The Learning Success Blog

What happens if you suffer chronic brain inflammation?  How does it affect you, physically, emotionally and cognitively?

And what can you do to help you recover?

Sarah Rasborsek, a young, healthy, successful woman enjoying her life, was stricken by brain inflammation.  Her world was turned upside down. I met her via a Learning Success Podcast interview in February 2019, where she explained what had happened and how difficult her life had become.

Now  a little over a year later, Sarah spoke to me again on another episode of the Podcast. She has made significant progress in her rehabilitation. But she explains she will be unlikely to return to how she was before the inflammation. She describes herself as a new Sarah - Sarah 2.0.

Dr Norman Doidge's best selling book , “The Brain That Changes Itself” did more than any other to change our view of the brain’s ability to “rewire”.

While Dr Doidge published it around the middle of the last decade, it remains an easily readable, fascinating account of how we came to know that brains are “plastic”.

Scientists, educators, and parents had believed brains are “hard-wired” - our abilities are limited by the structures in our brains.

In “The Brain That Changes Itself” Dr Doidge explains how that old belief has been replaced by the knowledge of “brain plasticity" – our abilities can be changed and improved by various forms of mental exercises.

"Neuroscience now is very interested in attention disorders.", says Dr Martha Burns.

Dr Martha Burns is a neuroscientist, author of over 100 journal articles and multiple books, and a leading expert on how children learn. She explained:

"So what we were talking earlier about listening skills, that's the term teachers use. Listening skills. Can the child sit in the classroom and pay attention to me?

Listening skills is auditory attention. One of the great things about Fast ForWord is it builds auditory attention. One of the best studies that's independent, that it has a control group, is on auditory attention.

Many of the children I work with in my speech pathology clinic who have dyslexia also have additional difficulties with processing information and sustaining their attention.

They often have some or many of these challenges: 

• Difficulty following verbal instructions
• Need instructions to be repeated
• Slow to process information
• Easily overloaded with auditory information
• Difficulty sustaining attention for learning tasks
• A tendency to daydream
• Easily distracted
• Academic difficulties

These symptoms could indicate that they have one or more of the conditions known as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), auditory processing disorder (APD), or specific language impairment (SLI).

Did you finish school last year?  Last decade?  Last century?

Does it matter when? 

It might, if you want to keep your brain sharp and agile.

It’s unlikely you completed school last year. Most readers of this blog are older than that. You might have finished in the 2000’s. Or last century -  in the 1990’s, 1980’s, 1970’s or even earlier (like me!).

You learnt new things almost every day when you were in school.  Your brain was very active, building new neural pathways and strengthening existing ones.

If you finished school last decade or last century, it is likely you haven’t been learning new things nearly every day since then, and it’s the new things, the novel things, are best for keeping your brain sharp.

There's a big chance that you've seen one of your students playing with a silly filter on Snapchat, or perhaps you've caught one of them wandering around campus playing Pokémon Go. While they may appear to be typical apps these days, an innovative technology makes them possible — augmented reality (AR).

Not to be confused with virtual reality (VR), which is technology designed to bring users into a simulated 3D world, AR changes the world of the user by adding digital elements into real life through a device.

Here's how this innovation can transform the field of education. 

In 1964, Bob Dylan sang:

Come gather 'round people wherever you roam….for the times they are a-changin'

Do you know the song?

Bob Dylan received a Nobel prize for literature in 2016. It was for the lyrics he wrote, like “The Times They are –a-Changin”.

He was right about that way back in 1964.

And the times are still changing. Especially in education. That’s thanks to educational neuroscience. It’s changing education in ways we could not have imagined.

Educators and schools around the world are increasingly using the knowledge, techniques, and programs developed from a new understanding of how our brains learn. They are applying neuroscience in their classrooms.

Why?

As an educator, you might be asking yourself why would I do this in my school?

Here are some reasons why. Educational neuroscience can:

Is educational neuroscience a legitimate area of knowledge which can help teachers and students, or is it mostly "neurobabble" as some articles in the Melbourne Age and in The Conversation have recently suggested?

The authors of both these articles correctly point out that there is an increasing amount of brain-based language in education discussions. And also that much of the 'brain' and 'neuro' language being used has little scientific basis.

But that does not mean all discussion of the role of neuroscience in education should be dismissed as useless "neurobabble". In fact educational neuroscience is now a recognised scientific discipline which is being studied in some of the world's leading universities including Stanford, Columbia and Vanderbilt in the USA and Cambridge University in the UK.

Many children struggle with reading, but there are ways parents can help prevent reading difficulties.

Reading researcher, Dr Jennifer Buckingham estimates that as many as 1 million children in Australia are at risk of reading failure.

We know from scientific research that the ability to read is one of the most complex skills we can learn.

According to reading research organisations in Australia and overseas, including The Centre for Independent Studies in Australia, the National Reading Panel (USA), and the USA National Institute for Literacy, there are some critical skills for learning to read.