A Marriage of Art and Learning: An Interview with James Catterall

Dr. James Catterall, professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education, says that his academic career has taken him down three main paths over the last few decades. The first was the examination of the economics of education, a pursuit that extended naturally from his undergraduate background in economics and from his graduate work at Stanford…

Bill Newsome’s Neural Basis of Behavior

Dr. William Newsome is sitting at his PC computer grumbling. “Do you know what IBM stands for?” Newsome asks in a slight Southern drawl. “It stands for ‘I’m Building a Mac’,” he quips, displaying quick-witted charm and ardent loyalty to the Macintosh operating system. Dr. Newsome, an associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, is…

Can Music Education Enhance Brain Functioning and Academic Learning?

Echoing Mozart: Discovering a Link between the Brain and Music When Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher published the results of their study on the relationship between music and spatial task performance in 1993, the “Mozart effect” became a popular term. It referred to the study’s findings that ten minutes of listening to Mozart can boost…

Brain Benefits of Bilingualism

Preventing Dementia Bilingual adults with Alzheimer’s take twice as long to develop symptoms as their monolingual counterparts. The mean age for the first signs of dementia in monolingual adults is 71.4 and for bilingual it is 75.5. Focusing on Tasks Bilingual people display increased concentration on their assignments over their monolingual counterparts. They are more…