The Neuroscience of Learning: Brain Fitness for all Ages Fit Brains Learn Better Martha S. Burns, Ph.D

1. The New Science of Learning
The Neuroscience of Learning:
• We used to think we were born
Brain Fitness for all Ages
with brain capacity
– We inherited it from our parents
Martha S. Burns, Ph.D – We did the best we could
Fall, 2011
– If a child couldn’t learn they were just
not smart
• We now know all that is changed
Fit Brains Learn Better
The incredible story of Gabby
If Gabby Giffords can talk again
Giffords
• Gabby Giffords was elected to the • With much of her left hemisphere gone
House of Representatives in 2007 for • All of your students can learn
the state of Arizona
• She was shot in the head Jan. 8, 2011
• The bullet went through her forehead
and destroyed much of the left side of
her brain – the side that talks
• Here she is today
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2. Foundations for a New Science
of Learning
DeHaene, 2009
Neurons that fire together wire together in networks
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3. MATHEMATICS SKILLS - Identifying the aSLF.
Specific These pathways
connect the
The New Science of Learning
pathways in
inferior parietal
the left lobe/IPS with
hemisphere precentral and
communicate inferior frontal
signals regions. Tsang et 1. What these regions do and…..
between al., used
regions that diffusion- • How they are connected via
are active weighted data to
during mental estimate this superhighway system
white matter
arithmetic tract. Theyecall • How the highways develop in early
tasks. this tract the
anterior superior years
longitudinal
fasciculus
(aSLF).
Tsang J M et al. PNAS 2009;106:22546-22551
©2009 by National Academy of Sciences
Different dimensions of adult cortical plasticity are enabled by the
Neuronal Communication System behaviorally-context-dependent release of:
• acetylcholine (focused attention/reward)
(Kilgard, Bao)
• dopamine (reward, novelty) (Bao)
• norepinephrine (novelty) (Bollinger)
• serotonin (Bollinger)
• Adenosine 5’-triphospate (ATP) released by
axons and stimulates myelination (Ishibashi)
• et alia
In infants, exposure-based plasticity is relatively uniform.
In older children, learning-induced changes are complexly “nuanced”
by differences in behavioral context that result in the differential
release of 6 or 7 modulatory neurotransmitters.
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4. How does reading become superimposed
on language?
Grade 3+
Reading development pyramid --
upper levels depend upon a solid base Grades 1-2
below
Kindergarten
4 to 5 year old skills
3 to 4 year old development
2 - 3 year old development
Birth to 2 year development
Who? What? A unified sound wave coming from an unseen talker is analyzed
to produce two distinct percepts—Who spoke and What was said.
P K Kuhl Science Aug. 19 2011;333:529-530 Early Language
Development
• The foundation for reading
• The precursor for reading
• For some children, the bottleneck that limits success
• Children differ in language experience
P K Kuhl Science 2011;333:529-530
Published by AAAS
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5. Organization of cortical responses to spoken language in 3 m old infants.
Birth to 2 years
1. Child is born - normal hearing and cognitive potential
2. Makes generalizations about sounds around him/her
•speech sounds versus environmental sounds
•recognizes speech sounds of own language
3. Uses own language sounds in babbling then early
speech
•full repertoire of native language phonemes by 18mo.-2 years
•early adjectives (good, hot), verbs (see, want, go), pronouns (me,you)
10-12 months - first word
H
18 months - 10-20 words; 2 yr.- two word phrases; 200 words
Dehaene-Lambertz, et. al, 2006
e
a
ri
n
g
lo
s
s
w
it
h
O
Normal Development of the Brain Maps for Hearing
M
E
Brain
maps
depend
on
hearing
the
sounds
Zhang, Bao & Merzenich, Nature Neurosci 2001
Zhang, Bao & Merzenich, Nature Neuroscience, 2001
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6. Structural MRI Studies of Language
Function (Fiona M. Richardson, Cathy J. Price,
The New Science of Learning Brain Struct Funct (2009) 213:511–523)
• The relationship between vocabulary
How educators build left knowledge and brain structure in 47
hemisphere hubs that participants ages 7 to 75 years.
support learning and the • The relationship between vocabulary
networks and make them knowledge and posterior
supramarginal grey matter was also
more efficient
studied in 16 teenage participants
Plots of grey-matter density are based on data by Gogtay et al. 2004 and illustrate
Richardson and Price, 2009 the local grey-matter density in the mid-dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in red, in the
angular gyrus of the parietal cortex in blue, in the posterior superior temporal
sulcus of the temporal cortex in purple, and in the occipital pole in green.
Fig. 1 Structural variance with
vocabulary knowledge in the
posterior
supramarginal gyrus. Locations of
the peak co-ordinates from the
following studies: red Mechelli et
al. (2004), blue Lee et al. (2007),
and green Richardson et al. (2009).
The correlation of vocabulary knowledge with grey matter in the left posterior
supramarginal gyrus in teenage years, but not later in life, suggests that this
region is engaged in learning more typically exploited within formal
education, e.g.learning to link new words with specific lexical equivalents.
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7. Ability to Easily Learn a Foreign
Language (Richardson and Price, 2009)
• Those who were able to learn an unknown So what
foreign language
– showed a greater left hemisphere asymmetry in about
the parietal lobes reading?
– and also had more white matter (fiber tracts) in
left hearing and language temporal lobe region
• Affirms other research that found increased grey
matter in the auditory cortex in those with good Viking Press
auditory perception
– Also observed in musicians (Gaser and Schlaug 2003;
Schneider et al. 2002)
December 2009
– as well as for those with an aptitude for learning tonal
languages such as Mandarin, where pitch is particularly
important for distinguishing between words (Wong et al.
2008)
a | Training for arithmetic
problems leads to
decreasing engagement of
the inferior parietal cortex
(shown in yellow) and
increasing recruitment of
Turkeltaub et al Nature the angular gyrus (shown
Neuroscience 2003 in blue).
b | a moving time window
of 200 scans and reveals
that there are significant
changes in activity of the
angular gyrus (shown in
green) after only
approximately 8 repetitions
of a problem
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8. How Learning to Read Changes the Cortical
Networks for Vision and Language
Science 330, 1359 (2010);
Stanislas Dehaene, et al.
Literacy Enhances Brain Responses
in Three Ways (DeHaene, 2010) The New Science of Learning
• Boosts organization of the visual cortex
• Allows practically the entire left hemisphere
Reasons some children may
spoken language network to be activated by enter school with good
written sentences learning potential
• Refines spoken language processing by
…….but a brain that is not
enhancing the phonological region
yet ready to read
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9. Kindergarten Language Exposure and SES
Cumulative Effects of Effects of Low Language
phonological awareness Language Experience Development on Reading
Indicators of Understands and
potential reading uses 2000+ words verbal memory - sentence
6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1314 15
High Oral
45 Million Words
repetition and story recall Language in
Estimated Cumulative Words
High SES
difficulty are Speech is 80% correct Kindergarten
5.2
reductions in: expressive vocabulary
Reading Age Level
Follows 2-3 step command years
(In Millions)
26 Million Words difference
MLU = 4.3 words - full complete Middle SES
rapid serial naming Low Oral
sentences used with good, but Language in
not perfect, grammatical form receptive sentence Kindergarten
Names all upper & lower case letters 13 Million Words
comprehension Low SES
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0 12 24 36 48 Age 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
of Child (In Months) Age of Child (In Years)
(Hart and Risley, 1995) (Loban, 1967; Hirsch, 1996)
Fig. 1 Developmental Progression in Language
Acquisition and Emergence of Achievement Gaps ELL
Associated with Income and Race.
• Need to build the ability to perceive
internal detail to words
• Phonics instruction is a much less
transparent in English than many other
languages
– Much easier to learn to read Spanish than
English (DeHaene, 2009)
Published by AAAS
D K Dickinson Science 2011;333:964-967
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10. ELL prevalence Second Language Learning
• According to the 2000 census, nearly one-third of
children ages 5 years and older speak Spanish at • Affects the way the brain is organized for
home. language
– Add the under-5 population and the percentage is even
higher.
• Differs depending upon when the second
– Due to continued immigration and globalism, the language is learned
bilingual population will continue to grow in Texas. • After the critical period requires the same
• 5-8% of these children exhibit a speech-language developmental criteria as the first language
problem in their native language which will
require remediation in addition to bilingual
education
Learning a Second Language During Critical Period Learning a Second Language After Critical Period
Birth to 5 Years After Birth to 5 Years
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11. Oral Language
• Over 80% of classroom
?
instruction is presented
through talking
• Language processing,
primarily at the level of
phonology, is the primary
cause of reading and
spelling problems
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