Connecting cognitive science and neuroscience to education: Potentials and pitfalls in inferring executive processes

Scientific understanding of mind and brain is advancing quickly and energetically, and society’s need to improve the quality of education makes headlines every day. Naturally, these two trends create a broad interest in using research about the brain and mind to guide educational practice. Knowing how our minds/brains function, how we use the brain and body to process and store new information, how our minds/brains change and develop, and how damage to our brains contributes to dis-abilities and other problems—all these research efforts have great poten-tial for moving forward the science and practice of learning. This move to make educational practice more scientific has proper-ties that are similar to the history of medical practice. Medicine once relied on the collected wisdom of culture but had no systematic proce-dure for testing which medical practices were actually effective. In the last 200 years, especially since the innovations of Louis Pasteur in France, medicine has established a powerful base in research in the bio