Response journal entry #3: Intelligent Learning Environments: recommendations from the Neuroscience perspective

On Wednesday May 26th, 2010, we had an interesting lecture in our university based on Intelligent Learning Environments: recommendations from the Neuroscience perspective by Silvia Castro.
The great progress in neuroscience has allowed separating the brain mechanisms that enable learning, remembering and recording the information permanently in the brain.
During the lecture she explained how the brain becomes more effective when we learn something complicated. One aspect I agreed on was, what makes a brain to work in better efficient way?, that is, its capacity to generate experience and information to become more concise and more quickly, because there should be a multi-sensory stimulation and sensory sources; the more information and the more sense we have, we will learn in a better and faster way. That´s how we have learned most of the time, by doing it, and knowing step by step what we are doing, and at the end we would be able to stick with it.
Learning must be meaningful, varied, practical and situated. Nowadays, technology can help us to make easier to obtain all kind of information. However, not all facilities like this one, is good, because it makes the brain lazy and therefore not capable of doing a real research of what we are learning because is already handed it to us. We need to be very careful, and be self-conscious about real and honest learning.
Another aspect that I liked about neuroscience is trying to go beyond of any intelligence tests in order to explore the brain in regions or functions that will determine the cleverness of a person. The constant practice in problem solving can reactivate memory traces for learninf a second language. The learning process must be activated prior knowledge and relate new concepts in order to remind them and be able to have the neurons as connectors to get the information.
Definitely when the environment for learning is good, the learning will be better. It is therefore important as educators should focus our efforts on capturing the attention of the student with the greatest variety of possibilities, always seeking to stimulate the satisfaction in the educational process. In consequently, thanks to the contribution of neuroscience is possible that teachers and classes are no longer boring, by contrast, learning can be a pleasurable and effective activity.