How education can change the brain
Professor Antonio Damasio, University of Southern California

As students learn skills, changes must be taking place in the brain. In skills like learning to read and learning to play a musical instrument, the brain adapts to support the learner's performance. Antonio Damasio, Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Neurology at the University of Southern California, spoke with the HGSE community about these examples of how educational experience alters the brain. From a conference at HGSE, October, 2004.

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Summary

Damasio describes a research study comparing two groups of people: stroke victims who have language impairments due to brain damage (patients referred to as Aphasic), and normal citizens of Portuguese villages who had not been to school and are illiterate. Would these groups that both lack reading and writing skills show similarities in brain areas associated with language? He explains that at a structural level, the related brain areas were grossly the same in these two groups. However, at a functional level, the patterns of brain activation were not the same—the intensity with which brain areas were recruited for certain tasks differed. The "functional architecture" of the brain depends on the kind of education you experience.

What about learning to make music? Damasio describes how training in a musical instrument that requires finger dexterity changes the "representation of the fingers" in the brain. That is, the brain regions involved with moving the fingers (i.e., "representing" the fingers) change as a student practices these skills. Other neurons near to that region get taken over by it, so that the surface area of the brain controlling the fingers spreads, facilitating more highly skilled finger movements by the musician.

To examine brain activity in living humans, researchers can use a variety of brain imaging techniques. One common method today is fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), a brain scanning technique that provides information about blood flow to specific areas of the brain. When a person performs a task, blood flow to some brain regions increase. It is inferred that those regions are part of the brain network carrying out the task.

By Maria Fusaro, doctoral student in Human Development and Psychology at HGSE.