This is Dave Vellante, we're here at day two EMC World 2013. This is the cube where we extract the signal from the noise. We bring you the best guests that we can find. We like to talk about tech athletes. I'm here with David Floyer, the CTO of Wikibon, my personal tech athlete, and Syria Varanasi, who is the vice president of engineering at EMC. Within the new software-defined storage group, the Viper group, you were employee number one, I understand, of Project Born. You were essentially brought in to really get that project started, right? Yes, yes, I was. I was hired in from VMware to start this project. Yeah, okay, so let's take us back to the beginning. When was this now? We talked about a couple years ago? November 2011. November 2011, so. What was the language that was even used back then? Was it software-defined storage? Was it, hey, we have this idea? What do you think? Take us back to the instantiation. So back then, we were looking at two trends. The biggest trends we were looking at was, we had heterogeneous storage that we have in the enterprise, and we were thinking about what does it take to convert that to a private cloud? What does automation mean? And then we were thinking about taking objects to the next level and what do we need to do to actually provide that service to service providers? So those were the big focuses, if you will. Okay, so the name, Project Born, was it, wait a minute, for that's Jason Born. Is that right? It is, it is Jason Born. Okay, so it's a deadly killer. It's all, it's stealth. It's very efficient and adaptable. Those are the characteristics that you guys, it's survivable, right? That's right. Okay, so then, so EMC brought you on from VMware. How did Project Born evolve into Viper? So you know, before it started off being born, it started off being Storage OS. The underlying platform, if you will, on which you can lay on services. So a plan from the very beginning was to actually build a platform that does two things, provide automation and think about new data services that people want. So you know, along the way we thought, okay, Storage OS, that's very blah. We need a new name. So we had a lottery, if you will, on names and Project Born was the official name that we ran under. So that's how it came about. Because there are Storage OSes out there today, right? So what's different about Viper as a Storage OS, if you will, as a platform, than every day run of the mill Storage OS of which EMC has a number of them? For one thing, we're not tied to any platform. So we sit as a layer about any platform. We're completely on software. We manage a whole bunch of heterogeneous arrays that have their own OSes on it. And what we actually do with the platform is we try to provide services that can leverage services that are written on top of our platform across all the physical infrastructure. So that's the big focus for us. So we're actually not buried inside any system, if you will. Okay, so now your baby is born and you're seeing this product come to market. David Floyer and I were trying to, again, unpack Viper yesterday. So you talk about separating the control plane from the data plane. Why is that important? And what does that bring for your customers? So there's two challenges that we see when we go into and talk to customers. The first is they buy Best of Breed equipment today. And Best of Breed could be EMC arrays, third-party arrays, who knows what they buy. What ends up happening is they actually provide solutions that work for everybody, but managing this is extremely complicated. So the first need for the customers, can I provide automation to make it simple to manage existing infrastructure? That's the first big push for us. The second thing is, as you've heard throughout the conference here, people want to know, hey, yes, we have block and file and we consume that, we know what to do, it's complicated, but okay, I understand what to do. For things like the new data services, Bead object, Bead HDFS, how do we adapt? What do we need to do? How many solutions do we need? So we wanted to provide a single place where you can do both, and that's fundamentally... So, why? So do you want to jump in there? Yeah, sure. So you provide a set of services at that layer. So the automation and provisioning and all of that is at that layer. So where do you draw the line? For example, you could put replication there, or you could put send provisioning there, or you could put ODF from Microsoft there. Where do you draw the line between a service which you would expect to see, like for example replication, and would be useful? So for example, you take Invista, that had the services, common services for all the stuff that were underneath the virtualized level. So, what's your thinking about that? So the first piece of the puzzle for us, if you will, is physical infrastructure already contains appliances, if you will, where we can solve similar problems, right? You've mentioned Invista. So we have Vplex, which does the same thing. It sits in the path and it's an HA product. Yeah, it doesn't do much of the services, though, does it? It leaves that. But you're just giving an example of an appliance. That's right. So you have Vplex, which is actually a storage array, but it also provides these services about HA and availability. You have things like Recovery Point that provide us data protection you can copy from an array to another array. So wherever we can, the hardware underlying infrastructure, we try to leverage it. If it's not possible to leverage it, then we'll try to augment that with services of our own. That's the first piece of it. The second thing is, you know, we have solutions that actually provide consistency to applications and so on for individual physical arrays. So we provide a common set of APIs on the system so you can provide the same services across all the infrastructure, right? So that's what we do. So to answer your question specifically, do we draw a line anywhere? Not really, but we try our best to leverage what we have to get the best possible solution. But for example, snapshots will be, to me, quite a good thing to have above the line. Absolutely. To be the same across. So we provide a snapshot API. Okay. And when you take a snapshot against a Viper controller, the snapshot is implemented across any of the physical arrays that we support. So all those solutions we provide as a single place you can consume. So I have a question on Twitter. The question is, so, just clarification, is Viper an appliance? Viper is a software solution, so you download it as an OVF on ESX. So it's not, it's a software appliance, if you will, but no software. So it's a software appliance, if you will. Okay, but it's not, it's not applied. It's no hardware. So then the obvious follow-up is, okay. And it runs on the VMware. What does it run on? It runs on a virtual machine. It runs on ESX. Right. At GA, it runs on ESX. Okay, great. So that's the sort of, you've used the earlier example of an appliance, you used Vplex or any appliance. That's the difference. It's a software-only appliance. That's right. This is fundamentally, the platform is actually just purely software. It's built for scale-out and availability and so on. And as such, you can download it from our website. That's what we built it for. Is there anything out there in the industry that is comparable in concept even? Or is this a first in your view? You know, I haven't run into any, I'd have to admit. Yeah. So what about OpenStack or things like that? I mean, there they've defined a set of services and then people come in, for example, with SolidFire and they've added some extra things. So it seems to net up a lot of service there. You're saying OpenStack is a platform with an open set of APIs that can... Yeah, with the individual, the APIs that get tweaked. So, conceptually, it sounds similar. What about that, is it? So, you know, if you think about things like OpenStack or VMware, DynamicOps, VCAC and so on, these are cloud automation stacks. They are orchestrated over compute network and storage. So, what we provide is a storage platform which plugs into these stacks. So, for example, we have a Cinder plugin with OpenStack, so you can, if you're an OpenStack user, you can actually use Viper and stitch together the compute network and storage. Yeah. Okay, right. Okay, and so where are we today and where is this evolving? So, David Goulden kind of took us through the roadmap. We had a demo, you had the CTO, UBS, gave a little demo of essentially provisioning VMAX, and then promises of object interfaces later this year and then into the roadmap in 2013, can you talk about that from a technical perspective? What, you know, align what we heard there with what you're working on?  So, we have, obviously we have VMAX that we demonstrated. We have VNX, both file and block. We support Icelon, both NFS and SIFS, and third party, we are demonstrating NetApp. That's what we have. So, just to show that, you know, customers do have heterogeneous environments and they want to automatically install all of this. So, we do support that. We will have Vplex and RecoverPoint when we go out and Object. So, we have Object running over in the Viper object interface. On the Icelon, is that? It runs on Icelon, in fact, runs on any NFS filer, if you will. And we'll support S3 and Atmos and Swift APIs. And here, we're going to be very compliant. We're going to say it's wire format compatible, so you don't need to change your applications as it should just work. So, what was the hardest part from an engineering standpoint that you had to, you know, break through to make this a reality? So, you know, as we defined it as storage OS and we went to Born and then we went to Viper, at each step of the journey, if you will, we went and talked to a customer and said, hey, here's what we have. We've solved a provisioning problem. There's like, that's only one-third of the problem. I was like, all right, what's the next one, sir? You need to go program the sand. So, we go program the sand. It's like, you left the last mile out. What's the last mile? Close the provisioning with the server. It's like, okay, we'll close the provisioning with the server.  So, the hardest part for us was each time we went in with customer feedback, we just got more. And we had to take a holistic view and say, we need to get this much done to make it compelling to the customer. I think that was the hardest part for us. Yeah, so storage management and data management and volume management is hard. I mean, it takes companies decade to build that out. So, where did that IP come from? Was it a combination of new stuff that you built? Or did you pick and choose from parts of the EMC portfolio? Talk about that a little bit. So, Viper, the controller aspects are completely homegrown. We use open source components, but they're truly cloud-scale and we built it ourselves. The object piece as well is completely homegrown. We had the Atmos as a starting point, so we used the Atmos APIs, but the architecture itself was quite different. So, all of this was organic. And you've talked about it being open and all the APIs are open. Does that mean that anybody can use them? Does that? Yes. And what about the openness of the stack itself? Are you selling that? Is there a license fee for that? How's that going to go to market? So, that is a discussion best for marketing at this point. But I think at this point, we're thinking of licensing it out. So, we're thinking about various options there. Yeah, we're going to get into some of the pricing a little later on. So, and we'll, in fairness, stick to the sort of technical pieces of it. So, I wonder if we could break down a little bit more when we talk about separating the control plane from the data plane. And David, you and I talked about this a little bit last night, but so, let's focus, let's start with the control plane. What are we talking about here functionally? What are the functions that are on that side of the separation? So, it's everything that you do for storage management. So, it starts from provisioning. It starts from provisioning your replication, your backup. It starts with thinking about your network and how you program it. So, your sands starts with it. You think about your host and how you consume your storage. The entire life cycle completely. So, when we talk about the data path, we're talking about the servers of storage, IO connectivity. We're not in the data path there. Very much by choice for block and file, because some of these protocols are very latency sensitive and you don't want to insert yourself if you don't have to. So, that's the control aspect. So, you're a separate control path too. Yes, yeah. So, go ahead, David. So, you've set up all of this environment. Where do you see it being adopted, mainly? I mean, obviously the enterprise could take that as a solution for just the provisioning of storage, et cetera. There are other products out there that will do similar things to that. Where do you see it? Where are you focusing this? Is this on the enterprise? Is it on the cloud providers? Or do you see a hybrid platform with some of it on a cloud provider and some of it in the main data center? What's the, where are you selling this to? And who do you think are going to take this up? We've spoken to large enterprises as well as service providers. And I think the easiest way to think about this is anyone who has heterogeneous storage and really wants to simplify how they consume storage. That's the perfect place to use a product like Viper. So we do two things to any enterprise or a service provider. We help you manage the today and we help you provide solutions, we help you by providing solutions for the tomorrow. So we think about automation complexity and how we simplify and we think about object, your HDFS and other interfaces that you may need for your business tomorrow. So a platform like that, you can use it anywhere. We also provide, as part of the solution, a way to report across all these various different solutions, your file, your block, your object, if you will, pertinent. That's very powerful, right? That's not a solution you get every day. So honestly, heterogeneous environments where you want to use, you want to solve your complexity today and want to expand tomorrow. That's perfect. All right, Surya, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and taking us through the story of born to Viper. Congratulations, a lot of hard work. And we'll be watching. All right, so this is theCUBE. And thank you for watching. We'll be right back with our next guest. We're live from EMC World 2013. All right, thank you.


Rubella virus is a major human pathogen that can cause neurological damage in unborn babies if contracted during pregnancy. Despite successful vaccination programs in some areas, the virus remains endemic in many parts of the world, leading to periodic outbreaks. Research into the virus has advanced our understanding of its effects on the developing brain, with particular focus on how it affects microglia, a type of immune cell found in the brain. Our research shows that Rubella virus primarily targets microglia, and that this infection is accompanied by a strong interfere on response from non-microbial cells such as neurons and neural progenitors. The presence of microglia appears to reduce the severity of this response, suggesting that they may play a protective role against the virus. This article was authored by Galena Popova, Hannah Retolak, Chang N. Kim, and others.


Okay, thank you very much for having me and I think the sponsors of this event as well and Lou Rockwell all of it The title of the speech of course corrupt political influence on military intelligence and its fundamental role in state propaganda And that's a long title, but hopefully I'll be able to cover it It's often noted that the phrase military intelligence is an oxymoron The US intelligence community collects data on the whole world But only when that data becomes important to the US state is a deep analysis and targeted collection performed While intelligence in wartime can and should be driven by decentralized requests from the field and field commanders The intelligence community has long been organized around serving the ruling state and giving the state what it asks for This makes sense because the US Congress has not declared war in over 80 years At the same time this makes no sense at all because arguably the US state has been at war continually for the past 80 years the implication of this dichotomy and Confirmation of the very title of this talk was demonstrated in a typical way on May 3rd of this year When sent com commander general Eric Carilla rushed to tweet that his command had conducted a unilateral strike in northwest Syria targeting a senior al Qaeda official 12 days later sent com itself Investigated and discovered that they had actually targeted and killed a Syrian shepherd and father of 10 and that there were no al Qaeda Any of the bad guys near the area? first response was to delete the tweet 20 days after the tweetable event CNN reported well, it's too bad But at least some of his staff had urged Carilla to hold off on the tweet until they knew who they actually killed Let's think about that for a minute The lesson learned here was hold off on the tweet Notwithstanding what another famous shepherd in the Middle East may have concluded the US military in its intelligence system Serves only one master the state and its propaganda In my time at the Pentagon 1998 to 2003 I was a consumer of intelligence not a producer of it Intelligence is always a consumer product, but the orders are placed from above or from the center One or more of the 17 plus federal level agencies seek out the information that's been requested and Provide an intelligent product up the chain to the overarching state intelligence boss the director of national intelligence Who then informs the big guy? The big guy unless his name is Trump always gets what he wants Incidentally this office of the DNI the director of national intelligence was created only in 2005 Before then the CIA filled that post since 2005 there have been only seven confirmed DNI's and for acting DNI's President Trump himself burned through two confirmed DNI's and for acting DNI's President Trump Sorry, the seventh and current DNI is Avril Haines She was introduced to Congress during her confirmation almost three years ago as committed to Bringing non politicized truth to power and restoring trust and confidence in the intelligence community and the American public Haines went from bookstore owner to national security expert and today leads and coordinates the 17 plus intelligence agencies Yet she was well prepared for her role. It is based on what her buyers want dependent on the satisfaction of her state employer 17 agencies is a lot We're talking about the CIA and NSA the DIA Army Air Force and Avian Marine Corps and Special Operations Command intelligence agencies homeland defense and FBI Department of Energy National Reconnaissance Office National Geospatial Intelligence Agency DEA Treasury Department of Justice Department of State Bureau for Intelligence and Research and most recently the National Space Intelligence Center Given the militarized nature of the domestic agencies that have intelligence functions and the subordination of the State Department to Economic social informational and literal warfighters. I consider all of these 17 agencies part of military intelligence And every one of these agencies is corrupted by their political bosses slash customers These intelligence agencies were made infamous by the New York Times in 2016 when it reported Hillary Clinton's false claim that all 17 U.S. Intelligence agencies verified a Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee emails the Times retracted this some years later Only three of the 17 agencies had ever agreed to this electioneering tripe And that was three too many because most of us and most of the rest of the world knew the Clinton New York Times Claim was false. We knew because of the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich in the summer of 2016 Who according to those who would know was the source of the leaked DNC emails? We knew because of the ceaseless work of 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern and others who understood the evidence rationally We knew because most of the world recognizes the New York Times and the Washington Post as pure state media U.S. peacetime intelligence is a 200 billion dollar project growing bigger each year That's a hundred billion in the published budget and another 100 billion in CIA and defense black budgets All of these intelligence agencies with some variation in technology and expertise use much of the same Unclassified and classified sources to inform their agencies conduct analyses and make their reports While the U.S. Isn't engaged in any declared or legal wars to paraphrase the famous warfighter and soldier Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. What's the point of having it if you can't use it? And it is not used and it is used not to defend the country but to defend and preserve the state Intelligence spending is the third largest part of the discretionary federal budget after the defense offense budget and Interest on the federal debt it consumes more than any other non-military department more than agriculture Veterans benefits education with its massive student loan debt mill more than the departments of housing transportation foreign affairs energy labor We don't think of intelligence spending separately because it's hidden like an internal parasite within the overall defense budget If we want to consider if we want to understand corrupt political influence on military intelligence We need to consider the financial scope of the U.S. Investment in state intelligence. It is significant We need to think about who the customer is U.S. Political figures and power players our elite ruling class and that ruling class national and international Is that war with the people us for its very survival in war you use what you have And the elite owns every one of our military and official intelligence producers. It's their military intelligence not ours Before I go on let's consider what technology computing and AI advances have done to military intelligence battlefield and battle space knowledge and responses are in many cases post human if You can imagine computer games if you can play them. This has become much of modern warfare The intelligence for targeting is through sensors and data and the priorities are rarely the result of a thinking human But rather just choosing from a set of options delimited by logistics and calculated probability the pilots who fly the F-35s are really quite optional It's not your granddad's war fighting at least at the general and admiral level and boy Oh boy, do we have a lot of generals and admirals more per capita than ever before in our history One cannot even imagine most of our current flag officers anywhere near the front line of battle And of course there isn't really a front line to stand on the US hasn't fought a war in decades That has made us better fighters better strategists better ethicists better novelists or better leaders Instead we play war games and our political leaders get to watch them live from a safe room somewhere Because of these trends traditional intelligence that informs the strategy of war for war fighters and soldiers Is simply not needed not requested and not produced the computer is faster And we've been playing war this way for politicians and their cronies for decades For the vast intelligence sector to stay relevant it has to offer what the customer wants and What the customer wants isn't defense or even better war fighting it wants legitimate confirmation of its pre-existing Prejudices an information that supports a favorite or dominant political narrative or agenda It wants to stay in power and to do that the people must believe the state the only real you meant The intelligence community seems to do anymore is aimed at how to better read the political tea leaves in Washington and maintain budget share as we have seen with the Snowden revelations the National Security Agency for example does not have to obey the Constitution or federal law unless and until it gets caught even then with a wink and a nod It continues to violate the law We see similar behavior in the DOJ FBI and Homeland Security, of course, and this has been a consistent habit of The CIA for decades starting with its first director Allen Dulles The bureaucratic imperative is to grow influence and outcompete the other 16 agencies for favor credibility and budget share in theory these agencies do not compete don't overlap and willingly share information and technology between them But in fact they compete with each other for relevance their missions overlap in many ways and they Jealousy guard their information sources and technologies often ironically and sometimes hilariously Nearly all of what these agencies gather and produce is accessible and available in the open information system often with far more accurate analysis I Mentioned the sent com case earlier to show how the lap dogs in the military compete like golden retrievers for some political love But Congress itself parties and state media behave like canines as well panting and slobbering over Credible patriotic Americans doing their part for national security narratives consider the first Trump impeachment a Uniformed military officer in the NSC Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman blew the whistle Over the perceived intent and tone of a July 25 2019 phone conversation between Trump and the now infamous Volodymyr Zelensky Strangely enough Trump was concerned about Ukrainian corruption and he mentioned barisma Unlike military and civilian whistleblowers and truth-tellers I don't know like the late Daniel Ellsberg Ray McGovern Colleen Riley Catherine Gunn Sabelle Edmonds Bill Benny Thomas Drake Edward Snowden Chelsea Manning Jeff Sterling Jessica Raddock and the list goes on and on unlike these intelligence Professionals and American patriots instead of being harassed to fame targeted imprisoned or exiled Somehow the US Congress and state media bent the knee in all of the devotion to truth and justice Exhibited by Vindman and his co-petitioners It's almost funny today to look back given what the Congress and the media had been forced to acknowledge about Ukraine The corrupt US government interaction with the puppet government it put in place there And of course what we all now know about the Biden crime syndicate My own experience with politicized intelligence or the intelligence producers and product being manipulated to support a political agenda Was in the run-up to the second invasion of Iraq a Decade earlier during the first invasion of Iraq a desert storm in 1991 I did not realize that much the same thing was happening Then as in 2002 instead of intelligence guiding our politicians It was being used to shape the public opinion at home to support a long-standing neocon and DC agenda in 1991 as in 2002 the war was driven more by ideology and petro dollar politics than a physical threat to the United States After 9 11 a day when some very strange things happened in our country New requests for intelligence came down from the political leadership Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was yelling find everything you can about Iraq and Saddam Hussein and Vice President Cheney started making visits to talk with CIA analysts in their offices It didn't take long for the Intel community to understand It had a job to do who their customer was and what he she they wanted Where I worked in the Near East South Asia director of OSD plans We had a senior executive service civilian intelligence officer signed from DIA Who oversaw staff of regional intelligence specialists our top DIA officer found out the hard way What happens when you provide actual intelligence and objective analysis to a political appointee who wants something different than that? After several workplace confrontations and some interesting verbal abuse the senior career intelligence officer was fired and sent back to the DIA a More compliant replacement eventually was found but as I recall there was not a big rush Because political appointees in my office and the office of special plans would simply take information From wherever they could find it and create a story. They wanted to go up and out I worked next to a guy who for a time who was not attached to DIA intelligence at all But who happened to be an Arabic reader? He was told by the political appointees to scour the internet and find things that were being said and Written in Arabic media that would please our boss and his bosses and support the mission He enthusiastically did just that Intelligence Military and otherwise is not like truth where the truth serves only itself its own goal and its own reward Intelligence must have an audience it must be needed and wanted and ideally acted upon and utilized if not It is consequently buried Unwanted and not acted upon something that the intelligence bureaucracy itself Recognizes as dangerous to its continued relevance and funding Thus responding to the customer and yes, this is the language we use in intelligence Can easily become a slippery slope of simply tailoring truth guesses and possible lies into a presentable and acceptable package Now in defense of most intelligence professionals I knew and knew of in and after 9-eleven There was pushback and there were complaints But what we didn't have then were loud and proud patriots perhaps like a lieutenant colonel Vendement to uniform up and present his grave concerns to the media and to Congress Perhaps if someone like lieutenant colonel Vendman had come forward with sincere complaints about the state of national security Because of the actions of politicians and their political appointees in the Pentagon telling the truth about fake intelligence Cherry-picked factoids the firing and sidelining of intelligence professionals who tried to stop it and the direct pressures Placed on lowly analysts by senior elected and appointed officials Well, maybe things would have been different It's so sad that we didn't have someone like lieutenant colonel Vendman when we could have really used him Of course, I'm I'm being facetious and sarcastic. We had plenty of people who saw what was happening The problem was if intelligent if honest intelligence analysis had been wanted it was there But it wasn't wanted because honesty would have gotten in the way of the DC narrative. I Don't want to play back the sordid history of the manipulation of intelligence that preceded 9-11 and that Promulgated the Patriot Act or that perverted the investigation into the letters sent by key sent to King congressmen and senators and media Letters containing US manufactured and patented anthrax spores I don't want to review the sick and incredible destruction of Iraq as a unified country and the perversion of our own law At the behest of government and others our industries and their think tanks Then as now neo-conservatives promote promoted the mandate of democracy Another oxymoronic idea that provides top cover for the real agenda of Washington DC Which I think is to control the world's reserve currency and by extension the actions decisions and resources of the rest of the world and to maintain maintain their own elite dominance as The politicians and ideologues see it using military intelligence as tailored Politicized storytelling is a good thing They see this as patriotic in a truly fascist way To use the entire energies of the state to energize the population of that state to expansive and never-ending war To seize and shape the imagination of over 300 million Americans and over 600 million NATO stonies is seen as necessary It is beyond necessary. It is the very key to the survival of the state And if that isn't a good use of military intelligence the salivating sweaty pale-faced neocons don't know what is I Do want to spend a little time on Ukraine? And how to use a phrase from the title of this talk the corrupting political influence has come into play First if military intelligence is an oxymoron corrupting and political our repetition a few years ago Then vice president Robin Ware or maybe it was Robert L. Peters famously told an audience How he got the anti-corruption prosecutor general of Ukraine Victor Shokin removed He threatened to withhold from then-president Poroshenko a billion dollars in loan guarantees and gave him a couple of hours to decide You've all heard it before but it's too much fun not to say it again Biden told us all well son of a bitch he got fired Biden's threat came in late 2015 and Shokin's firing was in March 2016 So as usual Biden exaggerated for comedic purposes at the time Shokin himself did not think Biden was why he had been fired He came to believe that only later because he was thinking about looking into barisma holdings Incidentally when Trump decided to ask if anyone would look into barisma. He too almost got himself fired So no looking into barisma people Do we have intelligence and surveillance in one or more of our 17 agencies that would clear all this up? Of course we do but our corrupted politicians don't want it There was a reason Trump went through so many directors of national intelligence and it's the same reason the deep state fears his possible return to DC It's life or death for them. It's their intelligence bureaucracy not yours not mine not Trump's nor will it be Bobby Kennedy's But barisma jokes aside there was another and very real reason Biden carrying the water for the deep state wanted Shokin fired Shokin was actively investigating US involvement into the 2014 uprising Specifically he wanted to find out who planned an orchestrated sniper fire into the demonstrating crowd in the center of Kiev on February 20th We know it today is the Maidan massacre You'll think I'm crazy, but it turns out there was US involvement in the ouster of the Ukrainian president Yanukovych Thanks to a leaked phone conversation between State Department under Secretary Vicki Newland and then US ambassador to Ukraine Jeffrey Piat The US neocons wanted the realistic and Russia friendly Yanukovych out They wanted him blamed for the massacre and they were working to ensure their guy was put in place as the interim leader in advance of the coming May elections in Ukraine Newland chose Arsene Yatsenak or Yats as she called him Later that year after a few months in Yats's capable hands the pro-nado pro-US and pro-EU Poroshenko was elected president with 56% of the vote Significantly this election was preceded by Independence referendums in Crimea and parts of the Donbass admits effectively what was and has remained a civil war This is all verifiable, but there's more and Shokin was all over it Fantastic stories abound about an infamous US sniper Brian Boynger who trained Ukrainians in the same time frame Boynger is implicated in assisting Ukrainian and American coup plotters in taking down Yanukovych government including the preplanned use of snipers around the Kiev Square To make sure it went the way the US needed it to go. I Share this story in part because we don't know all of it and because I'm very confident that the US intelligence Community does know all of it and likely contributed to it Shokin was looking into the snipers of the Maidan massacre a year after it happened and Obama's State Department could not let that happen I share this story because the EU leadership at the time knew about the US coup in Ukraine and Some of them were not in we're not supportive of it Intercepted phone calls showing that among others Estonian Foreign Minister Hermes Piat and EU high representative for foreign policy Katherine Ashton were aware and Concerned that Ambassador Piat and US Secretary of State for European and your Asian Affairs Victoria Newland were deeply involved in the coup And were specifically responsible for the Maidan massacre Did Ambassador Piat make sure former US soldier and maybe still on the US dime Brian Boynger? Was able to enter Ukraine just in time for a little sniper action our intelligence community knows it probably assisted EU's Katherine Ashton and her vocal concerns among other EU cautions and resistance to the US cowboying in Kiev is Precisely the kind of thing Newland was reacting to when she made her infamous epithet f the EU I'm not telling you anything that you don't already know This is what the US government does and it does so using the intelligence community which it owns Those 17 agencies work hard to justify legitimize and cover up the ongoing corruption of our so-called Republic because that's what their bosses tell them to do We could choose a country a political movement and an era in US history and fill in encyclopedia on How this has worked and how it works today Someone is getting their $200 billion worth, but I'm pretty confident it is not the American people a System where no one can accurately determine the real value of goods and services is exactly what we have in the US government And we can see this specifically in the state intelligence sector Mises explained how a planned economy cannot make rational calculations Rationality is only possible where there's a free market. He writes in In their role as consumers the market Participants determine the rankings of good ready to be used in consumption in their role as producers Businessmen select those capital goods that promise to render the highest yield This way not only is not only the consumer goods, but also the production goods receive a ranking According to the present urgencies in the given state of the production technology the interplay of the two Evaluation processes ensures that the economic principle prevails everywhere in consumption as well as in production He notes that this interplay of two Evaluation processes is not possible in a socialist economy And yet that's exactly what we have evolved in the military and state intelligence apparatus today a socialist economy a Planned economy of presumably for important accurate and timely government knowledge for the defense of the nation And it does not work. It cannot work That it is politically corrupted is more than a symptom. That's actually the point The great Seymour Hirsch wrote an essay just last week Entitled when the intelligence is inconvenient. What goes wrong when politics suppresses the truth Hirsch has spent a lifetime documenting and reporting Inconvenient intelligence and he has watched how the political and elite wagons have circled and locked down Decades earlier he and truth seekers like him won Pulitzer Prizes and were published on the most trusted of newspapers Today state media is united against him defaming him and spiking his reports Hirsch writes The DIA defense intelligence agencies assessments are now The intelligence of choice inside the White House He goes on to show that some of the actual intelligence gathered and assessed Inside the US system and within DIA had accurately put forth the likelihood that the sarin attack in Syria in 2013 10 years ago was conducted not by the Assad government, but by the US government's ally the al-Nusra front this actual intelligence at the time was rejected and DIA was being taught a lesson That the customer desires drive the product not objective facts or honest analysis Our political customers do not want to be informed. They want to be obeyed Ten years later. We find DIA is now the preferred White House source of intelligence all hail DIA has learned its lesson first and always satisfy the customer Hirsch worries as do all moral and thinking people that the way this system works is taking the US Russia and the world into full-blown war possibly nuclear war Having multiple intelligence sources all vying for a pat on the head by ideologues Psychopaths and idiots who hold political power is not an accident Emergent totalitarian states tend to develop systems with competitive spies both domestic and foreign intelligence Elites and political oligarchs want intelligence agencies to compete for their approval This is the one this is one of the easiest ways to find out which people and which organizations are loyal It's not complicated. It's happened predictably everywhere. There's tyranny and tyrannical government Seymour Hirsch wrote his latest essay now because he sees the same politicization of intelligence happening in Ukraine He marvels at the sheer uninformed and simply wrong beliefs and assessments of guys like Blinken and Sullivan And those still supporting Biden's a hundred billion proxy war against Russia Politicization of intelligence corrupt intelligence production that supports the state narrative rather than the God's honest truth is the reason Along with many of you. I thought that general Eric Kurilla's premature Twitter ejaculation last May about his latest drone strike was both sad and psychopathic, but sad psychopathic and ridiculous is the rule these days Last week retiring chief of the joint chiefs of staff general Mark Milley Took the CBS news crew into the Pentagon op-center where he runs the US proxy war in Ukraine CBS very earnestly broadcasted the live Ukrainian force strengths and locations shown on a flat screen on the top secret military ops center In this impenetrable basement of the Pentagon as Milley contentedly explained what he does all day set aside for a minute whether or not this is a growth a gross breach of Classification and whether the DOJ will indict the general spoiler alert. They won't This Milley news story was pure war theater versus actual war We're ensuring our generals know and use verifiable honest truth is an imperative more valuable than gold Milley tells CBS that he speaks with the general's illusiony his Ukrainian live-action roleplay counterpart three times a week We watch in disbelief and horror as one deaf and blind general Cheerfully advises another in the name of neo-conservative ideology and a shared strategy of I hope this works out Meanwhile, Ukraine is being steadily destroyed and the Ukrainians themselves slaughtered named impoverished and forced into diaspora All of this is the direct and predictable result of the political corruption of intelligence Curiously we can still talk about this in public and we as people Communities organizations and businesses have a fantastic ability to gather information Test and check our theories our ideologies and prejudices actual data Contact with and first-hand information from experts around the world is available on nearly every subject to almost anyone who wishes to have it Access to history whether a thousand years ago or last week is at our fingertips today There is nothing in this world that is truly stopping any of us from thinking evaluating Judging and learning we have that power US decision-makers politicians and Intel customers on the other hand Imagine they have a monopoly on honest information and truth and that they can shape truth to justify their ambitions The billion spent each year on information gathering and analysis by government is wasted on these politicians and ideologues And it is a waste of money for the American people who truth be told are at least as well informed today as your average politician With far better instincts and ethics. I have talked mostly this afternoon about the corrupt political influence on intelligence and I haven't really Directly address the fundamental role of the so-called intelligence community in shaping and strengthening state propaganda But in every case I mentioned today state propaganda was always served and never exposed by the intelligence apparatus The intelligence community has given and gives credence to the state's near constant efforts to fool and Confuse Americans and the world and it does this because it is rewarded by the state for doing so Punished when it fails to comply and the state is their only customer There are thousands of examples of how this has worked in previous years and decades For example, we just discovered that the CIA bribed and pressured its own scientific analyst to support the state propaganda campaign around the origins of the COVID-19 virus All aspects of state messaging are must be and will be aggressively supported by state intelligence agencies There is light at the end of this tunnel for Americans and the rest of the world Demographic and technological change in our society favors both peace and truth the rapid decline of US economic and political power abroad is both parallel and Precursor to an even more rapid decline in the state's economic and political control here at home The rest of the world is no longer going to finance our quality of life our blind spots and the American regime's militarism I doubt coming generations of Americans are going to pay for it either corrupt straight narratives Posing as wisdom and truth with the backing of a captive and subservient intelligence apparatus Cannot prosper or persist in a free market of information And all of us here today and millions more around the world are living proof that that market is unstoppable


Hi, this is Tracy Takahama Espinosa. Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you a little bit about mind-brain education and getting rid of neuro myths and teacher practices. We're going to approach this through the lens of the science and the art of teaching or really the vision that neuro science psychology and education together have of neuro myths and how we can get rid of them to improve teacher education. I teach a course at the Harvard University Extension School called the Neuroscience of Learning. It's an introduction to mind-brain health and education. I had the honor of serving on the OECD expert panel looking at teacher's new pedagogical knowledge and I currently serve as an associate editor in Nature's Partner Journal of Science of Learning, which is a peer review online journal. I'm also an associate professor here in the Latin American social science research faculty doing educational research. We'll begin by defining a few key terms so that we're all sharing the same vocabulary on the same page. Then I want to talk about how beliefs and neuro myths are actually a reflection of an individual's value systems and attitudes and how they think the brain learns or who can learn and who has the potential to learn different things at different times in their lives. Then we're going to look at some of the common neuro myths that are still prevalent and talk a little bit about each of our own roles in getting rid of those myths and making sure that our practices, professors, teachers, educators, is as professional as possible. Just to be transparent, I do have some very clear biases based on this idea here that designing educational experiences without an understanding of the brain is like designing a glove without understanding the hand. I believe that the brain, yes, it's the organ of our endeavors. I also think that teaching is perhaps the most important profession in all of society. I'm also biased in that I know that schools are the single most important social institution in which individuals spend most of their time and I believe that education really is the path towards development. These are my own particular biases. You don't have to buy into those, but it's good that you know where I'm coming from when I share this information. Before getting into the definitions, it's time for you to go to work. I want to see what you know already and compare that with the evidence that comes out of current research. Please take any piece of paper that you have, fold it in half. On one side of the paper, you're going to draw a happy face. This is what I know. On the other side, you're going to put a big question mark and you're going to say, well, these are things that I've heard of. I'm not sure, but I'd like to know more about this. On the left side, something you know about the brain and learning and on the right side, something that you want to know or something that you heard or doubt or suspect may be a neuro myth. Please take a minute to do that. Pause your video and we'll come back in one minute. Keep your papers to yourself and we're going to be looking at that later. What I want to do now is to define some of these key terms that we're going to be using throughout the presentation. First and foremost is to understand what I really mean by mind, brain and education science and that's that little sweet spot here right in the middle in between the neurosciences, the psychological sciences and the educational sciences. This idea of mind, brain and education is different from educational neuroscience or from this idea of learning sciences because it looks at a focus of balanced contributions from education, psychology and neuroscience and how they add to our own knowledge about how humans learn and how we can teach better based on that information. This means that it's focused on understanding this teaching and learning dynamic, not just on how humans learn, but rather what occurs during this exchange is back and forth between the teacher and the student that finally reaches this aha moment of I get it, I understand. So understanding all the intricacies of teaching, not just learning. And this is really important because these other fields, educational neuroscience for example, is very much focused on how humans learn and that's great. How do we know that people learn? Understanding the neural mechanisms, the psychological influences, what really helps people learn? That's important but even more so I think is taking that one step further and understanding now how do we leverage that to teach better. So there have been multiple publications recently talking about this whole new field of mind-brain education or understanding the influence of neuroscience and psychology in education and one that recently came out in February of 2017 has to do with the pedagogical knowledge and changing nature of the teaching profession. How do we have to adjust the way that teachers become teachers in the future so that we can leverage the information we now have about mind-brain and education science? And this is needed more than ever because basically solutions to today's problems really need to be supplemented or nurtured from multiple fields. Education on its own has not been able to resolve all these problems so we need to have a much more sophisticated approach to this and after about 125 years of formal education we still haven't figured it all out just with educational loans so we really have to use the other sciences to help us out here. And finally I think we've reached a stage where we can accept you know the brain is very complex. It's perhaps the most complex organism in the universe and that is the organ of our profession. That's what we have to know and so part of teacher education has to include a better information about the brain and learning. So the next big word that needs defining neuro-myths and neuro-myths it basically comes from these two pieces right neuro is related to cells that are in the nervous system or in the brain and myths which are widely held false ideas. So this basically means together these are false beliefs about the brain and or the way the brain works or functions. And the Center for Educational Neuroscience at the University College of London takes this one step further it's not just what people might read in the press but it also leads to teaching practices or ideas or techniques that do not actually have a scientific basis and so that's what a neuro myth is and that's what we're trying to get rid of today okay. The second big word to understand has to do with competencies when we talk about objectives when somebody says okay give me the objectives for this class that you're about to teach we really disaggregate that into pieces and call them educational competencies. And educational competencies are just the sum total of all of the knowledge the skills and the attitudes that you want to teach. The reason it's important to break this down in this way is because you know you can oftentimes teach you know dates facts formulas theories concepts grammatical rules for example that is purely knowledge based and that's a lot of things that you can generally get from google for example you can learn that off of recordings from other people on the internet but being able to use that knowledge that's a skill set and that skill is something that you really need teachers for but even more importantly and the things that are actually long term and significant learning has to do with the change in attitudes and attitudes are really value sets it's what students will remember about you long after your course is done so do understand yourself a bit better through the discipline that you're learning okay. So the key reason that we want to define competencies and to understand the difference between people learning knowledge or people learning skills or people learning attitudes is that which of these do you think is the easiest to teach and the easiest to evaluate knowledge right and which is the hardest to actually cultivate and to measure definitely attitudes attitudes take a very long time to form and the key thing about attitudes is that they also can be for example unidentified prejudices as john haddie cites teacher prejudices about intelligence influence students learning so this is if i ask you for example do you think what the teacher thinks of your ability to learn influences your ability to learn absolutely right so what a student thinks a teacher thinks of him whether or not it's correct or not influences a student's learning outcomes so this is very important to understand because our attitudes the way we think about for example the brain and learning are the things that grow into myths so these unconscious prejudices can be anything from you know if only the children were better behaved you know as if you know social contagion had no role in teaching if you know better if you know about the brain a bit more you understand that you have a lot of control over that right or if only the parents were more responsible or if only the parents had passed on better genes right as if intelligence was fixed by hereditary factors alone or if only the kids would eat better or sleep better presuming that no one has taken the time to explain the role of sleep and nutrition and learning which it could be possible that is also true right if only kids spent less time on computers as if technology in and of itself hurts learning not always it actually can help learning in some cases right or if only there were more boys in my class or more girls in my class as if genders determine superiority in different learning situations then i would be a great teacher these kinds of unconscious prejudices are things that are born they're actitudinal they're things that you embrace over time and they influence how you interact with the students in your class and what they can potentially learn so there's a big link now between those attitudes a teacher's attitudes about things what they value what they believe and the birth of neuro myths for example if a teacher doesn't have the right attitude if a teacher does not accept that intelligence is fluid it's not fixed if a teacher doesn't have that right attitude about his approach to teaching he can become a good teacher but he will never be a great teacher these are important to recognize and understand because in many cases these are what fuel neuro myths in society so teacher attitudes and another topic for another day i hope we have the chance to talk about this a bit more later on but these 15 teacher attitudes were born of all of the literature from john haddie's research and supported by neuroscientific evidence so we know that great teachers would always score a top four i totally agree with this statement you might want to take this test yourself and see how you actually score finally it's important to define the context of education you know education a hundred years ago was very different you know the resources that we used were very different the methodologies that we used in classrooms were very very different the way we disciplined people was very very different all of those things have changed a lot but probably the thing that some changed most is our understanding about the brain old models of human learning are there how brains were really promoted neuro myths every single thing you see here right left brain men's women brain teenage brain the 10 percent of brain use the triune brain having three different brains all of those are myths okay so it's very important to know that without good technology we weren't able to actually envision the brain therefore we were imagining how things worked now this is okay if you've been in teaching for 20 or 30 years you shouldn't know better you just shouldn't know better but now there's new technology you know we've gone from just basic autopsies to understanding things about the electrical and chemical changes in the brain and being able to overlay these things into 3d models and going even further now we can actually see how there are total networks involved in every type of learning there's at least for example 16 neural networks that have to be primed and perfectly ready before a kid can learn to read so we know that we're talking now not about you know right and left brain things or that creativities in one part of your brain and spatial abilities are in another and math is in another and languages in another now we talk about networks and we can really see how these networks are formed and the hubs the main areas that information passes through multiple times when a person is learning something so we have new technology now and this is helping us get rid of some of the myths but the problem is some of the myths have just been around so long that people have them repeated over and over again they believe them they still believe them even though we have evidence that they're not true we also have further evidence outside of neuroscience in education we have better longitudinal studies we can actually compare over time whether or not a kid who does brain gem for example ends up being any better 13 years down the line than a kid who does not they do not so we can look at these longitudinal studies and they can help us now shape our better understanding about what types of methodologies to invest in or to use in classes we also have better international comparative skills so we can look at things and we can see well it's a myth that for example Asians are better at math than North Americans we can see that there are subtle differences in the way that numbers or symbol systems are processed in the brain and it does make a difference depending on the methodology applied in the class so we can look at international comparative studies and those also help us get rid of some of those myths we also have methodologically comparative skills so before we used to look at quantitative or qualitative data and we used to have to look at them very very differently or unless we replicated the precise study we weren't able to compare results now thanks to some of these newer studies we are able to compare and see what effect sizes certain interventions have or different types of interventions have and this leads us to a new model of teacher education right we want to combine mind brain educational science with information from visible learning john haddy's work that has to do with what we know influences student learning outcomes and put this onto a different type of teacher formation over the lifespan this is very important to acknowledge because when we give a hierarchical concept of how teachers should be trained it's really clear that one of the first things that teachers have to learn and reflect upon are their own attitudes and their own prejudices about learning for example think to yourself now and just write this on a piece of paper for yourself do you think that certain kids from certain social and economic status um learn differently or do you think that kids of a certain race learn differently or that boys and girls learn things in different ways think about that to yourself what are some of the prejudices that you might already have that are so ingrained in you that they color the way that you work with your students in class just write that down quickly for us okay so now let's turn to this idea why is it so hard to get rid of myths tan to this i want to share some of the information that i have from a recent delphi panels with experts from around the world i invited 42 experts from 11 different countries to comment and to look at questions and within the mind brain and education science field what are things that we can say are true about the brain and then what are these things that are mythical about the brain and the really big scary thing is that from 10 years ago when i first did the study on this um there has been an increase in the number of myths that exist out there unfortunately you would think that over time we would reduce the number of neuro myths that people believe in unfortunately because of this echo chamber we hear these things over and over again we believe them when we really shouldn't believe them so of all the different things we talked about on the delphi panel one of the key things had to do with what is real what is good information and what are neuro myths and once we could do that we have this great foundation of how to give instructional guidelines what should we then do in a classroom so the final point related to the delphi panel is that when we asked the delphi panelists what are the biggest challenges for mind brain education in the future they listed a lot of things but one of the top ones was that teachers aren't explicitly taught about neuro myths okay so let's look at those neuro myths and we use the categorization scheme that was developed by the oecd countries back in 2002 and they agreed on criteria for information that teachers receive in general there's information that is well established we know that there's plasticity in the brain for example that lasts throughout the lifespan there are things that are probably so like for example sensitive periods as opposed to critical periods what's intelligence speculation it sounds good like for example uh men and women look different from the outside therefore they should probably be different on the inside well that's intelligence speculation but there's very little evidence to back that up right or what is a neuro myth and so this D category what's a neuro myth are really the bad things to avoid and these A and B categories are the things that we say okay these are things that we could really apply so i'm going to ask you now we're going to play a little game here i'm going to ask you into which category does information follow the information that is categorized in the sway from the delphi panel is actually supported by the literature not only by expert opinion so there's been a lot of research on neuro myths uh over the years right daniel answers work and teneco vangagon passes work bailey decker's article very very influential all of these people have been writing about neuro myths over the years and most of these things have come up only over and less than the past 10 years so all of the research on neuro myths is relatively new but what's important to see is that there's over 200 different articles that have been written in recent years about neuro myths but that still hasn't gotten into the regular teacher training track so neuro myths continue to persist and they persist mainly because you know these are hypotheses which are invalidated but they capture the imagination they make you think oh somebody is a right brain person or a left brain person and that's why they sort of groan and persist for some really clear reasons number one we are all guilty of wanting things to be easy and to be clear in general in teacher training complexity is rejected we prefer the quick you know sound bite to the deep explanation or to a lot of reading that's on us we have to decide if we're going to up our game and teaching right and the second huge reason has to do with popular press reports that sort of give this echo chamber we're talking about it just is repeated over and over again and sometimes these are things that are true for you know rats but there's no such thing related to humans since that's kind of sketchy there right or they use old technology for example oh humans use only 10 percent of your brain well that's what we thought before when we had you know pretty lousy technology in the in the 80s when we began to do neuroimaging studies but now with greater technology we're able to see that's just not true you're not just using 10 percent of your brain right or there are things that we hear over and over again for example they're based on good evidence but it's really sparse there are other times that we confuse you know there's a correlation two things happen at the same time therefore we think one thing caused the other thing so for example there are fewer women in science therefore we say oh that means that women don't have brains for science totally not true then there's other studies that have to do with absence versus existence so we used to study stroke patients and we'd say oh look he lost his ability to name objects when he had a stroke in this particular area therefore that area is responsible for that skill set which is not always true then there's things like over generalization of findings so you get a small number of studies and they're used to make a blanket statement about all people for example if we have a handful of studies on gifted populations or autistic people and then we say okay so all people with autism have brains at two x y or z not necessarily true have to be very careful about that so in many cases we have studies on adults but not on school age children so we do have a lot of studies for example on mathematical reasoning tons of things but 85 percent of them are done on adults not on kids so can we really generalize that information and apply them to kids that leads to myths as well and then we have finally these this group of studies which are true in the lab context but is it really true in real life in real classrooms right can we say things about the information based on those studies that happen in the labs so what are some criteria for identifying myths you can have confidence in studies that are more recent look for studies that have been replicated it's not just a one-off that they found this thing once for example the mozart effect the guy finds it the mozart effect seemed to work and then he tries to replicate it and it doesn't work so he retracts but by the time he's already published the first study there's a billion dollar industry going out there so studies that have been replicated are worthy of your attention studies that look at school age populations or that appreciate the complexities of learning it's not just a simple lab experiment they measure real skills that are done within academic settings classrooms not just lab design okay so here's the quiz tell me whether or not you think that this is well established probably so intelligent speculation or a neuro myth true or false true meaning there's no such thing as a truth in science by the way there's just more evidence or less evidence so is this well established or is this something that's a neuro myth teaching to a person's learning style improves learning outcomes totally mythical in fact the research on investing in teaching towards learning styles really shows that it's kind of a waste of money to do this okay so don't go into that maybe if you're referring to the word like style like somebody's unique way of being there's not that much harm in this however if you think about this it's really an assault on our understanding of how the brain really learns think about all learning all learning think about Aristotle here all learning passes through the senses right you learn about your world through all of your senses and your brain is so efficient that it's always trying to get as much information from all of its senses as possible in order to understand and make decisions about the world around it and so pretending that you could actually turn off one of these senses for a moment or be primarily using one sense and not another is not really the way the brain works the brain is very efficient tries to get as much information from all of the senses as possible and you can sort of put this to the test when you think about if you tell somebody oh yes i'm a very visual learner but then i change your context i take you to a musical concert um you will shift your modality of preference will be based on the context in which you can gather the most information so please try and stay away from these things the main reason that these neuro myths are problematic is because they do harm telling somebody that they have a learning style x and then well you know i teach to a different type of style which is why we don't get along and why you're not learning in my class is really not right and it does harm so please stay away from that how about this one well established urinal myth each individual's brain is differently prepared to learn different tasks learning capacities are shaped by the context of the learning prior learning experiences personal choice and an individual's biology and makeup pre and perinatal events and environmental exposures all influence learning do we agree that all those things influence learning yes not all brains are prepared to do all things this means that you cannot just take any joe and say okay this guy is going to be a genius at math or whatever all of those things prior experience interest for the topic genetic makeup all of those things influence whether or not that person will be successful in that okay so it's a myth that brains are all equal in their ability to solve all problems that's just a myth well established urinal myth stress influences learning but what stresses one person may not stress another in the same way this is absolutely true it's well established that stress does impact learning but both negatively and positively there is such a thing as good stress you stress is actually a very good thing to have it's good to be a little bit stressed when you're in a learning situation well established urinal myth the brain changes constantly with experience absolutely true it's well established that the brain changes just about every day and hopefully tonight you're going to go to bed with a different brain than you woke up with this morning because you've had new experiences okay the brain is plastic neuroplasticity exists throughout the lifespan absolutely well established you have plasticity until you die okay so it's there it exists all the time so what are our main challenges that much of what we hold to be truths in our own teaching tend to be mythical so myths are created because of overgeneralization or they're based on partial truth or sparse evidence all of these are reasons that things could be a myth okay so let's look at the reasons for certain myths that are out there right now we're going to look at 40 quick myths and we're going to look at why they are myths in the first place people can multitask that is a myth this is based on new information but it's also based on unsubstantiated beliefs or misconceptions about how the brain really learns male and female brains learn differently this is based on a partial truth you know it's intelligence speculation to think this but we don't have a lot of evidence to show this there's only five physical differences in the brain between men and women and there are almost no studies that show that any of that translates into behavioral differences there are a handful of studies about spatial differences but again there are so few of them that it's really hard to say that that's true so in general male and female brains do not learn that differently they might have different neural pathways but they do not have different levels of potential cognitive development progresses via fixed progression of age-related stages that means that like a one-year-old supposed to do certain things then a two-year-old supposed to do different types of things and a three-year-old is that true or not this is a real overgeneralization of the information and it is a misinterpretation of the data it's good and maybe helpful criteria to divide people by ages but all of us know that not everybody at the same age is ready to do the same thing sometimes you have people who begin to read when they're three years old and sometimes you have people who are nine years old and they begin to read it's not that a certain age fixes in their brain says okay it's time to read at the stage much more important are prior experiences to the actual age of the individual mental capacity is hereditary and cannot be changed by the environment or experience totally a myth right and we know now that you are born with a set of genes and they can be potentiated based on your environment so based on this balance of what you inherit and what you do with it what your environment does is important we have a real problem though with correlation and causation here because somebody who might be born into a certain socioeconomic situation for example and that fellow doesn't even graduate from high school and then he has a kid who also doesn't graduate from high school so we think that well that kid is inheriting that father's genes maybe he's just inheriting his circumstances he went to bad schools nobody motivated him to go to college or whatever it's not that his genes caused him to have that level of intelligence it's actually the opportunities that were more influential there so this is definitely a myth intelligence is fixed at birth and not fluid totally unsubstantiated we know none of us would be in education if we actually believe this right intelligence is fluid it changes throughout the lifespan most people use about 10% of their brains not true as we mentioned before based on old technology we used to think that we used to say get in the brain scanner okay name all the animals you can think of that start with the letter D okay and then we take this kind of a neuroimaging and we'd say look he's using 10% of his brain to do that when it might have been 100% of what was necessary to say the word dog right so now that we can see throughout the whole process it's not just a singular take but it's over time we can actually see how those networks work together to come up with that word dog we can see that we're using a lot more than 10% of our brain the left and right hemispheres of the brain are separate systems for learning not true brain parts work in isolation from each other not true it's not that you have like spatial abilities and creativity in one side and then logic and math in another just not true okay that some people are more right brain and others are more left brain is not true there's actually nothing that you do that only uses one of your hemispheres okay your brain will shrink if you don't drink six to eight glasses of water day okay it's intelligence speculation because so much of the brain is made up of water you think okay that makes a lot of sense it's just not true okay our brain acts like a video camera we store and make a memory of everything we see just not true we store memories that we have paid attention to so the combination of attention and memory it leads to learning but if you have not paid attention to something you will not be able to store it in long-term memory drugs make holes in your brain if this was used metaphorically it's okay to give pep talks to kids about this but there are some commercial ventures that literally sell people the idea that drugs are making holes in their brain and they actually show you know doctored up pictures of holes in brains not true not true if you had a hole in your brain you'd be dead individuals learn better when they receive information in the preferred learning styles as we mentioned before not true used a lot to promote and sell products but it's just not true the theory of multiple intelligences is validated by neuroscientific research no it's not good old howard gardener even accepts this is a psychological theory applied to education but it's not validated by neuroscience okay drill and kill promotes learning repeating repeating repeating it's important to repeat to reinforce connections in the brain so that you can retrieve information quickly but drilling all the time does not mean that does not lead to more meaningful learning it can lead to a type of mindless repetition of information a mindless memorization of certain things but it doesn't mean you know it a squared plus b squared equals c squared okay you can say that over and over again you can memorize it but it and you can drill it until you remember the formula but it doesn't mean you understand it it doesn't mean you learned anything high stakes testing are an accurate measure of what a student knows unfortunately we've put a lot of money a lot of stock into wanting to measure how people grow and learn and unfortunately they are not always the best measure of what people really know humans are born with a blank slate and they will learn if knowledge is simply provided you know sort of this empty vessel and we just fill it up with knowledge not true in fact nobody's born a blank slate you've already had experiences in the womb so you're born knowing things already right and also just exposing somebody information does not mean that they will learn it so just pure exposure doesn't mean that you'll learn it either right everything important about the brain is determined by the age of three not true it's good that you have low levels of stress and good nutrition in the early years but barring high stress and malnutrition people will learn throughout the lifespan the earlier the better in most cases for example in interventions if you want to change things that's great but it doesn't mean that you are doomed if you didn't go to early child stimulation classes from zero three it doesn't mean you're doomed forever okay violent video games have no effect on behavior they actually do have effect on behavior using the internet makes you smarter or dumber the internet is a tool it's like you know a pencil you know this doesn't make you smarter or dumber it's how you use the tool that makes you smarter or dumber extra stimulation is needed to improve the brains of preschools children no normal stimulation talk to the kid age appropriate vocabulary that's what we're looking for in kids you do not need to take them to those extra classes and memorize flashcards for them to be success later on in life learning is independent of the learner's history absolutely untrue all new learning passes through the filter of prior experience so we know that the learner's history plays a huge role in what he can potentially learn in the future learning problems associated with developmental differences and brain function cannot be remedied with education yes they can many of them can you're not doomed to the brain that you were born with we know that interventions can make a huge difference in learning achievements individuals are not responsible for behavior associated with developmental differences in the brain this means that oops sorry my 18 year old had a car crash it's not his fault his brain hasn't developed yet that's not on why is it then that most 18 year olds don't have car crashes right and certain ones do so you can't blame your brain and get out of it that's just not ethically correct teens are irresponsible and act out because the prefrontal cortex doesn't develop until the mid 20s the only longitudinal study that exists on teenage brains is done by Jay Geed in California wonderful set of studies but every couple of years there's this revelation wow the teenage brain is still rearranging itself into the late teens and then wow human brain is still developing into the early 20s and then wow the 25 year old brain still isn't settled what we know is that the more you know the more you can though and there's always a rearrangement the longer you study we stop doing these long-term trajectories of brains because basically there is a decline but it tends to parallel when people leave formal education so long as you keep thinking and studying you're always still you know rearranging your brain when you sleep your brain shuts down nothing could be further than truth that's the time of memory consolidation and also re-energizing to be able to focus and to pay attention the brain is plastic for certain kinds of information only during critical periods for example you can only learn to speak a foreign language before you are 17 or 7 or whatever not true my 7 year old grandma learned Spanish okay you can learn all the way until you die there's no critical period for anything that you learn in an academic context there might be a critical period for gross mortar skills and for your first language but there is no critical period for any academic subject memory is like an objective recording of a situation and reality exists as an abstract form for all to perceive not true this is not a tape recording we can experience the same things and we can perceive them very differently neurons are never replaced you can't grow new brain cells not true neurogenesis shows and this is in the late 1990s we're able to see this in human brains as well that there is a certain limited amount of neurogenesis that does occur in the brain brain damage is always permanent not true maybe you've lost that one network in the brain or that one area of the brain but your brain can rewire itself to recuperate skill sets in different areas of the brain neurogenesis the birth of new brain cells optimizes learning not true and not even predictable you can't project when you're going to have neurogenesis meaning you cannot optimize learning by sort of timing moments of learning with neurogenesis neuroplasticity is due to good pedagogy no good pedagogy can complement neuroplasticity and lead to learning but it's not only due to good pedagogy the brain has unlimited capacity for memory unfortunately the brain is a physical entity so it is it has a physical limit to it though we don't know exactly what that is memorization is unnecessary for learning and unwanted in modern education memory is needed for learning what we don't want is people memorizing for example the times table or grammatical rules without context then it's it's not transferable you can't use it in a new context so memorization is vital for learning what we don't want though are just memoristic activities the brain remembers everything it has ever experienced forgetting is due to bad encoding while forgetting might be in some cases due to bad encoding forgetting can also be due to multiple other factors there are multiple reasons people forget and multiple ways that people can remember and so it's not as easy as just what is memory there are multiple subsets of memory that teachers need to be aware of as well learning can be isolated from the social and emotional context myth all learning is emotionally engaging so every decision is based on an emotional context as well reasoning and decision-making can be divorced from emotion and feeling and in doing so this improves the quality of thought not true the emotion will still be experienced the way you feel that emotion is something that you can manipulate but you cannot change the emotion which is based on chemical releases and from the brain to the body those things will not change languages are located in the left hemisphere of the brain absolutely wrong in fact there's huge networks that have to do with um humor interpretation intonation that are far more right hemisphere uh dependent so this is just not true it's not that there's a left and right division of responsibilities for domain areas like language children must acquire their native language first before learning a second language absolutely not true and I have living proof in my three children who are brought up with four languages you can learn multiple languages at the same time children are sponges and learn foreign languages effortlessly believe it or not it takes a whole lot of effort to learn language we just think relatively speaking it seems like less effort than we put into learning languages so but it is not an effortless task it does take a lot of energy out of those kids okay so this is a look at a couple of the myths there are more than 70 of them still out there so you should be asking yourself now what can you do to eliminate them in your context can you please write down really quickly what is something I can do to get rid of the neuro myths in my school please give us some ideas just write that down really quickly okay so we have to accept that some of the biggest challenges that we have the main barrier to great teaching is actually our own unexamined or unconscious attitudes we think that boys could do something better than girls or that a certain race does something better than another race or a certain person from a certain neighborhood will not achieve as highly as somebody from another neighborhood those are things that we have to think about for ourselves we have attitudes about how students and their families and their makeup influences their ability to learn we have certain perceptions about how learning processes occur do you know enough about how the brain learns to be able to get rid of your own biases about how people learn we also have you know perceptions and attitudes about intelligence how does it occur how does it grow who has it who doesn't have it where does it come from unless we examine those things they can morph into myths in our own minds attitudes about how humans learn best and many people think well I know that I learn best if I do x y and z therefore everybody must learn that same way that's not true different people need different things to learn the same content based on their own personal past experiences so teachers we need to be more critical of the literature that we read and we need to embrace this complexity of the human brain and third and most importantly we have to really look at our own beliefs about how people learn and what could possibly be myths that creep into our own teaching practices this means end of the day it's up to us to up our game we have to now accept the brain is the most complex organ in the universe and that is our professional organ we have to understand the brain a bit more and other people have to appreciate us a bit more if a doctor a lawyer or a dentist had 40 people in his office at one time and all of them had different needs and some who didn't want to be there at all and who are causing trouble and if that doctor or the lawyer the dentist without assistance had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months then he might have some conception of what it is to be a classroom teacher so think about that pat yourself on the back being teachers is really really one of the toughest professions that we have in society but it isn't come into of us to now learn a bit more about our profession including about the brain so what did we try to do today we looked at the definition of some key terms what is mind-brain education what is a neuro myth and also what are educational competencies and attached to that we looked at competencies as being knowledge skills and attitudes and we talked about how attitudinal things things that are really the long-term understandings that we have about the world can be related very closely to neuromythical understandings about how the brain learns what is intelligence for example then we discussed some of the neuro myths that are still prominent what and why we need to stamp those out in order to improve our own practice so the final task for you today I'd like you to think about three things that you didn't know before this talk today write those down two things you found so interesting you're going to continue to research them or you're going to talk to others about them and at least one thing that you are going to change in your personal or professional practice based on the information you learned today okay thank you very much for the opportunity if you'd like to look at other resources related to bilingualism and multilingualism please have a look at either of my web pages and if you have any questions please don't hesitate to write thanks a lot