Mind Brain and Education

Contributed by BHR (known as Brain Hemisphere Research), the Rethinking School.
Brain Growth Cycles
According to Dr Kurt W. Fischer, Bigelow Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, behavior and the brain changes in a repeating pattern that appears to involve common growth cycles.
From birth till age thirty, new capacities for thinking and learning coincide with growth cycles in the brain. Growth spurts in the brain and cognitive development occur within the same age periods during childhood and adolescence years.
Cognitive spurts
The amount of electrical activity in the cortex, which supports reasoning and thinking skills, and the strength of connections between its parts, show periodic spurts. These spurts occur at the same time new skills emerge, say in musical performance or spatial reasoning.
Cognitive spurts in cluster skills only show up when children enjoy optimal learning conditions, such as the support of a good educator or mentor. Removing instructional help, such as when an educator shifts from working with a child to having the child work alone, leads to a natural, rapid drop in performance.
When it comes to best performance, there is a rapid jump in performance at about four years, seven years, eleven years, fifteen years and twenty years, under optimal learning conditions.
It turns out that brain activity shows a similar growth curve, with a series of jumps in the energy of brain waves and a series of spurts, which are closely tied to age.
Cognitive growth and brain activity growth occur in parallel with capacities to think and solve problems, and brain activity growth developing in spurts at particular ages. Therefore brain growth and cognitive growth go hand-in-hand in the development of new capacities during childhood and adolescence.
Neuron growth
Brain growth and the development of new neurons or synapses, does not stop after infancy. Neuron growth takes place in at least two regions of the brain, namely the hippocampus and the olfactory cortex. The hippocampus is extremely important for memory functions, such as turning short-term memories into long-term memories.
Neuron pruning
Loss of brain tissue in infants and children is positive. It is the pruning away of the connections and neurons that are not very effective. A major part of learning is the process of getting rid of what does not work very well.
Function of left and right brain
Many beliefs about brain localisation are quite inaccurate. Language is not located entirely in the left hemisphere, and spatial skills are not found only in the right hemisphere. In reality, both functions are present in both hemispheres.
At the same time, there is some localisation of function, so the sound analysis of particular musical pieces is done primarily in the left hemisphere, while the global analysis of the meaning of a sentence is done primarily in the right hemisphere. These examples demonstrate a certain degree of localisation but do not reside entirely in one hemisphere.

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