Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Watching the Brain Think Charles G. Fry provides an excellent description of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and its relation to the NMR experiments done by chemistry students in a Nobel-Prize report that begins on p 922. Applications of MRI to medical diagnostics are well known. Perhaps less well known is that MRI can be applied to education. Functional MRI can be used to examine the brain while experimental subjects are involved in intellectual tasks, thereby elucidating which portions of the brain are involved in the task and how active these regions are while the task is being performed. Functional MRI is based on the fact that there is increased blood flow to a region of the brain that is involved in thinking. Increased blood flow reduces the concentration of deoxyhemoglobin, Image: Joy Hirsch, ref 1. which is paramagnetic. This alters the NMR signal and serves as a means of detecting brain activity within a volume element on the order of 1.5 ⫻ 1.5 ⫻ 5 mm and on a time scale of about 30 s. An example is shown in the figure, where areas of the brain that are activated by left-hand tactile stimulation are shown in yellow (1). Had I not heard of it via a news item on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, a Yale University Medical School study titled “Development of Left Occipitotemporal Systems for Skilled Reading in Children After a Phonologically-Based Intervention” would not have been on my reading list—but it should have been. In this fascinating study the development of children’s brains was evaluated using functional MRI (2). In addition to its implications for education research (see below), the paper nicely illustrates a subject on which I commented in May—the need to prepare our students to participate in a tremendous breadth of collaborative research. The list of authors includes expertise in pediatrics, physics, education, psychology, child development, imaging science, and radiology, as well as industrial scientists. The experimental section of the paper includes information about selection of subjects, intervention and control groups, presentation of stimuli, MRI instrument parameters, and statistical analysis of MRI data to create images. The study involved reading ability of children between the ages of six and nine. The children were divided into three groups: (1) a control group without reading disability; (2) a community intervention group of students with reading disability who received several different interventions provided by the schools they attended; and (3) an experimental intervention group of students with reading disability who received individual tutoring focused on helping them understand how letters combine to form phonemes. Functional MRI scans were made before intervention, after the www.JCE.DivCHED.org
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The ability to see which parts of the brain are active during different kinds of thinking processes may be a wonderful tool for exploring learning of all kinds.
eight-month intervention, and one year after the end of the intervention. For groups (1) and (3), but not (2), activity in regions of the brain associated with reading ability was significantly greater at the end of the 8month intervention period. Group (3) also showed significant further development one year after the end of intervention. The paper concludes that “the nature of the remedial educational intervention is critical to successful outcomes in children with reading disabilities”, the occipitotemporal area “is critical for the development of skilled reading”, and that area continued to develop one year after the end of the intervention. The ability to see which parts of the brain are active during different kinds of thinking processes may be a wonderful tool for exploring learning of all kinds. Applying this idea to chemistry raises lots of questions. What regions of the brain are associated with thinking as a chemist thinks? Do organic chemists think differently from physical chemists? If so, what kinds of stimuli encourage development of those parts of the brain associated with each type of thinking? To what extent do different teaching/learning methods affect the brain’s activity and development in areas associated with chemical thinking? Are these effects immediate, long term, or both? Would actually examining brain activity and its development over time provide a more accurate evaluation of teaching than what we currently do? No doubt I have not thought of many other questions to which functional MRI could be applied in chemical education. It won’t be easy or inexpensive to carry out such experiments, but it might well revolutionize education research.
Literature Cited 1. fMRI—About Functional MRI(General). Functional MRI Research Center, Columbia University. http://www.fmri.org/ fmri.htm (accessed May 2004). 2. Shaywitz, B. A.; Shaywitz, S. E.; Blachman, B. A.; Pugh, K. R.; Fulbright, R. K.; Skudlarski, P.; Mencl, W. E.; Constable, R. T.; Holahan, J. M.; Marchione, K. E.; Fletcher, J. M.; Lyon, G. R.; Gore, J. C. Biol. Psychiatry 2004, 55, 926–933.
Vol. 81 No. 7 July 2004
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Journal of Chemical Education
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