.2 Controversy in Brain Research

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A lot of rat research that we accept as the bases for psychology and a lot of the stuff we believe to be true in psychology comes from brain research. Isn't anything particularly unusual that we would now start getting a lot of stuff from brain research that may impact or suggest qualities of the neurology of learning? That's the way we learn, that's the way we learn about learning. In some ways you have to understand that everything I say this morning, which represents not so much my personal biases, although I happen to agree with them, but the source of my bias this morning comes from Eric Jensen. If you want to check this out more, get the book Brain Bases Learning because that is where most of this is coming from. It's controversial, there are folks who don't come to the same conclusions that Mr. Jensen comes to.

However, his book is well documented, and he acknowledges that at least some of the theories are controversial. I'm sure their are others that are equally controversial, and he just doesn't recognize them. I mention all of this, because it is important to recognize that learning is all a matter of bias and perception. There is no such thing as objective knowledge. Certainly this is true in a field like brain research that is moving like a steam engine going down a track that nobody is in charge of. You can't expect everyone in the field, or in education, to be "up to date," or very thoroughly organized. But this doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to understand it, even as it is being developed. The old idea that until you have something mastered, you should just ignore it, doesn't work And the reason is this: most of what we do now in the classroom, we do based on all kinds of non-evidence. We just do it because traditionally that's how it's been done. That is just terrible. It is better to follow scientific evidence that is not entirely confirmed, rather than follow no evidence at all.

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