Researcher, Experimental Psychology Program, Psychology Institute, University of São Paulo. São Paulo, Brazil

Dr. Mirela Ramacciotti is a researcher whose path to neuroscience began in the classroom. After a law degree and three decades as an English-language teacher, school director, and materials writer, she trained in neuroscience, psychology, and speech pathology. That experience keeps her research questions tied to the real conditions in which people learn. She has been teaching since childhood, first her sisters, then her peers and students, and describes herself as someone who “breathes, lives and dreams about learning.” Outside the lab, she is a wife and mother, a piano player, an avid reader, and a lover of nature, which she calls her best companion when stress rises.

Description of her work

Dr. Ramacciotti studies how people learn, and how stress and the environment shape that process. Her work runs along three connected strands:

• The developing brain. She looks at how young children’s stress responses, executive functions (skills like focus, memory, and self-control), brain activity, and early language environment relate to their readiness to learn. The overall purpose lies in how this knowledge can be translated responsibly into classrooms.

• Early language and the teachers who support it. She has developed a training course for teachers, with materials, videos, and ongoing support, to understand how teachers’ beliefs related to qualifications affect the way educational programs are implemented.

• A third, unifying strand views learning as predictive. It draws on two ideas. Statistical learning is the brain’s ability to notice patterns in what we hear and see, like which sounds usually follow each other in speech or music, without being taught. And Predictive processing, that proposes that the brain is an active “prediction engine”: instead of simply receiving information, it constantly generates expectations about what will happen next and focuses on the mismatch between what it expected and what actually happened. These mismatches, called prediction errors, are what the brain uses to update its understanding of the world. Together, these ideas offer a framework that connects language, attention, and emotion within Mind, Brain, and Education.

Her current project builds on her postdoctoral research at University of Sao Paulo. It asks whether stress changes the brain’s predictive mechanisms that support adult learning, and whether the setting matters, for example an urban environment versus a natural one. Using behavioral tasks, EEG, and fNIRS (two techniques that measure brain activity), she aims to explain what happens in an adult’s brain under different conditions and how that relates to retaining knowledge.

Translation is at the heart of her mission. She is part of the coordinating team of the Brazilian National Science for Education Network (Rede CpE) and writes a regular column for MindBrainEd Think Tanks, working to bring accurate neuroscience to educators and counter neuromyths. She also teaches graduate courses on Mind, Brain, and Education and on the Bayesian brain, and she works to prepare the next generation of researchers and practitioners. Above all, she builds bridges between the science or learning and the real educational needs of Brazil.

Key ideas and reflections

• Learning is shaped by context. Stress, early language experiences, and the environment all influence how ready a person is to learn, and these differ from one individual to another.

• The brain learns by predicting. Detecting patterns and regularities helps connect language, attention, and emotion.

• Good science must reach the classroom. Research should produce actionable knowledge that is both rigorous enough for the laboratory and useful enough for the classroom

• Experience matters. Questions grounded in real teaching practice lead to research that can truly serve learners.