Professor John Stein, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, gave a fascinating talk at the recent Naace conference. I recorded it, and there are pictures of some of the slides he used. I do not have access to his presentation, but I think it will be obvious from the podcast where these pictures are relevant. Even without the podcast I think they paint a fascinating picture of what we can do to improve how we learn and retain things. If you think about it, the brain is the best technology we have, and the Professor's talk gave some useful advice on how we can get the best out of it. The conclusion seems to be: get plenty of sleep, eat a healthy diet, get plenty of physical activity and keep mentally stimulated.
The professor also made an admirable attempt to show how knowledge about the brain is relevant to educational ICT. For example, it turns out that males are better visuospatially than verbally, which means that the visual world of ICT will favour their style of learning. So perhaps the advent of YouTube, Voicethread and other non-verbal manifestations of IT are not as good for girls' learning as they may be for boys' learning?
I hope you find the talk as interesting as I did.
You can find it here.
And here are some of the slides:
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