Educational Neuroscience Quotes

The hallmark of resiliency is the ability to harness positive emotions when we need to counter the effects of hardship.

Those who are nurtured best survive best. It turns out that our emotional resilience and our ability to learn are inextricably interwoven.

our ability to learn is regulated by how we are treated by our teachers, at home and in the classroom.

Optimal sculpting of key neural networks through healthy early relationships allows us to think well of ourselves, trust others, regulate our emotions, maintain positive expectations, and utilize our intellectual and emotional intelligence in moment-to-moment

learning, in the complex sense in which it happens in schools or the real world, is not a rational or disembodied process; neither is it a lonely one.

Therefore, reading and reacting to other people’s behaviors, emotions, and attitudes have been hardwired into our brains. We are not only wired to connect, but we are also wired to attune to, resonate with, and learn from others.

Stage one—you’re caught in a second-dart reaction and don’t even realize it: your partner forgets to bring milk home and you complain angrily without seeing that your reaction is over the top. Stage two—you realize you’ve been hijacked by greed or hatred (in the broadest sense), but cannot help yourself: internally you’re squirming, but you can’t stop grumbling bitterly about the milk. Stage three—some aspect of the reaction arises, but you don’t act it out: you feel irritated but remind yourself that your partner does a lot for you already and getting cranky will just make things worse. Stage four—the reaction doesn’t even come up, and sometimes you forget you ever had the issue: you understand that there’s no milk, and you calmly figure out what to do now with your partner. In education, these are known succinctly as unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. They’re useful

discover that the quality of our relationships with our teachers, families, friends, and communities is as important to learning as the curriculum, testing, and technologies which usually occupy our attention.

Sensitive periods are triggered via the interaction of genetic timing and experience. Sensitive periods are times of rapid learning when thousands of synaptic connections are made each second (Greenough, 1987; ten Cate, 1989). The timing of sensitive periods varies

they found considerable plasticity from the onset of puberty into the early twenties. Once this was discovered, it became obvious that the upheavals of adolescence and early adulthood coincide with a previously unrecognized sensitive period of brain maturation in the prefrontal cortex

[One way] researchers sometimes evaluate people's judgments is to compare those judgments with those of more mature or experienced individuals. This method has its limitations too, because mature or experienced individuals are sometimes so set in their ways that they can't properly evaluate new or unique conditions or adopt new approaches to solving problems.

Congressman Ryan give a talk at the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia. He said that we all want two things for our children: We want them to care about others and we want them to pay attention. He pointed out that parents and teachers are always telling children, “Pay attention” and “Be nice.” But he went on to ask, “How often do they teach them how to do those things?

...education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can't have higher-level learning- you can't analyze-without retrieving information.' And you can't retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between "learning" and "memorizing" is false, Matthews contends. You can't learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can't memorize without learning.

are biased toward studying individual organisms. It is often difficult for scientists to grasp the idea that individual brains do not exist in nature. As much as one may adhere to the notion of the isolated self, humans have evolved as social creatures and are constantly regulating one another’s biology. Without mutually stimulating interactions, people (and neurons for that matter) wither and die. In neurons this process is called apoptosis (programmed cell death); in humans it is called failure to thrive, depression, or dying of a broken heart.

The intelligent want self-control; children want candy. —RUMI INTRODUCTION Welcome to Willpower 101 Whenever I mention that I teach a course on willpower, the nearly universal response is, “Oh, that’s what I need.” Now more than ever, people realize that willpower—the ability to control their attention, emotions, and desires—influences their physical health, financial security, relationships, and professional success. We all know this. We know we’re supposed to be in control of every aspect of our lives, from what we eat to what we do, say, and buy. And yet, most people feel like willpower failures—in control one moment but overwhelmed and out of control the next. According to the American Psychological Association, Americans name lack of willpower as the number-one reason they struggle to meet their goals. Many feel guilty about letting themselves and others down. Others feel at the mercy of their thoughts, emotions, and cravings, their lives dictated by impulses rather than conscious choices. Even the best-controlled feel a kind of exhaustion at keeping it all together and wonder if life is supposed to be such a struggle. As a health psychologist and educator for the Stanford School of Medicine’s Health Improvement Program, my job is to help people manage stress and make healthy choices. After years of watching people struggle to change their thoughts, emotions, bodies, and habits, I realized that much of what people believed about willpower was sabotaging their success and creating unnecessary stress. Although scientific research had much to say that could help them, it was clear that these insights had not yet become part of public understanding. Instead, people continued to rely on worn-out strategies for self-control. I saw again and again that the strategies most people use weren’t just ineffective—they actually backfired, leading to self-sabotage and losing control. This led me to create “The Science of Willpower,” a class offered to the public through Stanford University’s Continuing Studies program. The course brings together the newest insights about self-control from psychology, economics, neuroscience, and medicine to explain how we can break old habits and create healthy habits, conquer procrastination, find our focus, and manage stress. It illuminates why we give in to temptation and how we can find the strength to resist. It demonstrates the importance of understanding the limits of self-control,

Educated people, of course, know that perception, cognition, language, and emotion are rooted in the brain. But it is still tempting to think of the brain as it was shown in old educational cartoons, as a control panel with gauges and levers operated by a user — the self, the soul, the ghost, the person, the “me.” But cognitive neuroscience is showing that the self, too, is just another network of brain systems. [C]ognitive neuroscientists have not only exorcised the ghost but have shown that the brain does not even have a part that does exactly what the ghost is supposed to do: review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the brain to carry out. Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge. The brain does have supervisory systems in the prefrontal lobes and anterior cingulate cortex, which can push the buttons of behavior and override habits and urges. But those systems are gadgets with specific quirks and limitations; they are not implementations of the rational free agent traditionally identified with the soul or the self.

Perhaps the most exasperating cliche is about children being forced to memorize, not think. But memorization is not an abomination in itself, though the mnemic pressure on our species has dropped. Memorization is, de facto, exercise for the mind. Neuroscience shows an active hippocampus stimulates cerebral activity. We have often observed how the most profound and creative pupils are those who know the most things, though their usefulness is not always apparent. No question is more insinuating stupid than 'What good will it do to me?' In certain teaching contexts, it is not wrong to ask pupils to memorize. While it is not the only goal the idea that memorizing is useless since information is available online is also wrong and falsely self-obvious. It denotes a misunderstanding of how our mind works. Our brains are not computers, our memory can't be replaced by external HDDs. Each piece of info we memorize is integrated, albeit minimally, as living memory is active, while digital memory is passive. Strange as some may find it, memorizing can stimulate thinking as few other things can. What impairs thinking is the lack of the habit to reflect, the custom of stopping our mind's flow to go back to what we've learned.

Queen Anne of England established the Longitude Act in 1714, and offered a monetary prize of over a million in today’s dollars to anyone who invented a method to accurately calculate longitude at sea. Longitude is about determining one’s point in space. So one might ask what it has to do with clocks? Mathematically speaking, space (distance) is the child of time and speed (distance equals time multiplied by speed). Thus, anything that moves at a constant speed can be used to calculate distance, provided one knows for how long it has been moving. Many things have constant speeds, including light, sound, and the rotation of the Earth. Your brain uses the near constancy of the speed of sound to calculate where sounds are coming from. As we have seen, you know someone is to your left or right because the sound of her voice takes approximately 0.6 milliseconds to travel from your left to your right ear. Using the delays it takes any given sound to arrive to your left and right ears allows the brain to figure out if the voice is coming directly from the left, the right, or somewhere in between. The Earth is rotating at a constant speed—one that results in a full rotation (360 degrees) every 24 hours. Thus there is a direct correspondence between degrees of longitude and time. Knowing how much time has elapsed is equivalent to knowing how much the Earth has turned: if you sit and read this book for one hour (1/24 of a day), the Earth has rotated 15 degrees (360/24). Thus, if you are sitting in the middle of the ocean at local noon, and you know it is 16:00 in Greenwich, then you are “4 hours from Greenwich”—exactly 60 degrees longitude from Greenwich. Problem solved. All one needs is a really good marine chronometer. The greatest minds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not overlook the longitude problem: Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, Gottfried Leibniz, and Isaac Newton all devoted their attention to it. In the end, however, it was not a great scientist but one of the world’s foremost craftsman who ultimately was awarded the Longitude Prize. John Harrison (1693–1776) was a self-educated clockmaker who took obsessive dedication to the extreme.

Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers… Parents and other passengers read on Kindles… Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing… As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago… My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading… Increasing reports from educators and from researchers in psychology and the humanities bear this out. English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19thand 20th centuries because they no longer have the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts. We should be less concerned with students’ “cognitive impatience,” however, than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts… Karin Littau and Andrew Piper have noted another dimension: physicality. Piper, Littau and Anne Mangen’s group emphasize that the sense of touch in print reading adds an important redundancy to information – a kind of “geometry” to words, and a spatial “thereness” for text. As Piper notes, human beings need a knowledge of where they are in time and space that allows them to return to things and learn from re-examination – what he calls the “technology of recurrence”. The importance of recurrence for both young and older readers involves the ability to go back, to check and evaluate one’s understanding of a text. The question, then, is what happens to comprehension when our youth skim on a screen whose lack of spatial thereness discourages “looking back.

Harvard’s Ichiro Kawachi agrees. He identifies a range of social policies that would be vital to promoting greater socioeconomic equality—and hence, better health. “Make an investment in education, for example, to give people a decent start in life,” he says. “We can subsidize childcare, which is a major stress for low-income mothers, especially those who are single parents. We can expand unemployment insurance and expand access to health care. This is controversial only in the United States. Other societies view health care as a basic human right.

Like the shaman, a teacher has to have a clear vision so that a student can come to believe that he or she sees something real that can be shared. The teacher’s message must be “I know something you don’t know, something you don’t have, but I am committed to sharing it with you and bringing you on this journey.

demonstrated that, in general, students seem to learn better when information is presented in particular ways and at a certain pace. Proper nutrition does have a measurable impact on memory and learning, and physical activity does enhance learning.

Emotional attunement between teachers and learners is highlighted, as well as the central role of storytelling in traditional and contemporary learning. Research has also found that exploration and play, usually consigned to less important after-school activities, are central

contact—emotional networks integrate with sensory and motor systems to connect social and emotional meaning with behaviors.

Conversely, we humans are born premature and highly dependent newborns whose brains are shaped through years of interactions with our caretakers and the environment.

The extent of neural growth and learning during sensitive periods results in early experience having a disproportionate impact on the shaping of our brains.

Education is cumulative, and it affects the breed. —Plato

Take, for example, the way in which physicians responded to the high mortality rates of children in orphanages early in the last century. Assuming that microorganisms were to blame, doctors separated children from one another and kept handling by adults to a minimum in order to reduce the risk of infection. Despite these mandates, children continued to die at such alarming rates that both intake forms and death certificates were completed at admission for the sake of efficiency.

consistent caretakers and allowed to interact with one another, that their survival rates improved (Blum, 2002). What better evidence is there that the brain is a social organ requiring positive human connection as much as food and water? Educational experts are guilty of a similar myopathy when they focus on curricular content and test performance rather than the social world of students and teachers.

Keep in mind that teaching in tribal societies is generally performed by biologically related, caring, and deeply invested elders, one on one or in small groups. In these naturally occurring, attachment-based apprenticeships, learning is interwoven with the behaviors and biochemistry of bonding.

Despite the fact that childbearing has been delayed into the 20s and 30s, the brain still expects this to happen at 12 or 13 years of age.

Reward systems, such as those mediated by dopamine, also destabilize during adolescence in order to allow for the creation of new attachments, behaviors, and goals. This search for purpose and meaning makes adolescents more vulnerable to good and bad social influences,

Perhaps the postponement in modern culture of the historically relevant challenges of adolescents,

such as mating, childbearing, and establishing an occupation, lead to confusion, emptiness, and psychological distress.

Qué lejano, anticuado y erróneo ha quedado aquello de que "la letra con sangre entra". Esta expresión debería ser sustituida por "la letra con dopamina entra".

Our manifesting mission is a White Op, a term based on the military black op, or black operation, a clandestine plot usually involving highly trained government spies or mercenaries who infiltrate an adversary‘s position, behind enemy lines and unbeknownst to them. White Op, coined by my best friend Bunny, stands for what I see needing to happen on the planet: a group of well-intentioned, highly trained Bodhisattva warriors (appearing like ordinary folk), armed with the six paramitas and restrained by ethical vows, begin to infiltrate their relationships, social institutions, and industries across all sectors of society and culture. Ordinary Bodhisattvas infusing the world with sacred view and transforming one mind at a time from the inside out until a new paradigm based on wisdom and compassion has totally replaced materialism and nihilism. The White Op is in large part how I envision the work and intention of my colleagues and me at the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science; we aspire to fulfill it by offering a Buddhist-inspired contemplative psychotherapy training program, infused with the latest neuroscience, to therapists, health-care workers, educators, and savvy business leaders. (p. 225)

This principle of only hiring people who are better than the ones we currently have means we don’t make desperation hires to fill an open position. And the raise-the-average rule makes hiring decisions surprisingly easy. It’s easy to visualize in your mind the average person in your sales force or on your brewery floor or even in senior management and it’s easy for your intuition to evaluate whether a candidate is better than the average person. Your gut will tell you. If you’re used to traditional hiring, you might feel uncomfortable turning to intuition. Aren’t we taking too big a risk by relying on our gut feelings about somebody rather than rationally assessing facts such as past experience or education? I would counter that we’re fooling ourselves by not relying primarily on intuition. As recent neuroscience has shown, our brains don’t work rationally. If you hook a functional MRI machine to a chess grandmaster, you find that the best of them are not rationally calculating their next moves; they’re imagining what will happen, unconsciously bringing to bear the hundreds of thousands of moves they’ve already seen. They’re arriving at a feeling that guides their actions. They are using the nonrational part of their brain. The quantitatively logical part of your brain is pretty paltry. Just try counting by prime numbers while you’re multiplying other numbers by seventeen. Impossible. But reading emotions by looking at someone’s facial expressions while you’re navigating a crowded sidewalk is easy for your brain.

Studies of mindfulness training and the structure and function on the brain reveal, for example, that mindfulness promotes the growth of important integrative fibers that help us with the regulation of emotion, attention, thought, and behavior. These executive functions in ourselves, and in our students, can be cultivated with mindfulness training. Mindfulness cultivates integration within us, creating an inner sense of calm and clarity. And mindfulness cultivates an interpersonal way of being integrated with others as we become more empathic, compassionate, and connected to those around us.

researchers exploring the impact of mindfulness training on children, adolescents, and adults have revealed a wide range of positive outcomes including: improvements in executive functions such as the regulation of attention, emotion, behavior, and relatedness; physiological enhancements in our immune function; elevations in the enzyme (telomerase) that maintains and repairs the ends of our chromosomes; and even preliminary findings suggesting the optimization of the control molecules on our genes (epigenetic regulatory histones and methyl groups) that help prevent certain forms of disease.

the classroom environment can be a setup for serious stress-related health problems. In a sense, both teachers and their students are “captives”—they can’t leave during class without suffering adverse consequences. Furthermore, the social and emotional dynamics of a room full of children or adolescents can be intense and sometimes chaotic. Under pressure, some students become disruptive, distracted, and even defiant, and teachers may become anxious, frustrated, embarrassed, and hopeless. From this perspective, it’s easy to see why teachers are burning out and students aren’t learning. The stress response is derailing our teaching and our students’ learning.

Nurturing Activities Self-Assessment In this section, you will discover the things you are doing now to nurture your well-being. In the section “Things I Do Now,” write all the activities you can think of that you really enjoy that you do now. For example, you may enjoy getting a massage, working out in the gym, playing tennis, reading a novel, or just taking a walk in the woods. Next think about how each of these activities supports one or more of the four dimensions of your personal growth and development: physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Activities that promote physical development include such things as exercise, relaxation, and massage. Those that promote emotional development include fun things with others that make you happy, such as attending a party with friends, seeing an inspirational film, or just sharing a meal with your family. You can promote your intellectual development by, for example, reading newspapers or intellectually stimulating magazines or books, attending courses, or having intellectual discussions with your colleagues. Activities that give your life meaning and help you connect to something greater than yourself give you spiritual meaning. These can be activities done in a religious context, such as attending services, but they can also be purely secular, such as reading an inspirational poem or practicing mindfulness. Next think about things that you are not doing now but would like to do. Again consider how each of these activities supports the four dimensions. This is your self-care plan. Things I Do Now: Activity Physical Emotional Intellectual Inner Life Self-Care Plan: Activity Physical Emotional Intellectual Inner Life

Rather than simply training our children’s minds to absorb and regurgitate facts so that they can do well on standardized tests, mindfulness has the potential to promote other valuable cognitive skills, such as creative thinking, perspective-taking, and innovative problem-solving.

Learning to BREATHE (L2B) (Broderick, 2013) program, a mindfulness-based program for adolescents and pre-adolescents designed to promote emotional awareness and improve emotional regulation, attentional focus, and stress reduction.

Educators and mindfulness instructors of the Mindfulness in Schools Project developed a curriculum called “.b” (pronounced “dot bee”), which stands for “Stop, Breathe, and Be.

The eight lessons5 are: 1. Puppy training: Playing with attention 2. Taming the animal mind: Cultivating curiosity and kindness 3. Recognizing worry: Noticing how your mind plays tricks on you 4. Being here now: From reaching to responding 5. Moving mindfully 6. Stepping back: Watching the thought-traffic of your mind 7. Befriending the difficult 8. Putting it all together

The MindUp program (Hawn Foundation, 2011), now available for the elementary grades from Scholastic, covers four units: “How Our Brains Work,” “Sharpening Your Senses,” “It’s All about Attitude,” and “Taking Action Mindfully.

Described as “an immersive experience in dynamic mindfulness,” the Transformative Life Skills (TLS) program was developed by the Niroga Institute in collaboration with Jennifer Frank, a professor at Penn State University. The program combines mindful yoga, breathing techniques, and meditation to help children and youth deal with life challenges with greater confidence and peace.

Kripalu Yoga in Schools (KYIS) was developed to empower adolescents to learn social and emotional skills such as stress management, emotion and behavior regulation, self-appreciation, self-confidence, and relationships skills.

Developed by Susan Kaiser Greenland (2010), the Inner Kids program teaches the “new ABCs”—attention, balance, and compassion. Through direct instruction, games, and other activities, the program aims to develop awareness of inner experience (thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations), awareness of outer experience (other people, places, and things), and awareness of how these two blend together.

The Holistic Life Foundation’s program combines yoga postures, fluid movement exercises, breathing techniques, and guided mindfulness practices. The movement activities are designed to enhance muscle tone and flexibility, and students learn breathing techniques designed to help them calm themselves. Each class includes a didactic component where instructors talk to students about identifying stressors and using mindfulness and breathing to reduce stress. At the end of each class, students lie on their backs and close their eyes while the instructors guide them through a mindful awareness practice. The program has been offered in a variety of settings in school and outside school.

These programs have been successfully integrated into schools in the US, Canada, and/or the UK; have a clearly articulated curriculum that can be easily accessed and replicated; are based in developmentally appropriate practice; and have some preliminary evidence of efficacy that has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Inner Resilience Program (IRP) to help New York City teachers in Ground Zero cope with the resulting trauma (Lantieri, Nambiar, & Chavez-Reilly, 2006). Not long afterward, she began to develop a mindfulness-based curriculum for students in response to requests from teachers, parents, and administrators (Lantieri, 2008).

The Calm Classroom (CC) program is based on the work of Herbert Benson, the Harvard Medical School professor and pioneer in mind-body medicine who developed the relaxation response (RR) method in the 1970s (Benson & Klipper, 2009).

2001, the program expanded to offer a low-residency, two-year contemplative education master’s degree that is designed for classroom teachers at all levels, pre-K through higher education

Throughout history, the role of education has been to prepare children for adulthood. Today our world is changing so rapidly that it’s difficult to know what it will be like even a decade from now. While we cannot predict the features of the world our children will inherit, we do know that the pace of change will most likely continue to accelerate (Thomas & Brown, 2011).

The Niroga Institute also offers a professional development program to prepare teachers and others to teach the TLS curriculum.

In 2000, the Mind and Life Institute held a dialogue between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and a group of prominent scientists to explore ways to foster emotional balance and decrease “destructive emotions.” As documented in Daniel Goleman’s book Destructive Emotions (2003),

As part of the CARE program, teachers learn how to balance their work and personal lives in order to continually renew the inner strength they need to do their jobs well. To

These practices are introduced sequentially, beginning with short periods of silent reflection, extending to longer periods of mindfulness practice, and finally including activities that bring mindful awareness into everyday activities such as standing, walking, and role plays of challenging situations.

CARE program components increase in complexity across sessions and are augmented by individual reflective writing and group discussion. Teachers are given a CD of recorded guided practices that they can use on their own at home and a series of homework activities designed to help them apply and practice the CARE skills.

Another program that evolved from the Cultivating Emotional Balance project is Stress Management and Relaxation Techniques (SMART) in Education, an eight-week, 11-session program that involves after-school or evening sessions for a total of 36 contact hours. With the support of the Impact Foundation, this program was developed by Margaret Cullen, a licensed therapist, MBSR instructor, one of the developers of CEB, and a primary facilitator for CEB research.

Mindfulness is a particular state of consciousness that involves awareness and acceptance of whatever is happening in the present moment. You can think of it as “fullness of mind,” because you bring your full, undivided attention to the present moment.

Practicing mindfulness means monitoring, in real time, your experience, and doing so in a nonjudgmental way (Kabat-Zinn, 1994).

Mindfulness involves three fundamental processes: forming intention, paying attention, and adjusting your attitude (Shapiro, Carlson, Astin, & Freedman, 2006).

Through practice we can strengthen our capacity to incorporate mindfulness into our daily lives until it becomes a habit of mind (Roeser & Zelazo, 2012). Mindful

This sequence of intentionally engaging in present-moment awareness, becoming distracted, noticing your distraction, and then bringing your attention back to the present is the practice of mindful awareness itself.

Interpersonal mindfulness helps us recognize how our behavior affects our students. Our students learn social values primarily by observing and responding to our behavior.

The eighth sense is relational. It is our ability to attune ourselves with another person. When

As you will discover in Chapter 6, mindful attention to the relational senses of your students can help you orchestrate the dynamics of the classroom to promote student engagement and prosocial behavior.

The most widely studied mindfulness-based intervention is Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (or MBSR), developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Center for Mindfulness (Kabat-Zinn, 2009).

Over time, with practice, you will become more aware of your thoughts and feelings. You will notice which thoughts and feelings tend to capture your attention and which are easier to release.

Just as physical exercise builds muscle, mindful awareness practice builds attentional focus and flexibility.

Setting an intention is not the same as setting a goal. If I don’t reach a goal, I may feel disappointed, as if I failed. Setting intention doesn’t assume that I will reach an end point, but that I will stay on course. Setting intention is gentle and forgiving. Throughout the day, I can check my

Frustrations happen and we begin to get triggered. When this happens to you, you can rely on a brief and very simple exercise to calm your nervous system. Simply take three long, slow, mindful breaths.

1.10 Four Kinds of Predictive Validity for Intelligence Tests 1.10.3. Everyday Life The importance of general intelligence in everyday life often is not obvious but it is profound. As Professor Earl Hunt has pointed out, if you are a college-educated person, it is highly likely that most of your friends and acquaintances are as well. When is the last time you invited someone to your home for dinner that was not college-educated? Professor Hunt calls this cognitive segregation and it is powerful in fostering the erroneous belief that everyone has a similar capacity or potential for reasoning about daily problems and issues. Most people with high g cannot easily imagine what daily life is like for a person with low g. [...] Consider some statistics comparing low and high IQ groups (low = 75–90; high = 110–125) on relative risk of several life events. For example, the odds of being a high school dropout are 133 times more likely if you’re in the low group. People in the low group are 10 times more at risk for being a chronic welfare recipient. The risk is 7.5 times greater in the low group for incarceration, and 6.2 times more for living in poverty. Unemployment and even divorce are a bit more likely in the low group. IQ even predicts traffic accidents. In the high IQ group, the death rate from traffic accidents is about 51 per 10,000 drivers, but in the low IQ group, this almost triples to about 147. This may be telling us that people with lower IQ, on average, have a poorer ability to assess risk and may take more chances when driving or performing other activities (Gottfredson, 2002; 2003b).

Humanitarian Science 101 (Sonnet 1202) BRAIN means Benevolent Reformer Applying Information Nobly. DATA means Determined Action of Transformative Awareness. Information Technology is primitive IT, Civilized IT means Informed Transformation. Heuristic and holistic can never go together, Shortcuts only obstruct the rise of realization. Electronics means electron artistry. Chemistry is an art of bonding. Mathematics is the art of numbers, Evolution is the art of correcting. Society without science dumps the world in stoneage, Science devoid of society shoves the mind into iceage.

It's not magic, it's science. Neural plasticity is real. Long-term potentiation is any parent or teacher's best friend.

Bruce Perry, renowned psychiatrist, educational researcher, and author, says, “Relationships are the agents of change, and the most powerful therapy is human love.

The reality that we can produce these epigenetic changes to our chromosomes using our consciousness is one of the most exciting discoveries of recent years. In Chapter 8, we’ll see the revolutionary implications of this superpower for humankind’s future. CONSCIOUSNESS AND LONGEVITY While your genes, environment, and habits play a role in your health and longevity, the quality of your consciousness is paramount. A large-scale study by Boston University School of Medicine followed 69,744 women and 1,429 men for decades: 30 years for the men and 10 for the women. It looked for “exceptional longevity,” defined as living to age 85 or older. What made the difference? Optimism! The most optimistic people had a lifespan that was 11% to 15% longer. They had a 60% greater chance of reaching 85 when compared to the pessimists. The results held true even after the study’s authors adjusted their statistics to account for factors such as smoking, alcohol use, diet, education level, chronic disease, and exercise. And that’s just the single resilient trait of optimism. When you add the years that research demonstrates you gain from other qualities of consciousness, like love, joy, compassion, and altruism, the number goes up.

At a Gates Foundation conference, former US president Barack Obama declared, “If you had to choose one moment in history in which to be born, and you didn’t know in advance whether you were going to be male or female, which country you were going to be from, what your status was, you’d choose right now.” He observes that the world has never been “healthier, or wealthier, or better educated, or in many ways more tolerant, or less violent, than it is today.” As a species, we’re moving far beyond the survival mentality of Caveman Brain. We’re leaving behind the standards of behavior that defined “normal” in the last century. A critical mass of people is using the human superpower—unique in evolutionary history—to reshape the tissue of their own brains. Bliss Brain is a wonderful-feeling state, but when practiced consistently, it leads to trait change, as neural pathways are repatterned in much healthier ways. This isn’t simply helping us feel better as individuals. It’s contributing to Jump Time in collective planetary evolution. Just as the Renaissance of the 1300s changed art, law, education, politics, religion, agriculture, science, and every other facet of human existence, the compassion produced by Bliss Brain transforms the material reality in which we live. This is the most exciting time in all of history to be alive. As we as a species jump to the next level of flourishing, we are unlocking creative potential the world has never known before. From changing our minds to changing our brains to changing our societies to solving global problems, we’re ushering in a completely different future for the planet.

When I give presentations on trauma and trauma treatment, participants sometimes ask me to leave out the politics and confine myself to talking about neuroscience and therapy. I wish I could separate trauma from politics, but as long as we continue to live in denial and treat only trauma while ignoring its origins, we are bound to fail. In today’s world your ZIP code, even more than your genetic code, determines whether you will lead a safe and healthy life. People’s income, family structure, housing, employment, and educational opportunities affect not only their risk of developing traumatic stress but also their access to effective help to address it. Poverty, unemployment, inferior schools, social isolation, widespread availability of guns, and substandard housing all are breeding grounds for trauma. Trauma breeds further trauma; hurt people hurt other people.

Perhaps the most exasperating cliche is about children being forced to memorize, not think. But memorization is not an abomination in itself, though the anemic pressure on our species has dropped. Memorization is, de facto, exercise for the mind. Neuroscience shows an active hippocampus stimulates cerebral activity. We have often observed how the most profound and creative pupils are those who know the most things, though their usefulness is not always apparent. No question is more insinuating stupid than 'What good will it do to me?' In certain teaching contexts, it is not wrong to ask pupils to memorize. While it is not the only goal the idea that memorizing is useless since information is available online is also wrong and falsely self-obvious. It denotes a misunderstanding of how our mind works. Our brains are not computers, our memory can't be replaced by external HDDs. Each piece of info we memorize is integrated, albeit minimally, as living memory is active, while digital memory is passive. Strange as some may find it, memorizing can stimulate thinking as few other things can. What impairs thinking is the lack of the habit to reflect, the custom of stopping our mind's flow to go back to what we've learned.

The brain learns by making mistakes; maybe we can stop punishing them.

One of the unique things about Buddhism, particularly in the Sanskrit tradition, is that investigation and experiment play a very important part. Many troubles come out of ignorance, and the only antidote to ignorance is knowledge. Knowledge means a clear understanding of reality, which must come through investigation and experiment. In ancient times, the Nalanda masters14 carried out these investigations mainly through logic and human thought, and perhaps in some cases through meditation. In modern times, there is another way to find out about reality: with help of equipment. I think both science and Buddhist investigation are actually trying to find reality. Furthermore, there is a tradition in Buddhism that if we find something that contradicts our scripture, we have the liberty to reject that scripture. That gives us a kind of freedom to investigate, regardless of what the literature says. For example, there are some descriptions of cosmology in the scriptures that are quite a disgrace. When I give teachings to Buddhist audiences, I often tell them that we cannot accept these things. In the initial stages of my curiosity, I would look out into space and see many things. I was curious how these things came to be. Look at our body. There’s a lot of hair on the head and, underneath it, a skull. Unlike other parts of the body, there is some kind of special protection there. Why? Usually we believe the soul or self lies at the center of the heart. Now it seems that the soul—if we can identify it at all—is here in the head, not in the heart. The Buddhist texts on psychology and epistemology make a clear distinction between two qualitatively different domains of experience. One is the sensory level: our experience of the five senses. The other is what Buddhists refer to as the mental level of experience: thoughts, emotions, and so on. The primary seat, or physical basis, of sensory experience is thought to be the sensory organs themselves. But now it seems to be clear from modern neuroscience that the central organizing principle of sensory experience is really to be found more in the brain than in the sensory organs themselves. Buddhists are very interested to learn such things from scientific findings. I think the relationship is very helpful. Therefore, we began introducing the study of science to selected Buddhist monastic students in India more than four years ago. A systematic introduction of science education in the monastic curriculum is gradually being established. As for my participation here, I have nothing to offer. I am always eager just to listen and learn from these great, experienced scientists. Although there is a language problem, and also my memory problem, it sometimes seems that I learn from the session—but after the session there is nothing left in my head. So there’s the problem! Anyway, it may leave some imprints in my brain.

Abhijit The Useless (A Sonnet) At school I didn't even know the term neuroscience, Yet today I'm a symbol of neuroscience and psychology. As a kid I never even dreamed of becoming a scientist, I just wanted to observe the underpinnings of reality. After high school I failed my medical entrance exam, Yet to the world I am a vessel of ethics in medicine. I chose CS Engineering instead but soon dropped out, Yet today I am the epitome of responsible engineering. Failure and success are eternally entangled, Masses fear them while legends feast on failure. I never felt the urge for academic validation, Yet today I'm regularly cited in Springer. I never studied science in the pursuit of grades, I accidentally became a scientist by doing science. Grades and degrees are shortcut to social validation, But when you are a pioneer pushing the frontiers, all mortal validation turns null and void.

Most researchers and educators agree that kids need hands-on Publ., experience with materials, people, and nature. As child-development NOT FOR expert Nancy Carlsson-Paige points out, “Open-ended materials such as blocks, play dough, art and building materials, sand, and water ONLY encourage children to play creatively and in-depth. Neuroscience tells USE 28, 2015 Shambhala us that as children play this way, connections and pathways to the brain become activated and solidify.

We are witnessing nothing less than the emergence of a new educational paradigm, one that’s Copernican in scope and influence; the field of training and education has been blown wide open. When we couple the discoveries of modern neuroscience with the transformative practices of Eastern tradition, we come to the conclusion that almost any quality of mind, body or spirit can be sculpted by practice. We may not be able to change our hair color, but when it comes to the really important qualities of our bodies and life experience, it’s all there waiting for us, open to modification and refinement through beautiful training and practice.