The Teachers College of Columbia University in New York, founded in 1887, has a tradition of innovation in education. Currently they are studying the electrical activity of the brain, to try and understand how people learn new languages, read, and solve problems.
Dr Karen Froud, who heads the Neurocognition Language Lab at Columbia University, has been working on how people learn to pronounce vowel sounds: “In fact, it’s not really a problem producing the sounds, it’s a problem perceiving the sounds. At the level of the brain we can see that.”
She notes that watching brain activity makes it possible for experts to guess what intellectual activity is occuring. Teachers from all kinds of institutions find these studies useful.
Amira Mandelbaum, who teaches in a therapeutic pre-school, told euronews: “I could understand, sort of, from an outsider’s point of view what was going on with the kids, I could see their behaviour and how they were interacting, but it was really hard for me to understand what was going on in their brains, what autistic children are experiencing. Just understanding that sometimes they need more oxygen to their brain, I’d be able to help them with deep breathing and that could regulate their system a little bit.”
Grace Chung is a student who plans to work with people who have had strokes. She said: “By studying the brain, I think I will be able to learn what part of the brain is causing certain problems my patients are having. I kind of see it as working with muscles; if you hurt your leg muscle, you would not train your arm muscles to work better. So if I know which muscle, or which part of the brain is causing the problem, I can target the skill better.”
For now, rather than showing how to treat disorders, neural research shows that any learning activity physically alters the brain.
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