Todd Rose’s brilliant talk at TEDxSonoma expands on a startlingly simple point: When you design for the average, you design for no-one. He suggests instead we to need design for the extremes. For anyone who has worked with students, it is an intuitive enough concept, in theory. Yet in application, it has proven challenging, especially in a climate fixated on norm reference test … Read More
Oh, The Places You’ll Find Yourself — Spatially Speaking
Below is a TED Talk by Neil Burgess, a neuroscientist at the University College in London, who researches, as described on the TED website, “how patterns of electrical activity in brain cells guide us through space.” [ted id=1349] Supplemental to the grid cells Dr. Burgess discusses are additional neurological systems that give us a sense of our surroundings. Dan Peterson, … Read More
Your Brain on Improv
The below TEDx Talk by surgeon, researcher, and musician Charles Limb, unpacks some of his emerging hypotheses about the brain during improv, and how those might translate into understanding creativity. Or at least one small slice of it. If he is correct, there are probably a broad range of implications for education. How might improv be used in the classroom … Read More
The Mysterious Workings of the Adolescent Brain
There is a common thread that connects the earliest parents to the current ones. It isn’t walking to school uphill in snow both ways, negotiating screen time, or bedtime battles. At some point or another we have all thought the same thing about our kids: “What in the world were they thinking?!” While neuroscience still has a long way to … Read More
