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Electricity stimulates math skills?

November 7, 2010 By

Shocking news: Electrical brain stimulation improves math skills for up to six months, claims a study published in  Current Biology.  Researchers, who used a weak electrical current, hope to aid people with moderate to severe numerical disabilities — as many as 20 percent of the population — as well as stroke victims.

“I am certainly not advising people to go around giving themselves electric shocks, but we are extremely excited by the potential of our findings,” said Roi Cohen Kadosh of the University of Oxford. “Electrical stimulation will most likely not turn you into Albert Einstein, but if we’re successful, it might be able to help some people to cope better with maths.”

Turn on the juice and Johnny can find the lowest common denominator? Here’s hoping it pans out.

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Handwriting helps the brain

October 22, 2010 By

Writing by hand is good for the brain, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Using advanced tools such as magnetic resonance imaging, researchers are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development.

. . . Some physicians say handwriting could be a good cognitive exercise for baby boomers working to keep their minds sharp as they age.

“New software for touch-screen devices, such as the iPad, is starting to reinvigorate” handwriting.

I fill in crossword puzzles by hand, so maybe I’m getting an anti-Alzheimer’s twofer.

Motherhood also leads to brain growth, a study finds. New moms who gush the most about their baby’s wonderfulness show the most growth in brain cells.

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Left/right brain theory is bunk

September 20, 2010 By

Creativity isn’t a right-brain function. Logic isn’t a left-brain function. Left/right brain theory is bunk, writes cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham on The Answer Sheet.

In the usual mythology, the left hemisphere of the brain is logical, ordered, and analytic, and it supports reading, speech, math, and reasoning. The right hemisphere is more oriented towards feelings and emotions, spatial perception, and the arts, and is said to be more creative.

We have known for at least 30 years that this characterization is incorrect.

It takes a whole brain to read or listen to music or think sequentially or do just about anything. Educators who try to teach to one side of the brain or the other are wasting their time, Willingham writes.

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Can exercise build bigger brains?

September 17, 2010 By

Can Exercise Make Kids Smarter? Several recent experiments link aerobic exercise with brain development, reports the New York Times.

In a University of Illinois experiment involving  nine- and 10-year-old students, the fittest children, as measured by a treadmill test, performed best on cognitive challenges; MRIs showed “significantly larger basal ganglia, a key part of the brain that aids in maintaining attention and executive control.”

Since both groups of children had similar socioeconomic backgrounds, body mass index and other variables, the researchers concluded that being fit had enlarged that portion of their brains.

A second Illinois study focused on complex memory, which is associated with activity in the hippocampus. The fittest children had larger hippocampi than the least-fit children.

A Swedish study of more than a million 18-year-old boys who joined the army, found “better fitness was correlated with higher I.Q.’s, even among identical twins,” the Times reports.

The fitter the twin, the higher his I.Q. The fittest of them were also more likely to go on to lucrative careers than the least fit . . . There’s no evidence that exercise leads to a higher I.Q., but the researchers suspect that aerobic exercise, not strength training, produces specific growth factors and proteins that stimulate the brain, said Georg Kuhn, a professor at the University of Gothenburg and the senior author of the study.

Aerobic endurance, not muscular strength, was linked to a livelier  brain.

According to a new UI study, not yet published, Wii Fit will not make us smart. Twenty  minutes of running on a treadmill improved test scores immediately afterward;  20 minutes of “playing sports-style video games at a similar intensity” did not.

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Too stupid to know they're stupid

June 22, 2010 By

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma:  Some people are so stupid they don’t know they’re stupid. The New York Times’ Opinionator Blog focuses on research by David Dunning, a Cornell social psychology professor and his graduate student Justin Kruger.

Errol Morris interviews Dunning, who says, “If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.”

DAVID DUNNING: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.” But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas. And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.

College students who were doing badly in grammar, didn’t know it, Dunning found in his research. You’d think someone taking a class would get feedback from the instructor. Are they not being told their grammar is poor? Or are they very good at not hearing what they don’t want to hear?

Dunning praises Donald Rumsfeld’s ruminations on “unknown unknowns,” the stuff you don’t know that you don’t know. Morris seems incapable of crediting Rumsfeld with insight. It’s kind of funny to watch him struggle to deny that Rumsfeld was on to something.

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Brain training fizzles in Britain

April 21, 2010 By

Computer-based brain training doesn’t improve cognitive skills, concludes a large study published in Nature. The study involved healthy adult viewers of a BBC science program. From the Wall Street Journal:

One group took part in online games aimed at improving skills linked to general intelligence, such as reasoning, problem-solving and planning. A second test group did exercises to boost short-term memory, attention and mathematical and visual-spatial skills—functions typically targeted by commercial brain-training programs. A third “control group” was asked to browse the Internet and seek out answers to general knowledge questions.

The conclusion: Those who did the brain-training exercises improved in the specific tasks that they practiced. However, their improvement was generally no greater than the gains made by the control group surfing the Internet. And none of the groups showed evidence of improvement in cognitive skills that weren’t specifically used in their tasks.

Critics say the brain workouts were too brief –  10 minutes a day, three times a day, for six weeks — to make a difference.

Modest benefits to cognitive abilities have been reported in studies of older people, preschool children and videogame players, the study’s authors say.

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Gifted at 4, ordinary at 17

February 2, 2010 By

I want to thank Diana Senechal for guest-blogging for meso ably while I was on vacation. 

New York City parents prep their four-year-olds for IQ tests that will decide who gets into a “gifted” school, reports New York Magazine. But IQ tests aren’t very reliable for young children, especially at the high end of the scale.

Chance figures more prominently into high scores—a good night’s sleep, comfort with the tester—and lucky guesses on tough questions are worth more points than answers to midrange questions. In 2006, David Lohman, a psychologist at the University of Iowa, co-authored a paper called “Gifted Today but Not Tomorrow?” in the Journal for the Education of the Gifted, demonstrating just how labile “giftedness” is. It notes that only 45 percent of the kids who scored 130 or above on the Stanford-Binet would do so on another, similar IQ test at the same point in time. Combine this with the instability of 4-year-old IQs, and it becomes pretty clear that judgments about giftedness should be an ongoing affair, rather than a fateful determination made at one arbitrary moment in time.

Lohman estimates that only 25 percent of 4-year-olds who scored 130 or above would do so again as 17-year-olds.

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Do children need to be bored?

January 7, 2010 By

Children need a little boredom, writes Nigel Farndale in The Telegraph.

 With more toys than ever, children are overstimulated and unable to focus their attention.

 How can a jigsaw puzzle that might take hours to solve compete with a PlayStation game that has the synapses fizzing within seconds?

We did succumb to a Wii last year, however, and I regret letting it into the house. Not only is it the rival of den-making, football-kicking and tree-climbing, it is the enemy of reading. But ordering your children to turn the Wii off and read a book instead hardly sends out a positive signal about the pleasures of reading – which is a shame, because a child who has discovered the magical world that lies between the covers of a good book is rarely bored. I have a feeling our Wii is going to meet with an accident any day now, and will take several months, possibly several years, to repair.

There’s no such thing as overstimulation, counters Amanda Marcotte on DoubleX. Farndale is just a curmudgeon, she writes.

Constant stimulation may annoy curmudgeons, but it helps work those growing brains into the sort of brains that parents supposedly want for their kids.

. . . After all, a good video game is a rapid-fire series of problem-solving situations. Shouldn’t we want kids to spend their leisure time working on that? (Scientist friend on hand wants it to be known that video games are used as therapy for ADHD kids, to retrain their brains to concentrate.)

Do kids need the stimulation provided by gaming? Or would they be better off spending the time with a jigsaw puzzle, a book, a ball or a tree? I’m pro-book, but I have almost no experience with video games.

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Chaos is bad for kids

December 17, 2009 By

Kids growing up in chaotic homes with no clear rules or routines have  lower IQs and more behavior problems, concludes a study analyzed by Daniel Willingham on The Answer Sheet.

Rsearchers factored out “the parents’ education level, parent’s IQ, a measure of the literacy environment in the home (number of books and so on), the housing situation, a measure of parental warmth/negativity, and a measure of stressful events.” Chaos still emerged as a negative factor for children’s IQ and behavior.

Chaos hurts in the classroom too, speculates Robert Pondiscio.

It’s not hard to imagine higher level of student achievement, if not IQ, in classrooms that are well managed and orderly.  At the very least, the lack of those qualities is one of the most visible signposts of poorly run schools.

A Teach for America teacher in D.C. uses the “respect bell” to keep order. When a student curses, insults someone or strays off task, the teacher rings a hotel-style bell ($5 at Staples).

(Students) insisted, pleaded, begged that I stop. But I wouldn’t – at least until they, themselves, stopped saying or doing disrespectful things. Surprisingly, my decision to hold my ground led students to police each other in a positive way. They told each other to quiet down, to stop using profanity and to focus in on the lesson. For a moment, I had a class that was completely silent and on-task!

I think kids feel secure with an authoritative adult in charge.

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Reading builds brain connectivity

December 12, 2009 By

Intensive reading practice can change a child’s brain, according to a study published in Neuron.  Several programs “improved the integrity of fibers that carry information from one part of the brain to another,” reports NPR.

Some parts recognize letters, others apply knowledge about vocabulary and syntax, and still others decide what it all means. To synchronize all these operations, the brain relies on high speed “highways” that carry information back and forth, (Marcel Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon) says.

Using a MRI, Just and colleague Timothy Keller found children 8 to 12 years old with poor reading skills had lower-quality white matter compared to typical readers. Some of the poor readers  were given 100 hours of remedial reading instruction.

When they were done, a second set of MRI scans showed that the training changed “not just their reading ability, but the tissues in their brain,” Just says. The integrity of their white matter improved, while it was unchanged for children in standard classes.

Equally striking, Just says: “The amount of improvement in the white matter in an individual was correlated with that individual’s improvement in his reading ability.”

The reading instruction focused on “decoding unfamiliar words,” reports UPI.

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