[Reading-hall-of-fame] Brainless Learning

[Ken Goodman]

I enjoyed Tom's discourse on the brain studff
Steve Strauss, both a linguist and a neurologist, and Ihave been working 
ogether looking at a number of his aphasic patients.
Steve is very critical of the claims for how the brain responds to 
letter combinatiosn flashed to subjects while they are undergoing MRI's
On the other hand there is a strong trend in brain studies by 
neurologists who are developing an understanding of how the brain uses 
the senses to selcetively supply input
base on what predicts it will find as makes sense of the world. THis 
memory-prediction view is quite consistent with my model of readng.
Ken Goodman

tsticht at znet.com wrote:
> July 25, 2010
>
> Brainless Learning
>
> Tom Sticht                                                                  
>                                                                           
> International Consultant in Adult Education
>
>
> Today there are shelves of books that call for educators to base their
> instruction on the (relatively) new science of the brain. Books based on
> neuro-imaging of the brain call for brain-based reading instruction,
> brain-based mathematics instruction, drawing on the right and left brains,
> and on and on. Interestingly however, a large group of cognitive and
> neuroscientists meeting in Santiago Chile in 2007 concluded that brain
> science has little or nothing yet to tell us about educational practice
> (see the Santiago Declaration online).
>
>
> With this interest in brain science and learning, I recalled an early
> experience I had in my professional training. In the early 1960s I was a
> graduate student at the University of Arizona working on a Ph.D in
> psychology. While there, I had an opportunity to attend a colloquium given
> by a Dr. Beatrice Gelber. Dr. Gelber was by the time I heard her a very
> senior scientist in the field of biological psychology.
>
>
> One of the first things I (and other grad students) noticed about Dr. Gelber
> was that she had a pronounced tic in her left eye, in which the eye
> repeatedly blinked shut. We all soon understood why she had this tic. Her
> special interest at the time of the colloquium was the behavior of the
> paramecium, a one cell animal with no brain. Yet Gelber was apparently
> training it in an experiment on learning! But to observe the organisms, she
> had to look through a microscope for hours upon end. Over time, this had
> apparently led to the tic in her eye.
>
>
> In an online book (Shufflebrain: The Quest of Hologramic Mind) the late
> Professor Paul A. Pietsch prepared a chapter entitled Microminds and
> Macrominds in which he discussed some of Gelber’s research. He wrote:
>
>
> Begin quote:”…in the 1950s an animal behaviorist named Beatrice Gelber
> conditioned paramecia by the same basic approach Pavlov had taken when he
> used a whiff of meat to make a dog drool when it heard the ringing of a
> bell.
>
>
> Gelber prepared a pâté of her animal's favorite bacteria (a single
> paramecium may devour as many as 5 million bacilli in a single day; then
> she smeared some of it on the end of a sterile platinum wire. She dipped
> the wire into a paramecium culture. Immediately her animals swarmed around
> the wire, which was not exactly startling news. In a few seconds, she
> withdrew the wire, counted off a few more seconds and dipped it in again.
> Same results!. But on the second trial, Gelber presented the animals with a
> bare, sterilized wire, instead of with bacteria. No response! Not at first,
> anyway. But after thirty trials--two offers of bacteria, one of sterile
> wire--Gelber's paramecia were swarming around the platinum tip, whether it
> proffered bacterial pâté or not.” End quote
>
>
> Years after Gelber’s work which purportedly demonstrated learning in the
> brainless paramecium, Eric Tytell published an article online in October
> 19, 2007 with the intriguing title: Learning Without a Brain. The article
> has an equally enticing introductory paragraph:
>
>
> Begin quote: “You don't need your brain to walk. You don't even need it to
> catch yourself after you stumble. And now, it appears, you may not even
> need it to learn some new skills. A recent report suggests that the spinal
> cord itself, without the brain at all, is able to adapt to a new
> environment – and possibly even anticipate how its environment has
> changed.” End quote
>
>
> Tytell goes on to discuss research that seems to suggest that the rat spinal
> cord, when surgically separated from any connections to the rat’s brain, can
> adapt to this new situation and learn to walk all over again, with no brain
> involved.
>
>
> Now all this is not to say that in the intact human learning can occur
> without a brain. But it does raise the point that the biology of learning
> is complicated, throughout, and possibly outside of, the brain and the
> central nervous system. We have to be cautious in our reactions to claims
> about the educational implications of the latest brain science.
>
>
> As John Bruer, the philosopher of science and President of the McDonnell
> Foundation, where tens of millions of dollars have been spent on
> neuroscience,  has repeatedly admonished, we need to keep the findings of
> neuroscience on the backburner, and instead pay attention to the research
> on education that provides solid evidence for the effectiveness of our
> instructional strategies and methods.
>
>
> This is a no-brainer!
>
>
> tsticht at aznet.net
>
>
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