National Adult Literacy Database

By Tom Sticht

Today there are shelves of books that call for educators to base their instruction on the relatively new science of the brain. These books based on neuro-imaging of the brain call for brain-based reading instruction, brain-based mathematics instruction, drawing on the right and left brains, and so on. Interestingly, however, a large group of cognitive and neuroscientists meeting in Santiago, Chile, in 2007 concluded that brain science has little or nothing yet to tell us about educational practice.

With this interest in brain science and learning, I recalled an early experience I had in my professional training. In the early 1960s while a graduate student at the University of Arizona working on a PhD in psychology, I had an opportunity to attend a colloquium given by Dr. Beatrice Gelber. She was a very senior scientist in the field of biological psychology.

One of the first things I noticed about Dr. Gelber was that she had a pronounced tic in her left eye which caused the eye to repeatedly blink shut. We all soon understood why she had this tic. Her special interest at the time of the colloquium was the behaviour of the paramecium, a one-cell animal with no brain. Yet Dr. Gelber was apparently training it in an experiment on learning! But to observe the organisms, she had to look through a microscope for hours upon end. Over time, this had apparently led to the tic in her eye.

In an online book (Shufflebrain: The Quest of Hologramic Mind) the late Professor Paul A. Pietsch prepared a chapter entitled Microminds and Macrominds in which he discussed some of Dr. Gelber’s research. He wrote:

“In the 1950s an animal behaviourist named Beatrice Gelber conditioned paramecia by the same basic approach Pavlov had taken when he used a whiff of meat to make a dog drool when it heard the ringing of a bell.

“Gelber prepared a pâté of her animal's favorite bacteria (a single paramecium may devour as many as 5 million bacilli in a single day) then she smeared some of it on the end of a sterile platinum wire. She dipped the wire into a paramecium culture. Immediately her animals swarmed around the wire, which was not exactly startling news. In a few seconds, she withdrew the wire, counted off a few more seconds and dipped it in again.

“Same results! But on the second trial, Gelber presented the animals with a bare, sterilized wire, instead of with bacteria. No response! Not at first, anyway. But after thirty trials -- two offers of bacteria, one of sterile wire – Gelber’s paramecia were swarming around the platinum tip, whether it proffered bacterial pâté or not.”

Years after Dr. Gelber’s work, which purportedly demonstrated learning in the brainless paramecium, Eric Tytell published an article online in October 19, 2007, with the intriguing title: Learning without a Brain.

The article has an equally enticing introductory paragraph:

“You don't need your brain to walk. You don't even need it to catch yourself after you stumble. And now, it appears, you may not even need it to learn some new skills. A recent report suggests that the spinal cord itself, without the brain at all, is able to adapt to a new environment – and possibly even anticipate how its environment has changed.”

Tytell goes on to discuss research that seems to suggest that the rat spinal cord, when surgically separated from any connections to the rat’s brain, can adapt to this new situation and learn to walk all over again, with no brain involved.

Now all this is not to say that in the intact human learning can occur without a brain. But it does raise the point that the biology of learning is complicated, throughout, and possibly outside of, the brain and the central nervous system. We have to be cautious in our reactions to claims about the educational implications of the latest brain science.

As John Bruer, the philosopher of science and president of the McDonnell Foundation, where tens of millions of dollars has been spent on neuroscience, has repeatedly admonished, we need to keep the findings of neuroscience on the back burner, and instead pay attention to the research on education that provides solid evidence for the effectiveness of our instructional strategies and methods.

This is a no-brainer!

Tom Sticht is an international consultant in adult education. He can be contacted at tsticht@aznet.net.