On a recent early morning field trip, Kyle Takei appeared surprisingly awake for a typical high school teenager.<\/p>\n
Wide-eyed and bouncing in place, the 18-year-old, who had traveled from Vermont to the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center<\/a> at McLean Hospital<\/a> in Belmont, Mass., was eager to hold something special: a human brain.<\/p>\n After a brief introduction and comments from Tim Wheelock, the center\u2019s assistant director in neuropathology, Takei donned a Tyvek gown and latex gloves and picked up one of several cerebral specimens on the steel table before him.<\/p>\n Without even a hint of irony, the awestruck teen called it \u201cmind-blowing.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard to believe that this 1,400-gram hunk of stuff is what controls everything. At one point, this was some guy\u2019s brain, and he had thoughts and dreams, but now he is being studied by me,\u201d said Takei in amazement as he turned the brain over repeatedly in his hands.<\/p>\n Takei was part of a high school class trip coordinated with the help of Adi Flesher, a master\u2019s student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education<\/a> (HGSE).<\/p>\n Flesher is pursuing his degree in the School\u2019s Mind, Brain, and Education<\/a> program, an interdisciplinary, one-year sequence that connects the study of cognition, neuroscience, and educational practice.<\/p>\n \u201cI just really got interested in talking with kids about their minds,\u201d said Flesher, a former assistant director of a summer camp who became increasingly fascinated with how and what his young campers thought after hearing them discuss their own struggles with attention deficit and obsessive compulsive disorders.<\/p>\n \u201cWe take 16-year-olds and teach them about a car so that they can drive. There\u2019s driver\u2019s ed, but there\u2019s no brain ed,\u201d said Flesher. \u201cIf you think about it, the study of the brain is a much more basic and important part of human life that we don\u2019t really address in any formal way in the education system.\u201d<\/p>\n When his brother Amir, a teacher at the Compass School<\/a> in Vermont, needed to help develop an interdisciplinary elective class, one that could rival the school\u2019s established filmmaking course in popularity, he looked to Adi for inspiration.<\/p>\n In exploring what to study, Amir and fellow teacher Beth White brainstormed with their students on possible topics. In the end, the brain was the top vote getter. With help and suggestions from the students and input from Adi, the teachers combined the science and psychology of the brain into a class they call \u201cThe Science of the Mind.\u201d The course is a series of workshops divided into a humanities component \u2014 where the teens study such diverse areas as Buddhist psychology, Plato\u2019s \u201cParable of the Cave,\u201d and the psychological dimensions to the science fiction film \u201cThe Matrix\u201d \u2014 and a science section, where they study the anatomy and mechanics of the human brain. As a final project, students write an academic article on a mind or brain topic for inclusion in their own scientific journal.<\/p>\n The class culminated in last week\u2019s outing to neuroscience, psychology, and education labs around the University. This is the second trip to Harvard for the high school class. The first group of Compass students visited in 2008 when the course was in its pilot phase. Though Amir and White coordinated the first excursion, they were able to use Adi\u2019s Harvard connections to broaden the scope of this year\u2019s visit.<\/p>\n The students listened intently on March 25 as Joshua Greene<\/a> explained how the brain engages in moral reasoning. Greene, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology<\/a> who directs Harvard\u2019s Moral Cognition Lab<\/a>, discussed how he uses neuroimaging to explore how the brain reacts to the \u201ctrolley problem,\u201d an ethical dilemma that asks if it is morally acceptable to throw a switch that will guide an errant trolley onto a track, killing one trapped person, but saving five others trapped along the track\u2019s first section.<\/p>\n Ariel Temple, 17, said of Greene\u2019s research, \u201cI just love challenging my mind with those hypotheticals: What would I do, what\u2019s moral, what\u2019s not. All that kind of stuff, I just find it really fun.\u201d<\/p>\n Later that day, the group visited HGSE\u2019s Project Zero, where the students offered themselves up as test subjects for master\u2019s candidates developing experiments around how people think about the concept of emergence, and video games aimed at helping students to learn about science.<\/p>\n For the youngest member of the expedition, handling human brains was challenging.<\/p>\n \u201cThe thought that holding somebody\u2019s brain in your hands is [holding] everything that made them who they were, their thoughts, their memories, their life\u2019s story \u2026 that is a lot to take in,\u201d said Meghan McGowan.<\/p>\n Still, the 16-year-old was thrilled to meet Greene, the author of a paper on moral reasoning that she read prior to the trip.<\/p>\n \u201cI read it like seven times, and thought \u2018this is so cool.\u2019 Come to find out yesterday, the guy who wrote it, we met.\u201d<\/p>\n Flesher and his brother are now exploring ways to bring the brain class to more students, in part through summer camp programs, and by developing a teaching model that can be used by other schools.<\/p>\n \u201cOur ultimate hope,\u201d said Adi, \u201cis to get more kids engaged in this kind of cool learning.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On a recent early morning field trip, Kyle Takei appeared surprisingly awake for a typical high school teenager. Wide-eyed and bouncing in place, the 18-year-old, who had traveled from Vermont to the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., was eager to hold something special: a human brain. After a brief […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-499993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499993\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}