MIND, BRAIN, AND EDUCATION Volume 1—Number 2 © 2007 the Author Journal Compilation © 2007 International Mind, Brain, and Education Society and Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 66 ABSTRACT —In recent years, educators have been looking in- creasingly to neuroscience to inform their understanding of how children’s brain and cognitive development are shaped by their learning experiences. However, while this new inter- disciplinary approach presents an unprecedented opportu- nity to explore and debate the educational implications of neuropsychological research, a good model for this dialogue is lacking. This is in part because relatively little is known about the relationships between cognitive, emotional, and neuro- logical development, in part because of a dearth of research methods designed to rigorously connect issues of learning and development to neuropsychological strengths and weak- nesses, and in part because neuropsychological studies are rarely presented in a format that is conducive to meaningful cross-disciplinary dialogue with educators. To begin to address these issues, in this article, I present the complementary cases of Nico and Brooke, two high-functioning adolescents, who have suffered the removal of an entire brain hemisphere (Nico his right and Brooke his left) to control severe epilepsy. Through presenting a neuropsychological study of these rare boys’ emotion and affective prosody (vocal intonation) through the developmental lens of an educator, I reinterpret the neuropsychological findings for what they reveal about how the boys leveraged their emotional and cognitive strengths to learn important skills for which they were each missing half of the normally recruited neural hardware. While Nico’s and Brooke’s results seem on the surface to contradict expectations based on neuropsychological findings with adults, they combine to reveal a compensatory logic that begins to elucidate the active role of the learner as well as the organizing role of emotion in brain development, providing a jumping-off point for discussion between educators and neu- roscientists and a model for connecting neuropsychological strengths and weaknesses to learning. In recent years, educators have been looking increasingly to neuroscience to inform their understanding of how children’s brain and cognitive development are shaped by their learning experiences (Diamond & Hopson, 1998; National Research Council, 1999). Brain development is coming to be viewed as an active, dynamic process, one in which a learner’s approach to problem solving may actually serve to organize his or her brain over time and, conversely, one in which a learner’s par- ticular neuropsychological strengths may in turn shape his or her problem-solving approach. Because of the bidirectional nature of the relationship between learning and brain devel- opment, the fields of neuroscience and education are coming increasingly into a research partnership to investigate the ways that this developmental interaction plays out. However, while this new interdisciplinary approach presents an unprecedented opportunity to explore and debate the educa- tional implications of neuropsychological research, relatively little is currently known about the basic principles governing the organization of children’s brain and cognitive develop- ment in relation to experience. One of the reasons for this lack of knowledge is that, although educators intuitively recognize the importance of emotional and social considerations in understanding chil- dren’s development, there is currently very little research that effectively integrates social and emotional considera- tions into the study of brain development. The neurological A Tale of Two Cases: Lessons for Education From the Study of Two Boys Living With Half Their Brains Mary Helen Immordino-Yang 1 1 Brain and Creativity Institute/Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California Address correspondence to Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, 3641 Watt Way Suite B17, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2520; e-mail: mhimmordino-yang@post. harvard.edu.