He would study the way thoughts change the brain by using TMS to observe changes in the finger maps of people learning to play the piano.  One of Pascual-Leone’s heroes, the great Spanish neuroanatamist and Nobel laureate Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who spent his later life looking in vain for brain plasticity, proposed in 1894 that the “organ of thought is, within certain limits, malleable, and perfectible by well-directed mental exercise.”  In 1904 he argued that thoughts, repeated in “mental practice”, must strengthen the existing neuronal connections and create new ones.  He also had the intuition that this process would be particularly pronounced in neurons that control the fingers in pianists, who do so much mental practice.

Ramon y Cajal, using his imagination, had painted a picture of a plastic brain but lacked the tools to prove it.  Pascual-Leone now thought he had a tool in TMS to test whether mental practice and imagination in fact lead to physical changes.

The details of the imagining experiment were simple and picked up Cajal’s idea to use the piano.  Pascual-Leone taught two groups of people, who had never studied piano, a sequence of notes, showing them which fingers to move and letting them hear the notes as they were played.  Then members of one group, the “mental practice” group, sat in front of an electric piano keyboard, two hours a day, for five days, and imagined both playing the sequence and hearing it played.  A second “physical practice” group actually played the music two hours a day for five days.  Both groups had their brains mapped before the experiment, each day during it, and afterward.  Then both groups were asked to play the sequence, and a computer measured the accuracy of their performances.

Pascual-Leone found that both groups learned to play the sequence, and both showed similar brain map changes.  Remarkably, mental practice alone produced the same physical changes in the motor system as actually playing the piece.  By the end of the fifth day, the changes in motor signals to the muscles were the same in both groups, and the imagining players were as accurate as the actual players were on the third day.

The level of improvement at five days in the mental practice group, however substantial, was not as great as in those who did physical practice.  But when the mental practice group finished its mental training and was given a single two-hour physical practice session, its overall performance improved to the level of the physical practice group’s performance at five days.  Clearly mental practice is an effective way to prepare for learning a physical skill with minimal physical practice.

As I said, a really fascinating book and worth checking out.

Q: What do you think of the current trend toward one-to-one computing in schools, in which every kid has his or her own laptop or handheld?
A: Well, that’s why I invented the idea of the Dynabook [Kay's 1968 prototype for a wirelessly networked, multimedia laptop]. That’s the whole point of that concept. As Seymour Papert once pointed out, just imagine the absurdity of a school that has only two pencils in each classroom. Or imagine a school where all the pencils are locked up in a special room.

But I think the big problem is that schools have very few ideas about what to do with the computers once the kids have them. It’s basically just tokenism, and schools just won’t face up to what the actual problems of education are, whether you have technology or not.

Think about it: How many books do schools have—and how well are children doing at reading? How many pencils do schools have—and how well are kids doing at math? It’s like missing the difference between music and instruments. You can put a piano in every classroom, but that won’t give you a developed music culture, because the music culture is embodied in people.

On the other hand, if you have a musician who is a teacher, then you don’t need musical instruments, because the kids can sing and dance. But if you don’t have a teacher who is a carrier of music, then all efforts to do music in the classroom will fail—because existing teachers who are not musicians will decide to teach the C Major scale and see what the bell curve is on that.

The important thing here is that the music is not in the piano. And knowledge and edification is not in the computer. The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

Educators have to face up to what 21st-century education needs to be about, and start thinking about solving that problem long before they bring the computer
on the scene.

So since I didn’t actually create the look of this page myself, here is something I did throw together very quickly.

If only all the Scheme assignments were that easy.

Carl Sagan on Skepticism and Wonder

I have also recorded another episode of Spectrum Analysis.  I’m really hoping to be able to continue that project for at least the coming semester and I think I will be able to do that.  Just as long as Fay hasn’t battered my Miami crew too badly.

I do find it amusing how I have practically no human visitors to my site but spam bots manage to find me just fine, wanting to link to all sorts of “fantastic opportunities”.   So if you are a real human, why not try to post a comment?  You have to correctly answer a very basic math question, and then I have to approve your comment.   But hopefully I won’t get so much spam even in the moderation stage.  Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.