LATEST ARTICLES
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Brain Science to help teachers improve teaching methods
Article in New Scientist, Sept. 16, 2009:
Brain science to help teachers get into kids' heads
- By Nora Schultz, Berlin
- New Scientist, 16 September 2009
- For similar stories, visit the Teenagers and
- The Human Brain Topic Guides
NEUROSCIENCE could do for schools what biomedical research has done for healthcare. That's the conclusion of the Decade of the Mind (DOM) symposium last week in Berlin, Germany, to discuss how the latest findings could be used to improve education.
"In medicine, we have an excellent system in place to go from basic research to clinical practice, while in neuroscience we have the basic understanding of how the brain learns but still need to figure out how to translate this into the classroom," says Manfred Spitzer of the University of Ulm in Germany, one of the conference organisers. With brain imaging and, increasingly, genetic studies now complementing psychology research, a host of new findings could inform teachers about the conditions in which our brains can be primed to learn best.
One of the main themes emerging at the DOM meeting was that the foundation of successful learning is improving executive function - a collection of cognitive processes important for self-control and focusing on the task at hand. Brain-imaging studies have mapped executive function to several regions, including the anterior cingulate gyrus, which also lights up during error detection and when children learn numeracy and literacy.
Various studies presented at the meeting showed that improving a child's executive function could be achieved with relatively small changes, for example, by altering the timetabling of exercise sessions or encouraging the learning of a musical instrument (see "Stretch and learn" and "The Stephen King effect")
Click here: To read the entire article.
www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327265.800-brain-science-to-help-teachers-get-into-kids-heads.html
#
Friday, September 11, 2009
Pink Brain, Blue Brain
A BOOK REVIEW OF
Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It by Lise Eliot
In the Sept. 14, 2009 issue of Newsweek, under the title "Pink Brain, Blue Brain: Claims of sex differences fall apart," Sharon Begley reviews Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It by Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.
Although there is no specific mention of the current buzz word "tomboy" — which is circling about the the BBC's coverage of the of sex-orientation testing case of South African sprinter Caster Semanya — Begley's review explains how Eliot can make the broad claim that there is "little solid evidence of sex differences in children's brains."
Perhaps — perhaps — it's true, if we use Eliot's argument, that tomboy behavior derives more from the expectations of parents than it does from the dispositions of the kid. But I'm thinking that if a girl-kid waxes tomboy, she hadda be a curious wannabe in the first place! Either way, lets beat the tom-toms — o-boy-o-boy-o-boy! — for all of the tomboys of this Earth ever: then, now, and hereafter!
KEY IDEAS IN BEGLEY'S REVIEW:
• Marching through [her] claims like Sherman through Georgia, [Lise Eliot] explains that assertions of innate sex differences in the brain are either "blatantly false," "cherry-picked from single studies," or "extrapolated from rodent research" without being confirmed in people.
• Other baseless claims: that women are hard-wired to read faces and tone of voice, to defuse conflict, and to form deep friendships; and that "girls' brains are wired for communication and boys' for aggression." Eliot's inescapable conclusion: there is "little solid evidence of sex differences in children's brains."
• How we perceive children—sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them.
•
To read Begley's entire review of Pink Brain, Blue Brain, click here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/214834.
#
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Rollins Reservoire Outing
Exclusive Pictures
The August 27, 2009, Outing of Cindy's TBI "Pontoonaquaphilia" Society at Rollins Lake
With special thanks to Skipper Lane Rollins.
Photos and Apple iPhoto development by John Horlivy.
•
The Mystery of Anne Green's Savory Coleslaw:
Q. What seasonings did she use?
A. Dillweed & celery seed.
#
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Meditation and Gamma Waves
This is a study from Scientific American that came out of the Center for Compassion and Altruism at Stanford. It gives preliminary results on some EEG studies that are being performed using the Dalai Lama's monks showing the difference between newbie and seasoned meditators' brain waves.
•
http://compassion.stanford.edu/
May 26, 2009 | 34 comments
Meditation on Demand
New research reveals how meditation changes the brain
By Peter B. Reiner
meditation
Brenda McEwan
e-mail print commentIn the fall of 2005, the Dalai Lama gave the inaugural Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, DC. There were over 30,000 neuroscientists registered for the meeting, and it seemed as if most of them attended the talk. The Dalai Lama’s address was designed to highlight the areas of convergence between neuroscience and Buddhist thought about the mind, and to many in the audience he clearly achieved his objective. There was some controversy over his being invited to deliver this lecture insofar as he is both a head of state and a religious leader, and for that reason he largely stuck to his prepared text. But he strayed from the text at least once, reminding the audience that not only was he a Buddhist monk but also an enthusiastic proponent of modern technology.Elaborating, he shared a confidence with the audience, telling the audience of scientists that meditating was hard work for him (even though he meditates for 4 hours every morning), and that if neuroscientists were able to find a way to put electrodes in his brain and provide him with the same outcome as he gets from meditating, he would be an enthusiastic volunteer. It turns out that a recent set of experiments, from researchers at MIT and Stanford, moves us a step closer to making his wish a reality.The Dalai Lama’s interest in neuroscience has been reciprocated by at least some members of the neuroscience community. Reasoning that studying the brains of people who meditate might lead to novel insights about the human brain, investigations of long-term meditators has been fertile ground for scientific investigation, with some of the more rigorous work emerging from Richard Davidson’s laboratory at the University of Wisconsin. From the perspective of neuroscience, meditation can be characterized as a series of mental exercises by which one strengthens one’s control over the workings of their own brain. The simplest of these meditation practices is ‘focused attention’ where one concentrates on a single object, for example one’s breath. When expert meditators practiced focused attention meditation, demonstrable changes were seen using fMRI in the networks of the brain that are known to modulate attention. A second set of experiments studied long-term meditators practicing ‘open monitoring meditation’, a more advanced meditation practice which in many ways is a form of metacognition: the objective is not to focus one’s attention but rather to use one’s brain to monitor the universe of mental experience without directing attention to any one task. The unexpected result of this experiment was that the EEG of long-term meditators exhibited much more gamma-synchrony than that of naive meditators. Moreover, normally human brains produce only short bursts of gamma-synchrony. What was most remarkable about this study was that long-term meditators were able to produce sustained gamma-activity in a manner that had never previously been observed in any other human. As such, sustained gamma activity has emerged as a proxy for at least some aspects of the meditative state.Gamma WavesBut what causes gamma rhythm? And are there any potential benefits of sustained gamma-activity? The strongest hypothesis for the cellular mechanisms underlying generation of the gamma rhythm is that it is due to the activation of fast-spiking interneurons in the cerebral cortex. In two new papers to be published in Nature, the laboratories of Christopher Moore and Li-Huei Tsai at MIT and Karl Deisseroth at Stanford tested this hypothesis directly. The experimenters utilized optogenetics, developing custom-designed viruses to infect only the fast-spiking interneurons of either the prefrontal or barrel cortex in mice with genetically engineered, light-sensitive cation channels. Then, they inserted fine optical fibers into the relevant region of the cortex, allowing light to be delivered to the infected neurons and thereby activating only the fast-spiking interneurons. (In essence, this allowed them to switch particular brain cells on and off.) In both experiments, selectively stimulating the fast-spiking interneurons evoked gamma oscillations, thereby confirming the hypothesis that these neurons drive the gamma rhythm.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=meditation-on-demand
#
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Graded Symptom Checklist
Hello, Yes-brainers,
The symptom checklist for head injuries presented here may fit like old hat on the brains of Cindy and Kerry, our neuro-practitioners at Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital, but I thought I'd post the list anyway, introduced by Jane Brody's commentary on it. It's good to know that such a list exists and that it caught the spotlight of the New York Times. To jump to the online article, click here. —John
•
Symptom List Helps Gauge Head Injures
Published: August 24, 2009
Dr. Robert C. Cantu, a neurosurgeon who is an expert on sports-related concussions, says every parent with a child who plays a contact or collision sport should have what is called the Graded Symptom Checklist.
Issued by the National Athletic Trainers’ Association, the checklist should be used at the time of a head injury and at least four times afterward: at 2 to 3 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours and 72 hours after the injury, or until all symptoms have cleared.
The checklist can help determine whether a concussion has occurred, its severity and whether a player is fit to return to the game.
But the checklist is also important to use later, on the recommended schedule, because symptoms of a concussion are sometimes delayed. A player who sustained a direct or indirect blow to the brain may feel all right initially, then develop symptoms hours or days later.
Athletic trainers, doctors or other medical personnel who suspect that an athlete has suffered a concussion can use the checklist to evaluate a player both at rest and during physical exertion. Coaches and parents can be trained to use it as well.
Professional evaluators, parents and players must understand that a return of symptoms when a brain-injured athlete is physically or cognitively stressed is a clear sign that the brain has not healed.
“Any one of these symptoms occurring in the aftermath of a head trauma would disqualify an athlete from participating in the sport,” emphasized Dr. Cantu, co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University School of Medicine. “No athlete should be engaged in physical exertion if any symptom is present.” — JANE E. BRODY
◊
Attention Yes-brainers:
Because of our blog's format constraints, we are unable to see the far right edge of the checklist graphic. What gets cut off is the number 72 and the column of spaces below it. To get a copy of the original as it appears in the Times, go to this page, and click on the hot text for graphic on the left.
| ||||
Copyright New York Times 2009
#
Monday, August 17, 2009
Smart Babies
New York Times Image
"Your baby is smarter than you think"
Alison Gropnik
In her essay "Your Baby is Smarter than You Think" in the New York Times of August 15, 2009, Alison Gropnik explains how recent studies
demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible," claiming that in "some ways, they are smarter than adults.Gropnik shows how the studies reveal
capacities for statistical reasoning, experimental discovery and probabilistic logic allow babies to rapidly learn all about the particular objects and people surrounding them.
▼
KEY CONCEPTS OF THE ESSAY
▼ "New studies . . . demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible. In some ways, they are smarter than adults."▼ "Three recent experiments show that even the youngest children have sophisticated and powerful learning abilities.▼ "Last year, Fei Xu and Vashti Garcia at the University of British Columbia proved that babies could understand probabilities."▼ "In 2007, Laura Schulz and Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz at M.I.T. demonstrated that when young children play, they are also exploring cause and effect."▼ "In 2007 in my lab at Berkeley, Tamar Kushnir and I discovered that preschoolers can use probabilities to learn how things work and that this lets them imagine new possibilities."▼ "But babies’ intelligence, the research shows, is very different from that of adults and from the kind of intelligence we usually cultivate in school."▼ "Babies are captivated by the most unexpected events. Adults, on the other hand, focus on the outcomes that are the most relevant to their goals."▼ "Babies explore; adults exploit."▼ "Part of the explanation for these differing approaches can be found in the brain. The young brain is remarkably plastic and flexible. Brains work because neurons are connected to one another, allowing them to communicate. Baby brains have many more neural connections than adult brains. But they are much less efficient. Over time, we prune away the connections we don’t use, and the remaining ones become faster and more automatic. Moreover, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls the directed, planned, focused kind of intelligence, is exceptionally late to mature, and may not take its final shape until our early 20s."▼ "But what children observe most closely, explore most obsessively and imagine most vividly are the people around them. There are no perfect toys; there is no magic formula. Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play."
▼
THE ESSAY IN FULL:
Your Baby is Smarter than You Think
By Alison Gropnik
Generations of psychologists and philosophers have believed that babies and young children were basically defective adults — irrational, egocentric and unable to think logically. The philosopher John Locke saw a baby’s mind as a blank slate, and the psychologist William James thought they lived in a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Even today, a cursory look at babies and young children leads many to conclude that there is not much going on.New studies, however, demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible. In some ways, they are smarter than adults.
Three recent experiments show that even the youngest children have sophisticated and powerful learning abilities. Last year, Fei Xu and Vashti Garcia at the University of British Columbia proved that babies could understand probabilities. Eight-month-old babies were shown a box full of mixed-up Ping-Pong balls: mostly white but with some red ones mixed in. The babies were more surprised, and looked longer and more intently at the experimenter when four red balls and one white ball out of the box — a possible, yet improbable outcome — than when four white balls and a red one were produced.
In 2007, Laura Schulz and Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz at M.I.T. demonstrated that when young children play, they are also exploring cause and effect. Preschoolers were introduced to a toy that had two levers and a duck and a puppet that popped up. One group was shown that when you pressed one lever, the duck appeared and when you pressed the other, the puppet popped up. The second group observed that when you pressed both levers at once, both objects popped up, but they never got a chance to see what the levers did separately, which left mysterious the causal relation between the levers and the pop-up objects. Then the experimenter gave the children the toys to play with. The children in the first group played with the toy much less than the children in the second group did. When the children already knew how the toy worked, they were less interested in exploring it. But the children in the second group spontaneously played with the toy, and just by playing around, they figured out how it worked.
In 2007 in my lab at Berkeley, Tamar Kushnir and I discovered that preschoolers can use probabilities to learn how things work and that this lets them imagine new possibilities. We put a yellow block and a blue block on a machine repeatedly. The blocks were likely but not certain to make the machine light up. The yellow block made the machine light up two out of three times; the blue block made it light up only two out of six times.
Then we gave the children the blocks and asked them to light up the machine. These children, who couldn’t yet add or subtract, were more likely to put the high-probability yellow block, rather than the blue one, on the machine.
We also did the same experiment, but instead of putting the high-probability block on the machine, we held it up over the machine and the machine lit up. Children had never seen a block act this way, and at the start of the experiment, they didn’t think it could. But after seeing good evidence, they were able to imagine the peculiar possibility that blocks have remote powers. These astonishing capacities for statistical reasoning, experimental discovery and probabilistic logic allow babies to rapidly learn all about the particular objects and people surrounding them.
Sadly, some parents are likely to take the wrong lessons from these experiments and conclude that they need programs and products that will make their babies even smarter. Many think that babies, like adults, should learn in a focused, planned way. So parents put their young children in academic-enrichment classes or use flashcards to get them to recognize the alphabet. Government programs like No Child Left Behind urge preschools to be more like schools, with instruction in specific skills.
But babies’ intelligence, the research shows, is very different from that of adults and from the kind of intelligence we usually cultivate in school. Schoolwork revolves around focus and planning. We set objectives and goals for children, with an emphasis on skills they should acquire or information they should know. Children take tests to prove that they have absorbed a specific set of skills and facts and have not been distracted by other possibilities.
This approach may work for children over the age of 5 or so. But babies and very young children are terrible at planning and aiming for precise goals. When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we really mean that they can’t not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest. This has led us to underestimate babies in the past. But the new research tells us that babies can be rational without being goal-oriented.
Babies are captivated by the most unexpected events. Adults, on the other hand, focus on the outcomes that are the most relevant to their goals. In a well-known experiment, adults saw a video of several people tossing a ball to one another. The experimenter told them to count how many passes particular people made. In the midst of this, a person in a gorilla suit walked slowly through the middle of the video. A surprising number of adults, intent on counting, didn’t even seem to notice the unexpected gorilla.
Adults focus on objects that will be most useful to them. But as the lever study demonstrated, children play with the objects that will teach them the most. In our study, 4-year-olds imagined new possibilities based on just a little data. Adults rely more on what they already know. Babies aren’t trying to learn one particular skill or set of facts; instead, they are drawn to anything new, unexpected or informative.
Part of the explanation for these differing approaches can be found in the brain. The young brain is remarkably plastic and flexible. Brains work because neurons are connected to one another, allowing them to communicate. Baby brains have many more neural connections than adult brains. But they are much less efficient. Over time, we prune away the connections we don’t use, and the remaining ones become faster and more automatic. Moreover, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls the directed, planned, focused kind of intelligence, is exceptionally late to mature, and may not take its final shape until our early 20s.
In fact, our mature brain seems to be programmed by our childhood experiences — we plan based on what we’ve learned as children. Very young children imagine and explore a vast array of possibilities. As they grow older and absorb more evidence, certain possibilities become much more likely and more useful. They then make decisions based on this selective information and become increasingly reluctant to give those ideas up and try something new. Computer scientists talk about the difference between exploring and exploiting — a system will learn more if it explores many possibilities, but it will be more effective if it simply acts on the most likely one. Babies explore; adults exploit.
Each kind of intelligence has benefits and drawbacks. Focus and planning get you to your goal more quickly but may also lock in what you already know, closing you off to alternative possibilities. We need both blue-sky speculation and hard-nosed planning. Babies and young children are designed to explore, and they should be encouraged to do so.
The learning that babies and young children do on their own, when they carefully watch an unexpected outcome and draw new conclusions from it, ceaselessly manipulate a new toy or imagine different ways that the world might be, is very different from schoolwork. Babies and young children can learn about the world around them through all sorts of real-world objects and safe replicas, from dolls to cardboard boxes to mixing bowls, and even toy cellphones and computers. Babies can learn a great deal just by exploring the ways bowls fit together or by imitating a parent talking on the phone. (Imagine how much money we can save on “enriching” toys and DVDs!)
But what children observe most closely, explore most obsessively and imagine most vividly are the people around them. There are no perfect toys; there is no magic formula. Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play.
Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology at Berkeley and the author of “The Philosophical Baby.”
The New York Times. "Sunday Opinion." "Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think." Alison Gropnik. August 15, 2009. 10.
#
