Gustavo Deco, neuroscientist: “We care a great deal about diet and sports, but we should be even more concerned about education”
An Argentine researcher at Barcelona’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Deco has reflected on the importance of activities focused on cognitive development.
When families sign their children up for extracurricular activities, sports are usually the first thing that comes to mind. Soccer, tennis, martial arts, swimming, track and field - we naturally gravitate toward physical activities that keep young people active and help them maintain peak fitness.
But neuroscientist Gustavo Deco, an Argentine physician and researcher at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, has reflected on how activities focused on cognitive development often go unnoticed compared with those centered on physical fitness. “We care a great deal about our children’s diet and sports participation, but we should be even more concerned about education, because it directly affects the most important part of that physical body: the brain,” he said.
“An adolescent brain is in a state of intense plasticity and reorganization, constantly optimizing its information-processing pathways,” Deco explained. “Effective learning happens when the educational environment allows the brain to integrate information from both bottom-up and top-down processes,” he added, advocating for an educational system in which curiosity plays a central role.
“A happy brain operates in learning mode”
The research, conducted alongside colleagues from the University of Oxford and Budapest and published in the book Whole Brain Modelling Cartography Dynamics, explores how the brain is organized and how it changes across different stages of development. “A stressed brain operates in survival mode. A happy brain operates in learning mode,” Deco summarized.
The researchers even included a section examining how the covid-19 pandemic affected people’s brains - particularly those of adolescents. “The coronavirus lockdown and its impact on the teenagers who took part in the study was enormous, far greater than the effect of exposure to mobile phones,” he concluded.
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