The neuroscientist had got through around an hour of their keynote address - full of references to neurons, dopamine and functional connectivity - when a teacher boldly raised her hand.

The event was a Science of Learning conference. It had the aim of bringing academic researchers and teachers together to bridge the gap between the laboratory and the classroom. The top billing had gone to someone who studied the brain, and why not? Making positive changes to the brain is what we teachers are all about, right?

And yet, when that teacher raised her hand and spoke, she uttered a line that questioned that certainty and conveyed a sentiment that has stayed with me ever since. “I don’t teach brains,” she said. “I teach students.”

The teacher’s statement is the sort of thing that splits a room: you may have quietly cheered to yourself on reading it or you may have groaned at what you perceive to be pedantry. Either way, though, as research exerts ever more force on how a school functions and what a teacher is permitted to do in a classroom, it’s worth stopping to consider the distinction made in the statement more deeply. Because, as you will see, the distinction matters.

This is old ground, of course, in some disciplines. The teacher’s statement taps into the millennia-long debate concerning the relationship between physiology and psychology; between sensation and perception; between the brain and the mind.

Participants in this debate traditionally fall into two camps. The first are termed dualists: these individuals believe that the mind exists separately from and can interact with the brain. The second are termed monists: these individuals believe that the mind is little more than the brain performing its typical functions.

Historically, science has existed in a grey zone between these two philosophies. Although the tenets of research demand monism (all observations must have a material cause), academia maintains distinct fields dedicated to the brain (neuroscience) and the mind (psychology). Although there is frequent collaboration between these fields, they remain largely discrete and incommensurable.

Has all the debate that has gone before given one side an edge? Most interestingly for teachers, a new framework for understanding the quandary has emerged in the past few decades. And it calls into question much of what you may hold dear in the new wave of “research-informed” practice.

So, let’s begin.

The new framework is called emergence. Luckily, I have explored this concept in an earlier Tes article, so we needn’t dig too deeply here, although a short primer might be useful.

Emergence is the ultimate manifestation of the phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.

Put simply, this framework suggests that when many small entities interact to create a larger system, novel properties emerge that are neither extant in nor predictable by the individual entities themselves.

As a simple example, acceleration is a feature common to every functioning car in the world. However, acceleration cannot be said to exist in any of the individual parts that make up a car (the engine, the axle, the wheel). Accordingly, acceleration can be understood as a property that emerges only when all the parts of a car come together.

To be fair, acceleration can be said to have correlates within the car (parts that are required in order for emergence to occur), but a correlate is not the same thing as the property itself. For instance, if I were to remove the spark plugs from a car, acceleration would cease, but it does not follow that acceleration exists in the spark plugs themselves.

So, according to emergence, the mind is best understood as a property that emerges through interactions between the brain, body and environment. Importantly, the mind does not exist in and cannot be reduced to any of these individual aspects. Attempting to elevate one aspect above the others is akin to elevating spark plugs above the wheels when it comes to acceleration: largely meaningless.

To understand this more fully, though, and to get to grips with why this matters to educators, we will need to dig a little deeper.

The brain

The human brain is often referred to as the most complex thing in the universe. When considering the numbers involved, this certainly appears to be true.

The brain works via communication among approximately 85 billion neurons, over a network of about 1 quadrillion synapses. And, extrapolating from retinal cells, it has been suggested that each neuron has 10 to the power of 1,389 possible communication configurations.

To put that into perspective, it is believed that there are a meagre 10 to the 80 atoms in the entire universe.

It’s owing to this complexity that many people believe the mind must exist in the brain. But, staggering as these values are, are they truly necessary for a functioning mind?

In a study exploring just 46 adults, brain sizes varied up to 50 per cent between individuals (ranging from 975 cubic centimetres to 1,499 cubic centimetres). These different volumes almost certainly reflect significant differences in neuronal and synaptic numbers, yet the mental function of each person was indistinguishable.

To compound this further, consider hemispherectomies: surgical procedures (often related to intractable epilepsies) that require the removal of an entire cortical hemisphere - approximately 40 per cent of the entire brain.

Although these operations frequently lead to movement issues (owing to the severing of corresponding motor connections), they often confer little to no long-term impact on personality, memory, humour or cognition. Put simply, the mind remains.

But let’s not stop there. There are cases of individuals who (through tumour or encephalitis) have lost anywhere between 80 and 95 per cent of all the neurons within their brain. Surprisingly, some of these individuals function completely normally with little to no cognitive dysfunction.

Perhaps, though, it is not size that matters. Perhaps it is only the communication patterns that matter. In this case, so long as a person has enough brain cells to pass messages, then the mind can exist.

This argument might be valid if the brain only communicated via neurons and synapses. However, we are now aware of at least four additional communication mechanisms (gap junctions, glial communication, ephaptic coupling and volume transmission) that simply cannot occur in the absence of normal neural tissue.

That the mind can persist in the absence of a complete or fully functioning brain suggests that there must be more to its emergence than neurons and synapses. As Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist Alan Jasanoff suggests, “attempts to reduce cognitive processing to the brain’s electrical signalling or its wiring…are at best simplistic and at worst mistaken”.

What else, then, might interact with the brain to allow a mind to emerge?

Brain plus body

Over the past couple of decades, concepts such as the brain-gut connection, the intracardiac nervous system (that “little brain in your heart”) and visceroception (gut feelings) have gained prominence in academic and public settings. What makes these concepts so important is that they reveal the body can change the brain just as surely as the brain can change the body.

The idea that functions of the mind rely heavily on actions of the body is commonly referred to as embodied cognition - a long-standing theory that came to prominence following the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

Consider the issue of emotions. For over a century, researchers have defined emotions as physical sensations within the body that give rise to mental feelings manifested within the mind. As the father of US psychology, William James, explained: “We feel sorry because we cry; angry because we strike; afraid because we tremble.”

This leads to a striking hypothesis: if emotions exist in the body, then the interruption of physical sensations should lead to the interruption of emotions. In fact, this is frequently what we see.

Many individuals who have suffered spinal injuries that block the passage of physical and interoceptive sensations into the brain often demonstrate differential processing of emotions and altered emotional expression (often manifesting as even temperament and softened empathic response).

Do not misunderstand: this does not imply that people with a spinal injury lack emotions. This merely implies that some come to rely on secondary senses (such as sight or hearing) and long-term memory to generate feelings. In other words, a significant change in the body leads to a significant change in the mind.

At a deeper level, consider the literature on transplantation. If the mind were reducible to the brain, then swapping out body parts should have no real impact on a person’s cognition. However, significant personality changes have been documented among organ donees for more than 50 years (leading to the theory of cellular memory). Furthermore, it’s long been demonstrated that personality and behaviour can be significantly altered by swapping out gut flora.

In one compelling example, researchers performed a faecal exchange (yep, you read that correctly) between the highly timid BALB/c strain of mice and the more outgoing Swiss strain of mice. Three weeks after the swap, the once meek BALB/c mice became significantly more outgoing and exploratory while the Swiss mice became more anxious and isolated. Again, only the body was manipulated; no neurons or synapses in sight.

But wait - just as the brain does not live in a vacuum, neither does the body. This means that there must be a third player in the emergence of the mind.

Brain plus body plus environment

Although the brain and body are wonderful, each goes somewhat haywire in the absence of something to interact with. In fact, after only 15 minutes of sensory deprivation, many people will begin to experience powerful hallucinations as the brain and body start to spontaneously activate.

Similarly, prolonged social isolation (such as prisoners sentenced to solitary confinement) frequently leads to significant cognitive changes, including psychological disturbances, impulse control problems and alterations in both facial and spatial processing. In both of these scenarios, the body and brain are internally interacting as normal. However, with little external interaction, properties of the emergent mind begin to change.

The idea that functions of the mind rely heavily on interaction between individuals and their environment is called enculturated cognition. This field of research demonstrates how an individual’s context and culture can feed back to significantly change both the brain and the body.

For example, consider adolescence. As most people know, teenagers can prove highly volatile and often engage in risky behaviour. These behaviours are frequently attributed to the brain: as frontal regions within the teenage brain undergo myelination, impulse control becomes stunted.

While it’s true that the adolescent brain is undergoing maturation, this ignores the importance of peer influence on teen behaviour. Extrapolating from research, when teenagers perform simulated driving tasks in isolation, they are around 24 per cent more likely than adults to undertake risky behaviours. However, when these same teenagers perform these same tasks in the presence of their peers, this value skyrockets to around 77 per cent. This suggests that teens can modulate behaviour far better than most people assume; they simply alter their behaviour to match the environment within which they are embedded.

It appears that manifestations of the mind are not predicated solely on actions of the brain and body - they’re predicated on the milieu within which the brain and body are situated.

Back to education

So, what does this journey into the brain-mind debate mean to your average teacher in a classroom facing 30 pupils?

Jasanoff best sums up the argument when he says: “The message that you are not your brain may be one of the most important lessons science has to teach us.” In other words, that teacher at the start is right.

Though it’s true that the brain plays a role in the emergence of the mind, it has never and can never act alone - only through interaction with the larger body and wider environment can a mind emerge and be understood.

It’s important that we grasp this in education. Unfortunately, when a purely brain-centric model is adopted, unwarranted emphasis is placed on neurological mechanisms that may divert attention and resources away from more promising behavioural and/or environmental concepts.

Consider, for instance, learning struggles. Growing up, I was a horrible student: my performance was abysmal and I spent more time in the hallway than in the classroom.

Using a neuro-centric model that equated struggle with neurology, my school frequently asked that I be tested for developmental disorders, such as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), and behavioural disorders, such as oppositional defiant disorder. Interestingly, after changing schools in Year 5, I started to flourish. In the end, my struggles were largely environmental - as my context shifted, so, too, did my patterns of learning.

This extends beyond struggle into disorder. Whereas it’s true that many disorders that affect learning may manifest as chemical imbalances in the brain, these issues frequently arise only following bodily or environmental triggers (termed the diathesis-stress model). This is why many therapists adhere to a bio-psycho-social model of disorders, whereby therapeutic considerations stretch across the brain, body and context.

For instance, although ADHD is commonly thought of as a brain disorder, there is evidence that behavioural interventions work just as well as pharmaceutical treatment in the short term and better in the long term. Furthermore, it has long been recognised that students with ADHD can sustain attention in some contexts but not others, suggesting environmental intervention may play a significant role in remediation.

When we reduce all struggles to problems of biology, this leads to two outcomes.

First, it absolves us from asking difficult questions concerning context. It’s far easier to see a problem as related to an individual than it is to seriously question what contextual structures (such as class organisation, assessment practices, reward patterns, etc) might be contributing.

Second, it diminishes agency. When biology becomes the scapegoat for learning difficulties, it becomes tricky to engender personal responsibility and generate a sense of contribution to a larger milieu.

Furthermore, a focus on physiology frequently leads to a one-size-fits-all model for education that ignores the integral role of environment to the emergence of the mind.

Programmes such as Visible Learning and High-Reliability Schools utilise research in order to determine “effective” strategies. Importantly, these programmes speak largely from a contextless belief that all learning boils down to biology.

Although some of these “effective” strategies will work some of the time, absolutely none of them will work all of the time. It’s narrow minded and potentially detrimental to construct pedagogical systems without accounting for the very real influence of environmental and contextual elements on the impact of varied techniques.

This, then, begs the question: what is the role of academic research in education?

A neuro-centric view of learning often impels us to turn to researchers who have neither experience with, nor consideration for, larger biological or environmental issues.

For instance, there is ample evidence that exercise enhances cortical and cognitive function via calcium influx and cerebral neuronal activation. This has led some researchers, including renowned biologist John Medina, to talk up the benefits of using treadmills in school classrooms.

While it is true that exercise can improve learning, manifestations of the mind brought about by the context of 25 bouncing students are almost certainly going to overshadow any neurological benefit.

Lest you think I’m being flippant, consider the gamification of learning (grounded in the biological literature of reward circuitry and memory), brain training (grounded in the biological literature of plasticity) and noninvasive neuro-enhancement (grounded in the biological literature of brain stimulation). These are all very real practices, extant in thousands of schools around the world. Although there is strong neurological evidence to support these procedures, there is equally strong sociological evidence that any benefit of these procedures is largely eliminated or (in some cases) reversed once implemented within a classroom.

Again, when we ignore the important influence of environment on the emergent mind, we fail to see that reducing learning to simple properties of the brain can lead educators and policymakers to waste time and funds on ultimately fruitless resources.

As a final consideration, it’s important to recognise that most academic research is conducted in clean, heavily controlled laboratories. In a very real sense, our knowledge of the brain and body comes largely from work that explicitly eliminates environmental variables. Unfortunately, it is impossible to eliminate environmental variables from a classroom - in fact, they are the very essence of school.

Don’t misunderstand; it’s certainly worthwhile for educators to engage with and consider brain and behavioural research, but the final determination of how these concepts should be adapted and applied can only be elucidated by practitioners at the chalkface.

Asking teachers to follow a script or recipe is not a sign of careless leadership; it is a sign of blind adherence to a philosophical position of the mind that simply does not align with the realities of school.

Jared Cooney Horvath is a neuroscientist, educator and author

This article originally appeared in the 15 January 2021 issue under the headline “Change your mind about the brain”