Here’s a story from so far back that I’m no longer worried
about calling out the people in question.

I sat in a ballroom packed with fellow conference-goers,
hearing the latest science on learning and the brain, brought to us by a
compelling, charismatic, and utterly self-assured speaker.

Amazingly, he told us, people’s underlying neurocognitive
profile reveals itself through one simple test – whether your thumbs cross left or right when you clasp hands. Delighted chatter spread through the
audience as we all tried it ourselves.

Other remarkable facts were to follow, including this one
guaranteed to inspire an audience of educators: When you engage in challenging
mental activity, like the new crop of tech-based brain games, you can actually
prevent cognitive decline in old age. This includes staving off dreaded
diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

So uplifting. So well presented. So wonderfully relevant to teaching
and learning in the contemporary age.

And almost certainly wrong, down to the last word.

I’m a fan of conferences. There is nothing like a good
keynote, or workshop, or even a crackling Twitter backchannel to reconnect you
with like-minded people, get you thinking differently, and set you on a new
course in your work.

At their best, conferences can wildly energizing, and attending
them is a privilege, one that I wish were more broadly accessible
within academia. But there’s a real problem brewing within the education
conference circuit, one that I don’t think we talk about enough but really need
to.

It’s the problem of decorative neuroscience.

You probably know what I mean, because you have probably
seen it yourself. It’s a superficial sprinkling of brain research that’s
presented not in depth and with nuance, and not really intended to convey the
main findings and remaining questions. Decorative neuroscience isn’t there to
do that. It’s there to lend an air of novelty, inevitability, and credibility
to the speaker’s message.

This is not just a problem with conferences. It happens lots
of places, on blogs, marketing materials, in books aimed at audiences of
non-scientists. I’m not the only person who’s expressed frustration with the
practice of borrowing neuroscience concepts, with varying degrees of accuracy,
to prop up claims way beyond what the science itself actually warrants. But
conferences today seem to be ground zero for wild claims, over-extension, and
mistranslation.

I don’t want to come down on the whole idea of bringing
science of all kinds to conversations about learning, or chill productive discussion
by policing what is said and by whom. I love that more people every day are
becoming excited about the science of mind and brain, and that they see it as
relevant to the enterprise of teaching and learning. It’s what I’ve hoped and
waited for my whole career, and the last thing I want to do is get in the way
of that.

I also don’t want to make things harder for people who are
doing the talking. It’s tough to be up at the keynote podium, and doing so
requires the elision of many details that one would never skate over in, say, a
piece of scholarly writing. We can’t knock speakers for trying to pack big
concepts into one short speech, or for trying to make complex ideas engaging
and broadly accessible. That is, after all, what the good ones get paid the big
bucks to do.

But I do want the people who put up their precious money,
time, and energy to hear these messages to get really good, scientifically
grounded ones.

As I talked about in an address that I gave at the 2019 POD
Network conference, it’s also extremely easy to over-interpret, over-apply,
or just flat misrepresent the science when it fits into someone’s already
polarized stance on an issue. Reputable-sounding research is a great whetstone
against which to grind our axes, but doing so simply sets back the whole
enterprise of thoughtful implementation of the best, most solidly established
findings from all the learning
sciences.

So how do you know if you may be encountering decorative neuroscience?
Here are a few red flags.

There are neuroscience-related slides – or
diagrams, or other materials – that aren’t discussed or even explained, but rather
thrown up and taken down as the speaker speeds towards a conclusion. These slides/diagrams/videos contain terms and
illustrations that are probably unfamiliar or totally incomprehensible to the
audience, and this seems like an intentional choice rather than a simple misapprehension.It’s unclear whether “findings” from “research”
refer to converging evidence from multiple studies, or just a single isolated one.There are glaring examples of common misconceptions,
such as neuromyths
or conflating causation and correlation (cognitive
activity prevents brain disease, ADHD is skyrocketing due to the spread of technology,
and so on).It’s unclear which specific studies, books, or
articles are the source of the claims the speaker is making.The speaker lacks an academic background,
publishing history, or any other identifiable credentials that are directly relevant
to the field of neuroscience.  

That last one in particular pains me to write, so I want to
say more about it.

I’m not ready to say that only people with degrees in – or
world-class research programs in, or big-name recognition within – neuroscience
should be the only people who get to talk about it. There is plenty of good
translational science communication by non-scientists out there (see here, here,
and here
for just a few examples). We should treasure the amplification of
evidence-based thinking about teaching and learning that occurs as a result.

But I do think that especially in this area, we need to be informed,
discerning, and choosy consumers. It should be acceptable – common, even – to
ask whether the person discussing neuroscience is an actual expert in the
subject. There are different reasonable levels of that expertise – everything
from having a strong self-taught background, to holding relevant degrees, all
the way up to being a bona-fide world-class contributor of original research in
the field. There’s flexibility in how much of that background we’d consider to
be a bare minimum of credibility. Asking the question, however, should be non-negotiable.

It should also be non-negotiable to have some way of tracing
back to the sources of the speaker’s claims. Talks are no place to include
in-depth literature reviews, or even standard bibliographies, but mention can
be made of key sources within the flow of the talk.

Better yet, speakers can put together a handout, web site,
heck even a Pinterest board or Padlet with
their source materials. This can be a way for people who want to do a deep dive
later to have a way to do that. It also helps nip in the bud any evidence-free
nonsense claims (such as this one about drastically
shrinking attention spans or the debunked “Cone
of Experience”). Even the most solidly well-constructed studies occasionally
have to be revisited when
replications don’t pan out or new information comes along, so it’s good to
know where the speaker is coming from for that reason as well.

Neuroscience is fascinating, trendy, at an early stage of
development, and above all,  extraordinarily
complicated. All of these things create a perfect storm in which misinformation, mythology, and
hype can thrive, even among highly
educated people. This is why we need to  vet our expert speakers, and the
higher-profile the platform and the louder the mike, the stricter the vetting
should be.

Science can be
engaging, approachable, and accurate all at the same time. We know this. It’s
time for our speaker lineups to reflect it as well.