Neuroscience exploded into the education conversation more than 20 years ago, in step with the evolution of personal computers and the rise of the Internet, and policymakers hoped medical discoveries could likewise help doctors and teachers understand the "hard wiring" of the brain. That conception of how the brain works, exacerbated by the difficulty in translating research from lab to classroom, spawned a generation of neuro-myths and snake-oil pitches--from programs to improve cross-hemisphere brain communication to teaching practices aimed at "auditory" or "visual" learners. Today, as educational neuroscience has started to find its niche within interdisciplinary "mind-brain-education" study, the field's most powerful findings show how little about learning is hard-wired, after all. In contrast to the popular conception of the brain as a computer hard-wired with programs that run different types of tasks, brain activity has turned out to operate more like a language. Different parts of the brain act like the letters of the alphabet and by the time a child is 8 months old, the letters are there--the basic connections have formed in the hippocampus or the prefrontal cortex, say--but then through experience, those neural letters activate in patterns to form words, sentences, and paragraphs of thought. That analogy offers a whole different idea of how the brain develops, both normally and abnormally. Moreover, mind-brain-education researchers say, helping teachers and students understand how the brain changes in response to experience may be the best way to link neuroscience findings to classroom experience.