Neuroscience and early years education: Brain waves

The latest research by neuroscientists brings important messages for early years educators about how young children's learning develops. Wendy Wallace reads between the lines

Renowned neuroscientist Professor Colin Blakemore has issued a clarion call to the Government and all concerned with early years education to get their priorities right. There is no evidence, he says, that early formal instruction benefits children (and some that it disadvantages them) but plenty to suggest society could make better use of nursery education for three- and four-year-olds.

In a recent lecture to a packed hall at the Royal Society of Arts in London, Professor Blakemore - who has a mission to make science accessible to lay people - outlined increases in scientific understanding of early learning and the brain and the messages they contain for early years educators.

The Government's expansion of pre-school experience for three- and four-year-olds begs the question, said the Professor, of what we do with those two extra years. The knee-jerk reaction from a Government which has staked much on older children achieving basic standards of literacy and numeracy, he said, was to 'lash these kids to their desks'. 'But in fact, all the evidence is that formal instruction before the age of seven or eight does not pay off in terms of lasting benefits.'

Professor Blakemore put forward a compelling argument that leading children to text books and worksheets at the ages of three, four and five may not only damage later academic study but may preclude them learning other, arguably more vital, social skills. The sense of self begins to emerge in children between the ages of around six months and two years. Between the ages of about one and four, said the Professor, children build not only a sense of themselves and their beliefs but an understanding that other individuals are different from them and may have other views, other emotions and other knowledge.

'It is the development of that sense that is the basis of the functioning of our social structures,' he said. 'Altruism, co-operation - those are the things that the brain is set up to learn at three, four, five and they are the things that our society in the last 30 years has become most deficient in.'

Any professional early years worker will already be aware of the intense social learning that takes place in the nursery, as children struggle to be with themselves and others in a group setting. But what scientific evidence is beginning to point to is the possibility that these vital skills can only be fully incorporated in these fleeting years, while the brain is still developing. As social skills are practised, research suggests, they actually alter the structure of the growing brain.

'It's so simple for people to believe that we are feeding one end and changing the other,' says Tom Shea, chief executive of the Jigsaw Group, which sponsored the lecture. 'In reality, our work is substantially more sophisticated than that and we're attempting to make sure our staff know it.'

Research into animals' brains in the past few decades has pointed to the way the development of the brain is dependent on the stimulus it receives.

Neuroscientists at Harvard University in the 1960s experimented with cats reared with one eye closed, and found that even if the eye was later opened - and technically functioned perfectly - the cat saw nothing through it. 'The lack of activity in that eye had led to its disconnection from the brain.'

The researchers discovered a period of sensitivity in cats' development of vision, between about the age of three weeks and three months. Cats who were deprived of the opportunity to use their eyes for even a few hours during that time suffered permanently impaired vision. The great breakthrough in understanding that came from these experiments was that 'stimulation from the world has an organising effect on the brain,' said Professor Blakemore.

That this process holds good for human sight too was tragically proved when in Japan there was a brief fashion for operating on babies' eyes to give them a rounder shape. Babies whose eyes were bandaged for as little as one week in critical periods for sight development went on to develop lifelong sight problems.

In the 1960s, while Colin Blakemore himself was a student at the University of California at Berkeley, other experiments showed the effects of stimulation on the brains of animals. Rats exposed in the first weeks of life to an environment rich in stimulation developed bigger brains, with a thicker cortex.

The difficulties in researching the development of the human brain are obvious; unlike cats and mice, babies cannot be readily experimented on. Magnetic resonance imaging techniques are also shedding light, so to speak, on human brain activity.

But, said Professor Blakemore, some knowledge is transferable. 'We know quite a lot about the development of the brains of animals. I'm certain that those messages can eventually be translated for educators.'

The cumulative effect of the scientific advances so far has mainly been a close attention to the importance of variety and richness of early experience. But are we focusing on the right kind of early experience? Professor Blakemore, now director of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at Oxford University, described the growing tendency, particularly in the United States, to hothouse children's intellectual development as 'unhelpful'.

Focusing on young children's developing social skills and ability to empathise with others would, he suggests, go far in correcting social problems. Professor Blakemore suggested that if these capacities are - for a raft of reasons - no longer being reliably developed in some children in the home, the education system should tackle the deficiency as a priority.

How the brain works remains mysterious. The human brain contains approximately 100 billion nerve cells. Each one has 10,000 connections from other nerve cells. We create one million nerve connections in the brain for every second of our lives - a number almost impossible to conceptualise. What's more, the brain is highly plastic; it continues to adapt in accordance with the way it is used.

New nerve cells are created throughout life. 'It gives new hope to the concept of lifelong learning,' said Colin Blakemore. 'That is what the brain is designed to do.'

Increased understanding of the development of the brain raises the question of whether, at the other end of the life spectrum, the early years curriculum can be tailored to match sensitive periods of brain development. Some pointers are emerging. The brain is programmed to acquire language between birth and the age of about eight years; why then, asks Professor Blakemore, do we generally delay teaching a second language until the secondary school years? Learning languages in the early years uses a different part of the brain from studying them later.

Although infants simultaneously learning two or more languages may initially show some confusion, there is clear evidence that they catch up by age eight.

Begun in the United States in the mid-1990s, this dialogue between educationists and scientists is a relatively new one. Now, there is a flurry of discourse between these two intellectual camps. The current period of what Colin Blakemore called 'creative turmoil' in the world of education - combined with ever more intractable social problems - may make educators increasingly receptive to new ideas from neuroscientists. 'If you don't get it right between nought and five,' says Tom Shea of Jigsaw, 'you're fundamentally failing children. Everything else then becomes trying to restore and revive, rather than building on the platform.'