Helping Low-SES Students Thrive

• January 26, 2012 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

Studies and statistics have clearly demonstrated the link between low achievement and low socioeconomic status or SES. Still, studies have also shown that given the right conditions, every student – including those from less fortunate circumstances – have the opportunity to succeed. Not only that, but the kinds of changes that can increase achievement are available to every household, regardless of SES.

Factors linked to low-SES have been shown to have an effect upon readiness for school and achievement once a child has entered school. Circumstances include a household’s lack of financial wherewithal to devote to learning resources such as books, supplies and computers. Other contributing factors include lack of parental involvement; only 36% of low SES parents read to their kindergartners, compared to 62% in the highest SES students (Coley, 2002). In addition, parents of low SES households tend to be dual-income or single parent families who have limited time and energy at home to devote to meaningful engagement with their children.

That said, many successful students do come from low-SES homes. While some of this success can be attributed to the simple innate resiliency and drive arising from within the student, research has been able to tease out a number of common factors in such homes, where certain practices are clearly contributing to student success. 

Factors for Success

In 2006, Allison Milne and Lee Plourde studied this population, selecting six second-grade students from a Central Washington elementary school who came from low-SES homes but were also high achievers. While the number of students in the study was limited, Milne and Plourde outline a number of common factors in their homes that likely contributed to their success:

• Educational content in the home: In all households, these students as early learners all had access to learning materials, such as books, writing material and structured time. All students attended preschool or Head Start.
• Placing value on education: All parents held having an education as an important value, and made efforts to ensure that their children understood this value. Of the participant families, all parents had completed at least through the 10th grade.
• Positive, supportive relationships: Regardless of family structure (single mother, guardian, two-parent, etc.), successful children’s families demonstrated patterns of support and open communication. Such parents expressed wanting open, respectful relationships with their children, and spent time with them having more adult-like conversations. They also indicated that they spent time together and had fun with one another. Finally, these families all had support systems of friends and family nearby to lean on in times of need.
• Understanding of the parental role: When it came to questions about their job as parents, all expressed “eerily similar” answers, such as providing support and guidance at home, and making sure their children understood the essential nature of a good education. They also made sure that they set examples through their own behaviors that communicated such values to their children.

Even though this study was limited in its sample size, the implications and the opportunities are far reaching. If low-SES children have the support and understanding that we see in these households, financial status does not have to be the ultimate determinant of academic achievement.

For further reading:

Factors of a low-SES household: what aids academic achievement?

Education and Socioeconomic Status, American Psychological Association

Related Reading:

Changing the Culture of Poverty by Doing Whatever it Takes

What Educators Can Do About Poverty in American Schools

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Categories: Education Trends, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: achievement gap, at-risk, early learning, elementary school learning, emotions in learning, how children learn, learning environment, motivating students, self-esteem, student growth, title i

What Does The Marshmallow Experiment Tell Us About Self-Control?

• January 24, 2012 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

What is the mark of a good student? Is it innate intelligence? Is it attention span? Is it drive? Studies show that a major contributor to success might be as simple as having self-control. Take, for example, the marshmallow experiment.

Place a single marshmallow in front of a four-year old. Tell them they can eat it now or wait 15 minutes and have it along with a second marshmallow.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Walter Mischel of Stanford University performed this very experiment with over 500 nursery school children. What percentage do you think was able to control their impulses and hold out for marshmallow number two? In the end, fewer than one in three children were able to wait it out for the two marshmallows. At four years old, they simply had not developed the ability to delay gratification required for the challenge.

Paired with recent follow-up studies with 155 of the same individuals, the marshmallow experiment has come to shed fascinating insights on the inner workings of motivation and gratification, and how the two contribute to future success in school and life.

In the end, these studies have shown that children who were able to resist that first marshmallow were also more likely to be able to “avoid substance abuse, maintain a healthy body weight, and even perform better on the SAT than peers who couldn’t resist temptation.” In another study by Angela Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania, self-control was a better predictor of academic success than IQ.

Self-control: Innate or teachable?

Given the proven connection between self-control and life success, the question arises: Is it possible to develop tools that help people enhance self-control?

As it turns out, self-control is the result of processes in two parts of the brain. Our rational thoughts, such as “If I wait, I get the second sweet,” take place in the pre-frontal cortex. More urgent decisions take place in the more primitive ventral striatum. Decisions like these that connect to deeper desire and reward depend on the environment around us. In this second case, the thought process might be, “Gee, that marshmallow sure looks soft, sweet and yummy, and I really want it. Right now.”  Research has shown that the rational thoughts can often be derailed by the primitive limbic system; this is no surprise, given the importance of these systems to the survival of our species over the eons.

So, can we strengthen the ability of the rational side to win out over the impulsive side? One solution might just lie in helping young people change how they focus on the environment around them, such as helping them differentiate between “hot” and “cool” cues.  The limbic system deals with “hot” cues, activating emotions like impulse, anger, sadness, happiness and satisfaction. On the other hand, “cool” cues are processed in the frontal lobe and activate cognitive systems that control functions like planning, problem solving, working memory and reasoning. Returning to a variant of our marshmallow experiment, studies have shown that students who were coached to focus on “cool” attributes like color or shape were better able to resist temptation than those who focused on “hot” cues like taste.

Toward impulse-control interventions

Research is now underway to figure out how educators can better harness some of these insights into the power of impulse- and self-control to help students better achieve success. At the KIPP Academy School in New York, the marshmallow experiment has been used as a way to initiate discussions about self-control with 6th graders and help them make better, more rational decisions.

Ultimately, the ability to produce concrete strategies and tools that help students learn to control their impulses will depend upon the results of investigations that are still in the works. But eventually, if we are taking the research to heart, success will likely follow.

For now, if your students seem a bit impulsive from time to time, a chat about marshmallows might be just the thing to get them thinking.

Further Reading:

Study Reveals Biology Behind Self-Control

Related Reading:

Tips for Teaching Positive Behavior

Building Your Child's Self-Confidence

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Categories: Brain Research, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: behavior, decision making, early learning, emotions in learning, Innate abilities, toddler

Using the Power of Optimal Timing to Improve the Brain’s Ability to Learn

• December 13, 2011 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

Learning is both a behavioral and biological process that is supported by the neurons in the brain over time.

When we learn, our brain cells physically change in response to stimulation, forming pathways to facilitate the connections we use repeatedly. For example, if you meet a person only once, you might not remember their name or recognize their face if you were to run into them on the street ten years on. On the other hand, if you see that person every day for a year, you will likely be able to recognize their face and remember their name much more readily should you not see that person for a long period of time.

Learning processes like these in the brain take predictable, measured amounts of time. While these rates will vary from person to person and nervous system to nervous system, we can depend upon certain relatively constant timeframes for learning and processing an understanding of some of these timeframes can allow educators to take maximum advantage of them. That’s why the Fast ForWord® products function on each of these scales by design, using the power of optimal timing to improve the brain’s ability to learn.

Learning depends upon a specific feedback loop characterized by timing between stimulus, response and reward ^[i]. Here are some of those timescales, along with how Fast ForWord works within each:

• Milliseconds: Auditory processing happens on the millisecond timescale. Fast ForWord helps improves auditory processing rate to ensure that students are able to “keep up” with auditory input such as spoken directions from their teacher.
• Seconds: Reinforcement learning happens on a scale of seconds and is achieved by interacting with one’s surroundings.  The Fast ForWord program’s reward system is based on this time scale, delivering rewards to students at just the right moment to maximize reinforcement learning, helping students get the most benefit from the program.
• Minutes: Our actions change based on how we perceive our surroundings. This kind of adaptation can take minutes. As students move through Fast ForWord exercises, they can see their performance results changing minute by minute. Being able to see such improvement helps motivate students toward greater learning. In other words, as they perceive the positive results of their actions, students adapt and learn to generate more of those positive results.
• Days or Weeks: Consolidation and maturation of memories can take days or weeks. When a student overcomes an obstacle in Fast ForWord, their confidence is strengthened and they not only learn the material, but they learn about their own capabilities and what success feels like. The memories of such experiences and the associated feelings – gathered and built upon over the days, weeks and months – lay the foundation to spur them on to future success. Such success in the classroom can lead to a greater drive to perform well in other areas, such as doing well on a test, winning on the athletic field, or successfully completing that college application.   We cannot underestimate the power of experiencing success and the sensation that it creates.

In the classroom, having an awareness of how long it takes for a student to assimilate and process certain kinds of information can add an entirely different rhythm to our instruction. In having such an understanding of how the brains of our students work, we can time our teaching to optimize learning and help our students achieve maximum success.

References:

[i] Why Time Matters Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. University of California San Diego

Related Reading:

The Brain Gets Better at What it Does: Dr. Martha Burns on Brain Plasticity

Video Games: A New Perspective on Learning Content and Skills

 

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, accelerate learning, auditory processing, brain plasticity, emotions in learning, how children learn, learning environment, motivating students, processing rate, teacher impact, technology in education

Modeling Healthy Choices: Three Habits for Optimal Brain Health

• November 10, 2011 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

Isaac Asimov said, “The human brain…is the most complicated organization of matter that we know.”^[i] And it’s true.  Our amazing brains are both a product of biological evolution and a reflection of the world around us.

First, the stuff of the brain – grey matter, white matter, fluids, blood vessels – is made up of nutrients from the plants and animals we consume from the world around us.

Second, in terms of brain function, our interaction with our environment has a major impact on both brain structure and brain health. Extensive and ongoing research into “brain plasticity” has proven that everything we experience, everything we see or touch or hear, creates a perception that changes the wiring of the brain itself.

Given that our brains are a product of evolution (which is outside of our control) and environment (which is only partially under our control, and often less than ideal), how can we keep our brains as healthy as possible, from birth all the way through old age?

The pathway to optimal brain health comes from the small choices we make every day. By making healthy choices on a regular basis, and particularly by turning those choices into habits, we can help our brains stay healthy while also helping the young people in our lives learn positive self-care skills that can last a lifetime.

Here are three important steps everyone can take toward optimal brain health:

• Eating more healthy foods and minimizing unhealthy foods. Eating foods that provide nutrients to build healthy brain tissues is essential. Foods high in omega-3 fatty acids, such as salmon, avocados and nuts, along with foods high in potassium like bananas promote brain function. Also, lowering our intake of sodium can reduce blood pressure, a factor that can, if left unchecked, lead to stroke.
• Engaging in regular physical exercise. Like every other organ and tissue in the body, the brain needs healthy blood flow to function at its highest possible levels. Physical exercise helps improve and maintain cardio vascular health, allowing the body to efficiently and effectively deliver oxygen and nutrients to the brain. But it can do more for us. In students, educators have reported physical exercise resulting in less disruptive behavior, higher self esteem, less anxiety and greater attentiveness. Dr. John Ratey of Harvard University describes exercise as “food for the brain.”
• Giving your brain practice in the activities you want it to be good at. The neural pathways that our brains create over time, as we have said, are a direct result of the stimuli that we receive. That’s why through practice and training, a child can work to shape their brain into that of a great musician or mathematician or martial artist. At the same time, we must remember that negative input also affects our wiring. For example, excessive amounts of watching television and playing video games has been shown to have concerning chemical and biological effects, such as the suppression of melatonin release, elevated blood cholesterol and an increased chance of coronary heart disease – and these effects should be taken into consideration as we make decisions about how we spend our time.

The brain might be the most complicated organization of matter we know of, but that doesn’t make it difficult to keep healthy. By learning to choose the right foods, the right activities, and the right input, we can each take control – at any age – of building the brains we want. 

Children can begin learning to make good choices from the earliest ages, but it is up to parents and teachers to model these healthy habits of mind.  

Yes, that means you.

References:

[i] J. Hooper and D. Teresi. The Three-Pound Universe. Macmillan Publishing Company. 1^st edition 1986.

Related Reading:

Lifelong Learning and the Plastic Brain

5 Paths to Brain Health: Tips from Dr. Paul Nussbaum

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: behavior, brain plasticity, brain training, health and well being, nutrition, self-esteem, teacher impact

Shaming Some Kids Makes Them Aggressive

• November 3, 2011 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

Many people believe that youth who are aggressive and violent towards other children have low self-esteem. Youth programs are often designed to boost self-esteem in kids at risk. Does the research support this belief? A team of researchers designed a study on young teens to examine their responses to feeling shame.

The subjects were asked to compete in an easy, timed task against a competitor.  Some of the youth experienced shame when they were shown a fake list of competitors’ times and saw their own times at the bottom of the list.  The group that did not experience shame was not shown competitors’ times or their own rank.  Then all participants were given an opportunity to act aggressively by blasting their opponent with loud noise through headphones.  All participants also completed self report measures of narcissism (grandiose views of self, inflated sense of entitlement) and self-esteem a few weeks prior to the competition. 

The results of this experiment showed no evidence that the kids with low self-esteem were more aggressive.  Instead, kids with narcissistic traits were most likely to react to shame with aggression.  This is interesting to think about from the perspective of educators who want to support learning through optimizing a collaborative atmosphere as opposed to promoting a highly competitive environment.

References:

The Cracked Mirror: Features of Narcissistic Personality Disorder in Children. 2009.

Related Reading:

Of Rats and Men: How Stress Affects the Brain

Adolescence: What’s the Brain Got to do with it?

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Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: behavior, emotions in learning, health and well being, learning environment, self-esteem, teacher impact

Of Rats and Men: How Stress Affects the Brain

• November 1, 2011 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

You have probably experienced that feeling of not being as mentally sharp as normal when you are under a lot of stress. Recent research has demonstrated that the human brain functions less well under stress, and we now know that stress causes actual physical changes in the brain, and those changes are directly associated with a decrease in brain function.

The original research in this area was first performed with rats as subjects. Later tests with human subjects generated similar results. Let’s take a quick look at each case:

Case #1: The Rats. Bruce McEwen and John Morrison at Mount Sinai Medical Center found that in the rat’s brain under stress, nerve cells of the prefrontal cortex shrink, resulting in slower performance on attention-shifting tasks. On the other hand, neurons in the orbital frontal cortex used response-reversal tasks actually grew larger. A response-reversal task is one where a subject is reinforced for giving response A to stimulus A and response B to stimulus B. Then, they are placed in a reversed situation where they must give response B to stimulus A and response A to stimulus B. The test measures how well they can “reverse” their responses. In the face of such tasks, the plastic brains of the rats adapted to the stress stimuli and physically changed to address the conditions.

Case #2: The Humans. Conor Liston and B. J. Casey of the Sackler Institute used brain imaging to study male medical students preparing for their board exams and compared them to healthy students who were not experiencing the stress of studying for exams. The students were asked to perform two different mental tasks while their brains were being scanned with MRI. The stressed students were less able to shift their attention from one task to another and showed changes in the prefrontal cortex. Interestingly, their ability to perform response-reversal tasks was not impaired by stress; subjects were still able to “change their minds” when presented with information that changed their responses to a certain situation.

In both cases, we see experiments producing similar results when it comes to attention-shifting tasks and response-reversal tasks. Not only that, tests showed that the physiological effects were temporary in the rats as well as the humans. When Liston and Casey repeated the brain scans in their med students one month after the board exams were over -- and the stress was gone from the equation -- they found that the attention shifting ability and the brain scans of the stressed students had returned to normal.

So we are able to conclude that while stress causes changes to the brain and decreases some brain functions, the brain is able to recover fairly quickly. Once again, the research demonstrates how the plastic neural network of the brain – whether rat or human -- is constantly changing to address the stimuli it experiences and function at optimal capacity for its given external environment.

Further research on the effects of stress on the brain may help us to better understand how people respond to stress and could help in the understanding and treatment of stress-associated psychiatric disorders.

References:

Stress disrupts human thinking, but the brain can bounce back. January 27, 2009.

Related Reading:

Separating Brain Fact from Brain Fiction: Debunking a Few Neuroscience Myths

Left vs. Right: What Your Brain Hemispheres Are Really Up To

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Categories: Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: attention, brain plasticity, cognitive skills, decision making, health and well being, science

Kindergarten Math Readiness & The Cardinal Principle

• October 20, 2011 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

Something very interesting happens in the brains of young children when they reach age four, or thereabouts.  They start to understand “how many” items are in a set—and in particular, they begin to be able to differentiate sets of “four” items or more.  This ability signals that they have discovered “the cardinal principle,” the idea that the last number reached when counting the items in a set represents the entire set.

Of the many challenging concepts that preschoolers need to master for kindergarten math readiness, the cardinal principle is one of the harder ones, and it takes about a year to develop. It is a major milestone in a child’s mathematical development, after which the child is able to demonstrate a good understanding of “how many” in a variety of ways, such as matching sets of unlike items when the number of items in each set is the same.

Most parents believe that their child’s mathematical skills are developed largely by formal schooling, but research indicates that certain kinds of parent-child interactions in the preschool years, commonly referred to as “number talk,” are a primary driver of children’s mathematical ability through at least 5^th grade. Number talk includes activities such as rote counting (counting “one, two, three, four,” as when playing hide and seek), counting tangible objects such as Cheerios (“one, two, three, four Cheerios”), and labeling the number of items in a set (“there are four Cheerios”).

As with verbal literacy, there is wide variation in the math knowledge of four year olds, with a one to two year gap between children who are more mathematically advanced and their less advanced peers.  Children with more exposure to number talk, and specifically to number talk about sets of four or more items, catch on to the cardinal principle faster than those who engage in less number talk or in number talk that focuses mostly on smaller sets of one to three items.

Unfortunately, few parents are informed about how kindergarten math readiness develops, and they tend not to know which math skills are developmentally appropriate for their child in the preschool years.  For example, parents often do not realize that their young child, who can easily count to 10, may not be able to identify a group of 10 objects.  Parents also tend to spend more time engaged in number talk around smaller sets of one to three items instead of larger sets of four and more, while the opposite has been shown to be more beneficial.

How to Encourage Kindergarten Math Readiness

There are simple things that parents and caregivers can do to help preschoolers learn about numbers and prepare for kindergarten math:

• Ask children to count objects they can touch, such as Cheerios, pieces of cheese, or blocks, and objects they can see, like pictures of dogs on a page of the book Go, Dog. Go!
• Label the number of items in sets of objects children use throughout the day.  For example, “You have six crayons.”
• When counting tangible objects, label the number of items in the set, too, to point children toward the crux of the cardinal principle—that the last number counted represents the entire set of objects.  For example, “one, two, three, four crackers; you have four crackers.”
• Talk about larger sets more often.  What children learn about larger sets helps them perform better on tasks involving smaller sets as well.
• Expose children to age-appropriate, educational math games for preschoolers, such as the Eddy’s Number Party!™ game, a new iPad app from Scientific Learning that develops counting, number matching skills, and more.  The game, designed with cognitive scientists and educators, is based on research into how the brain learns.

Perhaps one day in the not-too-distant future, public awareness of the importance of building preschool math literacy will match that of building preschool verbal literacy.  But for now, parents and caregivers who are in the know can begin to engage preschoolers with the right kinds of activities to give them an edge in developing the early childhood math skills needed for success throughout the elementary grades. 

I encourage you to try the some of the tips outlined above if you have young children of your own and to share this article with other parents of preschool-age kids, as we work together to raise our children’s opportunities for future success.

For further reading:

Gunderson, E. A., Levine, S. C., Some types of parent number talk count more than others: relations between parents’ input and children’s cardinal-number knowledge. Developmental science. 14:5 (2011), pp 1021–1032.

Related Reading:

Introducing the Eddy's Number Party! Game - the First iPad App from Scientific Learning

Still the Write Stuff: Why We Must Continue Teaching Handwriting

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: accelerate learning, cognitive skills, early learning, how children learn, learning through play, math, play, toddler

Recognizing Emotions After Brain Injury: Re-Learning a Critical Social Skill

• October 4, 2011 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

For most of us, interpreting and expressing emotion is something deeply instinctive. But what happens when that ability to express ourselves or read another’s emotions goes awry? Imagine what can happen to a student’s classroom experience if they can’t make sense of something as simple as their teacher’s facial expression. In the past, these kinds of students have been seen as having behavior problems. So how can we help them succeed?

Research has shown that people with traumatic brain injuries often experience this same inability to interpret and respond to emotions, a condition called "affect recognition."

Barry Willer, professor of psychiatry and specialist in TBI (traumatic brain injury) of the University of Buffalo, tells the story of a man and his wife who came into his office with a problem. The woman had experienced a mild traumatic brain injury. While her husband was supporting her recovery as best he could, she consistently described his attitude as “indifferent. “ He was frustrated, to say the least.

“His wife didn’t know she wasn’t recognizing his emotions,” said Willer, recounting the story in a 2009 interview with Insciences Journal , “and he had no idea what was going on.”

This couple is by no means alone. Nearly fifty percent of all traumatic brain injuries result in problems interpreting and expressing emotion.

As educators, being able to connect with our students at an emotional level is essential to classroom success. Without that connection, the learning process can quite easily come to a halt. Thankfully, Willer has demonstrated that there is hope for this population, and that the human brain is quite capable of re-learning how to understand facial expressions and use that information to interpret emotion.

Willer and his team have developed two specific interventions that have shown positive results:

• Facial Affect Recognition (FAR): Individuals view faces on a computer screen that directs them to concentrate on specific elements of each face. "Look at the eyes. What are the eyes doing? What is the mouth doing?" and asks them to name the emotion.
• Stories of Emotional Inference (SEI): Participants are asked to read stories that describe events, along with character’s beliefs, wants and behaviors. From this information, participants are asked to infer the character’s emotions.

"What was so exciting about our preliminary study," says Willer, "is that someone may lose the ability to recognize emotions, but even 10 years later, they can re–learn the skill if given the right assistance."

As it turns out, the only emotion that traumatic brain injuries do not erase is "happy," which is very hard–wired and has an extensive amount of "redundant circuitry." Says Willer, "I don’t know how that happened, but we all can be glad it did."

For further reading:  Milders, M., Fuchs, S., & Crawford, J. R. Neuropsychological impairments and changes in emotional and social behaviour following severe traumatic brain injury. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 25, 2003. 157-172.

Related Reading:

Lifelong Learning and the Plastic Brain

5 Paths to Brain Health: Tips From Dr. Paul Nussbaum

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: adaptivity, behavior, brain plasticity, brain training, cognitive skills, effort, memory, processing

Neural Prostheses: The Melding of Hardware, Software and Wetware

• September 20, 2011 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

Earlier this year, I wrote about a researcher named Dr. Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University Medical Center and his work with a monkey named Aurora. Through placing implants in Aurora’s skull, Nicolelis was able to record Aurora’s motor nerve signals as she used a joystick to play a simple video game. He then used a computer algorithm to convert those signals into code to power a robotic arm. Over time, because of her brain’s ability to adapt and learn, Aurora taught herself how to control the movements of that robotic arm by just thinking about it.

What we see in Nicolelis’s work is the complex interplay of three different elements of a neural prosthetic system: hardware, software, and what has been come to be known as “wetware.”

• Hardware refers to the machine part of the system. This consists of the wires, computers, circuits, implants and manufactured devices that comprise the system.
• Software refers to the set of instructions, data and algorithms – in other words, the set of rules – that govern the function and operation of the hardware.
• Wetware refers to the combination of biological elements involved in the system, generally including muscles, hormones, nerves and the brain.

Through choreographing the delicate dance between these three systemic elements, biomedical professionals are becoming more able to develop neural prosthetics that continue to improve the quality of life for any number of disabilities, substituting motor, sensory or cognitive capabilities that have been damaged as a result of injury or disease.

Today, biomedical research has given rise to any number of neural prostheses. Visual prosthetics stimulate the optic nerve to counter certain types of blindness. Spinal cord stimulators induce sensations to mask and control pain. Pacemakers work with the muscle and nerves of the heart to monitor and regulate the heartbeat and control fibrillation.

One of the most common applications of the neural prosthesis concept is in the cochlear implant. Dr. Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus and neuroscientist, was the Principal Investigator back during the development of the first cochlear implants at the University of California, San Francisco. The work showed that in as little as six months, patients were able to develop remarkable speech discrimination abilities. It was found that speech discrimination abilities improved over time due to the brain’s plastic ability to change and adapt to these new inputs.

According to the NIH’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders, over 59,000 adults and children have cochlear implants. Just like Aurora’s robotic arm, a cochlear implant involves the integration of hardware, software and wetware. But instead of using motor neurons to articulate robotic fingers, cochlear implants form the technological bridge between the world of sound and the ability to perceive that sound in someone whose ears cannot convert sound vibrations to a nerve impulse. While the ones we developed had a single channel, today’s devices have up to 120, which allows for better input fidelity through stimulating different parts of the auditory nerve.

Of the three elements of the neural prosthetic system, hardware, software and wetware, the only one of them that can be expected – even depended upon – to change over time is the wetware. Both because of normal development and brain plasticity, an individual’s ability to effectively use neural prosthetic will naturally change over time as the individual’s own nervous system adapts to make better use of the hardware and software.

As Dr. Nicolelis demonstrated with Aurora, wetware is an amazingly malleable apparatus. We might imagine these neural prosthetic systems as fantastically complex in terms of their hardware and software. That said, research out of the University of Washington, Seattle, has suggested that, because of brain plasticity, we may be able to use simpler algorithms in the external hardware and software, and depend upon the plasticity of the wetware to make optimal use of these devices.

In the end, we as humans, with our drive to heal and discover, seem to have a limitless ability to develop innovations to remedy our physical ills. And yet, it is the plasticity of our nervous system’s innate ability to adapt that will apparently allow us to make the most of these innovations.

For further reading:

Fallon, J. B., Irvine, D. Shepherd, R. Neural Prostheses and Brain Plasticity. J Neural Eng. 2009 December.

Moritz, C. T., Perlmutter, S. I., Ftez, E. E. Direct Control of Paralysed Muscles by Cortical Neurons. Nature. 2008 December.

Related Reading:

A Gymnast, A Cursor, and A Monkey Named Aurora

Dr. Martha Burns on Brain Plasticity

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: auditory processing, brain plasticity, brain training, cognitive skills, innovation, processing, science

Separating Brain Fact from Brain Fiction: Debunking a Few Neuroscience Myths

• September 1, 2011 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

The brain is one of the most mysterious and misunderstood organs in the body. It represents the seat of our judgment, our senses, perceptions and our creativity.  More than any other aspect of our anatomy, the uniqueness of our brains is at the core of what makes us truly human.

While neuroscience advances every day, there are a number of myths about the brain that are accepted by many people as fact. As a scientist, I and my colleagues have worked to uncover the brain’s truths.  So what are some of these myths – and what are the true stories behind them to the best of our scientific knowledge?

Fiction: We use only a small percentage of our brains.

Fact: General thinking is that we use only about 10% of our brains. Nothing could be further from the truth. Brain scans such as MRI and PET scans show that we regularly use all parts of our brains. Certainly, different areas of the brain are activated during different types of tasks, and some parts of the brain are less critical to support vital functions than others. But as even small brain injuries can show, every part of the brain performs essential functions in how we process, communicate with, and move through the world around us. Read more at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-we-really-use-only-10.

Fiction: The wrinkles on the surface of the brain appear and become more pronounced as we learn.

Fact: The ridges and crannies – more correctly, the gyri and sulci – on the surface of the brain actually all appear by the time a fetus is 40 weeks old. As the human brain evolved, gyri and sulci appeared as a result of the brain having to fold in upon itself as it grew larger to fit inside a correctly proportioned skull. While the gyri and sulci do not change as we learn, the brain itself – as we know from research in brain plasticity --  does continue to change throughout our lives.

Fiction: Brain damage is permanent.

This is an interesting myth, in that it is the result of ambiguous language. The brain is made up of a collection of neurons – brain cells – that are all networked together. When the brain suffers trauma and neurons are destroyed or damaged, those neurons cannot regenerate. In that sense, the damage to them is permanent. That said, those neurons are linked together at synapses to form complete networks. While a single neuron cannot be repaired, the pathways and connections throughout the brain can rewire themselves and form new pathways. If a connection is lost due to injury, we can reestablish that connection if the damage is not so acute that the entire network cannot be rewired. For a scholarly treatment of how the brain recovers from injury, see http://web.uvic.ca/~skelton/Teaching/General%20Readings/Robertson%20Murre%201999.pdf.

Fiction: A person is either “left-brained” or “right-brained.”

The theory goes that left-brained people are more logical and right-brained people are more creative. Certainly there are asymmetries associated with locations of certain brain functions. For example, mathematical computation and the grammar and vocabulary aspects of language seem to be controlled in most people in the left brain, while numerical approximation and comparison, along with interpretive aspects of language like prosody and intonation, appear to be controlled in the right.  These ideas date back to original research done in 1861 by French physician Pierre Paul Broca. Today, through MRI and PET imaging techniques, we have a much more complex view of the way the brain’s hemispheres control functions and interact with one another. The two perform a complex dance of information exchange that gives rise to our abilities. For a look at results of some of these MRI tests in children, see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8780075.

Fiction: There are five senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch.

These five are simply the ones that we are most aware of in our conscious minds, but we perceive and sense the world in a great many other ways. For example, “proprioconception” describes how our bodies are oriented in the world. “Nociception” is how we perceive pain. We sense changes in temperature. We sense balance. We feel thirst and hunger. We sense the passage of time. For a quick and easy description of the senses – in humans as well as other species – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense.

As scientists continue our search for the facts, there is much we don’t know; we are expanding our knowledge of the brain’s truths every day. As new discoveries are made, it is natural for facts to become distorted and reinterpreted with each new telling.   As educators and scientists, we should take the time to explain the truths about the brain and rectify any misunderstandings we may hear others repeat. The brain is amazing, and communicating the truths about it will further society’s understanding as a whole.

Related Reading:

Dr. Martha Burns on Brain Plasticity

How Learning to Read Improves Brain Function

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Categories: Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: brain development, brain training, cognitive skills, decision making, infant brain, Innate abilities, processing