Plant vacuoles

interesting questions. It took me about six months to realize that philosophy (as interesting as it is) wasn’t going to answer any questions about how to reform education. Psychology seemed like the answer: I reasoned that understanding the mind should help one fi gure out how to change it. The problem then became the paucity of information about the mind. At that stage, psychology was just shaking off its behaviorist perspective (my fi rst publication, when I was an undergrad, was a behavioral study with rats). I didn’t see any alternatives, and stuck with psychology. As it developed many years later, turning to studies of the brain opened up an entirely new way to think about education. I was an early adopter of neuroimaging techniques. Some of our studies focused on the nature of individual differences. In particular, we looked at how variations in regional brain activity predicted variations in behavior. Ultimately, my hope was that we could use such results to validate simple behavioral tests, and that those tests in turn could be used to characterize each person’s ‘processing profi le’. This profi le would indicate what sorts of processing a given person was good at, and what sorts of processing that person was not so good at. And, knowing this, we could fi gure out how best to help that person learn. This interest was a facet of my more general interest in the science of learning, which has deep potential applications in all walks of life. In general, my inclination towards applications has kept me alert to potential ways that basic science can be put into practical contexts, which has proven very useful.