My inter­est in the brain stems from want­ing to bet­ter under­stand both how to make school more palat­able for stu­dents, and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment more mean­ing­ful for fac­ulty. To that end, I began my Neu­rons Fir­ing blog in April, 2007, have been doing a lot of read­ing, and been attend­ing work­shops and con­fer­ences, includ­ing Learn­ing & the Brain.

If you agree that our brains are designed for learn­ing, then as edu­ca­tors it is incum­bent upon us to be look­ing for ways to max­i­mize the learn­ing process for each of our stu­dents, as well as for our­selves. Some of what fol­lows is sim­ply com­mon sense, but I’ve learned that all of it has a sci­en­tific basis in our brains. Read the rest of this entry »

My nat­ural rhythms are in cycle with the school cal­en­dar. Jan­u­ary 1st takes a back seat to my new year, which gets ush­ered in with the month of Sep­tem­ber when there is crisp­ness in the air that grad­u­ally shakes off the slower, more relaxed pace of summer.Conveniently, my career in teach­ing meshes with my nat­ural cycli­cal year. And as this year draws to a close, I am re-energized by the pace of sum­mer, know­ing that any­thing may pop in to my mind as I engage in activ­i­ties not directly related to school. But before that hap­pens, I’d like to reflect on this past year, in par­tic­u­lar as it was my first year of blog­ging about the brain.

My inter­est in the brain stems from want­ing to bet­ter under­stand both how to make school more palat­able for stu­dents, and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment more mean­ing­ful for fac­ulty. To that end, I began my Neu­rons Fir­ing blog in April, 2007, have been doing a lot of read­ing, and been attend­ing work­shops and con­fer­ences, includ­ing Learn­ing & the Brain.

If you agree that our brains are designed for learn­ing, then Read the rest of this entry »

The Aspen Health Forum gath­ered an impres­sive group of around 250 peo­ple to dis­cuss the most press­ing issues in Health and Med­ical Sci­ence (check out the Pro­gram and the Speak­ers bios), on Octo­ber 3-6th. It was the first con­fer­ence, by the way, where I have heard a speaker say: “I resus­ci­tated a woman yesterday”.

Key high­lights and trends:

1– Global health prob­lems require the atten­tion of the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity. Richard Klaus­ner encour­aged the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity to focus on Global Prob­lems: mater­nal mor­tal­ity rates, HIV/ AIDS, nutri­tion, can­cer, clean water.  Bill Frist, for­mer Sen­ate Major­ity Leader, added to that list the increas­ing epi­demic risks of global zootic dis­eases (trans­mit­ted between humans and ani­mals), sup­ported by 2 inter­est­ing data points: at any one moment, there are 500,000 peo­ple fly­ing world­wide; in a year, air­lines trans­port the equiv­a­lent of 2 bil­lion passengers.

2– “Let’s get real…Ideology kills”. Mary Robin­son, for­mer Pres­i­dent of Ire­land, on what it takes to stop HIV/ AIDS: “I am from Ire­land, a Catholic coun­try. And I am Catholic. But I can see how ide­ol­ogy kills..we need more empa­thy with real­ity, and to work with local women in those coun­tries who need things like female con­doms.” She was implic­itly crit­i­ciz­ing the large bud­get devoted to unre­al­is­tic absti­nence pro­grams. This ses­sion included a fas­ci­nat­ing exchange where Bill Frist rose from the audi­ence to defend the role of US aid, explain­ing how 60% of retro­vi­ral drugs in African coun­tries have been funded by the Amer­i­can tax­payer, high­light­ing Pres­i­dent Bush’s courage to make HIV/AIDS a top agenda item in many devel­op­ing coun­tries, and crit­i­ciz­ing other coun­tries for not doing enough. Which made Nobel Prize Lau­re­ate Peter Agre, also in the audi­ence, stand up and encour­age the US to really step up to the plate and devote 1% of the GDP to aid, as a num­ber of Euro­pean coun­tries do, instead of 0.1%.

3– Where is the new “Sput­nik”?: Basic sci­ence is cru­cial for inno­va­tion and for eco­nomic growth, but it is often under­ap­pre­ci­ated. Sci­en­tists are not “nerds”, as some­times they are por­trayed in pop­u­lar cul­ture, but peo­ple with a deep curios­ity and drive to solve a Big prob­lem. Many of the speak­ers had been inspired by the Sput­nik and the Apollo mis­sions to become sci­en­tists, at a time when the pro­fes­sion was con­sid­ered cool. Two Nobel Prize Lau­re­ates (Peter Agre, Michael Bishop), talked about their lives and careers try­ing to demys­tify what it takes to be a sci­en­tist and to win a Nobel Prize. Both are grate­ful to the tax­pay­ers dol­lars that funded their research, and insist we must do a bet­ter job at explain­ing the sci­en­tific process to soci­ety at large. Both are proud of hav­ing attended small lib­eral arts col­leges, and hav­ing evolved from there, fueled by their great curios­ity and unpre­dictable, serendip­i­tous paths, into launch­ing new sci­en­tific and med­ical fields.  Bishop listed a num­ber of times where he made deci­sions that were con­sid­ered “career sui­cide” by men­tors and col­leagues, and men­tioned “I was con­fused” around 15 times in 15 minutes…down to earth and inspiring.

4– We need a true Health Care Cul­ture: Mark Ganz sum­ma­rized it best by explain­ing how his health provider group improved care when they rede­fined them­selves from “we are 7,000 employ­ees” to “we are a 3 mil­lion strong com­mu­nity”, mov­ing from Read the rest of this entry »