(Lia Commissar) Hi! This morning
I'm going to talk about education and neuroscience,
both generally as a field that's developing
but also, the specific work that we've been doing in this field.
The Wellcome Trust -- OK --
the Wellcome Trust, for those of you who don't know,
is the second largest charitable foundation globally,
with the aim of improving health.
And it does that by funding lots of bio-medical research, but also
by funding work in the social science and humanities,
funding lots of education work, doing lots of engagement work
and also lots of policy work.
So I'm going to talk through a few things this morning.
Firstly, what has neuroscience got to do with education?
What impact does it have on education at the moment?
The work that we've been doing and then, thinking about the future.
So, what has neuroscience got to do with education?
Well, if education is about learning something,
be it knowledge or a skill,
and neuroscience is the study of the nervous system and the brain,
then they're pretty linked, in my opinion.
And it's not new to kind of talk about the brain, in relation to education.
People have been discussing this, critiquing it,
debating it for lots of years.
There is loads of research papers out there with titles such as
"A Bridge too far", "Its a Prime time to build a bridge",
"A two-way path is possible", "Booting the bridge from by thence". (check)
So lots of people have been talking about this bridge
but not many people have been building it.
And, this is kind of understandable
because its probably only really in the last 10 years that neuroscience is,
the understanding from neuroscience has evolved significantly
that we can start to think about how it may have implications for the classroom.
And this is really exciting and there is lots of potential
and its really understanding,
you can understand why teachers, why policy makers,
why technologists want to start applying some of these ideas to education.
But my word of warning that will go throughout this presentation
really is about waiting and doing the research and finding out
whether these things are actually going to be helpful and impactful
in the classroom.
And the other thing that I must say just before i go on
is that I am not saying in any way that neuroscience alone is the answer
and its going to solve all our problems
or can tell us everything about the classroom,:
that's a very complex ecosystem.
But, neuroscience is a kind of a new-ish field
where we can start using that alongside psychology,
alongside educational research and alongside teacher's knowledge
to build something really good for the future
and see if we can start improving learning in the class room. 2.51