Educational neuroscience and neuroscientific education: in search of a mutual middle way

Abstract

Cognitive neuroscience is a wide field embracing a rich variety of experimental paradigms and interpretive levels, from the biomolecular to the behavioural. Areas of experimental interest include vision, spatial cognition, audition and music, emotions, imitation, memory, motor function, language, and consciousness, most (if not all) of which can inform our understanding of cognitive behaviours relevant to education, e.g. learning, memory, motivation, literacy, creativity. Nor have neuroscientists been shy in publicising these new understandings in the considerable popular literature on brain science prominently displayed in all good booksellers. Curiously, whereas this literature features the brain bases of learning, memory, knowledge, even reading and mathematics, there is almost no mention of education, schools or classrooms. Equally curiously, in the vast mountains of educational policy, curriculum and outcomes documentation, there has been little or no mention of the human brain, the organ most central to the educational enterprise. It is as though education is regarded as having little to do with how learning actually takes place in the brains of students.