Neuroscience and the Classroom: Making Connections

Gauge your emotional response

Take a moment to be aware of your emotional response as you look at this picture. How does this emotion manifest itself in your body—your heart rate, your breathing, your muscles? What thoughts does accompany these physical reactions?

Hallie Cohen

"Kids like to know that they are going to be heard, and that what they are saying is important and valuable. That is fundamental to all this." – Hallie Cohen

Hallie Cohen attended Cleveland Institute of Music; Ithaca College; and Binghamton University, State University of New York. She has taught in public schools in both New York and Ohio and is currently a string specialist and reading intervention teacher at Walnut Springs Middle School in Westerville, Ohio. As a freelance violinist she has played in orchestras in upstate New York, Washington, DC, Maryland, Virginia, Indiana, and Ohio, in addition to performing locally with the Central Ohio Symphony and Newark Granville Orchestra.

Mirror Neurons

Neuroscientific evidence suggests that one basic entry point into understanding others' goals and feelings is the process of actively simulating in our own brain the actions we observe in others. This involves the firing of neurons that would be activated were we actually performing an action, although we are only observing it in someone else. Neurons performing mirroring functions have been directly observed in primates and other species, including birds. In humans, brain activity consistent with "mirroring" has been found in the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the primary somatosensory cortex and the inferior parietal cortex.

Admiration for Virtue

The data revealed that even the most complex, abstract emotions—those that require maturity, reflection, and world knowledge to appreciate—do involve our most advanced brain networks. However, they seem to get their punch—their motivational push—from activating basic biological regulatory structures in the most primitive parts of the brain, those responsible for monitoring functions like heart rate and breathing. In turn, the basic bodily changes induced during even the most complex emotions—e.g., our racing heart or clenched gut—are "felt" by sensory brain networks. When we talk of having a gut feeling that some action is right or wrong, we are not just speaking metaphorically.

Interrelated Forms of "Self"

We understand others' feelings in part by simulating them on our own neural mechanisms for bodily and mental self (in essence the subjective feeling or awareness of being "real"). Research suggests that we may have two interrelated platforms. The orange area is a central region for representing our own musculoskeletal, "arms and legs" body. This area is more active when we feel compassion for someone in physical pain or when we admire exceptional skill, presumably because these emotions are about others' physical pains and abilities. The blue area is a central region for representing the state of one's own internal, visceral body. This area is more active when we feel compassion for social or psychological pain or admiration for virtuousness, suggesting that these emotions may have co-opted the feeling of our "gut" self, as poets have long described.