Blog Post 1

The Big Picture

This chapter was basically about how neuroscience and psychology come together to help out educators, and hopefully allow teachers to find out better ways to teach students. However, neuroscience and psychology do not always come together. Neuroscience research is relatively new, and can provide some good research but also that research has to be implemented in the classroom to see if it actually works. Research has now shown that brain development is not only determined by genetics but also by experiences. Critical periods and sensitive periods his module also focused a lot on the specifics neurons that connect to one another and in a way, and to me it is almost like a circuit board or a car engine; everything has to be “connected” properly for the engine—or brain to work right.

Did this make sense? What surprised you the most, or what did you find most interesting, and why? How does this reading connect to your previous experiences with school or teaching? Discuss some of your unanswered questions about the reading for the class. Do you understand the material? What else do you want to know?

Everything is this module made pretty good sense to me, it cleared up some of the misconceptions that I might have had about brain development. When I first started reading this Module I read the 3 statements that could be true or false. At first I didn’t read that they could be true of false, and when I read the first two, I thought “No way can that be true!” So then I continued to read and realized they could be true or false. I have always been told that most people are either right-brained or left-brained, and I have taken many tests to see which I am. I took Psychology 101 last semester, and was still never told that such a thing doesn’t actually exist. This was the one thing that I found the most interesting because I took Psychology in high school and took Psychology 101 last semester and never once was this misconception brought up—in fact, at least in my high school class, I remember talking about being which side brain dominate and maybe even taking a test to see which side dominate I was. This reading finally made me make one realization within all of my previous experiences in school; I have heard the “use-it-or-lose-it” principle many times, but never actually thought about it into depth. All throughout school I have learned things over and over again, and this annoyed me a lot because I learned it well the first time, and saw no point in learning it again, until now. After reading this article, it finally clicked with me! I don’t have any direct questions about the reading, I understand it well. I would like to know more about how the actual research and data is done, how it is done in a classroom setting if big machines like MRI’s and such are used.

What is happening in the picture below? How and why does each change occur?

In this picture the synaptic connections are being made between neurons. At birth there are only a few connections, but during childhood there becomes many more. During childhood, like at the age of 6, there are lots of synaptic connections because this is a time of rapid learning, but as one grows some of those skills they learned earlier in life are no longer needed therefore the connections become stronger, like at age 14, for more efficiency for the skills and knowledge that are needed and used more. Each change occurs through being “pruned” and in a way “weeding out” the connections that are not needed. These changes occur because the child and brain mature with learning, making room for new synaptic connections.