Brainstorm: Text Only

Forget about blank slates.

You didn’t have a blank slate when you walked into kindergarten twenty, thirty, or forty years ago, one hand gripping your mother’s and the other clutching your favorite My Pretty Pony or your stretched-out Slinky or your bag of cat’s-eye marbles. You might not have known the names of all the colors–turquoise? chartreuse? magenta?–but you had already experienced them, and that knowledge was pulsing in your brain, just waiting for someone to name them and call them into your conscious world. You didn’t have a blank slate when it came to abstractions, either–you had already figured out that sometimes you got what you wanted by waiting rather than by throwing a tantrum, even if you didn’t know that this state of suspension between agony and hope was called patience. You don’t have a blank slate now when it comes to the concepts most foreign to you, even if you’re a social worker taking a class in computer encryption or an architect trying to work your way through James Joyce’s Ulysses.

We know more than we think we know. We can learn more than we think we can. Learning happens when we make a connection between what we know and what we don’t know, even more so when we feel excited or intrigued by the yet-to-be known–when we fall in love, so to speak, with the subject. And each time we learn something new, we are literally transforming our brains.

For years, educators and others have hoped that breakthroughs in brain science would lead to a greater understanding of both learning and teaching. They’ve largely been disappointed, as neurobiologists and pedagogical theorists rarely peer over their own disciplinary walls to search for connections between their research. However, James Zull makes this interdisciplinary leap in his new book, The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning (2002, Stylus Publishing, LLC), which shows how neurobiological research both supports and illuminates some of the best ideas in educational theory. Prof. Zull is perfect for this task. A CWRU professor of biology and biochemistry and director of UCITE (University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education), Prof. Zull straddles both disciplines himself.

A Researcher’s Fascination

“Anytime someone does what Zull has done–take ideas from two different fields and put them together for a lay audience–it is thought provoking,” says Linda Hodges, another cross-disciplinarian who is a lecturer in biochemistry at Princeton and associate director of that university’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning. Like UCITE, the McGraw Center works with professors and grad students who wish to improve their teaching. Often, says Dr. Hodges, those who teach science look askance at educational research, because it’s not–and can’t be–based upon controlled experiments, and it can’t claim to have predictive value, because human behavior is notoriously unpredictable. She believes that Prof. Zull’s book gives new credibility to educational research–even among biologists and mathematicians.

“When Zull connects the educational research to the more objective research from neuroscience,” Dr. Hodges explains, “it suggests that there really is something to this education research and that it can help teachers to construct better learning situations.”

Jim Zull’s fascination with the brain goes all the way back to high school. As he and his classmates dissected frogs during biology class, he opened his frog’s skull and stared at its brain. It was no bigger than the tip of his little finger. He knew it had been the control center for everything the frog had done up to that moment, and he thought it would be interesting to learn how it worked. By the time he got to Houghton College in the late 1950s, though, he discovered that little was known yet about the brain.

“Biochemically, about the only thing people knew about the brain was that it had a lot of fat,” Prof. Zull says. His eyebrows rise at the sound of the word “fat” during an interview in his office. “There is gray matter and white matter, and the white matter consists of fat, which coats the brain cells and acts as insulation. Fat! I found this both funny and disappointing.” Prof. Zull went on to get his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in biochemistry and spent the next few decades researching how the body’s cells signal to each other. And he continued to be fascinated by the brain.

Prof. Zull also developed a lively interest in the process of teaching. Teachers sometimes think that they can transfer knowledge from their brains into those of their students–and that they are indeed writing on a blank slate–but Prof. Zull believed this was a misconception. When he became the founding director of UCITE, in 1994, he noticed that other teachers throughout the University, no matter their discipline, struggled with this misconception.

While he was reluctant to abandon his own lab research in biochemistry when he assumed his post at UCITE, he saw the possibility of a new research direction: to explore and synthesize the findings of neuroscience and figure out how they applied to teaching. He realized he could bolster his research with stories from his own and other teachers’ classroom experiences–a source of both humor and humility. The culmination of this research, Prof. Zull’s book is of interest to anyone who teaches or learns–basically everyone, since we all do some of each at various points in our lives.

Whirling Through the Cycles

Prof. Zull’s book focuses on three ways in which the biology of the brain determines the process of learning. His first crackling of insight came when he read David Kolb’s book, Experiential Learning. A professor of organizational behavior at CWRU’s Weatherhead School of Management, Prof. Kolb describes the four-part cycle that leads to meaningful learning: experience, reflection, abstraction, and active testing. In this cycle, Prof. Zull saw what he calls a “natural link to biology.” He realized that the architecture of the cerebral cortex–the cortex is a layer of tissue over the cerebellum, the large part of the brain that does much of our thinking and learning–matches Prof. Kolb’s four-part cycle of learning.

Very generally, the cortex contains a section that picks up sensory details from our environment and our bodies; a section that integrates these sensory details with previous knowledge to analyze them and create meaning; a section that builds upon these insights to solve problems; and a section that sends out commands to the body to act upon these plans with language and movement.

These sections don’t necessarily light up sequentially, and there is much interplay between them. Many people engage one section more vigorously than others–thus, the difference in learning styles between one individual (who might respond with great sensitivity to sensory detail but doesn’t reflect much before making plans) and another (who might develop theories without basing them solidly on real experience). Even so, everyone’s brain is constantly whirling through the cycles. We’re constantly learning something, although not necessarily the things that someone else is trying to teach us.

“Everything you do in a classroom affects these kids’ brains,” says Dee Dickinson, an educator, author, and founder of New Horizons for Learning, a Seattle-based international education network, which has placed Prof. Zull’s book “high on our list of books every teacher should own, study, and refer to frequently.”

She continues, “I think teachers often don’t realize that what they say–sarcastic responses to wrong answers, for instance–make an indelible impression.”

The Best Reward

Prof. Zull’s second elucidation focuses on the parts of the brain that affect the intensity of our learning experience–they make the difference between one student’s eagerness to learn and another student’s intransigence. Teachers have known for a long time that student motivation is important, but haven’t understood why this is so and–more critically–how to improve it.

He clarifies this issue by describing how our brains are artifacts of our evolutionary history. Deep within it are ancient mechanisms for fear and pleasure that were critical to our survival as a species. One of these structures is the amygdala, the brain’s center for negative emotion, which is always on the alert for danger in our environment. When the amygdala’s fight or flight response is triggered–say, by a teacher’s sarcastic remark or even by what seems to be an unfriendly environment–the body involuntarily reacts, and learning takes a back seat to tensed muscles and even hostile body language. However, if a teacher can get a student engrossed in a cognitive task, like figuring out why baking soda makes vinegar bubble, the amygdala settles down and the panic recedes.

A complex of other structures in the brain registers pleasure. Studies have shown that when chemicals produced by these pleasure mechanisms wash through the brain, new information is connected to old knowledge more firmly–positive feelings provide more powerful cognitive glue. Finding the trigger for these pleasure mechanisms is tricky, though. Extrinsic rewards for learning–treats from the teacher, good grades, recognition, and so on–can sometimes help motivate the learner. But paradoxically, Prof. Zull explains, they often have the opposite effect, because the brain is hard-wired to maintain control over the body’s actions, and external rewards and punishments can be perceived as threats to the brain’s control.

Effective teachers, Prof. Zull argues, will do better to support an individual’s intrinsic reward system–that which already exists within each learner. In other words, teachers should learn all they can about the learner. What is already motivating her? What are her interests? What is her learning style?

As teachers create a comfortable learning environment and provide materials and prompts that trigger learning, the student’s growing sense of mastery over the subject is the best and most effective reward for learning. Learners derive pleasure from this progress toward a goal. Why? Prof. Zull suggests–and this is one of his most intriguing contributions to the study of brain function–that learners derive pleasure from intellectual movement, because it stimulates one of the brain’s pleasure structures that is also activated by physical movement like dance and running.

Prof. Zull believes that our enjoyment of stories stems from this same pleasure response to intellectual movement. “A good story goes somewhere,” he explains. “You can’t wait to see how it turns out. What you’re doing in a good story is putting movement into a mental image.”

This is just one of the reasons that Prof. Zull recommends the frequent use of stories in the classroom–even for teaching such subjects as algebra. Stories, he says, offer much more than plot and intellectual movement: They engage all parts of the brain and tap into the learners’ experiences, memories, ideas, and feelings. And Prof. Zull argues that the best stories–the ones that really grab the learners by the heart–are stories with some sort of moral. The outcomes must matter to the learners.

A Twinkling of Synapses

What, exactly, is knowledge? The third point Prof. Zull makes about the brain’s biology is that knowledge is physical. It is created and maintained by the connections–called synapses–between the brain’s neurons. These connections form intricate linked structures throughout the brain called neuronal networks.

Neurons are phantasmagorically shaped cells with tiny branches that make them look a bit like tumbleweeds. Each branch has hundreds of potential sites for connection. In fact, the possibilities for connection are staggering: There are about 100 billion neurons in the brain, and some of these neurons can make 10,000 connections, or even 100,000 in some special cases. Everything we know or feel is contained in our neuronal networks: the smell of our grandfather’s aftershave, the locations of Civil War battles, a quotation from Proust or the Bible or Dr. Seuss–it’s all there.

And our neuronal networks are always changing. New synapses form in bright flashes, old synapses fire rapidly and gain strength as we use that particular strand of knowledge, and unused synapses fire only occasionally and weaken. “From the moment of their development in the womb, our networks of neurons are blinking on and off in a starry night scenario,” Prof. Zull says.

What does this mean for teachers?

That our brains are already dense with knowledge. That the best way for teachers to help learners gain knowledge is to find out what they already know and link new information to the old knowledge–thus wiring it to an already existing neuronal network.

It’s impossible for teachers to guess which of our old synapses flare up when we hear new information. We’re probably not even conscious of this phenomenon ourselves. Prof. Zull suggests that teachers pull these older synapses into service by asking questions like, “What does this make you think of? Is there some part of this new material that rings a wild bell for you?”

By encouraging students to make associations between what they already know and the new material, teachers can help them arrive at their own unique “aha” moments. Prof. Zull offers an example of this process in his book, noting that middle school students often have a hard time learning about Martin Luther and the Reformation because they confuse him with Martin Luther King Jr. Frustrated teachers often argue with students, insisting that these are two entirely different people. However, Prof. Zull explains that teachers can exploit the confusion between these two religious leaders from the past by saying something like, “Yes! Martin Luther King was a lot like Martin Luther. In fact, why do you think Martin Luther King’s parents named him that? Why didn’t they name him Sam King?”

Given the right association, a student’s knowledge will expand in a twinkling of synapses. With a blast through the learning cycle–experience, reflection, abstraction, and active testing–and a flood of positive feelings, this new neuronal network might become one of the brightest constellations in that starry sky of the brain. Perhaps even an orienting constellation like the Big Dipper that will guide the learner along her lifelong path.

Kristin Ohlson is a regular contributor to CWRU Magazine. Her memoir, Stalking the Divine, will be published by Hyperion in August.