.1 RAT BRAINS

Today, I want to share with you some of the specific notation from brain research that should influence the way you act as teachers, and the way I act as a teacher. Most of this material comes directly from a book called, Brain Based Learning by Eric Jensen.

I want to emphasize the fact that a lot of brain research is moving so fast that a lot of it is controversial. In other words, we really don't know what the brain research tells you. For example there is brain research that suggests that you learn more from voluntary physical exercise than from involuntary exercise, but you learn more from involuntary exercise than you learn from no exercise. In other words the brain research says that the more exercise you have that is voluntary, the better that will physiology alter your brain and your capacity for learning.

Isn't that a pretty powerful finding? So sitting around being a couch potato is depriving your brain of the opportunities to grow and develop in ways that help you learn. That sounds pretty exiting and you know I am all in favor of exercise. But when you looked at what the research was on which that finding was based, you have to get a little nervous, or I get a little nervous because that brain research was done with rats.

They had three groups of rats, one group was pinned up not able to have any exercise, one group had nice cages with running things like treadmills to use any time they wanted to. The most interesting ones though were the involuntary exercise rats. If you were a rat researcher how would you organize rats to have involuntary activities? I suppose you could put them on a treadmill where they couldn't get off, and they would have to keep running to catch up. That would be one kind of involuntary exercise. But that's not what they did. These researchers took the rats once or twice a day and dumped them into a pool of water so they had to swim to shore.

After the rats died, they looked at their brain structures. The rats that sat around all the time, had the least well developed brains. In other words, they didn't have the potential to think as much as the rats that were dumped in the water and had to swim to shore. Those rats and more developed brains. But the brains of the rats that had voluntary exercise were developed most of all. There were actually more neuro connections, in other words potential thinking power.

The way you measure potential thinking power in the brain is to look at the actual number of neuro-connections there are. It turns out the brain is like a muscle. The more you use the muscle, the brain, the more neuro connections there are. In other words, if you don't use your brain very much when you are a little kid, when you get to be an adult you don't have a powerful brain to think with.

We used to think that some kids were genetically inferior because their IQ scores and stuff like just weren't that high. Now we are starting to believe it is because they were raised in deprived environments. It may mean that during the crucial area of growth they didn't have the kind of stimulus experience that allows their brain to grow and function. But still, no one knows whether or not this that involuntary/ voluntary exercise brain research from rats will hold up with humans or not.

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