For most educators and scientists, the phrase "science in the classroom" conjures up images of baking soda volcanoes and smoking glass test tubes. But for Dr. Michael Merzenich, a professor of otolaryngology and a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, "science in the classroom" means jump starting academic performance and student achievement. And lucky for us, Merzenich is a man who follows through on his beliefs.

"The end point in science is an issue. It's not a method, it's not the next experiment, it's an issue. The whole idea is to solve something, to figure out something."

As one of the founders of Scientific Learning Corporation, Dr. Merzenich has dedicated himself to using theoretical science to make a practical difference. Bridging that gap requires a certain irreverence, an instinct for challenging rules that limit progress. With his quick wit and schoolboy grin, Merzenich fits the bill perfectly.

His easy demeanor belies Dr. Merzenich's status as one of the country's most respected neuroscientists. A member of the famed National Academy of Sciences, Merzenich has done no less than revolutionize scientific understanding of brain development and learning throughout his career. In 1997, Merzenich joined Drs. Paula Tallal, Bill Jenkins, and Steve Miller to use his scientific accomplishments to make a real difference in student achievement. The success of the Fast Forword line of training programs is a testament to Merzenich's ability to transcend the artificial lines that divide theory from practice, the university from the public, and science from education.

BrainConnection: Dr. Merzenich, your research makes profound connections between education and basic neuroscience, two fields that most people would never relate. In a world of increasing specialization, what drives you to look outside of your own field?

Michael Merzenich: Well, I've always thought that one of the challenges of any scientist is to maintain an open-minded view, to maintain flexibility. One of the ways that you maintain an open-minded view is to take information from wherever you can get it. Cross-fertilization is crucial. One of the positive things that I got from Vernon Mountcastle, my graduate mentor, was an understanding that the more you understood about behavior, the more you could understand the constraints on physiology. You got a much clearer idea of what to measure and where the possibilities of correlation might really lie.

I began reading and thinking about practical and medical issues because I saw them as a source of insight. When you begin to see cross-fertilization of ideas from different disciplines, you have a special source of insight, and you become unafraid of it. I also believe strongly that the end point in science is an issue. It's not a method, it's not the next experiment, it's an issue. The whole idea is to solve something, to figure out something.

BC: So in your eyes, practical application is an integral part of basic science?

Merzenich: Yes, I feel very strongly about that. As a scientist, I think it's very enriching to try to carry the fundamental science into human application. There are a couple of good reasons for doing that, but one is certainly that it gives you sources of insight into issues of science that no one else has.

BC: Your work has shown that the brain can learn throughout life, while older theories described the adult brain as pretty rigid. But if our brain is always learning and changing, how do we retain information and skills? How does any stability occur?

Merzenich: That's a big question, a wonderful question. Let's talk about it from this perspective. Skills and abilities develop over time. This happens because the brain develops a fundamental level of processing, then learns progressively more complex behaviors to mastery. By mastering, I mean that to a certain point performing that task becomes automatic, it can be performed without the brain actually attending to what's happening. A mastered skill becomes part of the platform that underlies more complex skills and abilities.

For example, when a baby first learns to roll over, a lot of attention hypothetically has to be put into that skill. But later in life, there's not a whole lot of attention put into rolling over, or into any one of the thousands of other little movement abilities that are piled on top of it. So basically, you're constructing a repertoire of mastered skills and abilities that can be performed automatically.

So how does all of this platform stuff contribute to the development of any new skill? You have to re-engage the fundamental machinery of the brain. At this point the cortical neurons are working in a highly specific way, so that indicates that they have a sustained immediate efficiency.

It's a conflict between reliability and change, or to put it another way, if I change anything on any level in the brain, everything else has got to change.

 

 

 

"The brain doesn't lose it's [ability to learn a foreign language.] There are stronger demands that drive the brain in a twenty-year old versus a one-year old, but I don't think the cortex is shutting down its ability to learn, or to refine its machinery in relation to a new language."

BC: One example of that conflict might be in learning a second language. It's easy when you're a child, but it is hard to do as an adult. Doesn't that mean that the brain is losing its ability to change?

Merzenich: Oh, I don't think that's a correct interpretation of that phenomenon. I think that the brain doesn't lose its basic plasticity at all. I don't think it's degraded. You could say that there are stronger demands that drive the brain in a twenty-year old versus a one-year old, but I don't think the cortex is shutting down its ability to learn, or to refine its machinery in relation to a new language.

When you learn multiple languages together in a young brain, you create a kind of composite phonology that includes all of the elements of the two or so languages; you can see that in imaging. If you could isolate the phonological representations in the brain, you'd find that you have generated overlapping representations of the phonemes of the multiple languages, into a single master phonemic representation.

BC: So people who learn multiple languages as children process language differently than monolingual people?

Merzenich: The indication is that they're processing these languages as part of a "larger" language, you could say, that includes the elements of both. But why is it harder to acquire a second language later? Well, for one thing because the brain is being progressively occupied by the native language, as it becomes more and more powerful syntactically.

The longer you run this process, the more powerfully you can predict and sort the constructs of the first language in rich variety, in all kinds of spectral and tonal variations. You can make predictions at high speed about what belongs with what. But now, if I deliver a new set of complex acoustic inputs moving by at high speed... well, sorting that means that the brain now has to set up a second body of information in this highly competitive structure. The strong ongoing tendency of the machinery is to sort the sounds of the second language onto the first, because the brain is occupied by the first language.

That doesn't mean that the brain has lost its capacity to learn. Of course there's a critical period, in the sense that it becomes more difficult for you to acquire the second language in this competitive environment, but it doesn't mean that the brain is done.

"The public has paid for neuroscience research, like every other area of research, with the understanding that they'll get something from it."

BC: In other words, you learn a second language by mapping it on top of your first language. Does that mean that you can't modify the structure of the first language, the original underlying structure?

Merzenich: Who says you can't modify the original structure? I mean, is Fast ForWord modifying the original structure? Of course it is. And is it hard? That's relative. The reality is that by the time the child is nine months old they have been in the presence of about four and a half million words, and roughly half a million of those were directed to the child. That's a lot of training, but does it mean that we have to re-train a child with several thousand trials? No, we don't. That indicates that things are substantially malleable, not rigid.

BC: These theoretical ideas had already made you an extremely successful scientist before founding Scientific Learning. What motivated you to move from theory to a product?

Merzenich: I think that the public has paid for neuroscience research, like every other area of research, with the understanding that they'll get something from it. Of course, they do get something from it, in an understanding of the elemental and complex basis of the function of brain and mind. And this is a great cumulative achievement. But also, they ought to expect, if not demand, practical returns. I've always regarded myself as being a public servant in this respect.

I think that we're at the beginning of a great harvest. Obviously on the side of pharmaceutical chemistry, and from the point of view of genetic engineering, there has been a tremendous, positive translation of research findings into practical uses in medicine. I think we're going to see exactly the same thing in a different way coming out of integrative neuroscience. In condition after condition we'll begin to understand how the dynamic mechanisms of the brain are contributing to the expressions of illnesses, and ultimately that will lead to manifold strategies for attacking these conditions and their symptoms and their expressions. Ultimately, we will do this in a sophisticated way, with appropriate intensive behavioral, or maybe direct, stimulation.

So I think what the public is going to see in the next ten years is the beginning of a great class of breakthroughs in understanding the contributions of change in the brain. It will completely change how we think about and treat neurological and psychiatric illness, human disability and impairment, degradation of function in aging --- essentially the human condition as expressed in neurological terms.