Mary Helen Immordino-Yang may seem like 4 or more people given all the hats she wears related to neuroscience and learning.
Among other funded work, Immordino-Yang has a cross-cultural, longitudinal NSF CAREER study investigating adolescent brain and social-emotional development, and relations to school and life achievement in urban contexts.
Note: Immordino-Yang’s 2015 book, Emotions, learning and the brain: Exploring the educational implications of affective neuroscience, (available at Amazon)
But no, somehow it’s just one person doing all this research about what aspects of our brains and nervous systems affect what learning capabilities. Neuroscience in this context would include research into emotional states that may be in turmoil as students try to learn.
One imagines that neuroscience research also addresses what goes on when we use altered states such as VR, AR and other media extensions such as melding with various AI. Mary is noted here as a reminder of how much we don’t know about the body and learning.
For example, we presume that a student who is in an optimal learning state, perhaps emotionally stable, focused, and alert, after a good night’s sleep and a good breakfast will learn much “better” than a student not in those states. We need all the help from neuroscience research into optimal learning states, and how to create them, that we can get.
Kudos to a friend of the site teaching at New Roads School in LA, where MH Immordino-Yang recently spoke on her current research.