Sonia Lupien is the founder and director of the Centre for Studies on Human Stress (www.humanstress.ca) that has for mission to transfer scientifically validated knowledge on stress to the general public. She holds the Canada Research Chair on Human Stress. A scientific researcher for the last 30 years, Sonia Lupien studies the effects of stress on the human brain, from infancy to adulthood and old age. Her studies have shown that stress hormones can significantly impair memory performance and emotional regulation and that exposure to early adversity modifies the developmental trajectory of the brain. In her new research projects, she is working on differences between men and women in stress reactivity, and she is developing new educational programs on stress. She is also working on the impact of negative stress mindsets on the physiological response to stress in children and teenagers with the goal of developing new stress interventions aimed at modifying the public's interpretation of human stress.

His professional interests focus on science and scientific outreach. In science, he studied biology at UB and obtained his PhD in biomedicine at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (UPF) with a doctoral thesis on paleogenomics. In outreach, he has published about fifty articles, a children's story dedicated to Posidonia, a Mediterranean marine plant (Ed. Generalitat de Catalunya), which has been translated into Spanish, French, and Arabic, and the books "Curiosities of the natural world for everyone," "50 questions and answers for everyone" (Ed. Baula), and "Science under the spotlight" (Ed. Cossetània and TV3). From 2006 to 2019, he was a reporter on the science outreach program "Quèquicom" (Canal 33), and he carried out more than 140 reports that allowed him to immerse himself under the ice, fly in a hot air balloon, parachute jump, submerge in a submarine, swim across the Strait of Gibraltar, run a marathon, climb the Cavall Bernat de Montserrat, go spelunking, or experience weightlessness in a parabolic flight with the European Space Agency. He now presents a weekly live science section on the program "Tot es mou" (TV3), where he has already accumulated more than 200 interventions. During the Covid-19 pandemic, his outreach work had a unique impact and spurred the production of special programs in which he also participated, such as the TV3 Marathon (2020), and even directed, like the “Volem saber” saga (2020 and 2022). Since then, he continues to explain science associated with current events, such as the eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma (2021), where he even made live connections. Some of his works have been awarded the Albert Pérez Bastardas Award (2002), the Novo Nordisk International Award (2008), the Boeringer Ingelheim Award (2008), the Science in Action Award (2015 and 2018), and the Prisma Award (2019).

David Bartrés-Faz is Professor of Medical Psychology, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and Researcher of the ICREA Academia program at the University of Barcelona. His field of study is cognitive aging and the promotion of brain health throughout life. He has completed pre- and post-doctoral stays at Harvard Medical School in the United States, and at the Institut National de la Santé et the Recherche Médicale (INSERM, France) where he has trained in neuroimaging techniques and non-invasive brain stimulation. He has been principal investigator of 7 consecutive projects of the National Plan, of two projects of the European Commission for the Center of the University of Barcelona, published more than 160 scientific articles and supervised 11 doctoral theses. Together with Prof. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, he is currently coordinator of the strategic line of brain health at the Institut Guttmann and leads the Barcelona Brain Health Initiative prospective longitudinal study.

Dr Cathy Rogers completed her PhD in Educational Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London, after many years spent as a producer, director and host of science television programmes. It was those years spent working with other creatives that first piqued her interest in the brain basis of creativity – and this was the area she focused on for her PhD, investigating the processes involved in creativity in children. Her research interests are broad; she has worked with policy organisations and on the ground to improve the teaching of adult literacy, she works with a lab focused on understanding the factors that bring about social change and she is writing a hopeful, science-based children’s book about the future. Underpinning all her research is a passion to communicate ideas clearly, no matter how complicated the subject matter. Most recently, she has published a book which is an introduction to the field of Educational Neuroscience.

Angeline Lillard is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia where she directs the Early Development Laboratory and the Montessori Science Program. She is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science. She received her PhD in Psychology from Stanford University in 1991, and the American Psychological Association's Boyd McCandless Award for her early career contributions to Developmental Science. Her book, Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius (Oxford University Press) received the Cognitive Development Society Book Award, is translated into several languages, and is currently in its 3rd edition. She has been keynote speaker at dozens of Montessori and Psychology conferences nationally and worldwide. Her research has been funded by the Institutes of Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and many private foundations.

Despite what the media report, small amounts of stress have positive effects on brain and behavior. Yet, most people continue to think that stress is negative and this leads them to produce high levels of stress hormones. The idea that stress only have debilitating effects on brain and behavior is called a negative stress mindset. In contrast, a positive stress mindset is the idea that stress can also have positive effect on brain and behavior. Our studies and that of many colleagues show that children and teenagers are highly sensitive to negative stress mindsets, and these can lead to a physiological stress response that decreases cognitive performance. Consequently, we and others have developed various interventions to increase positive stress mindsets in children and teenagers that can have the potentiel to decrease stress reactivity and increase cognitive performance.

Only God creates out of nothing. To create, one must start with something pre-existing; in fact, one must recreate. Creativity is a manifestation of rationality. Language is the primary support of rationality and the raw material of creativity. However, language has physical limitations (intensity, frequency, duration...), alphabetical, morphosyntactic, grammatical, lexical, and semantic limitations. Therefore, humans have a series of rhetorical resources that enhance the potential of language to represent reality: metonymies, similes, allegories, parables, euphemisms, ironies, paradoxes, antitheses, oxymorons, prosopopoeias, equivocations, antonomasies, litotes, epimones, periphrases, paraphrases, or metaphors. And of all these rhetorical figures, metaphor is the most potent. Its potential is so great that we could not only consider it an engine of creativity but creativity itself.

The purpose of educational neuroscience is to use our understanding of how the brain works and how it learns to help teachers do an even better job of teaching young brains. Many of the insights from neuroscience come from understanding the processes our brains have perfected through evolution. Our brains didn’t evolve to sit in classrooms and learn! When the brain does learn, it does so by making use of the whole suite of processes that have been honed through evolutionary development. This means using the sensorimotor system to bring together all the information from sensory systems to produce movements; it means integrating emotions into learning; it means understanding social processing - recognising the central role that other people play in an individual’s learning. All of these aspects are as much part of what goes on in brains in classrooms as ‘pure cognition’. In this presentation I will describe how the brain works using this evolutionary perspective and setting out the brain’s processing priorities. There will be barely a word of jargon! Instead I will describe how the brain thinks and learns using simple language and analogies. I will talk about how the brain forms abstract concepts, how memory works, the principles of plasticity and more. Along the way I will point out the many synergies between what we have learned from neuroscience and what Maria Montessori observed more than a century earlier.

Prof. Angeline Lillard will briefly discuss what Montessori is. Studies on the outcomes of Montessori education will be reviewed, putting special emphasis on executive function, creativity, and academic and personal development.