Narrow Educational Experiences Limit Brain Development

Stagnation of development has been rationalized as “adulthood”; it is assumed that with the end of initial physical maturation comes the end of fundamental development of the brain and cognitive processes. Accordingly, secondary and higher education students apply their already developed intellectual skills to increasingly specialized bodies of knowledge. That is, education remains “intellect-predominant”; and as students advance in their education, they focus on increasingly segregated or isolated areas of knowledge.

As educational experience continues to be restricted to narrow channels, the adult brain in fact continues to modify its functioning to accommodate to those specific narrow channels of activity. For example, when perceptual or motor skills are learned (e.g., playing the violin), the adult’s brain modifies its functioning: the cortex has been found to reallocate the proportion of its area that is devoted to the sensory or motor inputs that are most used.

Such modification of specific cortical connections presumably occurs not only with the development of expertise in a specific activity, but also in a specific area of knowledge.

However, this modification of the brain’s functioning is not a systematic unfoldment of the brain’s potential. If specific expertise is not useful beyond a narrow channel of activity, then the corresponding specific cortical connections will also fail to have a broader life-promoting value. In practical terms, this means that the skill gained in playing the violin or in any academic discipline does not lead to skill in all the other activities of life — it does not develop life as a whole.

Cortical Plasticity in Adulthood

Summary: Research during the past two decades has shown that the brain continues to modify its functioning based on experience, that accumulated experience in adulthood changes the way the cortex represents sensory input.

Sample findings: The sensory cortical areas for vision, touch, and hearing represent their sensory receptors on the surface of the body in a topographic manner; there is a mapping between neighboring cortical areas and neighboring skin sites. Changes in cortical map organization occur as a result of training animals on tasks that produce specific, differential patterns of activity in identified sectors of the cortex (23–25). These changes in cortical map organization resulting from experience are referred to as cortical map plasticity.

Comparable studies in humans using magnetoencephalography (MEG) showed a larger area of cortical activity associated with the scalp projections of the finger used for Braille reading, and a smaller area for other fingers of Braille readers (26). This methodology also showed larger somatosensory representation of the digits of the left hand of string players, in comparison to other digits or to the comparable digits of control subjects.

Synaptic plasticity (changes in synaptic strength of neurons that fire together) has been studied for many years and is assumed to underlie the phenomenon of cortical map plasticity (25).

These findings indicate that the brain’s functioning continues to accommodate itself based on one’s specific experiences. An implication of this research is that it is vitally important for students to gain experiences that promote overall integration and effectiveness of brain functioning rather than being limited solely to isolated channels of skill or knowledge.

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References for this Page

(23) Annual Reviews of Neuroscience 14: 137–167, 1991.
(24) Annual Reviews of Neuroscience 19: 129–158, 1995.
(25) Annual Reviews of Neuroscience 21: 149–186, 1998.
(26) Brain 116: 39–52, 1993.