
circuitry known to be circuitry known to be involved
involved in self-knowledge. in self-knowledge. Subjects
Subjects have trouble make more mistakes when
switching their point of view to they have to judge the
consider what someone else knowledge of others. People
might know, mistakenly are much better at judging
projecting their own what they themselves know.
knowledge onto others.

How satisfying novices found the
explanations

How satisfying cognitive neuroscience
students found the explanations

How satisfying neuroscientists found the
explanations

Why?
• Explanations involving more technical language are
better, perhaps because they look more scientific
• Seductive details, related but logically irrelevant
details presented as part of an argument, make it
more difficult for subjects to encode and recall the
main argument of a text
• Neuroscience may illustrate a connection between
the mind and the brain that people implicitly believe
not to exist

Do we need educational
neuroscience?
• Yes, but beware seductive neuroscience
• Yes, because there are things we didn’t really
know without brain scans e.g. teenage brains
are developing
• Yes, because there is a long way to go before
neuroscience has ecological validity for the
classroom