“Learning is about biology.” James Zull’s first sentence sums up his thesis in The Art of Changing the Brain. Dr. Zull proposes that recent and continuing advances in neuroscience should inform the practice of teaching. After all, learning is an activity of the brain, so shouldn’t we be teaching with an underlying understanding of how the brain works? Writing for educators at all levels, Zull lays out a simple but convincing relationship between Kolb’s learning cycle and the anatomy of the human cerebral cortex. Understanding how information flows into and between various parts of the brain helps us to understand how to structure our courses to improve student learning. The practical suggestions and stories from his Zull’s own classroom experiences make this book useful, and his engaging and humorous writing style make it a pleasure to read. As I progressed through the book, I kept finding biological reasons why certain things that I do in my classroom work well, and why, regardless of my effort, other things don’t work as well as I had hoped.

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