During the school year, I frantically try to organize my children’s schedules, my work schedule, app updates, conference planning, and keep up with new research articles and social media. I still do all of that in the summer, but it’s a little less intense.
One of my goals this summer is to read “for leisure.” As I picked up the book Brain on Fire, I shook my head at my idea of “leisure.” However, the truth is that I enjoy neurology and prefer it over the choice of summer romance novels that line the shelves of bookstores and the beach bags of vacationers. As a matter of fact, one of the things I really liked about the book is the technical detail that the author uses to describe her “month of madness.” The author, Susannah Cahalan, was a happy, healthy 24 year old reporter for The New York Times. She begins to experience paranoia, memory loss, and eventually psychosis until doctors are able to diagnose and treat her rare condition. (I don’t consider this a spoiler since the book is an autobiography).
Before you start to worry that this is going to become a book review, there was a part that I believe relates to teaching — and not only to teaching Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). One of the pieces of advice that I (and others) frequently give is that when you’re introducing AAC, make it fun. Be silly, and respond to what the children say in an animated way so that they associate meaning to the word that they’ve just heard…and so that they remember the word.
One part if the book explains why that works, so I’m sharing it for any fellow neurology nerds. The author is describing how she remembers her hallucinations (when she’s forgotten so much) and she writes:
“…these head trips were intensely emotional and would therefore be tagged as important by the hippocampus and amygdala, an almond-shaped structure situated atop the hippocampus, located at the sides of the head above the ears in the temporal lobes, is a structure intimately involved in emotion and memory, helping to choose which memories should be kept and which should be discarded, based on which events have traumatized or excited us. The hippocampus tags the memory with context (the speech room with the speech-language pathologist, for example), and the amygdala provides the emotion (fear, excitement, and pain).
When the amygdala stamps the experience with high emotional value, it’s more likely to be preserved, a process called encoding, and eventually made into a memory, called consolidation. The hippocampus and amygdala help encode and consolidate the experience, or make it a memory that can be retrieved later.”
– Susannah Cahalan
from Brain on Fire page 243-244
Based on this, it’s important to keep in mind that this process happens whether we are conscious of it or not. Our brains do this because something is emotional…whether it’s a positive or negative emotion. If you are working on oral motor exercises and a child is crying in your speech room, he is going to remember it, and may cry or become upset when you walk into the room. By this same process, he will remember intensely giggling as you lay on the floor snoring because he said “sleep” on his device, and may happily run to you with his device when he sees you.
Be aware of the brain reactions you’re causing and the memories you’re making when you come into contact with people, especially when they are relying on you to teach them something as important as communication. Associate yourself with feelings of excitement, fun, pride, and success and children’s brains will decide that the information is worth remembering. If the satisfaction of fun, positive, emotional interactions is not enough…it’s evidence-based!
Sources from Brain on Fire:
“amygdala, an almond-shaped situated atop the hippocampus”:
Michael O’Shea, The Brain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2005).
Elizabeth A. Phelps and Tali Sharot, “How (and Why) Emotion Enhances Subjective Sense of Recollection,” Current Directions in Psychological Sciences 17 (2008): 147-152.
Joseph E. LeDoux, “Emotion Circuits in the Brain,” Annual Reviews of Neuroscience 23 (2000): 155-185.
“help encode and consolidate:”
Jesse Rissman and Anthony D. Wagner, “Distributed Representations in Memory: Insights from Functional Brain Imaging,” Annual Review of Psychology 63 (2012): 101-128.
Richard C. Mohs, “How Human Memory Works,” HowStuffWorks.com
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