Martin Ingvar
From learning for life to life long learning
The primary role for the school system in modern society is to prepare the children for life in a future society. Globalization and competition demands a high degree of flexibility of future work-life. Children of today have therefore an increased demand for cognitive tools for life-long learning. This changes the focus of our school systems to provide more training towards meeting the unknown rather that teaching the known. Basic skills for information gathering and critical evaluation has to be formally trained already early on. The single most important basic skill for success is reading. Therefore, the falling rates for reading proficiency in western nations is there fore an alarming trend that needs to be challenged.
Professor Martin Ingvar holds the Barbro and Barney Osher chair of Integrative medicine at the Dept of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet. Since several years he is lecturing publicly on brain development, learning, stress and dyslexia.
Integrative medicine has recently become the most important aspect of the research. Cognitive neurophysiology implies studies ofthinking, memory, emotional mechanisms and learning. Our focus is to study the neurophysiological traces of thinking, learning and social interaction. We use the tools of developmental biology to study the long-term interaction between envionment and brain development. We have a strong line of research in illiteracy and its effects on cognitive development.
