Fascinating story in today’s Washington Post (registration may be required) about “neuroplasticity,” the brain’s capacity to be rewired by mental regimens of one sort or another. The Post story concerns Buddhist monks steeped in years of meditation whose brains produce dramatically more intense and focused gamma waves than usual, a fascinating piece of information all by itself, but only one part of the ramifications of neuroplasticity, as reporter Marc Kaufman writes:

“What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain activation on a scale we have never seen before,” said Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the university’s new $10 million W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior. “Their mental practice is having an effect on the brain in the same way golf or tennis practice will enhance performance.” It demonstrates, he said, that the brain is capable of being trained and physically modified in ways few people can imagine. Scientists used to believe the opposite — that connections among brain nerve cells were fixed early in life and did not change in adulthood. But that assumption was disproved over the past decade with the help of advances in brain imaging and other techniques, and in its place, scientists have embraced the concept of ongoing brain development and “neuroplasticity.”

Dr. Davidson’s analogy of “golf or tennis practice” suggests that these neurological findings may be a case of back-to-the-future for educational theory. I almost said “pedagogical theory,” but of course these findings would apply equally well, or better, to andragogy, if indeed Knowles’ distinctions between pedagogy and andragogy are finally tenable. (My thanks to Lisa Ames for introducing me to this interesting and controversial term.) In any event, just as we know that part of the practice of a sport involves deliberate conditioning of certain muscles and reflex patterns that are important to excellence without being limited to a particular sport, or as much fun as actually playing a game of golf or tennis, it may also be that certain kinds of mental exercise help shape the direction or even the extent of our brains’ neuroplasticity in a way that would promote excellence in either particular or general intellectual endeavors, without that exercise being as enjoyable or apparently purposeful as we’d like it to be. This is, of course, a very old idea. Perhaps older kinds of curricular design had more merit than we’d like to admit: learning a foreign language, or diagramming sentences, or solving polynomial equations, or analyzing film clips, may be Good For You whatever your field of specialization turns out to be. Or to put it even more bluntly, maybe your piano teacher was right to devote so much time to having you practice your scales. It turns out that your brain really is like a muscle after all:

“What we found is that the trained mind, or brain, is physically different from the untrained one,” [Richardson] said. In time, “we’ll be able to better understand the potential importance of this kind of mental training and increase the likelihood that it will be taken seriously.”

Now the happiest education is probably the one in which an activity that the learner finds enjoyable is both good mental training and worthwhile as an end in itself. Yet such an experience is unusual for many students, especially beginners, and doesn’t always occur even for career intellectuals. One brilliant Oxford don confessed that he felt actual nausea at the beginning of any great intellectual undertaking–and I know he’s not alone in that feeling. (Certainly nausea and worse are not unknown to the athlete in intensive training, either.) The surer source of delight, then, is in the gain in neuroplasticity and sheer mental power to which the mental effort contributes. And those gains may be stimulated by mental activity that, like many kinds of physical conditioning, can be repetitive, wearying, even dispiriting. The trick, then, would be to learn enough about learning to have a better sense of what kind of mental regimens make one’s mind the strongest … and the most supple.

Though they are related, I think we should distinguish strength from suppleness, or to put it another way, mental power from neuroplasticity, since the latter is more about the power to be reshaped than about the sheer strength of particular intellection. And if the goal is to prepare our students to be self-directed, life-long learners, to put them in charge of their own zones of proximal development, to make them their own bootstrappers, a crucial function of education must be to train students to recognize, use, and expand their own neuroplasticity. I believe a liberal arts education best serves that crucial function. Education modelled on consumerism or superficial notions of “customer service” does not. True “student-centered” learning does not always mean that students will find their studies immediately engaging or satisfying. Some things will always have to be taken on trust, and struggling to earn that trust is one reason teaching is such hard work.

And always, lurking within every learning moment, a paradox waits: education both increases and decreases neuroplasticity. Tricky business.

(Here’s the original article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice”.)