(10 min read)
Answer: understanding brain plasticity
if you only make one change to the way you interact with your children and their learning, make it to teach them about brain plasticity.
Ok so it’s not a new Nintendo or a car, but if you were only allowed to take one thing from educational neuroscience – one nugget of learning to gift to your children – it would be understanding the concept of brain plasticity. It’s a skill that will take you further than a car and last longer than a games console. And I’ve yet to meet a child that doesn’t understand it, no matter how young.
So why is learning about brain plasticity so great?
Incredibly, researchers have shown that simply understanding the concept of brain plasticity alone is enough to improve students’ academic performance. Even if a teacher changes nothing else about the way they teach.
‘Plastic’ comes from Greek ‘plastos’, meaning to mould or shape. The fact that our brains are so malleable is what makes us experts at adapting to the world we live in. Despite having less DNA than an onion, humans express extraordinary variation: a child can grow up to be a violin virtuoso, speak 8 languages or get full marks in the pub quiz. Some of the genes you’ve passed onto your child will be promoted, others will be repressed – a process governed by the environment you raise them in. Modifications to cognitive skills such as learning and memory happen during early development.
We are biologically cultural. And education is a significant acculturing force.
We are born to learn.
Learning.
Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act but a habit”.
Carol Dweck, of the Growth Mindsets movement, argues that we are not born with a fixed level of intelligence, instead we can alter our intelligence through effort and work.
So, what’s the neuroscientific explanation for learning and intelligence? Are some people born clever, and others not? Is intelligence rigid?
We have approximately 86 billion neurons in our brains, some of whose structure and shape is in constant flux, adapting daily to help us survive life, by … learning.
At a neuronal level, learning happens when neurons make new connections with each other. Projections, called dendrites, branch off the neurons – and off these, further protrusions called dendritic spines protrude. Some neurons can have up to 30,000 dendritic spines on them.
When we experience something new, the dendrites on our neurons form new dendritic spines to make new connections. Forgetting to turn off your microphone during a meeting on Zoom (so everyone hears you yelling to your husband that the dog’s just been sick) causes new dendritic spines form, in order to make new connections with other neurons, so that the next time we’re in that situation there is a neural network in place to remind us to TURN OFF THE MIC. We learn not to make the same mistakes.
This rewiring can happen numerous times in a single day – listening to the news or hearing about your child’s dream alters your brain’s wiring before you’ve even had breakfast. Each time you meet someone new, parts of your brain rapidly form a new neural network to record the information – what they look like, their role, and maybe even their name. (Incidentally, if you say someone’s name out loud, it helps with the process – it loops the information through the brain on another merry circuit).
Forgetting.
But an important part of learning that is often overlooked is forgetting. Dendrites can retract and reduce their number of spines – and if we didn’t forget unnecessary information, life would be harder. Ultimately, the aim of memory is to help us survive. It does this not by remembering every detail, but by remembering the general gist of situations. Too much detail gets in the way – if you were bitten by an Alsatian dog on a beach, and your brain banked every specific detail about it, you would only be wary of Alsatians on that beach, not of dogs in parks or the woods. A baby learns to recognise faces not by memorising every human face it sees, but by getting the general gist that faces have two eyes, a nose and mouth.
Unless you have the condition, or gift of, hyperthymesia, in which case you know precisely what you ate for lunch on the 15th October 1996.
Brains like to streamline, in order to make as much of life happen in the background, on autopilot, as possible. You can read this text faster than when you were five, because you no longer need to sound out each letter or phoneme – you can forget that reading stage. Your brain updated its wiring to form efficient circuits for reading when you were around seven years old. However, is can also be a problem – we rely on assumptions, based on our own subjective past experiences, to interpret the world. And not all of these assumptions are correct. But more about that in another article.
Stress.
Stress affects brain plasticity. The parts of the brain that detect threat change. They become more vigilant/ anxious, and those related to learning and memory decrease in volume. Learning to avoid a violent member of the family will be banked; learning to spell the word ‘favourite’ will not. Times tables just don’t feature on the brain’s evolutionary list of ‘what to remember to help me stay alive’.
Stress also causes plastic changes in the prefrontal cortex (the PFC), the front part of the brain sitting behind the eyebrows. The PFC is responsible for a whole host of higher-order jobs, such as planning, working-memory and emotional regulation. It is the part that makes us human. The PFC liaises with the amygdala and the hippocampus, the parts that help form long-term memory.
Long term stress reduces PFC volume, and ultimately impairs its functioning[i]. (See the article about stress on my website, www.drtorrancejenkins.co.uk, and upcoming podcast).
Why understanding plasticity improves grades.
Sanne Dekker and Jolle Jolls, from two different universities in the Netherlands, asked teenagers how they viewed intelligence[ii]. Did they hold an entity theory (you can’t do anything to change it) or incremental theory (you can always change how intelligent you are)? The experimental group of students then completed three modules, learning about the brain processes behind learning and brain development. The control group did not.
Afterwards, the experimental group changed their beliefs about intelligence: on average more students believed that through hard work you could become more intelligent. They were thus more likely to keep on trying in the face of adversity.
Which ties in nicely with Dweck’s growth mindsets: with determination and by learning from failure we get ‘cleverer’. And other heroes and heroines from the world of cognitive psychology such as Angela Duckworth (having the grit to stick at something trumps any natural talent when it comes to success) and Malcolm Gladwell (who similarly found that it takes around 10,000 hours to reach expertise).
Which all good teachers and parents know anyway. Still, it’s nice to know that there is a scientific reason why.
(P.S. In fact, the differences in the DNA of an onion and ourselves are more about the rate of loss of junk DNA than an intelligence indicator, but the onion helped make a nice point).
[i] Radley, J., Morilak, D., Viau, V. and Campeau, S., 2015. Chronic stress and brain plasticity: mechanisms underlying adaptive and maladaptive changes and implications for stress-related CNS disorders. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 58, pp.79-91.
[ii] Dekker, S. and Jolles, J., 2015. Teaching about “brain and learning” in high school biology classes: Effects on teachers’ knowledge and students’ theory of intelligence. Frontiers in psychology, 6, p.1848.