Neuromyths I have known and loved

In one study Dr. Howard-Jones cites, 48 percent of British teachers agreed with the statement “We mostly only use 10 percent of our brain.” Ninety-three percent believed that “individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style (for example, visual, auditory or kinaesthetic)” (research actually doesn’t support this), and 29 percent believed “drinking less than 6 to 8 glasses of water a day can cause the brain to shrink” (it can’t). Sixteen percent thought that “learning problems associated with developmental differences in brain function cannot be remediated by education.”

How Brain Myths Could Hurt Kids

I was able to pull the paper, and the data on teacher belief in learning styles is hilarious.

Percentage of teachers who believe individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style:

93% of teachers in the UK
96% of teachers in the Netherlands
97% of teachers in Turkey
96% of teachers in Greece
97% of teachers in China

Pretty much the entire planetary teaching force.

Eureka

This afternoon, while Ed and I were having lunch in the American Diner over in …. Nyack?

Hmm.

I have no idea what town the American Diner is in.

Retake.

This afternoon, while Ed and I were having lunch in the American Diner, it came to me.

Why MOOCs don't work, and why flipped classrooms aren't going to work, either.

I've got it.

Optimal arousal levels.

That's the problem.

As usual, the world of athletics is way ahead of the world of everything else.

More anon.

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk
Who wants flipped classrooms? (Salman Khan on liberating teachers)
True story
Are math & science lectures boring in a way humanities & social science lectures are not?

"Brain in the News"

Don't think I've ever mentioned the Dana Foundation's Brain in the News. I'm a fan.

Free subscriptions here

I've just discovered they have a "Neuroeducation" page, too. Looks interesting.

off-topic: a sex difference I had never heard of

Reading The role of the orbitofrontal cortex in normally developing compulsive-like behaviors and
obsessive–compulsive disorder by David W. Evans, Marc D. Lewis, and Emily Iobst, I came across mention of a sex difference so striking I had to post:

[H]man studies show gender differences in callosal axons projecting from the OFC -orbitofrontal cortex]: men attain maximal callosal size in this region at age 20, well ahead of women who do not attain it until 40-50 years (Cowell, Allen, Zalantino, & Denenberg, 1992).

We're talking about a 20-year gender gap in development?

Twenty or 30?

Really?

And how is it nobody's ever heard about it?

It's not like the orbitofrontal cortex is an insignificant part of the brain, or anything.

The Runner

This is an amazing story. (via Frontal Lobe)

paging Dr. Willingham

We need Daniel Willingham to break this down:

Study gives more proof that intelligence is largely inherited
UCLA researchers find that genes determine brain's processing speed

Because unfortunately that headline has quickly turned into this one:

Bad at Math? Blame It on Your Parents
And if your kids aren't good at math, blame yourself

Just imagine the kind of damage this kind of headline can do.

We've been talking about cultural attitudes towards ability and this absolutely sends the wrong message that effort doesn't count for much. If you're not good at something, blame it on your gene pool and get on with it.

We already have a serious problem with believing that we're either good at math or we aren't. This just adds fuel to the fire.

In Why Don't Students Like School? Daniel Willingham asserts, "Our genetic inheritance does impact our intelligence, but it seems to do so mostly through the environment. There is no doubt that intelligence can be changed."

Children need to know that it is within their power to increase their intelligence. That ability can be improved with effort. If parents and educators buy into the you're-either-born-smart-or-you're-not mindset, we're doomed to continue declining on all internationally benchmarked assessments of academic ability.

We need Dr. Willingham to counteract this spin and control it with headlines that make sense. Changing cultural perceptions about learning needs to happen now.

I blogged more about it here .

voodoo correlations in social neuroscience

I've always been skeptical of big behavioral claims based on brain scan data.

Turns out I was right.

Here's Andrew Gelman (and here, too).

Brain imaging studies under fire (naturenews)

interview: Have the Results of Some Brain Scanning Experiments Been Overstated? (Scientific American)

LEHRER: What is a "voodoo correlation"?

VUL: We use that term as a humorous way to describe mysteriously high correlations produced by complicated statistical methods (which usually were never clearly described in the scientific papers we examined)—and which turn out unfortunately to yield some very misleading results. The specific issue we focus on, which is responsible for a great many mysterious correlations, is something we call “non-independent” testing and measurement of correlations. Basically, this involves inadvertently cherry-picking data and it results in inflated estimates of correlations.

To go into a bit more detail:

An fMRI scan produces lots of data: a 3-D picture of the head, which is divided into many little regions, called voxels. In a high-resolution fMRI scan, there will be hundreds of thousands of these voxels in the 3-D picture.

When researchers want to determine which parts of the brain are correlated with a certain aspect of behavior, they must somehow choose a subset of these thousands of voxels. One tempting strategy is to choose voxels that show a high correlation with this behavior. So far this strategy is fine.

The problem arises when researchers then go on to provide their readers with a quantative measure of the correlation magnitude measured just within the voxels they have pre-selected for having a high correlation. This two-step procedure is circular: it chooses voxels that have a high correlation, and then estimates a high average correlation. This practice inflates the correlation measurement because it selects those voxels that have benefited from chance, as well as any real underlying correlation, pushing up the numbers.
One can see closely analogous phenomena in many areas of life. Suppose we pick out the investment analysts whose stock picks for April 2005 did best for that month. These people will probably tend to have talent going for them, but they will also have had unusual luck (and some finance experts, such as Nassim Taleb, actually say the luck will probably be the bigger element). But even assuming they are more talented than average—as we suspect they would be—if we ask them to predict again, for some later month, we will invariably find that as a group, they cannot duplicate the performance they showed in April. The reason is that next time, luck will help some of them and hurt some of them—whereas in April, they all had luck on their side or they wouldn’t have gotten into the top group. So their average performance in April is an overestimate of their true ability—the performance they can be expected to duplicate on the average month.

It is exactly the same with fMRI data and voxels. If researchers select only highly correlated voxels, they select voxels that "got lucky," as well as having some underlying correlation. So if you take the correlations you used to pick out the voxels as a measure of the true correlation for these voxels, you will get a very misleading overestimate.

This, then, is what we think is at the root of the voodoo correlations: the analysis inadvertently capitalized on chance, resulting in inflated measurements of correlation. The tricky part, which I can’t go into here, was that investigators were actually trying to take account of the fact they were checking so many different brain areas—but their precautions made the problem that I am describing worse, not better!

Of course, now I'm wondering whether there is anything I think I know about brain & behavior that is not based on non-independent analysis.

Willingham on "levels of analysis"

What Can Cookies Do For Students?

A couple days ago, the NYT carried an interesting Op-Ed written by a professor of molecular biology and neuroscience and an editor of Nature Neuroscience on how the brain responds to tasks requiring "willpower." The article, Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind, was ostensibly discussing the mortgage/economic crises that some families might be facing; but there are some fascinating observations made in the article that could improve teaching and learning.

The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. . . . The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others have found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.

In one pioneering study, some people were asked to eat radishes while others received freshly baked chocolate chip cookies before trying to solve an impossible puzzle. The radish-eaters abandoned the puzzle in eight minutes on average, working less than half as long as people who got cookies or those who were excused from eating radishes. Similarly, people who were asked to circle every “e” on a page of text then showed less persistence in watching a video of an unchanging table and wall.

First thought -- anytime chocolate is involved, it's got to be a good thing. We need more research like this.

But seriously, eating cookies improves your ability to stick to a difficult or boring task. Who else is thinking about automatic recall of math facts? Perhaps all we need to do to hit our national goals is give kids cookies instead of radishes.

Last month when the CMT tests were being administered to all those 3rd through 8th graders, parents were asked to donate boxes of healthy snacks for the classrooms -- granola bars, fresh fruit, carrot sticks, etc. Perhaps we are sealing our own fate with this behavior -- if we'd have sent chocolate chip cookies and tossed the carrot sticks, maybe our kids could all hit goal.

But things get even better as we read through the op-ed:

What limits willpower? Some have suggested that it is blood sugar, which brain cells use as their main energy source and cannot do without for even a few minutes. Most cognitive functions are unaffected by minor blood sugar fluctuations over the course of a day, but planning and self-control are sensitive to such small changes. Exerting self-control lowers blood sugar, which reduces the capacity for further self-control. People who drink a glass of lemonade between completing one task requiring self-control and beginning a second one perform equally well on both tasks, while people who drink sugarless diet lemonade make more errors on the second task than on the first. Foods that persistently elevate blood sugar, like those containing protein or complex carbohydrates, might enhance willpower for longer periods.

If you need to study for a big exam, it might be smart to let the housecleaning slide to conserve your willpower for the more important job. Similarly, it can be counterproductive to work toward multiple goals at the same time if your willpower cannot cover all the efforts that are required. Concentrating your effort on one or at most a few goals at a time increases the odds of success.

Clearly, we all need to stop insisting our kids clean their rooms and clear their dishes if we expect them to sit down and do their homework or study for an exam.

But what does this say about our schools? Minutes off of recess is so common a punishment its not even worth noting. Carrot sticks and fruit for birthday snacks? No rough-housing during recess, when you get recess? Are we expecting our kids to have far more willpower to sit and do dull tasks than is reasonable given the human limitations of willpower? Perhaps schools should rethink the school day in terms of willpower depletion -- classroom tasks can be less engaging (and more productive) if kids are given a freer rein, or more sugar, at other times of the day.

I'm hoping Catherine will jump in here, because she has so much more cognitive studies at her fingertips than I ever will.

Which of the following education reform movements is the most bogus?

Over at Teach Effectively, John Wills Lloyd has opened the Education Bogus Bowl, asking:

Which of the following education reform movements is the most bogus? (Listed in alphabetical order):

• Block scheduling for classes at the secondary level.
• Brain-based instruction
• Differentiated instruction
• Inclusion of students with disabilities in general education settings

You can only choose one. There will be other flights. Go and vote.

cross posted at I Speak of Dreams.

the misbehavior of organisms

Do yourself a favor and start your year by reading Keller & Marian Breland's The Misbehavior of Organisms.

There seems to be a continuing realization by psychologists that perhaps the white rat cannot reveal everything there is to know about behavior... However, psychologists as a whole do not seem to be heeding these admonitions....

Perhaps this reluctance is due in part to some dark precognition of what they might find in such investigations, for the ethologists Lorenz (1950, p. 233) and Tinbergen (1951, p. 6) have warned that if psychologists are to understand and predict the behavior of organisms, it is essential that they become thoroughly familiar with the instinctive behavior patterns of each new species they essay to study. Of course, the Watsonian or neobehavioristically oriented experimenter is apt to consider "instinct" an ugly word. He tends to class it with Hebb's (1960) other "seditious notions" which were discarded in the behavioristic revolution, and he may have some premonition that he will encounter this bete noir in extending the range of species and situations studied.

We can assure him that his apprehensions are well grounded.

What I need now are Marian Breland Bailey's thoughts on the instinctive behavior patterns of 13-year old boys.

bigger & better

Lots of cool brain stuff at New Scientist.

Maybe I'll just forget the Book Club and spend my time hanging out on the web doing exercises intended to increase my working memory. (Sorry - I didn't write down the source that put me onto those two sites, but I remember it being serious.)

UNTIL recently, a person's IQ - a measure of all kinds of mental problem-solving abilities, including spatial skills, memory and verbal reasoning - was thought to be a fixed commodity largely determined by genetics. But recent hints suggest that a very basic brain function called working memory might underlie our general intelligence, opening up the intriguing possibility that if you improve your working memory, you could boost your IQ too.
Working memory is the brain's short-term information storage system. It's a workbench for solving mental problems. For example if you calculate 73 - 6 + 7, your working memory will store the intermediate steps necessary to work out the answer. And the amount of information that the working memory can hold is strongly related to general intelligence.
A team led by Torkel Klingberg at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, has found signs that the neural systems that underlie working memory may grow in response to training. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, they measured the brain activity of adults before and after a working-memory training programme, which involved tasks such as memorising the positions of a series of dots on a grid. After five weeks of training, their brain activity had increased in the regions associated with this type of memory (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 75).
Perhaps more significantly, when the group studied children who had completed these types of mental workouts, they saw improvement in a range of cognitive abilities not related to the training, and a leap in IQ test scores of 8 per cent (Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol 44, p 177). It's early days yet, but Klingberg thinks working-memory training could be a key to unlocking brain power. "Genetics determines a lot and so does the early gestation period," he says. "On top of that, there is a few per cent - we don't know how much - that can be improved by training."

As far as I can tell, the idea that working memory is highly related to IQ is solid and not likely to be significantly revised any time soon. I have the impression that, for awhile there, neuroscientists were thinking that IQ might actually be working memory, but that hypothesis seems to have been abandoned.