A quick primer on brain development

Neuroscience is a relatively new discipline encompassing neurology, psychology and biology. It has made great strides in the last 100 years, during which many aspects of the physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology and structure of the vertebrate brain have been understood. Understanding of some of the basic perceptual, cognitive, attentional, emotional and mnemonic functions is also making progress, particularly since the advent of the cognitive neurosciences, which focus specifically on understanding higher level processes of cognition via imaging technology. Neuroimaging has enabled scientists to study the human brain at work in vivo, deepening our understanding of the very complex processes underpinning speech and language, thinking and reasoning, reading and mathematics. It seems timely, therefore, to consider how we might implement our increased understanding of brain development and brain function to explore educational questions.

[1]  I L Fraser.  Understanding blindness. , 1969, Nursing mirror and midwives journal.

[2]  J. Eccles.  The emotional brain. , 1980, Bulletin et memoires de l'Academie royale de medecine de Belgique.

[3]  Marta Kutas,et al.  Altered visual-evoked potentials in congenitally deaf adults , 1983, Brain Research.

[4]  W. Greenough,et al.  Experience and brain development. , 1987, Child development.

[5]  D. Maurer,et al.  THE EFFECTS OF DEPRIVATION ON HUMAN VISUAL DEVELOPMENT: STUDIES OF CHILDREN TREATED FOR CATARACTS , 1989 .

[6]  B. Rockstroh,et al.  Increased Cortical Representation of the Fingers of the Left Hand in String Players , 1995, Science.

[7]  H. Neville.  Developmental specificity in neurocognitive development in humans. , 1995 .

[8]  H. Neville,et al.  Maturational Constraints on Functional Specializations for Language Processing: ERP and Behavioral Evidence in Bilingual Speakers , 1996, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[9]  Joseph E LeDoux.  The emotional brain , 1996 .

[10]  F. Rösler,et al.  Event-related potentials during auditory and somatosensory discrimination in sighted and blind human subjects. , 1996, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[11]  G. Berns,et al.  Brain regions responsive to novelty in the absence of awareness. , 1997, Science.

[12]  U. Bellugi,et al.  Neural Systems Mediating American Sign Language: Effects of Sensory Experience and Age of Acquisition , 1997, Brain and Language.

[13]  K. Stanovich.  Cognitive Neuroscience and Educational Psychology: What Season Is It? , 1998 .

[14]  D. Geary.  What Is the Function of Mind and Brain? , 1998 .

[15]  James P. Byrnes,et al.  The Educational Relevance of Research in Cognitive Neuroscience , 1998 .

[16]  R. Oostenveld,et al.  Increased auditory cortical representation in musicians , 1998, Nature.

[17]  M Ingvar,et al.  The illiterate brain. Learning to read and write during childhood influences the functional organization of the adult brain. , 1998, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[18]  M. Posner,et al.  Brain mechanisms of quantity are similar in 5-year-old children and adults. , 1998, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[19]  S. Dehaene,et al.  Abstract representations of numbers in the animal and human brain , 1998, Trends in Neurosciences.

[20]  D. Schunk.  An Educational Psychologist's Perspective on Cognitive Neuroscience , 1998 .

[21]  Richard E. Mayer,et al.  Does the Brain Have a Place in Educational Psychology? , 1998 .

[22]  D Bavelier,et al.  Cerebral organization for language in deaf and hearing subjects: biological constraints and effects of experience. , 1998, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[23]  F. Rösler,et al.  Effects of interstimulus interval on auditory event-related potentials in congenitally blind and normally sighted humans , 1999, Neuroscience Letters.

[24]  E. Spelke,et al.  Sources of mathematical thinking: behavioral and brain-imaging evidence. , 1999, Science.

[25]  M. Fagiolini,et al.  Inhibitory threshold for critical-period activation in primary visual cortex , 2000, Nature.

[26]  W. Fitch.  The evolution of speech: a comparative review , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[27]  F. Rösler,et al.  Event-related potentials during auditory language processing in congenitally blind and sighted people , 2000, Neuropsychologia.

[28]  Richard S. J. Frackowiak,et al.  Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. , 2000, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[29]  Axel Cleeremans,et al.  Experience-dependent changes in cerebral activation during human REM sleep , 2000, Nature Neuroscience.

[30]  M. Thioux,et al.  Neuroanatomical Substrates of Arabic Number Processing, Numerical Comparison, and Simple Addition: A PET Study , 2000, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[31]  S. Jackson.  Seeing what you feel , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[32]  S E Shaywitz,et al.  Neurobiological studies of reading and reading disability. , 2001, Journal of communication disorders.

[33]  B. Mazoyer,et al.  Neural Correlates of Simple and Complex Mental Calculation , 2001, NeuroImage.

[34]  David R. Shanks,et al.  Abstractionist and Processing Accounts of Implicit Learning , 2001, Cognitive Psychology.

[35]  S. Strauss,et al.  Teaching as a natural cognition and its relations to preschoolers’ developing theory of mind , 2002 .

[36]  A. Caspi,et al.  Role of Genotype in the Cycle of Violence in Maltreated Children , 2002, Science.

[37]  P. Skudlarski,et al.  Disruption of posterior brain systems for reading in children with developmental dyslexia , 2002, Biological Psychiatry.

[38]  R. N. Davis,et al.  Dyslexia-specific brain activation profile becomes normal following successful remedial training , 2002, Neurology.

[39]  J. Geake,et al.  Cognitive Neuroscience: implications for education? , 2003 .

[40]  Valéria Csépe,et al.  Auditory Event-Related Potentials in Studying Developmental Dyslexia , 2003 .

[41]  G. Marcus,et al.  FOXP2 in focus: what can genes tell us about speech and language? , 2003, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[42]  Thomas Elbert,et al.  Altered hemispheric asymmetry of auditory P100m in dyslexia , 2003, The European journal of neuroscience.

[43]  A. Fallgatter,et al.  Electrophysiological investigation of the effectiveness of methylphenidate in children with and without ADHD , 2003, Journal of Neural Transmission.

[44]  O. Hn,et al.  Education and the Brain : A Bridge Too Far , 2005 .

[45]  Dorothy V. M. Bishop,et al.  Individual Differences in Auditory Processing in Specific Language Impairment: A Follow-Up Study using Event-Related Potentials and Behavioural Thresholds , 2005, Cortex.