Educational neuroscience: neural structure-mapping and the promise of oscillations

•I discuss the promise of neural oscillations for specifying mechanisms of learning.•Cortical oscillatory encoding is explained and illustrated.•The role of oscillatory encoding in language learning is used as an example.

A critical goal for educational neuroscience is to specify causal developmental mechanisms of learning. In-depth understanding of neural information coding and transmission should enable understanding of how sensory systems build the cognitive systems critical for education - language, attention, memory - over developmental time. Cortical oscillatory encoding processes may offer mechanistic insights into how developmental trajectories unfold. All educators are familiar with children who show mastery of taught information one week, yet subsequently appear to lose it. Oscillatory research shows that sensory information that arrives out of phase with ongoing oscillations does not reach awareness, while complex combinations of bottom-up and top-down phase-phase and phase-power relations enable context and prior knowledge to influence current performance. Oscillatory studies of language are used to illustrate the promise of oscillations research for education.