ABSTRACT
One day last summer I was enjoying a pub lunch on a terrace overlooking Lathkill Dale in Derbyshire. I soon realised that most of the other diners were primary school teachers. They were on some kind of in-service training day. From what I overheard, one or two of them would have liked to spend the afternoon wandering about in the sunshine. But at two o’clock they all dutifully went back inside the inn for the next session. As I was leaving, I passed the open door of the room where they were meeting. On the overhead there was a diagram of brain cells. The lecturer was saying ‘So that’s what learning is’, pointing to a link between two cells. ‘Learning is what happens when there is transmission through the synapse.’
