Skills and the brain grow together
HGSE Professor Kurt Fischer

In this video clip, Kurt Fischer, from HGSE's Mind, Brain, and Education program, talks about exciting research findings that relate growth in skills to growth in brain activity. He provides an overview of this work, describing growth spurts in brain and cognitive development that occur within the same age periods during the school years.

<view video> (requires RealPlayer) <view text>

Kurt Fischer elaborates on measuring the growth in brain activity from childhood through early adulthood. He describes how EEG (electroencephalogram) techniques can be used to detect developmental patterns in brain connections. Animated graphics help to illustrate how connections among different brain regions appear to grow in cyclical patterns around the cortex.

<view video> (requires RealPlayer) <view text>

Learners of all ages build more complex understandings of the world and of people from their earlier, simpler concepts. In this clip, Kurt Fischer uses the example of children's social role understanding to illustrate how simple representations are reorganized into more complex representations and then into abstract concepts. These new skills that emerge in children's best performance are closely associated with growth spurts of brain activity.

<view video> (requires RealPlayer) <view text>