Cognitive Science

Contributions to Educational Practice

Marlin L. Languis, James Buffer, Daniel Martin, Paul Naour

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415683517
• eBook ISBN: 9781136635847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume brings together theory, research and development in cognitive neuro-science. It investigates the neural processes involved in cognition and learning, using developments in computer technology to study the brain in action and other topographic brain mapping. Electrical activity patterns of the brain in the learning processes are displayed through these techniques. Part 1 delineates neuroscience application to educational perspectives. Part 2 reports on emotional and learning disorders, such as autism, while Part 3 applies cognitive science to educational and mental health, as well as to settings such as the classroom, rehabilitation centre or doctor's office.

Part One

Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience and Educational Practice

Chapter I

Emerging Metaphors of Mind: Unmasking the Brain

Richard M. Restak

Metaphors permit researchers, scholars, and philosophers to create models as proposed solutions for puzzling problems. A metaphor allows us to compare one thing which is familiar to another thing which we do not understand. It is an especially useful way to generate intuitive ideas about complex and difficult problems although every metaphor eventually breaks down at some point. No problem is more complex or more puzzling than the human mind. Metaphors of the mind have enabled us to ask important and penetrating research questions that lead to a more complete empirical understanding of how the human brain works. As our understanding of the functioning of the human brain has increased, existing metaphors of the mind of man have given way to new metaphors. Therefore, improved understanding of the brain challenges the adequacy of existing metaphors; and so, the scenario of science continues — a dynamic interplay of metaphors, models, and evidence.

Following is a review of some of the metaphors that have been generated about the brain in the past. In addition, a contemporary metaphor will be presented in our continuing search to understand the human brain. Aristotle thought of the brain as nothing more than a cooling system for the heart. The Assyrians put the seat of the soul in the liver. And the Egyptians who embalmed the Pharaohs carefully preserved the major organs in special jars. Because they conceived the brain to be inconsequential, they sucked it out through the nose and discarded it. Eventually natural philosophers and physicians in Greece ascertained the true state of affairs some centuries before the birth of Christ. But the enlightenment has given rise to mysteries of a subtler sort.

The brain is the center of all conscious experience. It governs the way we perceive, think about, and react to the world; holds our memories in trust; sows, germinates, tends, reaps, harvests, and husbands our emotions; and sustains our sense of self. Granted all that, how does the organ work? The functioning of the brain has been variously compared metaphorically to a computer, a telephone switchboard, and a railroad system. None of them has been entirely adequate. So far as we know, the brain is unlike any other structure in the universe, and perhaps only the vast complexity of the universe itself presents conceptual problems equally impenetrable. In terms of hardware alone, the number of neurons or cells in the brain is somewhere in the order of 15 billion, which happens to correspond to the number of stars in the Milky Way. Beyond issues of structure lurk questions that transcend biology. “Know thyself,” Socrates declared. But can one really do that? The issues posed by the brain are as broad as life itself. What happens within our heads when we write poetry, solve a puzzle, conduct business, fall in love? Why are we sad? Why are we happy? How do we learn? Why do we forget? What is mental illness? What causes it? How real is perception? How are we driven by curiosity, altruism, or professional ambition? Incidentally, what is the source of these drives? Researchers around the world are engrossed in such questions. In some areas, they have made major breakthroughs. At other points, the brain remains a mystery.

Modern ideas about the brain, even the recognition that the brain is important to the mind, can be traced back to Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who, in a work titled “A Sacred Disease”, first noted the relationship between the brain and behavioral manifestations. He noted that a sword wound to the head caused a paralysis to the opposite side of the body. He also noted that epilepsy, the “Sacred Disease” he referred to, brought about changes in behavior of a subtle sort, sometimes changes in personality. He was a meticulous observer. While the Romans, the Arabs, and the Medieval Christians often mused on the locus and the nature of the mind and soul, it was not until the 19th Century that brain research came into its own.

In 1861, Paul Broca, a French physician, noted that a patient of his in the South of France had a distinct disorder of language in which he had difficulty articulating what he wanted to say. In addition to this, he had a paralysis of his right arm and his right leg. The patient talked in short, telegraphic speech, such as, “I–went–restaurant–food.” instead of, “I went (to the) restaurant (and had a delightful meal) food.” Broca called this situation aphasia, a most insightful description of a language disorder. He localized it to a specific area of the brain in the frontal lobe, which is now called Broca’s area.

Later, Wernicke described language problems of a very different sort. Thus began the great era of localization which is based on the notion that one part of the brain is responsible for one piece of behavior. In a sense, this model continues up until the present day with the work of Roger Sperry. However, the first indication that hemispheres were related to different types of personality was an observation by a physician, Wiggan, who had noted that one of his patients, who was also his friend, had only one hemisphere at autopsy. Wiggan was intrigued that a person could live a life so completely normal in all outward respects, and still have only one hemisphere.

A person who has suffered a stroke may be incapable of understanding language and, as Broca has mentioned, may have difficulty expressing himself. He may fail to appreciate that his arms and legs are his own. Some of these lost functions may be recovered after time, indicating that the brain has great recuperative powers, assigning tasks to other parts of the brain. But the degree of recovery is almost always incomplete in the adult. This gives us our first hint of lateralization as an adult phenomenon. Interestingly, if the injury occurs early in life, a complete recovery is possible. A child of eight or nine can suffer brain damage or develop the complete loss of a cerebral hemisphere, yet go on to develop normally, as apparently happened with Dr. Wiggan’s patient.

The plasticity of the brain is seen mainly in the young. As we begin to mature into adulthood, the plasticity is lost and we have the localization and the specialization of the hemispheres. By the age of 10 or 12 the prognosis for an injury is similar to that of an adult — a large irreversible loss (Goldman, 1972). Why? Neurobiologists can’t say for sure. The brain’s recuperative powers depend on plasticity, which diminishes when one reaches adulthood. The researchers are now trying to discover why this occurs and whether the brain’s early plasticity can ever be recovered. When one thinks about it, there are great opportunities, both for physical rehabilitation and education, if people can recover lost abilities and functioning in language, speech, perception, and understanding. Can anything be done about the large numbers of people who have strokes, tumors, and accidents to a cerebral hemisphere?

Michael Gazzaniga has shown that the right hemisphere is capable of primitive speech (Gazzaniga, 1970). It’s possible that drawing, speaking, writing, and other abilities exist holistically in the brain, at least potentially, and are not limited to specialized centers. That’s the metaphor that I propose: integration may take place throughout the whole of the organism, without being localized into a specific area.

There is a history to support this new metaphor, which also takes us back into Victorian times. The metaphor begins with dour, introverted, asocial, and fascinating man named Hughlings Jackson who lived in London. He was a neurologist who developed a novel theory that the central nervous system has developed a complex vertical organization and that many functions are somehow represented at different levels, starting with the lowest and the biologically most ancient spinal cord and proceeding up to the rarified realm of the cerebral cortex. Jackson’s theory was based on his observation that a circumscribed injury never leads to a complete loss of function. As proof of his multilevel organization theory, Jackson pointed to a patient who had a difficulty in saying “No”. Jackson kept pushing him and pushing him to say it, and finally one day the patient blurted out in frustration, “No doctor, I just can’t say no.” Jackson was impressed with this fact: that there was an ability to say, in an unconscious way under the influence of anger and frustration, something that the willed individual was not able to say. So, it was suggested to him that subcortical basal ganglia areas beneath the cerebral hemisphere can, under certain conditions, actually motivate speech (Jackson, 1932). A similar anomally has been observed in stroke patients who, under the control of strong emotion, can move a paralyzed limb. Such performances are possible, according to Jackson, because the brain is able to utilize alternative pathways that, under ordinary circumstances, are either totally unused or merely complementary to the major pathway.

Jackson’s theory of alternative brain pathways met with disbelief in his own time. But, many brain researchers now find it fits both research findings and common sense observations. In their view, mental processes should be regarded as complex functions that are diffused throughout the brain and nervous system and are not localized. A creative tension continues to exist today between these particular views, Broca vs. Jackson. There was an actual dialogue and actual debate between these people about how the brain was organized. So, they were looking for a good metaphor. There were those who said that the brain is highly localized. Franz Gall, a phrenologist, asserted that it was not only possible to localize specific functions in the brain, but also possible to localize certain attributes like friendliness, hatred, or republicanism (Gall, 1948). We had a whole generation of people that got into phrenology, and there was a great rage for feeling and palpating people’s skulls. From there it is only a small step to postulate “taint of degeneration.” Certain telltale physical signs can enable you to pick out an alcoholic; or someone who was a sexual profligate, as they called them; or someone that would go on to commit a crime. We still see the remnants of this kind of thinking. Popular journals may publish articles predicting how a test might be used to tell ahead of time who may become a criminal, or someone suggests that a chromosome test will pinpoint criminality. So, you see how research can lead to certain social and philosophical concerns. Brain science has many profound social and political implications. This must be kept in mind as we search for a model or metaphor.

The creative tension that exists today can be seen in descriptions of how we explain people’s behavior. Consider the exercise of will as an instance which can be electrically distributed throughout the brain even when the resulting action is extremely localizable in form. Kornhuber (1975) has done a study that resembles a stimulus-response paradigm where the person pushes a button at a certain point while scientists are registering brain electrical potentials. Kornhuber’s test is a little different because the subjects are not pushing buttons in response to a light or sound, but are merely pushing the button whenever they want. The researcher measures the electrical activity from the brain. Thinking back to Broca’s idea of the localization, you would expect that the right finger is controlled by the left hemisphere; therefore, just before the button is pushed, we should be able to record action potentials from the left hemisphere. In fact, what is found is that the first discharge is spread throughout both hemispheres, down into the subcortical areas, and even back into parts of the brain such as the cerebellum, which until recently was associated only with movement, balance, and coordination. It takes only a few milliseconds before one is able to measure the discharge from the left hemisphere. This suggests that the act of will, the act of deciding to push that button, is holistically distributed throughout the brain. This is an entirely different concept from the stimulus-response model in which the decision originates in the left hemisphere and the right finger pushes the button. Convincing proof that the brain is organized along functional, rather than anatomical, lines comes from these stimulation experiments.

Research suggesting a holistic metaphor of the brain was done originally by Karl Lashley (Lashley, 1950). Lashley began with his localization ideas by teaching rats to run a maze and then attempting to find the area of the brain in which that maze-running ability is encoded. He proceeded to remove parts of the brain in an attempt to localize the skill. He finally discovered that the animal was not able to do anything, but never found an area where maze-running was encoded. Other studies were done by Karl Pribram (1971) with primates who were taught to open a latch-key box for a peanut or fruit juice reinforcer. Pribram began cutting out parts of the primates’ brains. He found that, instead of a localized area important in opening the latch-key box, the animal becomes less efficient and more clumsy as you cut out more and more of the brain. Finally, the primate isn’t able to perform at all because of paralysis. There is a common-sense finding that Pribram is describing. For instance, I can reach down and pick up a pencil with my hand. Although I’m right handed I can reach over and do it with my left hand. I can even use my elbow to push it over and reach down and pick it up with my mouth. Or, I can say, “Would you please come and pick up this pencil?” There are numerous ways I can get this pencil into my possession. In fact, we are referring to the act of getting the pencil, the intention, or the willed action; some ways are easier than others. Picking it up with the hand is easier than reaching down and biting it with the teeth to pick it up. However, Pribram and associates have found it is the willed intent that is programmed throughout the brain. When you begin to cut out parts of the brain, the animal becomes less efficient and more clumsy, just as I would become more clumsy as I went about these different and increasingly difficult tasks.

Contemporary research has increasingly indicated holistic orientation within the brain. The mystery remains, how does one begin to understand a concept that seems to be localized, but is also widespread throughout the brain, in both hemispheres and down into the subcortical area. The puzzle is much like the medieval questions about how three persons can be in one God; both puzzles ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• Part One–Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience and Educational Practice
• Part Two–Cognitive Neuroscience Research: Probing Substrates of Educational Problems
• Part Three–Multidisciplinary Approaches to Educational Concerns in Helping Professions