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An interview with Dr Paul Howard-Jones, Coordinator, Neuroscience and Education Network

Kim Thomas

Educational research is being revolutionised. No longer does research have to be confined to observing what happens in the classroom, interviewing students or measuring results: now we have the opportunity to see what happens inside the brain when it responds to stimulus, and to use that information to inform educational practice.

One of the practitioners in this exciting new cross-disciplinary field of neuroscience and education is Dr Paul Howard-Jones. Paul, a lecturer in the Graduate School of Education at Bristol University and coordinator of the Neuroscience and Education Network, is using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe what happens to the brain under different conditions. Others, such as a team at Cambridge University, are using electro-encephalograms (EEGs) for a similar purpose.

How can looking at the brain help education? Paul believes that knowing which parts of the brain are activated under certain conditions can tell teachers a lot about which techniques are useful to use in the classroom, and which aren't. As far as the brain goes, he says, it's a question of "use it or lose it" - research in the US, he says, has shown that when students were taught to juggle, the part of their brain activated when they were learning to juggle actually grew in size and structure.

But this isn't about physical scientists thinking they can wade in and tell teachers what to do. Input from teachers and students, and feedback to them after the experiments, are important parts of the process. "The neuroscientific evidence has to join up with the educational social science evidence," says Paul. "We have to be able to look at different things with different perspectives, so we have a whole-learning perspective that takes into account the biological, social and experiential."

Most of us are familiar with the medical uses of MRI to produce clear pictures of the brain and to identify conditions such as brain tumours. The same equipment is used in fMRI, says Paul: "Functional MRI operates by putting someone in a very strong magnetic field, pulsing the magnetic field with a radio frequency and then looking at how the magnetic field relaxes. One of the ways in which it relaxes can tell you a lot about anatomy, and there's another relaxation signal that tells you interesting stuff about oxygenation."

First, says Paul, researchers do an anatomical scan to get a clear picture of the brain's structure (everybody's brain is different), and then a 'functional' scan where people are asked to respond to stimuli. The functional scan shows the blood flow to different areas of the brain. This makes it possible to see which parts of the brain are activated during particular tasks.

With funding from the Lifelong Learning Foundation, Paul and his colleagues have used fMRI to look at a particular strategy often used by teachers to stimulate creativity, in which students have to incorporate external material into their creative work - whether it's a poem, story or work of art.

The team began by asking their subjects (drama education students at Bristol University) to make up stories using three words, sometimes using words that were related and sometimes unrelated. People were asked first to be creative in their stories, and then uncreative. An independent panel of judges, who didn't talk to each other, was then asked to rate the creativity of each story. The judges were largely in agreement in rating the stories using the unrelated words as more creative than the stories using the related words.

The difficult question, says Paul, is deciding whether the subjects really were being more creative when using the unrelated words: "Are people just judging those with unrelated words as more creative simply because they've got unrelated words in?"

It was, he says, an "ideal experiment" to look at inside an MRI scanner. Because an MRI scanner is noisy and confined, the experiment was first carried out inside a mockup of an MRI scanner, to see whether the environment affected the outcome - it didn't.

The subjects were then put in a real scanner, and asked to make up stories, first being creative, then being uncreative: "When we asked people to creative, there were parts of their brain that were more active, and those we took as the correlates of creativity in this task."

Then they were asked to make up stories using unrelated words. "We noticed that one part of these creative correlates in the brain was more active again when they were using the unrelated words. And what was interesting was that it was the part of the brain, the right frontal medial gyrus, that is associated with a higher level conscious control."

In other words, when people were forced, by having to incorporate unrelated words, to be more creative, the conscious part of their brains worked harder: "When you're actually confronted with the task, there are millions of different ways of combining these words, and that doesn't require a lot of effort at all. What does require a lot of effort is actually deciding whether a combination is any good or not. And to do that you need to be filtering out all the rubbish, so it's actually a conscious increase in effort. And that's an important part of being creative. It's not just generating [stories], it's also picking out the wheat from the chaff."

The implication for education, says Paul, is that this particular teaching strategy, of asking students to use unrelated words in a story, actively encourages them to use the parts of the brain associated with creativity. To complete the research, the team carried out workshops with actors at the Royal Theatre in Plymouth, asking actors what it felt like to use these strategies for creativity, and then took all the findings back to the teachers who had originally discussed the research question with them, and to trainee teachers in drama education at the university.

Other projects Paul and his team are working on include using Futurelab's Debating the Evidence software to look at what happens in the brain when subjects are asked to interact with uncertainty, and the motivation provided by game-playing, a project which uses galvanic skin responses (looking at the changes in conductivity of the skin) as well as fMRI.

Paul is keen to stress that this isn't about "solely looking at education through a microscope in a laboratory" but about engaging with real-world educational practice: "What's really exciting is when people listen to the science, look at the results and say 'That ties in with what I feel I'm doing,' or even better, 'I think I can explain your results because I think I'm doing this.'