The Science of Learning: Best Approaches for Your Brain Do you wonder why people don’t understand the idea you’re trying to get across in a meeting? Are you mentoring another developer and struggling to understand why the still don’t get it? Do you run training courses and wonder why the attendees only learn 10% of the material? Only twenty years ago most people in the world of neuroscience believed that the connections between the neurons in your brain were fixed by the time you were a teenager (or even younger)[1]. The hippocampus is the gatekeeper for long term memory, in this case declarative memory (i.e. stories and experiences). Abstract Ideas We sometimes start talking about Unit Testing with a long theoretical explanation and we get blank stares from the people we’re trying to help. In the case of kids it would be more effective to teach math by using blocks or any other physical object that makes the idea concrete. What is going on in your brain? Emotion It is used to drive our behaviour however it can sometimes get in our way. Images