My Favorite Teachers: Mrs. Bandy and Dr. Gerald Canter

• May 8, 2012 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

Neuroscientists recognize the importance of teachers. Teachers are probably the only professionals that deliberately and strategically build brains. Dr. Stanislas Dehaene, the author of Reading in the Brain and The Number Sense, has published research demonstrating how literacy education alone augments our visual-spatial and language skills. Yet, many don’t appreciate how difficult teaching is or how it impacts our lives. When any of us considers influential people in our lives, people who shaped our sense of self or modeled future success for us, a special teacher is often on our list. Favorite teachers are often those who do three things for us: make us feel smart, take us under their wing to develop what they see as special skills, talents or abilities, and model for us how to proceed to realize our goals.

My list of special teachers contains two who meet those criteria. My first was Mrs. Bandy. She was my first and second grade teacher (I was very lucky to have her for two years). I was a middle child in my family, third out of four children, and as such my parents were very busy trying to help my older siblings get through high school and into college and take care of my little sister. As most middle children who read this blog can probably identify with, I learned to demand little and “get along.”  I knew how to keep quiet.  But, when I entered school I did not have a great deal of confidence.

Mrs. Bandy made me feel very special and took me under her wing. Reading was not easy for me so she put me in my own reading group. I wanted to be one of the “Busy Bees” but she told me she thought I might like different books than those they read (even though I noticed we all read Dick and Jane). It wasn’t until years later that one of my classmates told me that “The Busy Bees” had all the ‘smart’ kids. But at the time I thought they must all envy me because I got a reading group of my own.

I think the episode that sticks out the most as an example of the way Mrs. Bandy made me feel smart is the day we were playing Charades during share time. That day we were acting out fellow classmates instead of the usual book or movie title. I had no idea what I was supposed to do so when it was my turn I got up and just acted very flustered. Rather than be critical Mrs. Bandy laughed whole-heartedly and said, “That is so clever! You have acted out yourself!” I left school that day feeling very clever indeed and held on to that memory for many years.  By cheering me on when it was obvious I was bewildered, she helped me recognize that it is good enough to just give something a try, even if you are not certain what is expected. To this day, no matter where I am, no matter what challenge is put before me, I hear myself saying, “just try.” It doesn’t matter if I am the best, or smartest or fastest. What matters is that I give everything my best effort. And today, as a teacher myself, I try to model her approach and applaud all of my students as much for their effort as for their accuracy.

I had to wait almost twenty years for my other favorite teacher. Dr. Gerald Canter was a college professor of mine during graduate school at Northwestern. I took three courses from him and he mentored my Ph.D. dissertation. He was a brilliant lecturer, very dynamic and engaging. He inspired me in many ways. First, I tried to emulate his teaching style. But more important, I think, like Mrs. Bandy, he made me feel smart and competent. He encouraged me at every step.  In his courses, unlike many professors who gave multiple choice tests, Dr. Canter gave essay tests.  He did not use test readers but he personally read every test carefully and took the time to make thought provoking and stimulating comments.  His comments helped me to become a critical thinker and improved the cogency of my writing. Dr. Canter later provided strategic guidance during my professional life. He alerted me to teaching positions he thought I should consider, helped me conduct research, write journal articles, and develop effective teaching skills. All he ever asked of me in return was that I do the same for young students when I became established. I have tried to live up to his expectations my entire career.

The best teachers guide, inspire, encourage and provide us with a love of learning. Ah yes, and they build brains. How fortunate we are to have had a few marvelous teachers pave our way toward a successful adult life.

 

 

Related Reading:

5 Ways To Be A Better Teacher In Today’s Classroom

Teaching Children to Read

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Categories: Reading & Learning

Tags: employee stories, learning environment, motivating students, self-esteem, teacher effectiveness, teacher impact

Keeping in Mind: The Task of Working Memory

• March 27, 2012 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

Just about everyone has had the experience of going grocery shopping with a small list of purchases in their mind, only to forget one or more of them upon arriving at the store. Similarly, we all have left one room to retrieve something from another room, forgetting what we are after before we have even arrived. The ability to hold information in mind for a few minutes to a few hours is called working memory. It is essential for everything from language learning in children to following a book chapter from beginning to end.

Working memory was first defined by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch in 1974. It is a form of memory that may distinguish humans from many other animals (with the exception of several primates). Working memory, commonly referred to as short-term memory, allows a person to hold on to information for a period of time (minutes or perhaps hours) long enough to do something new with the information, like take notes or solve a problem.

A typical situation in which we rely on working memory is watching an informational program on television, like a segment on a news program, and discussing it later with a friend. We may forget about the specific news event later in the week, but for a period of time we “keep it in mind,” thinking about it and perhaps talking about it with others. Each time we share the information with another person or think about it ourselves, we select details that interest us and alter them slightly to keep them interesting to us. Other examples of tasks that require good working memory in adults include taking notes during a lecture or paraphrasing information we hear or read about. 

Alan Baddeley elaborated on the original concept of working memory in 1992, noting that unlike other kinds of short-term memory (such as rote repetition), working memory requires us to focus and maintain our attention on the task at hand. To keep our attentional focus, we must be goal-directed, ignoring distractions that might interfere with goal attainment. Baddeley stressed the importance of the “central executive” system for maintaining attentional focus in working memory tasks.

For children, working memory is essential for learning language. Unlike vision, where we can often study an image as long as we need to, everything we hear occurs in time. The speech signal moves very quickly: an average sentence is about 14 seconds long, an average single syllable word lasts only a quarter of a second, and the average consonant sound may last only 1/12 of a second.  

We are all made aware of how fleeting the speech signal is when someone is talking to us and we become distracted, which consequently requires us to ask the speaker to repeat what was just said. In that way, speech is like a billboard that appears briefly in our peripheral vision as we travel at 55 miles per hour along a highway. It we are not paying specific attention in that instant to that part of the road, we will miss it, or only retain small bits of the message on the billboard. In a similar way, information we hear leaves us as soon as it arrives. We are not able to hold it in view like a drawing or photograph, or study it like a person’s face, so we must keep the information in our mind. 

For some, improving working memory can be as simple as getting more sleep or more exercise or learning to avoid distractions.  For others, whose working memory is weak enough to significantly impact learning, more help may be needed. Fortunately, the brain is a malleable structure and cognitive skills like working memory can be improved by strengthening key learning pathways in the brain (as regular readers of this blog know—working memory is one of four cognitive skills rapidly strengthened by the Fast ForWord program). 

The truth is, we live in an exciting time.  Scientists are learning more all the time about how cognitive skills like working memory operate.  We can look forward to these discoveries yielding more insights and tools that we’ll be able to use to optimize learning throughout our lives.
 

Related Reading:

The Mirror Neuron System

Toddler Vocabulary Development: Shopping With Your Child

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Categories: Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: attention, auditory processing, brain training, language learning, oral language skills, processing

The Reading Brain: How Your Brain Helps You Read, and Why it Matters

• March 15, 2012 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

If you’re reading this, you’re probably an accomplished reader.  In fact, you’ve most likely forgotten by now how much work it took you to learn to read in the first place.  And you probably never think about what is happening in your brain when you’re reading that email from your boss or this month’s book club selection.

And yet, there’s nothing that plays a greater role in learning to read than a reading-ready brain.

As complex a task as reading is, thanks to developments in neuroscience and technology we are now able to target key learning centers in the brain and identify the areas and neural pathways the brain employs for reading. We not only understand why strong readers read well and struggling readers struggle, but we are also able to assist every kind of reader on the journey from early language acquisition to reading and comprehension—a journey that happens in the brain.

We begin to develop the language skills required for reading right from the first gurgles we make as babies. The sounds we encounter in our immediate environment as infants set language acquisition skills in motion, readying the brain for the structure of language-based communication, including reading.

Every time a baby hears speech, the brain is learning the rules of language that generalize, later, to reading.  Even a simple nursery rhyme can help a baby's brain begin to make sound differentiations and create phonemic awareness, an essential building block for reading readiness. By the time a child is ready to read effectively, the brain has done a lot of work coordinating sounds to language, and is fully prepared to coordinate language to reading, and reading to comprehension. 

The reading brain can be likened to the real-time collaborative effort of a symphony orchestra, with various parts of the brain working together, like sections of instruments, to maximize our ability to decode the written text in front of us:

• The temporal lobe is responsible for phonological awareness and decoding/discriminating sounds.
• The frontal lobe handles speech production, reading fluency, grammatical usage, and comprehension, making it possible to understand simple and complex grammar in our native language.
• The angular and supramarginal gyrus serve as a "reading integrator" a conductor of sorts, linking the different parts of the brain together to execute the action of reading.  These areas of  the brain connect the letters c, a, and t to the word cat that we can then read aloud.

Emerging readers can build strong reading skills through focused, repetitive practice, preferably with exercises like those provided by the Fast ForWord program, that "cross-train" all the reading-relevant areas of the brain.

Independent research conducted at Stanford in 2003 and Harvard in 2007 demonstrated that Fast ForWord creates physical changes in the brain as it builds new connections and strengthens the neural pathways, specifically in the areas of reading. After just eight weeks of use, weak readers developed the brain activity patterns that resemble those of strong readers.  And, as brain patterns changed, significant improvements for word reading, decoding, reading comprehension and language functions were also observed.

It’s never too early to set a child on the pathway to becoming a strong reader.  And it’s never too late to help a struggling reader strengthen his or her brain to read more successfully and with greater enjoyment. 

It’s all about the brain.  Have you hugged your brain today?

Related Reading:

How Learning to Read Improves Brain Function

Why You Should Read With Your Child

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Categories: Brain Research, Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: brain training, child reading development, crosstraining, early learning, improving reading skills, learning to read, literacy, oral language skills, reading comprehension, technology in education

The Mirror Neuron System

• February 21, 2012 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

What is a parent to do to get a child’s brain started out on the right path – to be able to concentrate on one task for extended periods, be able to handle rapidly changing information, and be flexible enough to switch tasks easily?

Well, it turns out the human brain seems to have a strategy: by developing two core capacities during the first few years of life, interactive play and language, the brain seems to become uniquely equipped to build a range of cognitive capacities.  Recent research suggests that a specific area in the frontal lobe – ‘the doing part of the brain’ - begins to wire itself very early in development through imitation of the movements and sounds made by others. This area, the so-called mirror neuron region, allows an infant to watch or listen to other people and respond with imitative or complementary movements or sounds.  

Because this area is the same region, in the left hemisphere, that is responsible for fluent, easy articulated, speech, researchers have speculated that it might have been an evolutionary starting point for development of human language. But, because it is also active in the right hemisphere, it seems to play an important role in social, and perhaps athletic, interaction. In fact, Miella Dapretto and her colleagues at UCLA recently reported research showing that children with autism spectrum disorders, which include a range of disturbances that impact, among other things, social skill development, have observable deficiencies in the mirror neuron system.

There is reason to speculate, based on the research now available, that exercising the mirror system in general, can build a brain that is better equipped for socialization, school, music and athletics. At this time existing research has demonstrated that exercising Broca’s area of the brain (and other areas that are connected to this area through complex cognitive networks), either through natural parental stimulation in infants or through intense specific practice in school-aged children or adults, one can systematically build a brain that is better equipped for many cognitive tasks including language, reading, writing, and math as well as remediate a brain that seems to have deficits or learning disabilities in one or more of these areas.

Every time a parent plays a game like “Patty-cake, Patty-cake” where the child and parent duplicate a routine with actions and a poem or song, the parent is helping the child to exercise the mirror neuron system. Parents have been doing these action/nursery sequences for years, and there are many similar routines in many cultures. Examples of “mirror neuron” routines that have been around and passed on for generations in Western cultures include – “So Big!” where a parent ask the child something like, “How big are you?” and the child and parent respond together holding up their arms in like fashion, “SO BIG!” or, with older children, “Eensie Weensie Spider” where parent and child imitate each other by alternately touching the thumb of one hand to the forefinger of the other hand to emulate the spider climbing up a water spout.

The wonderful thing about these types of routines is that they illustrate how intuitive parents have been for centuries, at identifying and exploiting the natural directions and priorities of brain development. What worries many of us in neuroscience is when parents abandon these time-tested and intuitive interactions with our young children, swayed by technological advances that enhance productivity and drive positive cognitive changes in a mature brain but by abandoning natural parental interactive routines may actually jeopardize the delicate balance of stimulation in the developing brain.

We must exercise caution when adults develop products that appeal to parents with names that inspire confidence like, “Baby Einstein”, if the products have not been subjected to reasonable controlled studies that will help us understand the impact of these activities on young brains. Most companies that develop products for young children do not conduct this type of research because the assumption is that toys and play activities that engage infants and keep them entertained are not harmful. But, unfortunately, that assumption is not warranted. Many of us who put our children in “walkers” or “swings” in the latter part of the twentieth century learned that these “toys” had unintended consequences (i.e., negative effects, on early motor development).

As developmental neuroscientists and other specialists have begun to understand the implications, both positive and negative, of early stimulation on later brain development, those of us in the sciences need to better inform parents and “toy” makers may need to attempt more accountable to parents. In all fairness, however, it may be unreasonable to expect toy makers to conduct independent controlled research studies that we have not even demanded of drug companies. So, the view held by many scientists is that an educated parent can look beyond the hype of advertising and provide for the young child in their care, a fostering environment that is calmly yet convincingly brain-enhancing.

For Further Reading:

The Mirror Neuron System and the Consequences of Its Dysfunction. Marco Iacoboni and Mirella Depretto. Nature Reviews | Neuroscience Volume 7, December 2006

The Mirror Neuron System is More Active During Complementary Compared with Imitative Action. Roger Newman-Norlund, Hein T van Schie, Alexander M J van Zuijlen, and Harold Bekkering. Nature Neuroscience Vol. 10, May 2007

Using Human Brain Lesions to Infer Function: A Relic from a Past Era in the fMRI age? Chris Rorden and Hans-Otto Karnath. Nature Reviews | Neuroscience Vol. 5,  October 2004

Understanding Emotions in Others: Mirror Neuron Dysfunction in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Mirella Depretto, Mari S. Davies, Jennifer H. Pfeifer, Ashley A. Scott, Marian Sigman, Susan Y. Bookheimer, and Marco Iacoboni. Nature Neuroscience Vol. 9,  December 2005

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. Daniel Goleman. NY, NY: Bantam Books, 2006.

Neural Plasticity: The Effects of Environment on the Development of the Cerebral Cortex (Perspectives in Cognitive Neuroscience).  Peter R. Huttenlocher. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002

Neural Mechanisms of Selective Auditory Attention are Enhanced by Computerized Training: Electrophysiological Evidence from Language-Impaired and Typically Developing Children. Courtney Stevens, Jessica Fanning, Donna Coch, Lisa Sanders,and Helen Neville. Brain Research Vol. 1205, April 2008.

Related Reading:

5 Things Every Parent and Educator Should Know About Early Childhood brain Development

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

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

Tags: attention, auditory processing, brain development, brain training, cognitive skills, early learning, emotions in learning, infant brain, Innate abilities, learning through play, musical training, play, processing, toddler

Building Your Child’s Self-Confidence

• January 10, 2012 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

As parents, we want our children to have confidence but not conceit.  That is, we want our children to monitor the outcomes of their behaviors realistically, to be polite and considerate of others, but retain a sense of self that is positive and assured. I believe the mistake parents often make is thinking that constant praise of a child is the route to self-confidence. It is an easy mistake to make, especially in a society in which so much emphasis is placed on making our children feel loved and building feelings of self-worth.

I, like most new parents, constantly praised my oldest child for everything she did from swinging at the park without falling to reading a stop sign as we drove to preschool. But the problem with that is that excessive praise may create unrealistic expectations for the child when they are in the “real world” where people do not praise them all the time. I did not realize that for my daughter this was creating tremendous pressure to be successful at everything she did. Conversely, some children who hear constant praise at home may feel confused or dejected when others are not as enthusiastic about their feats and develop a fear of failure.

A young client of mine, whose mother worked very hard to build self-confidence in her children by praising them continuously, developed a host of voice problems associated with stress in elementary school.  I have worked with other children who developed a “need” for constant praise that affected their ability to enjoy competition if they could not win.

Since a large component of human brain maturation involves increased self-awareness and improved capacity for self-monitoring of behavior, parents have the opportunity to be instrumental in helping a child develop this advanced skill. By encouraging self-appraisal that is realistic while avoiding being overly judgmental, parents help their child build confidence. 

Instead of constant praise, parents can try to use praise more naturally to encourage behaviors the parent believes are worthwhile or beneficial. Statements like, “I like the way you shared your toys today” or “You seemed to be having a lot of fun on the climber, do you feel like you are getting better at that?” may help a child learn to value effort and progress as well as to self-evaluate.

It is important to remind ourselves that to adequately develop the ability to monitor our behavior we have to understand mistakes as well as achievements. It is very difficult for a parent to watch a child fail at something, but as adults most of us are well aware that some of the best lessons we had as we grew up came from our failures, as rough as they may have been at the time.

Building your child’s self-esteem ultimately will help them succeed in endeavors both in school and in life.  One of the most important jobs for parents is to help your child successfully through life’s challenges and successes, help them feel good about themselves along the way, and learn to accept mistakes as an opportunity to do better next time. 

Related Reading:

Ok, So You Made A Mistake. But Look What You Learned!

Shaming Some Kids Makes Them Aggressive

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Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: behavior, early learning, how children learn, play, self-esteem, toddler

Toddler Vocabulary Development: Shopping With Your Child

• October 11, 2011 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

There is no better time to teach your toddler the names of things than when you go out shopping together. The wonderful thing about shopping with your child at a grocery store or clothing store is that he can sit in a shopping cart and interact with you while pointing to all the interesting colors, shapes and objects around him.

Never mind that as he gets closer to two years old he may want you to focus on the candy aisle, or buy everything fuzzy or toy-like.  Use the time to provide names for all the wonderful objects you can see.

 “Wow!  Look at these oranges today—they are so big. They look like big balls don’t they?”

“Hey, those peppers are green and red and yellow, just like Christmas lights—what fun!”

“I see blue shirts and white shirts. What color do you like?”

As you talk about all the shapes and colors, your tot will begin to want you to tell him more names. If he can’t ask you “What is that?” yet, he will start to point to objects he wants you to name or let him touch. (Of course you don’t want him touching fresh food items or knocking down items on shelves, but there is no harm in letting him feel a soft cloth or looking more closely at the funny picture on a box of cereal.)

Here are some tips for making shopping both fun and educational for your child:

• Color, shape, and size: Notice colors, shapes, and sizes as you shop the fruit and vegetable aisle with your toddler. Tell your child that bananas are “long and yellow,” and that oranges, apples, limes and lemons look like “orange, red, green and yellow balls.” At the clothing store, “big pants” may be for “big daddy” and tiny shoes may be “just the right size” for your child.
• Texture and touch:  Clothing stores are all about touch. PJ’s are usually “soft,” and raincoats are “smooth and stiff,” while some coats may be “furry.” Your child will love feeling all the different textures.
• Questions: Note that celery has “leaves” and broccoli has “flowers.” Ask questions, “Why do you think cauliflower is named that way?” Point out that potatoes have “eyes” and wonder aloud, “Why do they have so many and we have only two?”
• My shopping cart: Some grocery stores have begun offering small grocery carts for young children to push around. You may want to wait until your tot is two or a little older, but it can be fun to let him choose apples, oranges or boxed cereals and push them in his own cart. At home you can use empty boxes to “play store” on a rainy day.

You might hear yourself saying, “not today” or “not now” as your child wants you to add everything to your basket (or his), but giving him the opportunity to explore the world around him is a valuable experience for both of you.  You get to cross a few items off your to-do list, while your toddler works on vocabulary development through conversation and play, with his favorite person—you.

Related Reading:

The Magical Combination of Love and Limits: Tips for Teaching Positive Behavior

Story Strategies for Building the Best Bedtimes

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Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: brain development, early learning, how children learn, language learning, learning through play, oral language skills, play, toddler, vocabulary

Connecting the Dots Between Infant Temperament and Future Success

• August 18, 2011 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

What factors will ultimately determine a child’s ability to succeed in life? While measures like socioeconomic status might allow a child to start off on the right foot, current research is delving into the nature of temperament and how that affects a person’s ability to successfully navigate life’s many challenges.   If temperament is pre-determined, there’s not much a parent can do, but if nurture plays a role, then how can parents help their child have the best quality of life?

While temperament has long been thought of as something innate, recent research has demonstrated that only some aspects are genetic, while others are environmental.

On the genetic side, as any parent will agree, much of an individual’s personality manifests very early on in the infant’s life. Parents with more than one child often note that one of their children seems easygoing from day one, but another child is demanding. One child may be outgoing and social, while their sibling may be more shy or withdrawn.

As we consider how these seemingly innate traits develop, we cannot ignore the fact that the environment – from parental attention to nutrition – exerts a strong influence on a child’s personality development. Current research tells us that a pregnant mother’s iron levels can affect the disposition of her child. Emerging data gleaned from animal research indicates that the quality of maternal parenting styles, such as the way a mother nurses her infants or the amount of maternal grooming, affects the temperament of her offspring.

An interesting question arises: How do these early manifestations play out as the child matures? For example, will an infant who is able to self-calm herself in stressful situations by turning away from aversive stimuli or sucking her thumb, for example, continue to exhibit self-regulatory behaviors as she gets older?

Considering the interplay between innate versus cultivated aspects of temperament, what actions can a parent take to affect the development of a child’s personality to give that child the best chance at personal satisfaction, academic achievement and successful relationships later in life? As the above research – and our own parental gut instincts – suggest, we can set them up by providing:

• Excellent nutrition
• Logical, predictable rules for living with others
• Optimal environments and schedules for sleep
• Lots of interactive play with family and friends
• Less screen time
• Lots and lots of parental love and affection

 

With parents providing these positive factors for their children, every child – from shy to outgoing, from tense to easygoing – will have the best chance at developing a balanced temperament as they mature.

For further study, read: Child Temperament and Parenting, by Samuel Putnam (University of Oregon), Ann Sanson (University of Melbourne), Mary Rothbart (University of Oregon). 

References:

Feder, A; Nestler, EJ; Charney, DS.  Psychobiology and molecular genetics of resilience.  Nature Reviews  Neuroscience 10 (2009) 446 – 457

Related Reading:

Building a Foundation for School Readiness for Low Income Children

The Magical Combination of Love and Limits: Tips for Teaching Positive Behavior

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Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, behavior, brain development, cognitive skills, decision making, early learning, how children learn, infant brain, Innate abilities, learning environment, learning through play, play

Ben’s Story: Intensive Intervention Helps a Young Boy on the Autism Spectrum Succeed

• July 14, 2011 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

Ben was just over two when his mother brought him to my office for a speech and language evaluation. She was a speech pathologist herself and knew he was late to start talking. She had seen another speech language professional before me but wanted a second opinion; that professional had told her she thought Ben might be developmentally delayed.

Both mom and I sat on the floor with a few toys, a car and a truck, trying to entice Ben to play with us. Ben ran around the room, very anxious, probably because of the unfamiliar environment and a new stranger, me, to contend with. He threw the car against the wall and began to cry uncontrollably. I suggested that I leave the room for a few minutes to let Ben settle down and acclimate to the surroundings with his mother. Waiting outside I could hear her attempts to calm him down being frustrated by Ben's increasing agitation.

Finally I reentered the room and mom told me sometimes Ben would settle down in new places if he could have some place to hide for awhile. I opened the door to my materials closet and in he ran, slamming the door behind him. While Ben was "hiding" I asked mom to recount his history. I had heard very similar stories many times before. Ben was a first child, a beautiful responsive baby. He began smiling when a few weeks old and sat and crawled by six months. But sometime around his first birthday he began to change. He resisted being held, threw frequent temper tantrums, and his early first words disappeared. He had several ear infections so mom and his pediatrician thought these might account for his delayed speech so he had an operation at 20 months to place tubes in his ears to reduce the fluid in his middle ear.  But when he still wasn't talking by his second birthday mom began to worry. She also noticed he had started rocking and biting his right hand when he became frustrated and screamed if she tried to take him shopping with her.

He loved riding in the car in his car seat but the second she unstrapped him and he recognized and unfamiliar locale, his back arched and he would thrash and yell. One day, she recounted, a woman who had apparently overseen such a display in the store parking lot, came over to her and told her she needed some parenting lessons. Devastated, Ben's mom said she called her pediatrician who recommended a local social worker who specialized in helping parents deal with problem toddlers. It was the social worker who recommended mom bring Ben to me.

Ben eventually emerged from hiding after I enticed him with his favorite toy from home,  Thomas the Tank Engine. He sat in the floor staring at the toy train car and quietly spun the wheels for several minutes. Mom and I sat silently because if either of us spoke Ben would cover his ears and start rocking.

I enrolled Ben in speech therapy sessions three times a week and recommended that he also receive Occupational Therapy to provide sensory integration therapy to help Ben learn ways to calm himself. After about six months of therapy Ben was talking some but most of his speech was repetitive. "Teeze an kako" was one of his favorite repeated phrases as a request for cheese and crackers that we used in therapy to reinforce his good behavior. Mom said she had stopped trying to take Ben out to dinner or to the store because everyone stared at him, and she felt, blamed her as a bad mother when he yelled or threw things.

By three and one -half Ben was very hyperactive, not yet potty trained, and walked on his toes with his hands flapping in the air. He was speaking in short sentences but his speech was still repetitive and sing-song like. A typical phrase was, "You Ben friend? You Ben Friend?" and, "Ben want Tom Tom! Ben want Tom Tom!"  At this time Ben was diagnosed with autism by a well regarded psychologist in the area.

For many years mom rejected the autism diagnosis. She and her physician husband felt Ben was very bright and that his behaviors and speech problems masked his other strengths. For example, by four years of age Ben had memorized many nursery songs, word for word.  By five Ben could name all the major dinosaurs and tell you the era in which they lived and whether they were plant or animal eaters. But Ben's parents were crushed when the expensive private school they enrolled him in for kindergarten rejected him for first grade.

By the time Ben was seven his parents had invested thousands of dollars in private therapies, private schools, parent counseling, and ABA (applied behavioral analysis) interventions. Ben's mother had hired several different daytime babysitters to help her when a new baby girl arrived, but all would quit after a few months because Ben was so difficult to manage. They had tried ADHD medications which helped calm Ben down during the day but then he could not sleep at night, so either mom or dad ended up, night after sleepless night, trying to supervise Ben as he ran around the house at two a.m.

I have worked with many children like Ben and their parents. These children are dear and very smart in many ways. Yet these children are often locked in a mental prison that keeps them in a perpetual internal turmoil when they are young. As they age and receive therapy they usually emerge, finding solace and relief in their passionate interests. But their unique interests and strengths are rarely as comforting for the parents who see their child stop being invited to birthday parties and play-dates. Parents watch with constant anguish as other adults stare as their child rocks, spins, or obsessively recites favorite poems or perhaps counts windows or red shirts, on planes, in restaurants, at the park.  As Ben's mother explained, "If Ben had a visual sign of impairment others would show compassion, I'm sure. But he looks normal, just acts oddly, so I know people think I did something wrong as a mother."

As we learn more about Autism Spectrum Disorders, we are able to identify signs earlier, and our therapy can begin sooner and have more profound effects. Ben (which is not his real name), I am happy to say, was one of an early group of children to go through an experimental computerized language program out of Rutgers University in 1996, shortly after his seventh birthday which is now available to parents as part of the BrainPro Autism service from Scientific Learning. The first change Ben’s mother and I noticed after he completed six weeks of the program was that Ben began speaking in full sentences and started to initiate conversations. One day shortly after the program ended, he told me that his sister had “opened his lose tooth,” meaning that she had knocked out a wobbly baby tooth.  His intonational contour also changed dramatically, from being rather stereotyped to emotional and natural. Within a month or so he began relaying other stories about home and for the first time started enjoying games that involved pretending. On a standardized language test administered before and after the program, he had gained almost two years growth in receptive language skills. Some of the growth on the test appeared to be attributable as much to his ability to pay attention to test questions as well as new language skills he had acquired from the language tasks within the program.

A few years ago Ben’s mother informed me that he attended a junior college program in computer technology and, as of my last communication with her, was working as a computer technician for a local computer retail outlet.  He lived at home then but had friends at work and a hobby, not surprisingly, of building dinosaur models. Mom said, Ben “seems happy now" and his parents did as well. They were encouraged by his job, circle of friends, and hobby. With the years of anguish they were trying to help other parents cope with the fears and pain that surround an autism diagnosis in the early years, but inform on the hope emanating from new research on early identification and new technological intensive interventions that can supplement therapies.

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Family Focus, Fast ForWord, Reading & Learning

Tags: attention, auditory processing, autism, cognitive skills, emotions in learning, health and well being, intervention, learning disabilities, oral language skills, phonemic awareness, self-esteem

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

• July 12, 2011 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

In the 1980’s, brain researchers viewed the two sides of the brain as dichotomously opposed: the right hemisphere was seen as a gestalt processor, good at “seeing the big picture,” while the left hemisphere was attributed with detail processing skills. Other views at that time attributed the left hemisphere with being more logical and analytical while the right hemisphere was considered more intuitive.^[i]

Some went so far as asserting that men and women exhibited different right vs. left preferences: men were attributed with stronger left hemisphere skills and women better right hemisphere skills. Although this male-female distinction was never empirically verified through research, the somewhat “pop-psychology” view that the right hemisphere is important for skills like music and art, predominated. In fact, there were books written instructing individuals on how to “draw with the right hemisphere” or how to “teach to the right hemisphere”.^[ii]

It now appears that some of these notions need to be revised.  A current view is that, for the majority of us, the right hemisphere is a pattern recognizer that may develop before the left. From this perspective, the right hemisphere enables a child to attend to and appreciate the gist of a sensory experience within each cognitive domain. For example, in acquisition of mathematical concepts, the right hemisphere may enable a young child to appreciate quantities in terms of more vs. less prior to assigning numerical values to the quantities (which would involve left hemisphere skills). There is research demonstrating that babies can discern a group of dots in terms of general aspects of quantity.^[iii]

Patricia Kuhl at University of Washington in Seattle has shown that typically developing infants show an interest in human voices over other environmental sounds like a car horn or doorbell, and direct their attention to human voice when it conveys information that is interesting.^[iv] Ultimately this may lead to an understanding of how the melody of a voice is used to convey a person’s intent.  In other words, recent research suggests that the right hemisphere may be best at processing patterns like voice contour, facial expression, aspects of size and quantity, gestalt aspects of the world which, from a developmental perspective, represent the way children begin to learn about cognitive areas like music, art, mathematics or language.

Considering the cognitive domain of music, for example, the right hemisphere appears to have a fundamental preference for recognizing melody, which allows a young infant to be interested in and ultimately reproduce early nursery songs. In the realm of visual processing, the right hemisphere has been shown to be better at perceiving the form or outline of an object than the details contained within the object.^[v]. And, similarly, although many people regard the left hemisphere as dominant for language, newer research has shown that the right hemisphere is superior at processing information like vocal inflection (prosody), and perhaps going directly from word to meaning, especially in very familiar phrases like idiomatic expressions (eg., “it is raining cats and dogs”) while the left hemisphere is more important for processing aspects of language that depend on analyzing the specific sequence of the sounds and words which are essential for understanding grammatical form of language and perceiving internal details of words.^[vi]

Several neuroscientists have accordingly revised and expanded the early right-left dichotomy to see the right hemisphere as preferential in processing form, structure, and perhaps, direct links to emotion,^[vii]  while the left hemisphere handles complex, rapidly changing stimuli, in which discerning the specific sequential order is critical to perception (as in speech perception, for example, where one must discern and order very rapidly changing complex acoustic events very quickly.)^[viii]

Another revision to the older view of right versus left hemisphere complements the view that the right hemisphere is preferential for pattern analysis, and comes from developmental neuroscience which has reported research that supports the contention that for most cognitive skills the right hemisphere matures before the left.^[ix] This certainly seems to the case when one looks at the early stages of neuronal development and migration in the fetal brain,^[x] and also the building of early axonal superhighways, as well as the research on myelination.^[xi] In fact, it may be that when this typical right to left maturation does not occur, developmental neurological abnormalities result. For example, there is some early research evidence that Autism Spectrum Disorders may represent one example of developmental deviations in this typical right-to-left developmental hierarchy.^[xii]

Although it may seem somewhat of a stretch from the early research in this area, one can observe how this organization might be reflected in early childhood development in the stages children pass through in the gradual mastery of skills. For example, when a child first begins to enjoy music, the observant adult notices that the child moves his or her whole body to the musical rhythm. For nursery songs, like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” the child often begins by humming the melodies. In both cases, this may represent right hemisphere processing.

In most cases, it will be a few years before the child will be able to read musical symbols which would presumably involve more left hemisphere skill. We do have research that shows that when three month old babies are first listening to oral language, the right hemisphere is much more active than the left.^[xiii] Patricia Kuhl has shown that mothers instinctively seem to match their speech to babies’ early developing perceptual preferences by exaggerating melodic inflection with young babies, probably reflecting their intuitive knowledge that they need to exaggerate the language cues (intonational contour and vocal inflection) that the right hemisphere seems to process preferentially while deemphasizing the production of the speech sounds themselves (left hemisphere preferences).^[xiv]
 

[i] Deutsch, Georg and Sally P. Springer. Left Brain, Right Brain: Perspectives From Cognitive Neuroscience . W.H. Feeman and Company/Worth Publishers. 2001.
[ii] Edwards, Betty. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Penguin Putnam Press. 1999.
[iii] Xu, Fei et al. (2005) Number sense in human infants. Developmental Science. Vol. 8. 2005.
[iv] Kuhl, Patricia. Early Language Acquisition: Cracking the Speech Code. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Vol 5. 2005.
[v] Devinsky, Orrin and Mark D’Esposito. Neurology of Cognitive and Behavioral Disorders. Oxford University Press. 2004.
[vi] Hickok, Gregory and David Poeppel. The Cortical Organization of Speech Processing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2007.
[vii]Cahill, L. et al. Sex-Related Hemispheric Lateralization of Amygdala Function in Emotionally Influenced Memory: An fMRI Investigation. Learning and Memory. Vol. 11: 261-266. 2004
[viii] Tallal, Paula. Improving Language and Liteacy is a Matter of Time. Nature Reviews Neuroscience Vol. 5. 2004.
[ix] Huttenlocher, Peter. Morphometric Study of Human Cerebral Cortex Development. Neuropsychologia. Vol. 28. 1990.
[x] Galaburda, Albert et al. From Genes to Behavior in Developmental Dyslexia. Nature Neuroscience  Vol 9. 2006.
[xi] Herbert, Martha et al. Brain Asymmetries in Autism and Developmental Language Disorder: A Nested Whole-Brain Analysis. Brain: A Journal of Neurology.2004.
[xii] Herbert, Martha et al. Ibid.
[xiii] Hickock, Gregory and David Poeppel. Ibid.
[xiv] Kuhl, Patricia. Ibid.

Related Reading:

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Categories: Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: auditory processing, brain development, cognitive skills, infant brain, Innate abilities, language learning, memory, musical training, phonemic awareness

The Magical Combination of Love and Limits: Tips for Teaching Positive Behavior

• June 9, 2011 by Martha Burns, Ph.D

Young children have so much to learn about life.  One crucial skill they work very hard at learning is how to get what they want or need in a positive way. 

Toddlers do not have very much control and for the most part cannot “think out” appropriate ways to handle frustration or anger. Your little one year old will act impulsively when he is angry with you or other children and may use inappropriate or unacceptable behaviors in response. This often becomes even more exaggerated when your child is tired. The calm, consistent and measured way that you and other caregivers respond to negative behaviors will shape your child’s ability to gradually develop self-control and learn appropriate ways to handle stressful social situations.  

Hitting and biting, as well as pushing, throwing toys, books, sand or mud, and yelling or temper outbursts continue to be treated as unacceptable behaviors you want to handle by enforcing time-outs immediately after the event occurs. Waiting even a few minutes to enforce a time-out makes it difficult for a toddler to understand what the time-out is for. Once your child has calmed down you can bring her back into the situation she was removed from. As she plays appropriately you can provide a little praise to help her understand the difference between positive behaviors and her prior unacceptable behavior.

By 18-20 months of age, begin to teach your toddler the word “sorry” so that if she does show an unacceptable behavior toward another child or an adult, she learns to pair an apology to the offended person with the behavior.  This provides a verbal scaffold with the action so that the child is building language to help his learning.  

You may often find that because of your fatigue and frustration with a young child who does not yet have very much self control you become tempted to yell or spank your child. You are human just as is your child and these are natural tendencies.  But, try to avoid yelling at your child or resorting to slaps, shaking or spanking in response to a negative behavior. By using a calm but firm voice with your toddler and the consistent response of moving your child to a quiet area removed from the current situation (time-out) you will model the kind behavior you are trying to instill in your child and give him, and yourself, time to calm down.

If your toddler seems to show temper outbursts very frequently or does not respond to timeouts and the undesirable behaviors continue, consult your physician to rule out physical problems that might be causing pain or discomfort. If those do not seem likely or have been ruled out, you may want to consult with a behavior specialist. These professionals can help you develop consistent, constructive approaches for managing the behavior of your toddler. A few sessions with a good child behavior specialist could save you time and money in the future if the negative behaviors persist or increase during the toddler years.

As your child progresses through the first year, continue to set limits for special types of play activity and behaviors that might be appropriate in some situations but not in others. For example, a child needs to have plenty of exercise but there are situations where your child may have to sit still. A dentist’s chair, the first haircut, airplane take-offs and landings are situations where your child needs to limit physical activity. Similarly, restaurants and other public places provide excellent opportunities to teach your child polite behavior and consideration of others. There are situations where it is acceptable to play with toys and others where it might not be, like a church service or solemn occasion, for example.

Setting limits teaches your toddler to be considerate and thoughtful of others and helps build social skills.  When your toddler learns how to use constructive behaviors to reach her goals, she will feel happier and more in control, and so will you.

Related Reading:

Traveling with a Toddler

Early Learning Success Leads to a Leg Up in Life

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Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: behavior, early learning, how children learn, play, self-esteem, toddler