Why is Research about Learning so Important?

It is not uncommon today to find elementary school teachers implementing new ways of teaching which were not around before. This is the result of the massive amounts of research which is being done about how we learn. Most studies utilize young kids, as they have the most malleable brains! The notion of learning and specifically how we learn is extremely important in society today. In modern society, we are thrown a plethora of information and are told to memorize it. Thus, figuring out how we learn best would be beneficial to the next generation. Additionally, research exposing new mechanisms of learning or more effective ways of learning can ultimately lead to a change in teaching policies implemented in schools.

Dr. Wakefield used fMRI as a way to indirectly test how the interaction between the auditory and motor system is generated in development. fMRI is a useful technique, as it allows for a way to indirectly test whether a specific area of the brain is being activated. What is really being tested is called the BOLD signal. This signal refers to how much oxygen is being tested. This requires subjects to lie motionlessly in the fMRI machine while viewing stimuli. While this has really good spatial resolution, the experiment is often limited to tasks which do not require movement for testing. She tested to see the difference between how well kids learned novel verbs if they either performed the action or saw someone else perform that action.

A study lead by Rosario Tomasello and colleagues which seeks to find the connection between the activation of “spatio-temporal” parts of the brain was conducted by making an artificial model of the brain which incorporated up to date theories and understanding of the brain. Indeed, the brain is complex and different parts of the brain are activated when we hear information. If the information being presented has some sort of meaning which we had previously stored in our brain, then more areas are activated (i.e. supramarginal gyrus). If the semantic parts of the brain are injured, this would result in an impairment of speech and perception. To investigate how the parts of the cortex which are activated, a model using computational biology was manufactured which would allow scientists to view in detail the mechanisms of neuronal communication. The following figure shows the numerous areas which were looked at for activation.

The study found that repetition of the words strengthened connections in the the areas which were previously assumed to be activated in perception and memory. This makes sense because the forced repetition creates connections and if these neurons are forced to fire, the connections stay for longer. Additionally, the study found that there was a different kind of activation in the model if the word being presented was either an object or an action. There was activation of the motor cortex if the word was related to an action, while there was no activation of the motor cortex if the word was an object. This suggests that actively thinking about the word can trick our brains into thinking that we are performing the action. The study utilized artificial models of the brain and noted the pattern of firing: how often they fire (pattern) and the strength of the signal noted by the number of neurons firing.

The problem with this model is that the model itself assumes a certain mechanism for neurons instead of being open to the idea that there could be a different mechanism by which they function. Hence, having human participants and then testing the activation of firing in the different brain regions would have been better. Additionally, the model used artificial neurons which only considered how they would fire if a person was to see a word, not necessarily hear it. Perhaps a distinction between how the neurons would fire if one was to both hear and see the word compared to just seeing the word would also provide unique insight into how the brain functions. The technology of using computational biology to create models and testing them to see how the brain fires should be used to analyze theories, not necessarily make strong conclusions from since the mechanism of action is manually coded. The artificial neurons should serve as a platform to visualize how neurons fire to come up with more questions about neuronal activity.

Indeed, studies of the brain are rampant today and scientists continue to uncover the mysteries of the brain. It is important that we continue to revise our previous understandings and are willing to thoroughly consider previous theories to ensure that progress is not hindered because of false presumptions. As we develop new ways to measure the activity in the brain with higher temporal and spatial resolution, we will surely discover things which we never thought were possible!