3 Neuromyths About Learning and Behavior

Or: false things people say that annoy me as a parent

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One of the annoying things about being a parent (or a human in general) is how often one needs to bite their tongue as someone else is saying something clearly false but it would be rude and weird to point it out.

So instead, I've decided to write a takedown of these things on the internet. That way I can maintain a veneer of having some minimal level of social skills while still being a pedantic twat. Talk about having your cake and eating it too!

In all seriousness, these are neuroscience-based myths I run into a fair amount as a parent. Enjoy!

1. Learning Styles

There's this idea that different people learn better through their preferred sensory modalities. We hear about "visual learners" or "auditory learners". It's a pervasive idea in the education world, with over 90% of teachers in the UK believing it. This is interesting, since in the psychology and neuroscience literature it's one of the most commonly used examples of a "neuromyth".

Learning styles certainly has appeal as an idea. It simultaneously suggests some individualization in education, which sounds like a good thing, but it also suggests a very tractable number of "styles" (usually three—visual, auditory, and haptic/kinaesthetic) to be accommodated. It often comes with neuroscience explanations that sensory modalities are processed by distinct parts of the brain (ignoring that sensory information is typically processed in a widely distributed and integrated way across modalities).

The issue is that we've repeatedly tested the theory of learning styles and we know they aren't a real thing. It's not a hard thing to test—since learning styles are supposed to be based on individual preference, you just find out people's learning style, and then test if they learn better when taught in that modality or a different one. We've done this experiment a bunch of times. It doesn't work.

I like to think education is a progressive thing—that over time, we are learning more about learning, and that improves the education system. My kids should get a better education than I did, because we've had more time for research on what works.

But these sorts of myths are common in the education field, which makes me pessimistic about how much educational practices are being guided by the research. Most US states reference learning styles in their state-provided material for teachers studying for their licensing exam:

I was happy to discover at least my state, MA, references but does not advocate for learning styles. Source

There's no benefit to this. Teaching learning styles to teachers, and teaching students using learning styles, is a waste of time and resources.

2. Left Brain Right Brain

This is another myth common in education—that people have one "dominant" hemisphere of their brain, and this helps explain differences between learners. Over 90% of teachers in the UK believe this myth, too.

While there is some lateralization in the brain (meaning one hemisphere is more involved or better at certain functions than the other), it's massively misinterpreted in the general understanding.

In the 1960s, Roger Sperry worked with epilepsy patients who had undergone surgery to sever the major connections between the two hemispheres of the brain. His work was groundbreaking, winning him the Nobel Prize. His research led to the modern understanding of differences between the hemispheres, like that for most people, the left hemisphere is more dominant in language processing and the right is more dominant in spatial and non-verbal reasoning (though Sperry himself showed the right hemisphere has a significant amount of language processing).

But there isn't a neat "creative" versus "logical" division between the hemispheres. More importantly for education, individuals aren't "left" or "right" dominant. These ideas are misinterpretations of the neuroscience research on hemispheric differences.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of books and materials directed at teachers advising on things like how to "access" students' left or right hemisphere, or how to direct teaching of left-brained students versus right-brained students. Some have argued this stuff isn't just a waste of time, but positively damaging to education:

By expecting some students to be “left-brain learners” and think mostly logically and others to be “right-brain learners” and think mostly creatively, we limit all students’ opportunities to learn and grow.

—Donna Coch, Professor of Education

3. Sugar Causes Hyperactivity

Any parent that's been to a birthday party has likely heard this myth expressed: "After all this cake and candy, these kids are going to be out of control."

Like many myths, this one started with someone trying to sell something. In the 1970s, Ben Feingold, an allergist, wrote a best-selling book blaming ADHD on food additives. The main focus of the book was on food additives—colorings and flavorings, but it also mentioned sweeteners, sugar in particular.

The Feingold Diet became extremely popular. Popular enough that a slew of experiments up through the early 1980s tested the idea. They found no evidence that eliminating the various food additives impacted hyperactivity. In 1982, Feingold died, and the Feingold Diet slowly went out of style, as these sorts of fads tend to do (anyone remember how gluten was the cause of everything bad for about a decade?).

But the idea that sugar caused hyperactivity stuck around.

So again, there were a bunch of studies, and by the 1990s, we had a clear picture from the studies: "The meta-analytic synthesis of the studies to date found that sugar does not affect the behavior or cognitive performance of children".

Interestingly, though the studies didn't show a difference in behavior of the children, they did show a difference in behavior of the parents: parents who think their kid is consuming sugar report higher levels of hyperactivity. In other words, we see what we expect.

I suspect there are a few reasons why this continues to be a popular myth:

1. Kids usually are hyperactive when they get a lot of sugar, since they usually get a lot of sugar at exciting events. Kids go nuts at birthday parties. The holidays have lots of sweets and lots of excitement. But it's the stimulating event, not the sugar, that makes the kids nuts.

2. It sounds kind of plausible to people with some level of understanding of nutrition. Simple carbohydrates are digested more quickly, so it sounds plausible that kids could get a burst of energy from the literal energy in sugar.

3. It's simple. The original Feingold Diet pointed a finger at hundreds of different additives, making it confusing as a cause. Sugar is easier, it's one thing, and it's obvious when a lot of added sugar has been consumed making it easy to think you see a cause-and-effect relationship.

So there you have it, I managed to rant about three myths in one post. I've done my small part to fractionally reduce the likelihood of running into these myths in conversation (mostly by making it obvious to anyone who reads my writing that I'm a pedant about these things).

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