Since the impressive technological advances in brain imaging in the 1990s, neuroscience has enabled cognitive science to take a giant step forward. By observing the mechanisms of the brain in action, we can now confirm or refute certain hypotheses on which our understanding of learning and teaching has been built. Neuroscience has the power to bring us considerable progress in education without rejecting our entire pedagogical heritage or repressing the contribution of teachers in this great march forward—on the contrary.

This is the bet taken by Olivier Houdé, a specialist in cognitive development and learning, in his book L’école du cerveau : De Montessori, Freinet et Piaget aux sciences cognitives. From his and some of his colleagues’ perspectives, here’s why the education of today and tomorrow needs to be guided by neuroscience and how this can be achieved for the greater benefit of all.

Neuroscience 101

The field of neuroscience focuses on the study of the nervous system, from neurons to behaviour, and draws on a vast array of disciplines, from biology to chemistry, mathematics and computer science. The field itself is highly diversified, with several branches or sub-disciplines. To name but a few of the best-known, these include molecular and cellular neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience, which are of particular interest to us in education, such as medical and computational neuroscience.

Cognitive neuroscience, affective neuroscience and social neuroscience are three branches that give us access to a new perspective and analysis of the mechanisms of cognition and learning. Cognitive neuroscience combines neuroscience with the cognitive sciences, including psychology and psychiatry, to better understand the functions and dysfunctions of the neural systems involved in behaviour and cognition. They use neuropsychological tests, cognitive tasks, psychophysics, and the most sophisticated brain imaging techniques to unravel the mysteries of higher mental functions (perception, memory, language, etc.). Affective neuroscience is concerned with the behaviour of neurons in relation to emotions, while social neuroscience aims to understand social processes and behaviours through biological mechanisms.

Observing intelligence in action

At the end of the last century, the development of cutting-edge brain imaging techniques, particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), led to a quantum leap in our knowledge of the brain, making it possible to visualize its structure and functioning live and without danger. Not to mention that brain imaging has brought a significant advantage to the research process itself, enabling us to observe the learner at work without interrupting them to ask questions. All in all, it gave us a more accurate picture of the brain’s cognitive and affective activity during learning. In other words, this tool has finally enabled us to see intelligence developing and unfolding live.

Researchers have thus been able, among other things, to uncover the cerebral mechanisms involved in the acquisition of academic skills such as reading and arithmetic (Dehaene, 2007, 2011), specify the conditions necessary for learning (the 4 pillars), confirm the existence of neuroplasticity, grasp the importance of emotions in cognition and learning, and reveal the cognitive inhibition system, the third system of thought and “key to human intelligence” according to its discoverer, Olivier Houdé (1995, 2000). What is particularly interesting for the advancement of knowledge in education, according to Steve Masson, Professor at the Faculty of Education of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) and Director of the Laboratoire de recherche en neuroéducation (LRN), is the fact that we are no longer limiting ourselves to the functioning of the brain. “More and more researchers […] are also trying to understand how this functioning develops and how learning can influence this development,” he explains in an article entitled The contributions of neuroeducation to teaching: from neuromyths to current discoveries. That said, there is another reason – the most important, according to Masson – to examine the links between the brain and education, and that is the constraints posed on learning by the functioning and structure of this complex organ: “Knowing more about these constraints could help us to understand why some learning is particularly difficult, and to consider pedagogical avenues for overcoming these difficulties.”