John T. Bruer

Education and the Brain: A Bridge Too Far

terms of informing classroom practice. There is, however, a science of mind, cognitive science, that can serve as a basic science for the development of an applied science of learning and instruction. Practical, well-founded examples of putting cognitive science into practice already exist in numerous schools and classrooms. Teachers would be better off looking at these examples than at speculative applications of neuroscience.

Avoiding the pediatrician's error: how neuroscientists can help educators (and themselves)

to support a considerably more moderate recommendation. The best response a concerned scientist might make is to point out the pediatrician’s faulty logic. The pediatrician erred in drawing conclusions about functional change from data on structural change without considering whether or how the two phenomena are related. Before enacting the pediatrician’s recommendation, we would like to know considerably more about how changes in height and weight, or factors influencing them, are related to muscle development, motor skill acquisition and enhanced ath

Let's Put Brain Science on the Back Burner

Truly new results in neuroscience, rarely mentioned in the brain and education literature, point to the brains lifelong capacity to reshape itself in response to experience. The challenge for educators is to develop Learning environments and practices that can exploit the brains lifelong plasticity; define the behaviors we want to teach; design learning environments to impart them; and constantly test the educational efficacy of these environments.

Can we talk? How the cognitive neuroscience of attention emerged from neurobiology and psychology, 1980–2005

This study uses author co-citation analysis to trace prospectively the development of the cognitive neuroscience of attention between 1980 and 2005 from its precursor disciplines: cognitive psychology, single cell neurophysiology, neuropsychology, and evoked potential research. The author set consists of 28 authors highly active in attentional research in the mid-1980s. PFNETS are used to present the co-citation networks. Authors are clustered via the single-link clustering intrinsic to the PFNET algorithm. By 1990 a distinct cognitive neuroscience specialty cluster emerges, dominated by authors engaged in brain imaging research.

Penicillin for Education: How Cognitive Science Can Contribute to Education

New teaching methods can act like the educational equivalent of penicillin, but only if we start to think about education differently.

The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness

Part One * Consciousness and the Scientific Observer * Proposals and Disclaimers Part Two * Neural Darwinism * Reentrant Signaling * Perceptual Experience and Consciousness Part Three * Memory as Recategorization * Time and Space: Cortical Appendages and Organs of Succession * Concepts and Presyntax Part Four * A Model of Primary Consciousness * Language * Higher-Order Consciousness * The Conscious and the Unconscious * Diseases of Consciousness Part Five * Physics, Evolution, and Consciousness: A Summary * Philosophical Issues: Qualified Realism * Epilogue