Educational neuroscience burst onto the scene with the hope of explaining how we learn. But the jury is still out on whether it’s useful for classroom practice. Neuroscientists, while investigating memory, stumbled across the spaced learning effect by examining simple reflexes in sea slugs, crayfish and cats—and by probing
and stimulating the neurons in thin slices of rat brain. The neuroscientists discovered that repeated stimuli, with precisely timed gaps, are one of the most reliable ways to convince neurons that an event is memory-worthy
