Education and neuroscience

Abstract

This paper argues that the central problems in relation to finding a connection between education and neuroscience centre of differences in time frames. Education deals with content that is cultural, and much of it has developed in the last four centuries. This is in sharp contrast with evolution which requires thousands of years to produce physiological changes. Consequently, biological explanations of cultural phenomena contribute very little to our understanding of educational issues. On the other hand, teachers are concerned with changes that take place in learners over a period of years, whereas neuroscience focuses on changes that last only seconds. Indeed, the technology of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), and resulting images of the brain, normally filter out long-term changes in levels of brain activity. The result is that educators and neuroscientists are generally focused on quite distinct kinds of activity. Because of these differences in what are identified as phenomena of interest, neuroscience has very little to say that is of interest in the classroom. When contributions from neuroscience to education are described, they are trivial, tentative or contradictory. The paper concludes that both education and neuroscience would benefit from a dialogue that is genuinely two way and critical, and it recognises that teachers and educators may have a lot to contribute, especially in understanding learning in a cultural context.