Brain Power from the New York Times

Throughout 2009 the New York Times published a series of six articles that discussed the latest findings in brain research. Here they are, starting with the most recent.

• Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them – explains how our brains learn math. It turns out there are optimal developmental times and methods for introducing our brains to math, and they aren’t when/what you might have expected.  The following comment got me thinking about when and how we teach reading:

A similar honing process is thought to occur when young children begin to link letter shapes and their associated sounds. Cells in the visual cortex wired to recognize shapes specialize in recognizing letters; these cells communicate with neurons in the auditory cortex as the letters are associated with sounds.

The process may take longer to develop than many assume. A study published in March by neuroscientists at Maastricht University in the Netherlands suggested that the brain does not fully fuse letters and sound until about age 11.

• Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Both Hope and Risk – talks about psychosurgery and its impact on those with O.C.D. (obsessive compulsive disorder). To paraphrase Shakespeare: To intervene via surgery or not to intervene via surgery. That is the question.

• After Injury, Fighting to Regain a Sense of Self – reminded me of anecdotes shared by V.S. Ramachandran in his book Phantoms in the Brain (probably THE book that pulled me in to the world of our brains). Essentially, injury can cause the brain to play some cruel tricks on itself, including fiddling with one’s sense of self. Is there a spot in our brains that defines who we are?

• In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable –  Call it intuition, a hunch, a feeling in your gut, but most likely you’ve experienced that sensation where you just “know” something to be so. While this article discusses the sensing of danger, it made me think of how we size up people in general, for instance, being “street smart”.

But United States troops are now at the center of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation, some people’s brains can sense danger and act on it well before other’s do.

Experience matters, or course: if you have seen something before, you are more likely to anticipate it the next time. And yet, recent research suggests that something else is at work, too.

Small differences in how the brain processes images, how well it reads emotions and how it manages surges in stress hormones help explain why some people sense imminent danger before most others do.

• At the Bridge Table, Clues to a Lucid Old Age – An avid bridge player, my 78 year old Aunt Joan would love this article! The article discusses the 90+ Study, which “has included more than 14,000 people aged 65 and older, and more than 1,000 aged 90 or older.” The question seems to be, which came first – being cognitively active and thus having a sharp brain, or having a sharp brain and thus being cognitively active. One are in which all scientists agree is the importance of social connections for maintaining brain health.

In isolation, a healthy human mind can go blank and quickly become disoriented, psychologists have found.

“There is quite a bit of evidence now suggesting that the more people you have contact with, in your own home or outside, the better you do” mentally and physically, Dr. Kawas said. “Interacting with people regularly, even strangers, uses easily as much brain power as doing puzzles, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this is what it’s all about.”

• Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory – This title opens up all sorts of questions related to ethics. On the other hand, what about a brain that has some unhealthy parts? I did enjoy one possible way of thinking about how our brain keeps memories:

…brain cells activated by an experience keep one another on biological speed-dial, like a group of people joined in common witness of some striking event. Call on one and word quickly goes out to the larger network of cells, each apparently adding some detail, sight, sound, smell. The brain appears to retain a memory by growing thicker, or more efficient, communication lines between these cells.

Richard Restak on Thinking Smart

The liveliest of the three Learning and the Brain opening keynote speakers, Richard Restak took us on a tour of the many ways we can keep our brains going strong. Restak is an accomplished author and presenter, and I suspect his talk, Think Smart: Improving Brain Performance, was a summary of his book by almost the same name, Think Smart – A Neuroscientist’s Prescription for Improving Your Brain’s Performance. As many of the reviews on amazon.com noted, Restak’s book does not cover new territory. What his book does, and what he did in his talk, is compile the known research in a manner that is digestible, interesting and entertaining. If a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, then the sugar is Restak’s talk (and based upon the reviews, his book).

Restak touched on each of the following, which are also topics that have periodically been in the news. While they are not new, they are important to maintaining strong cognitive function, and thus worth their weight in repetition!

• “What’s good for the heart is good for the brain.”
• Exercise, Exercise, Exercise
• Sleep is necessary for consolidation of learning.
• Power naps are powerful.

After reviewing the above, Restak went on to discuss his prescription for keeping our brains strong. To a certain degree, you have to accept what neuroscientists like Carol Dweck have been saying for awhile, that intelligence is not fixed. Rather, intelligence is fluid and we have the power to foster that fluidity. To be sure,  impediments such as heredity and injury can sideline attempts to improve brain strength, but in general we have the power to change our brains for the better, just as in general we have the power to improve the healthiness of our bodies. Restak’s list of “Specific Steps to Enhance Brain Performance” include the following areas in which he says we should focus our efforts to strengthen our brains:

• Attention: the equivalent of physical endurance
• Memory – sensory memory, long-term memory, and working memory: correlates with intelligence
• Mental exercises: you choose [which ones to do] because mental exercises are benefit specific
• Visual Observation
• Fine Motor Skills
• Tactile perception
• Logic
• Numbers
• Imagination
• Visual-spatial thinking

There are any number of ways to exercise your brain, including online games. Here is one of the more comprehensive sites, aptly titled games for the brain, which comes from one of the reviews on amazon.com for Restak’s book.

In the youtube video interview below SharpBrains CEO Alvaro Fernandez highlights some of the ways technology can be used to assist with brain training. His comments are appropriate given that the focus of the Learning and the Brain conference was Enhancing Memory and Performance in this Distracting Digital Age, and Restak also briefly touched upon the use of video game technology for strengthening some aspects of the brain. Disclosure: I have never met Alvaro, but I have exchanged emails with him and written a number of blog posts for the SharpBrains blog.

Happy Anniversary Internet! + DARPA’s Network Challenge

[UPDATE: The MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team has won! Interesting to read about how they set up their challenge network to maximize participation and benefit as many people as possible.]

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA is sponsoring a Network Challenge. Today, Saturday, December 5, 2009, DARPA is launching 10 red 8-foot weather balloons around the United States, in locations that are accessible to the public and visible from points nearby. These balloons will remain in place for 24 hours. Individuals and groups who registered in November are participating in the challenge, the goal of which is to identify the location of all 10 balloons and submit this information to DARPA. The first entity to do so will win the prize of $40,000.

My husband, who I recently described as an inspirationator (inspiration + innovator), created the Independent School Balloon Finding Team, which consists of 16 independent schools. Should this team win the prize, they will donate the funds to Kiva.

As of 8:43 p.m. EST:

As of 6:46 p.m. EST:

As of 5:50 p.m. EST:

As of 3:08 p.m. EST:

The Rough Guide to the Brain

A student told me about Barry Gibb’s The Rough Guide to the Brain, and a quick search turned up this video preview of his book, as well as a BBC overview. Turns out Gibb has a range of interests beyond neuroscience, and you can read more about him at his site, digitalis media. And if the preview film interested you, here is Gibb’s blog entry about how the film managed to get made.

My question is – has anyone out there seen the book? If so, I am curious to know about the diagrams and illustrations. Are there any pictures of an actual brain, or are the illustrations all drawings? Thanks for any feedback anyone might have!

Patricia Greenfield on Media, Multitasking & Education

Patricia Greenfield, Director of the Children’s Digital Media Center at UCLA, was the second of three opening keynote speakers at the Learning & the Brain Conference. Well, she was the second speaker for the vast majority of us who were in the grand ballroom. This conference was so packed that there was an overflow room for each day’s keynotes. Initially my colleague (who was part of the overflow) and I thought that the keynote talks would be lived streamed to the overflow room. Instead, PIRI did something that I thought was rather clever – they circulated the three speakers through the ballroom and overflow room, so that everyone heard and saw a live talk. Perhaps more work for the speakers, but rather respectful of the attendees!

Greenfield discussed New Media, Multitasking and Education: The Effects of Technology on Learning. She pointed to three types of multitasking:

1. within a single medium (viewing multiple screens/windows on a computer or television)
2. between two or more media (such as a computer and a cell phone)
3. between media and real life (such as a kid texting while you are talking to them)

and noted that multitasking, in general, has both pros and cons. The benefits relate to work or career skills, where it may be helpful to juggle multiple tasks, such as is done by air traffic controllers or movie producers.The costs relate to possible negative impact on both cognitive skills, and social and emotional skills.

She related an experiment done with college students where they viewed CNN news broadcasts with and without the news crawl going across the screen. It turned out that the students retained more of the news when there was no crawl. I asked my 18 and a half year old about the news crawl, and he said he finds it highly distracting, as do I. (Has anyone in the States noticed the number of highway gas station stops that now have large television screens playing at the pumps? I find them highly distracting and irritating!)

I was particularly interested in Greenfield’s comment that “reading counteracts the cognitive cost of media multitasking”, and that “out-of-class reading during the college years is a statistical predictor of critical thinking skills.” This made me wonder about reading in general, and how secondary schools tend to assign so much content area reading that there is precious little time for students to read for the pure joy of reading. [UPDATE: Related NPR story: Reading Practice Can Strengthen Brain 'Highways'.]

The 448 pages of conference proceedings are packaged in a spiral bound book, one of the treasured benefits of full registration, as it provides information about all of the conference sessions. Included in the book are two articles related to Greenfield’s presentation, both available on UCLA’s Media Center site: Technology and Informal Education: What Is taught, What Is Learned, by Greenfield and Are We Losing Our Ability to Think Critically?, by Samuel Greengard.

In my early years of teaching I prided myself on being able to multitask while responding to questions from multiple people at the same time. With age has come the realization that I am no longer as facile with multi-responding, and trying to multi-respond actually makes me less effective. Indeed, that realization could be one answer to a question posed by Greenfield: Could each task have been done better if done alone? In a January post earlier this year I explored the idea of multitasking and it provoked an interesting discussion in the comments.

[UPDATE: Here is an interesting take on multitasking, in which Howard Rheingold asks if there is a happy medium in the middle.]

Gary Small and iBrain

Public Information Resources, Inc (PIRI) is the organization that presents the Learning & the Brain Conference. Last weekend’s Cambridge, MA conference was the 24th such conference, and PIRI’s President, Dan LaGattuta, said the turnout was the largest in eight years. Indeed, there were so many attendees that the keynotes had overflow rooms, and the Marriott, where the conference was held, filled all of its conference block rooms, which is why I wound up at the Hyatt, an enjoyable mile’s walk from the conference.

Why so many attendees this time round? I am certain it was the enticing topic of  Modern Brains: Enhancing Memory and Performance in this Distracting Digital Age. Talk about a timely topic!

The conference began with three opening keynote talks discussing Modern Minds, Multitasking & Memory. The first talk, Digital Brains and Memory: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, was given by  Gary W. Small, the Director of the UCLA Center on Aging and the author of the recently published iBrain: surviving the technological alteration of the modern mind. He began by showing this youtube video:

It turns out that Small’s conference talk was quite similar to his talk given at the Center on Aging entitled The Impact of Technology on Your Brain.

As you may know, the developing brain – the brain of children and adolescents – is highly plastic, specifically because it is still developing. The plus side of this is that the developing brain soaks up new learning; the negative side is that the frontal lobes and the amygdala, which manage decision making and emotions, is a work in progress, and will not mature till the early to mid-twenties. Small stated that sixty percent of synaptic connections are pruned during this developmental phase, a “use it or lose it” process. In referencing a Kaiser Foundation study of a few years ago, which found children between the ages of 8 and 18 years spent 8 1/2 hours a day in front of a screen, Small went on to note that if more time is spent in front of a screen, then less time is being spent doing something else, so how will this impact brain evolution?

As one who uses email extensively (though my husband and I recently began “digital-free Sundays” ), I related to Small’s description of “email as an exercise in operant condition”, whereby the consequence of the operation reinforces the condition. The idea is that the hope of getting a useful, positive email, mixed in with all the spam, is what keeps us opening email.

Small touched upon a number of other topics including ADHD (thinking about ADHD kids and tech use is like the chicken and the egg issue, what is cause and what is effect?), sentences and emoticons activate different areas of the brain, and the 2008 Atlantic article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, from which Small highlighted that we sacrifice depth for breadth and no longer  have to memorize as much information. He also commented on multitasking, saying that we have a perception (actually, a misconception!) that we are able to multitask. In fact, “we are faster but less efficient” as we pay “continuous partial attention” to each of the tasks in which we think we are engaged. This comment on multitasking would be repeated multiple times by multiple people throughout the three day conference.

I found particularly interesting the Net Naive and Net Savvy study, which looked at “patterns of cerebral activation during Internet searching.”  The results suggest that Internet searching could be a useful brain exercise for improving brain functionality.

Small concluded with the following points:

• We should pick and choose what we commit to memory, and choose the right tool for the memory task.
• We should find a balance – digital natives need to improve their social skills and digital immigrants need to improve their text skills.
• Future technology should build on the benefits of face-to-face interaction. (This surely has implications for online learning.)

And for his last point, which I found intriguing, Small suggested that the “immediacy of sharing in social networks may stifle creativity because everyone knows what everyone else is thinking, right away.” Ponder that one!

Boston on the Brain

Thoroughly enjoyed the Learning and the Brain Conference.
More about it in the next few posts.

Meanwhile…

1. view of Boston across the Charles River from the Hyatt
2. crew shells on the Charles, the next morning
3. MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, Wiesner Building
4. same door, different label
5. biker jacket gift from very cool Boston brother-in-law!

Allow me to introduce…

This weekend marks another round of the Learning and the Brain conference in Cambridge, MA. For the second time, I have the delight of introducing some of the speakers at Saturday afternoon’s sessions. I am looking forward to hearing all three speakers, and was tickled that they were all part of the same strand, Digital Brains, Technology & Learning. Here are the introductions.

David H. Rose, EdD

In 1984 – before his favorite application, Google Earth, was even imagined, and before IT folks began providing general support for assistive technologies – David Rose cofounded CAST, the Center for Applied Special Technology. Both David’s and CAST’s focus is Universal Design for Learning. With the celebration of kids diversity as the backdrop, UDL aims to improve the accessibility of curriculum and materials for all types of learners.

David is on the faculty of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and has coauthored several books, including the forthcoming Learning in the Digital Age, which I eagerly await, and this one, Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age, which was the impetus for my school’s opening professional development this past fall.

Please join me in welcoming Dr David Rose for his talk Searching with Google: New Directions in Universal Design for Online Learning.

Kenneth S. Kosik, MD

If you’ve attended this conference in the past, you may already associate Ken Kosik, as I do, with illuminating talks about Alzheimer’s. He is the Harriman Professor of Neuroscience Research, and Co-Director of the Neuroscience Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In his spare time, he is the Executive Director of the Center for Cognitive Fitness and Innovative Therapies, also in Santa Barbara, the mission of which is to help people with cognitive decline be able to age gracefully and live fully.

Students and teachers at my school make extensive use of wikis, so I am particularly eager to hear Ken talk about the wikification of knowledge.

And in the spirit of collaborative wikis, please collaborate with me on welcoming Dr Ken Kosik.

Kurt W. Fischer, PhD

The Mind, Brain and Education figure prominently in Kurt Fischer’s world. In addition to being the Charles Bigelow Professor of Education at Harvard, he is the Director of the Mind, Brain & Education program at the Graduate School of Education, the editor or co-editor of numerous Mind, Brain & Education publications, and the Director of the International Mind, Brain and Education Society.

In his capacity as Director of this society, Kurt is leading the movement to connect biology and cognitive science to education.

Please join me in welcoming Dr Kurt Fischer for his talk about Mind, Brain & Emerging Technology to Improve Robust Learning.

Essential Questions

Grant Wiggins and his Understanding by Design cohorts define Essential Questions as those questions that

1. invite you to dig down deep into the topic
2. keep you thinking and broaden your understanding
3. let you ponder multiple approaches to the issue
4. give you room to change your mind about the topic
5. grab your recognition and affective networks
6. don’t disappear off your radar when the conversation stops

Michael Wesch (see yesterday’s post)  has some essential questions for educators to consider.

source for first two images: screen shots of streaming talk

source for this image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexragone/4102304516/

~~~

Speaking of photos… celebrating November 1954

A Neat NEIT

Want to see how a bunch of IT folks spent November 11-13? November in the NY IS world heralds the gathering of IT folks for the annual NEIT Conference, sponsored by NYSAIS. As arvind noted on ISENET, we are suped up on acronyms… A quick primer:

• NY – New York
• IS – independent school
• IT – information technology
• NEIT – NYSAIS Education & Information Technology
• NYSAIS – New York State Association of Indpendent Schools
• ISENET – Independent School Educators network

Of course, attendees also join in from CAIS (Connecticut Association of Independent Schools), MA (Massachusetts), NJ (New Jersey) and EW (elsewhere). The organizers, of which there are many, superbly manage accommodating 150 or so live bodies, plus any number of virtual attendees, who all share in the mix of keynote speakers, open space sessions, and recreation. Participating is an exhilarating experience! [UPDATE 12/5/2009: Alex and arvind delightfully recap NEIT 2009 in the 114th episode of their 21st Century Learning EdTech Talk, recorded November 17, 2009.]

You can scope out the pictures on Flickr or follow the conversation on Twitter or see the results of many of the open space sessions on the wiki or watch the keynotes.

Among the highlights for me were the professional development session Thursday evening, and Friday’s keynoter Michael Wesch. His name may not be on the tip of your tongue, but perhaps his videos have been in your queue. And if these videos don’t get you wondering, then ponder these questions that Wesch suggests every teacher should be asking.

Using EtherPad, a number of folks took collaborative notes on Wesch’s two part talk. And should you exhaust all of these resources, here is Wesch’s Digital Ethnography site at Kansas State University, which includes the blog, a collection of videos (including the two below), the YouTube Project, and World Sim (social studies teachers, are you checking out this world simulation project!).

The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final version)

and A Vision of Students Today