The Melheimian Sabbatiblog

Brain Myths & Reality

Monty sends this great piece on brain-based learning from our favorite, Dr. Eric Jensen:

http://www.jensenlearning.com/truth.html

 

MYTH: Getting the right answer quickly is best.
REALITY: Given the value of trial and error learning, probably those who are not the quickest (and not the slowest) are more likely to be better, more reflective thinkers.

MYTH: An enriched environment is one with posters, mobiles, manipulatives & music.
REALITY: Enrichment occurs more because of the process that the learners are undergoing than the decorations. Challenge, activity, feedback, novelty, coherence and time are crucial ingredients for re-wiring the brain. Enrichment means heavier cells, greater dendritic branching, more glial cells, multiple synaptic junctions and, in some cases, new cell growth (in the hippocampus).

MYTH: More content per hour is better.
REALITY: Each subject and each learner probably have an ideal amount of "ideas per hour" that can be learned based on learner background, motivation, learning skills and subject complexity and novelty. Only language acquisition occurs better with more content per hour.

And on the Mozart Effect: I would endorse a wider cultural variety of music to children than European music from 1720-1850. Current research particularly supports the use of strong rhythms. Rhythm is to the ears what patterns are to the

Why Teach Scripture with Art?

Art connects to the visual cortex, but it does a lot more. Color, contrast, and the emotional content of the art – all theses add recognizable patterns. Karaoke letters flashing on a screen, beautiful paintings inspiring the mind, along with art that the children create themselves, all these add a rich tapestry of depth to the learning experience. Bombarded with a sensual array of sight, sound, motion, emotion, fun, and meaning – the gatekeepers of the brain have no choice but to send the information through from short-term to long-term memory centers.

Sing it. Sign it. Dance it. Draw it. Present it in worship. Return to it seven nights week in a Home Huddle. You will remember this verse for the rest of your life.

Why Teach Scripture with Movement?

Sign language is all about patterns. It creates motion with meaning
and connects multiple areas of the brain and body all at once. Like
learning to ride a bicycle, once sign language is mastered, it is rarely
forgotten. It appears that this “skill memory” has an unlimited
storage capability in the brain and is among the most easily retrieved of all longterm
memories. Why is this so?

There is a barrier between the blood and the brain. It’s called the “blood-brain
barrier.” (Creative, huh?) There are only two natural molecules small enough to
make it through this barrier: oxygen and glucose. Singing and signing at the same
time floods the brain with both.

The higher the oxygen level in the brain, the more it can focus and stay alert.
Think of it: when you sing you move your diaphragm up and down, breathe
harder, and connect a whole array of muscles together, stimulating the brain. A
myriad of new connections (synapses) appear. Neurons throughout the body link
with neurons in the brain to memorize the song. Add sign language to the song
and you connect neurons throughout the body with the meaning of the song while
pumping glucose into the brain. Glucose creates the “glue” (Glial cells) that holds
neurons in place and insulates them to make them fire more efficiently. Every time
the song and sign are repeated, synapses get more and more efficient in
recognizing a whole array of sensory input. The song and sign together become a pattern that the brain can easily recall, retrieve and relive. This imprint is so
powerful that even by closing your eyes and visualizing the Bible song and sign,
your brain will retrieve the pattern from its memory banks and allow you to
reinforce it.

Aside from the oxygen and glucose you get while singing and signing a verse,
watching your friends sing and sign can be fun, too. This positive emotional boost
pumps a dozen or more memory-enhancing neurotransmitters (adrenalin,
serotonin, and dopamine) into the blood stream. By adding dance to the song and
sign, the motor cortex in your frontal lobe connects to the internal gyroscope in
the bones behind your ear, which connects to your somatic sensory cortex in the
parietal lobe, which registers the location of your arms and hands in space. (Okay,
that is more than you want to know.) Suffice it to say, teach with song, sign
language and dance, and you’ll be feeding the brain the patterns it craves as well as
the chemicals it needs to solidify the thoughts in place.

Why Teach Scripture with Music?

Why? Because music feeds the brain what it craves. Patterns.
If you have ever caught yourself unconsciously tapping a rhythm
with a pencil on a desk or with your foot on the floor when you
were nervous, anxious or bored, your brain was simply not getting enough
patterns, so it created its own.

Music is all about patterns. Cords are full of patterns. Rhyming words contain
patterns. The melody is a pattern that activates the right hemisphere of the brain.
Rhythm and harmony are patterns that activate the left hemisphere of the brain.
The beat of the music travels deep into the sub-brain (cerebellum) and actually
starts to synchronize your heart beat and breathing in a pattern. All of these
different areas of the brain chatter and link up with one another while the music
plays, increasing nerve connections between multiple parts of the brain and
codifying them into retrievable memory patterns.

Taking the Brain Seriously

The following is from the manual on our new Bible Song Sunday School.

We learned above that without at least two types of simultaneous
stimuli, an individual molecular gate won’t open. Without the gate
opening, an individual nerve cell won’t fire. Without multiple
nerve cells firing a massive sensory bombardment of information,
the brain won’t recognize patterns and register what you are trying to teach or
recall. If you take this brain science seriously, it will force you to rethink how you
teach everything. How you preach. How you create your space. How you do
pastoral care in small groups and presentations in large groups. Music and sign
language will become more and more central to the learning experience?

Why?

Because they work. Because they teach the way the brain learns. Because they
create patterns that cross all portions of the brain and reach beyond the brain to
neurons in your extremities. Because they will turn everyone involved into activist
participants in their own education.

“Neurons are greatly influenced by the company they keep,” says Dr. Thomas
Czerner. Adding music, movement and art will engage the learner and bring an
end the mindless doodling that generates from a pattern-starved mind.
The word “education” comes from the Latin (educatio) meaning to lead out or draw
out. If you want to teach something your learner will be able to draw out for the
rest of their lives, why wouldn’t you have them literally draw it out on paper now?
If you are serious about putting a pattern into their brains that they will be able to
retrieve years later, why wouldn’t you teach with more than the spoken word?
Why wouldn’t you employ eyes, ears, mouths, muscles, emotions, and the one
sense that is often forgotten in the classroom - the sense of humor? If you want to
optimize memory, you will use every asset in your brain-based arsenal, and put
those patterns in place at the optimal moments in a child’s life.

“Now thank we all our God, with hearts and hands and voices” isn’t just a good song.

It is good brain science.

That’s what BSS is all about.

Why Memorization before Puberty?

The earlier you begin to learn a language, the better chance you
have to speak it like a native. The earlier you learn the language of
faith, the more natural it will be to you the rest of your life. You
can learn a new song at any time, but before age 12 your brain is
set up to learn it a whole lot easier. Prior to puberty, the brain is operating at
1/250,000 of a second. At the onset of puberty, it slows down to 1/150,000 of a
second. The child’s brain in the 3 – 6th grade level is almost twice as efficient at
grasping and holding the Scripture verse as it will be when their hormones kick in.
Henry Kissinger came to America at 12. His brother was 10. Kissinger speaks with
a strong German accent. His brother has no accent. Suffice it to say, “Teach Bible
with music and movement – and teach it before age 12 – and you’ll cement the
Word of God into patterns you can recall the rest of your life.”

Structural Memory

The human brain is made up of three major mainframes, a number
of smaller processing centers, dozens of sensory input devices (to
process what you see, smell, taste and touch), and an unusual
collection of chemical messengers that affect who we are, what we
perceive, what we believe, how we react, and how we remember.

1. Mainframe I: The “Autopilot” Brain (Medulla) The brain stem, or medulla,
is the non-thinking part of your brain. It automatically (autonomically) maintains
and regulates your pulse, blood pressure, temperature, and other vital signs. You
can get to this autopilot through meditation, and other focusing techniques, but it
takes great concentration and practice to tell it what to do and how to behave. The
easiest way to adjust it is through the cadence and beat of music.

2. Mainframe II: The “Emotional” Brain (Cerebellum) The cerebellum sits
above the automatic portion of your brain and takes care of your instincts,
emotions, and feelings. Your genuine smile or frown comes to you sponsored by
this brain. So do ritualized movements like serving a tennis ball, driving a car,
or signing a song. Over the last decade, scientists have learned that emotions fire
along the same brain circuits that govern social relationships and the processes of
making meaning. Emotions are integrated with cognition, perception, and physical
action. They affect not only the state of your body and mind, but they also enhance or impede your memory. Music has a profound power to set moods in
place in this center of the brain.
3. Mainframe III: The “Thinking” Brain (Neo Cortex) Crowning the top of
you head is a wrinkled ½ inch maze of overlapping wiring called the cognitive or
cerebral neo cortex. This mainframe takes in most of your sensory information
and controls the majority of higher thoughts. It decides whether or not it is
appropriate to feel as bad as you do; whether or not you should act or refrain from
acting based on your best interest; and whether or not you give a rip about what
the teacher is saying if doesn’t appear to have relevance or meaning. This brain
serves as the long-term memory hard drive and retrieval system for all that you
think you know, and much of what you actually do.
The neo cortex is made up of two halves (hemispheres). The left brain works
faster than any computer in the world and loves to process details. It controls
complex voluntary movement and calculations, while the more artistic and
intuitive functions are performed better by the right half. The right carries with it a
sense of the whole as seen separately from its parts. It is spontaneous, creative,
and able to modify mid-course. The right half of your brain sees the forest. The
left half sees the trees. (And in some people, the bugs on the trees.) Sitting
between the two halves and connecting them into a whole is a big body of wiring
called the corpus callosum (“big body” in Greek). The more these two sides of the
brain talk, the more firing in the wiring between the two, the thicker the
connections there will be and the deeper you will understand a subject.

Tomorrow: The Four Processors in the Brain

Cellular Memory

Here's a little something I'm working on for the Bible Song Sunday School manual.

Your brain contains 100 billion nerve cells – as many as all the stars in the Milky
Way galaxy. There are quadrillion connections between these neurons – as many
as all the phone calls made in the world in the last twenty years. There is a physical
pathway connecting nearly every part of your brain with every other part. Not only
that, but these neural connections extend far beyond the brain, itself, to every part
of your body.

a. Neurons (Nerve Cells) An average nerve cell, the color of raw liver and the
consistency of an avocado, connects electrochemically with an average of 10,000
other nerve cells. Neural signals are not confined to your head, but travel through
an amazing maze – an information super-highway of unfathomable complexity
and overlapping wiring. These tentacle spies reach out to sensory outposts in every
part of your body. In a very real sense, your mind extends to your fingertips.
Here’s another strange truth: you don’t just have memories in your brain.
Memories are stored in every nerve cell in your body. You actually have memories
in your arm, your liver, your eyeballs, and your feet! (Ask Tiger Woods about
muscle memory.) If, as neuroscientists believe today, nearly every part of your brain is involved in nearly everything you do, then nearly every part of your body
is also connected to nearly everything you think, feel, learn and experience.
Memorization on a neural level is all about building, maintaining, and
strengthening connections and patterns of connections between the neurons of
the brain and body. The more connections - and the more repetition to solidify
those connections - the better your chances of creating long-term retention of
what you are trying to learn.

b. Glial Cells (Memory Glue) Aside from neurons, an
increasing bit of attention has been paid recently to another type
of brain cell – a glue cell made from glucose that provides
several maintenance functions for the brain. These mysterious,
yet abundant, glue cells (glial cells) provide structural support in
the brain, lay down markers to tell nerve cells where to grow,
facilitate waste removal, and maintain nutrition in the brain.
They provide one additional function that will relate to our
singing and signing Scriptures: they insulate the wiring of the
neurons with a little fatty sheath – myelin – to help the nerves
fire more efficiently. As with electrical wires, the more insulation,
the better the connection.

Molecular Memory

Here's a little something I'm working on for the Bible Song Sunday School manual.

In order to truly understand the basis of memory and design
teaching tools to maximize long-term retention, let’s take a look at
memory on the molecular, cellular, then structural levels.
1. Molecular Memory
Picture a wall with a gate. The gate is locked with a magnesium lock. Unless you
have at least two keys, the locks aren’t going to open. That’s how memory works
on a molecular level. A spaghetti-like protein responsible for long-term memory
called the calmoldulin is the gate keeper. This structure can’t and won’t open the
lock unless there are at least two simultaneous stimuli knocking on its door. (It
actually looks like a little gate in your nerve cell!) Technically speaking, if you don’t
provide at least two stimuli, the calmoldulin won’t unlock the magnesium lock and
release the calcium ions that create the long-term potentiation that forms a
memory. (Okay, that’s more than you wanted to know.) Suffice it to say, you’ve
got to open the molecular gates with at least two keys for long-term memory to
occur on a molecular level. Knocking lightly on the cell door with only one
stimulus won’t do the trick. Keep that thought in mind as we move from the
molecular to the cellular basis of memory tomorrow.

Patterns

A. Patterns

 “Your brain craves patterns and searches for them endlessly. In the absence of adequate sensory input, it will even make its own.” - Thomas B. Czerner, M.D.

If you have ever seen a person doodling patterns and shapes on a note pad during a lecture, you know the statement above is true. If listeners aren’t finding any relevance in what the teacher is teaching – if they see no patterns or connections to their own lives – they will create their own patterns. Literally.

The brain loves patterns. It organizes itself around patterns. It is constantly searching for patterns to store, patterns to retrieve, and new patterns to connect with existing patterns in its memory array. The brain hungers to make sense of the world. To do that, it needs to recognize patterns. Once the brain is efficient in recognizing a set of patterns, it begins to do amazing things. Read this if you can:

I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg! The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mind! Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed.

it wsan’t a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt!

Because you are familiar with the patterns of words and letters, you don’t even need to see the letters in the right order for your brain to take over and fill in the gaps of the lines above. It does the work for you… all because of patterns.

 

En-Ter-Taining Patterns

Does all this sound too much like entertainment to you to be education? Before dismissing it, look for a pattern in the word en-ter-tain.

En means in or into. Ter (territory, terra, terrain, terrarium) means the land. Tain (contain, retain, obtain, fountain) means to hold. The word en-ter-tain literally means to “enter their land and hold them.” That sounds like mission work… Jesus work. You can’t expect the learner to enter your world. You must enter their land if you are to hold them. And the only way to enter their brain - the only way to hold their attention is through relevant and recognizable…

Patterns!

What makes something irrelevant and unrecognizable? The lack of meaningful patterns. What makes it meaningful and relevant? You recognize some familiar patterns and the brain calls out for more. What does this have to do with education and Bible memory? Read on.