Here Comes Mel Levine

Ready or Not, Here Life Comes is Mel Levine’s most recent book. Published in 2005, it covers a range of topics dealing with preparing young adults (and their parents) for life after high school and college. On January 17th my husband and I had the pleasure of settling in to a packed auditorium where Dr Levine talked about this topic. This was our third time in about eighteen years hearing Dr Levine speak, so we were already familiar with his engaging style. We’ve predisposed to hear his update about the many animals he raises on his farm in North Carolina, among them geese, dogs, swans, peacocks, pheasants, and donkeys, to name a few!

Before I tell you about Levine’s talk, though, for those of you who do not know him, here is an introduction. Dr Mel Levine is a pediatrician and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina Medical School. He is best known, though, for being the co-founder with Charles Schwab of All Kinds of Minds and the Schools Attuned program. Schools Attuned provides training to teachers in, and assists schools with implementing, the programs of All Kinds of Minds. The All Kinds of Minds approach is compelling because it does away with the negative labels that so often stymie both the students who are labeled and the faculty who are charged with teaching them.

Levine’s approach is to uncover what is not functioning well within the student’s brain while also determining a student’s strengths. This process is called demystification, and can become an eye-opener for a struggling student and his or her parents. It is often the beginning of a fresh, positive approach to dealing with learning issues, and doing away with the stigma that often travels with kids who have been negatively labeled from year to year. In 2002 Dr Levine wrote A Mind at a Time, which is a most helpful primer for parents and teachers that covers the neurodevelopmental constructs behind the All Kinds of Minds approach.

You can get to know Dr Levine a bit more in this insightful September 2006 interview with Marge Scherer, Editor in Chief of Educational Leadership. The interview, Celebrate Strengths, Nurture Affinities: A Conversation with Mel Levine, is a well-focused lens both on Levine as an individual, as well as on his philosophy. And if you blinked in surprise that he lives on a farm with a multitude of animals, you can hear them at the beginning of this January 2005 NPR interview, Mel Levine: Teaching All Kinds of Minds, which begins on his farm. The NPR site also has seven additional audio clips of Dr Levine giving his views on a number of related issues. If you are interested in learning more, here are some additional books by Mel Levine:

Keeping a Head in School: A Student’s Book About Learning Abilities and Learning Disorders

All Kinds of Minds: A Young Student’s Book About Learning Abilities and Learning Disorders

Plasticity: The Final Four

I am NOT referring to the NCCA’s final four games of the men’s college basketball championships, the opening rounds of which begin in March and are often referred to as March Madness! I AM referring to the final four chapters of Norman Doidge’s book, The Brain That Changes Itself. These chapters are jam packed with science and philosophy.

An entire chapter is devoted to imagination and its role in shaping our brains. Perhaps you are familiar with the act of visualization as a means for improving in sports. Feel free to check your knowledge of this built-in brain tool with ChannelOne’s Head Game or read this New York Times article, FITNESS; Visualization: Does It Provide an Edge? As Doidge has written, it turns out “Brain scans show that in action and imagination many of the same parts of the brain are activated. That is why visualizing can improve performance.”

The topic of memory takes up another chapter, which is infused with references to Freud. Written clearly, it provides an excellent discussion of his theories, in particular transference and dreams, which equate to a “plastic view of memory.”

Rejuvenation is a word that always conjures up a positive image. Just take in this definition of “the phenomenon of vitality and freshness being restored” and how can you go wrong! Renew, refresh, repair… A stem cell is a cell that can make exact copies of itself. The brain has neuronal stem cells, so called because they can specialize as either neurons or glial cells. Doidge describes seeing these cells through a highly detailed microscope, and what he has to say about them is refreshing: “…stem cells don’t have to specialize but can continue to divide, producing exact replicas of themselves, and they can go on doing this endlessly without any signs of aging. … This rejuvenating process is called “neurogenesis,” and it goes on until the day that we die.” The simple-sounding keys to promoting neurogenesis include novelty, physical exercise, and learning (something new). Heck, that gives license to do all sorts of interesting things as we age, possibly making the latter portion of aging more fun than the first portion 😉

Doidge’s last chapter introduces Betty Edwards and her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. This is near and dear because in the summer of 2005 I took the one week Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain workshop taught by her son, Brain Bommeisler, in New York City. I am rather proud of my accomplishments, and invite you to see for yourself that it is possible to (re)learn to draw, which translates to learning something new later in life, which translates to brain plasticity.

Given how many entries I have posted about Doidge’s book, it will not surprise you to know that I found the content stimulating, refreshing, and exciting. The possibilities for what there is yet to learn about our brains, and the ways in which we will uncover that information, are indeed exhilarating.

Plasticity and the Brain: Merzenich and Taub

Michael Merzenich blogs at On the Brain, where he never seems to mince words as he gets right down to the subject at hand. PositScience: The Science with Dr. Merzenich is a 9 minute video during which Merzenich talks about the development of the brain, brain change, and plasticity.

His current company, PositScience, is focused on how to maintain plasticity and encourage brain change and growth for aging adults, with the goal of improving memory. If you are interested, there are a number of YouTube videos about this, including interviews with neuroscientists and users of the PositScience program.

[October 11, 2008 update – in going through my files I found a May, 6, 2007 NY Times article about Merezenich and his company, entitled Muscular Metaphor, which provides background on the company.]

Merezenich is another one of the neuroscientists featured in Norman Doidge’s book, The Brain That Changes Itself, and may best be known for his work on developing the cochlear implant.

What interests me most, though, are the findings of his research.

‘You cannot have plasticity in isolation … it’s an absolute impossibility.’ His experiments have shown that if one brain system changes, those systems connected to it change as well. The same ‘plastic rules’ – use it or lose it, or neurons that fire together wire together – apply throughout. Different areas of the brain wouldn’t be able to function together if that weren’t the case.

Within the same chapter, Doidge explains the brain chemistry that takes place during learning and unlearning, both of which take place as a function of plasticity. As you learn something, the neurons involved in the learning fire together and thus wire together. This is facilitated in cells by LTP (long-term potentiation), which is the chemical process of strengthening the synaptic connections. When the brain is poised for unlearning, the opposite takes place due to LTD (long-term depression), where the synaptic connections are weakened and disconnected.

Another neuroscientist who brightens the pages of Doidge’s book is Edward Taub. His research and innovation in stroke treatment pioneered CI (constraint induced) therapy, which exploits the brain’s plasticity. You can listen to Taub explain his work in an interview on The Brain Science Podcast, where there are also a number of links and references posted.

Taub’s research supported Merzenich’s findings that “when a brain map is not used, the brain can reorganize itself so that another mental function takes over that processing space.” In addition, with specific application to stroke patients and anyone who had some form of brain damage, “Not only could the brain respond to damage by having single neurons grow new branches within their own small sectors, but, the experiment showed, reorganization could occur across very large sectors.”

Hazaah!

A Chat with Virginia Woolf

I celebrated a birthday in November and our son, who lives and studies in Japan, sent me five books, one of which is A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.

This book did not come out of the blue, unless you count the digital wave that traveled from Japan to amazon.com to some delivery service to our door. Included in our son’s studies is women’s literature, as well as his own art of writing. And so my five birthday books revolve around women authors writing about issues related to women.

A Room of One’s Own, which our son labeled “First Wave”, is my first encounter with Virginia Woolf. Olivia, a close friend and neighbor who is British, has told me that when she was growing up as a student in England, Virginia Woolf was required reading. Olivia recalls, perhaps because Woolf was required, or perhaps because Olivia was much younger then, that she did not much like reading Virginia Woolf, finding her at times difficult and uninteresting.

In my case, perhaps because my introduction to Virginia Woolf was a gift, and I am that much older than Olivia was when she first read Woolf, reading this book was a thoughtful delight. I marveled at her word usage, which so belies the era in which she wrote. I respected her lack of anger and her attempts to provide rational and careful analysis in addressing her topic of woman and fiction. And I grinned upon discovering that there she was in 1929 asking one of the same questions that has peppered some of my blog posts, that of creativity and how it is fostered.

But what is the state of mind that is most propitious to the act of creation, I asked. Can one come by any notion of the state that furthers and makes possible that strange activity? Here I opened the volume containing the Tragedies of Shakespeare. What was Shakespeare’s state of mind, for instance, when he wrote Lear and Antony and Cleopatra? It was certainly the state of mind most favourable to poetry that there has ever existed.

You can listen to Virginia Woolf in a seven and a half minute BBC sound byte, A Eulogy to Words.

Plasticity and Education: Barbara Arrowsmith

[UPDATE: CBC (Canadian Broadcast Corporation) broadcast Fixing My Brain, an interview with Barbara Arrowsmith, June 16, 2009. I found out about this piece thanks to a post by Jason Atwood at playthink, which took me back to a post I wrote for SharpBrains reviewing Doidge’s book. A comment on that post included the link to the CBC piece. I love a good trail!]

Barbara Arrowsmith is another one of the amazing people who populate Norman Doidge’s book, The Brain That Changes Itself. Barbara was born with an asymmetrical brain, which means that one side of her brain functioned astonishingly well and the other side functioned retardedly. Even more amazing, though, is her perseverance, which led her to bust her chops and pursue college and graduate school, earning a degree in Education.

Arrowsmith’s keen interest in learning is based upon her own experience which, along with research that crossed her desk while a student, led her to develop methods for teaching students with learning disabilities. And this led to the creation, in 1980, of the Arrowsmith School located in Toronto, Canada. Barbara knew that it was possible to retrain the brain, for that is precisely what she had done for herself as she willed herself through school.

Here is a description of the Arrowsmith methodology from the school’s site:

The Arrowsmith Program is a program of intensive and graduated cognitive exercises that are designed to strengthen the underlying weak cognitive capacities that are the source of the learning disabilities. Each student’s program is based on a careful assessment to identify the specific learning difficulties.

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I am a big fan of Mel Levine, a pediatrician, author, speaker, and founder of All Kinds of Minds. In my 26 years of teaching I have heard Levine speak three times, and later this week will be hearing him speak for a fourth time. In 2002 he published the book A Mind at a Time, which crystallized the work being done by All Kinds of Minds. Also in 2002, PBS (Public Broadcasting System) partnered with All Kinds of Minds to create the broadcast Misunderstood Minds, which focused on learning issues related to attention, reading, writing and mathematics.

When reading Doidge’s chapter about Barbara Arrowsmith, I couldn’t help but wonder what Mel Levine would make of her approach. Arrowsmith’s system seems to be a head-on assault of an individual’s learning difficulties by using intensive practice to retrain those parts of the brain that cause the difficulty. Levine, on the other hand, attacks learning difficulties by utilizing the individual’s strengths to tackle specific difficulties. It is not an issue of “fixing” the problem, but rather of finding ways around the problem. Arrowsmith and Levine have the same goal, to make it possible for the individual to learn, but different methods for getting there.

Plasticity and The Senses: Paul Bach-y-Rita

This October 2012 update reflects new links for the videos, as PBS is no longer hosting Wired Science programs.
In December 2007 the PBS Wired Science show included a piece about Bach-y-Rita’s research: Mixed Feelings. Here are some additional videos covering some of the same content: BrainPort Vision Through Tongue, BrainPort Balance Device.

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The first time I heard of Paul Bach-y-Rita was on a public television broadcast of a special show about the brain. The story of Paul Bach-y-Rita fills the first chapter of Norman Doidge’s book, The Brain That Changes Itself.

The stories of Bach-y-Rita – how his father recovered from a stroke and the impact this had on Bach-y-Rita’s career, the people with severe balancing issues who were essentially cured by his discoveries and innovations, and the people who had no vision who were able to begin to see – are compelling in and of themselves. They are very human stories, derived from the work of a man who was altruistically motivated.

A major contribution of Paul Bach-y-Rita’s to neuroscience was in thinking of the brain as “polysensory”, meaning that the sensory areas of the brain, rather than only processing information from just the senses that normally report to those areas, are actually able to process information from any of the senses. The stories referenced above, relating to balance and vision, rely heavily on the polysensory ability of the brain to take input from the tongue and route it to the areas of the brain dealing with balance or vision.

Amazing? Absolutely! His work is a reminder of how adaptable our brains are, and makes me wonder how many more hidden secrets are waiting to be revealed. You can read more about the science behind Bach-y-Rita’s efforts in these articles:

On Wisconsin Magazine: Balancing Act (Spring 2007)

Discover Magazine: Can You See With Your Tongue? (June 2003)

Discover Magazine: Artifical Sight (August 2001)

College of Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison: Tongue seen as portal to the brain (2001)

And on an unrelated note, F, Happy Birthday tomorrow!

All Roads Lead To…Carol Dweck?

Back in the day, when all roads of the Roman Empire radiated from Rome, it could easily be said that all roads led to Rome. These days, it’s not so much about roads as it is about web searches. It never ceases to amuse me where a search will lead and what it will unearth.

I am an avid reader of Garr Reynolds’ blog, Presentation Zen, all about ‘issues related to professional presentation design’. In his December 21st post, Update from Oregon, Garr references Guy Kawasaki, who made his name as a Macintosh evangelist back when he was an Apple employee.

Following the link to Guy’s site I immediately began scrolling the December posts, eventually landing on How to Not Choke, which interested me because a quick scan showed it related to the brain. At the end of that post there is an addendum mentioning Carol Dweck, along with links to Guy’s post about her, a YouTube video interview with her, and a link to The Secret of Raising Smart Kids, a Scientific American article written by her (and which did not come up when I initially did a search for ‘Carol Dweck’).

I first wrote about Carol Dweck at the end of December in Plasticity in Progress. All roads may have once led to Rome, but, in a roundabout way, all my blog reading habits (well, I only read one regularly ;-)) led to Carol Dweck.

p.s. It’s now June 27, 2008 and I just found another useful article about Dweck. In the May 21, 2007 online issue of Newsweek, Wray Herbert writes about Carol Dweck in Are We Who We Think We Are?

Poetry on the Brain

Most nights at 7:00 p.m. find us watching The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on our local public television channel. On New Year’s Eve, Jeffrey Brown interviewed John Ashbery, a prodigious and prize winning current American poet. What particularly interested me was that apparently there are a large number of people who consider Ashbery’s poetry rather difficult to read and understand. Indeed, when some of his poetry was being read aloud, it seemed a bit incomprehensible to me, although in looking over printed versions I found his poetry easier to understand with the words in front of me.

Later that evening at serendip, I came upon a poem about the brain by Emily Dickinson, an American poet from the 1800s. Her poem, short and simple, inspired me to do a search for ‘poems about the brain’.

One of the first items that turned up was Verse broadens the mind, the scientists find, according to the article of the same name at the April 2005 Scotsman.com site. Essentially, reading poetry requires more eye movement, and greater eye movement relates to deeper thought. Apparently, trying to decipher the meaning of poetry, for instance, reading lines several times over to make meaning, turns out to be healthy exercise for our cortical muscle. From my experience with Ashbery’s poetry, reading was the crucial factor in my understanding. Listening without written words to follow only led me to confusion. The researchers interviewed for the article also commented on the use of rhyme as an aid for memory, as well as children’s innate love of rhyme that seems to get squashed by the time the children become young adults.

Of course, my search also led me to Neuroscience for Kids – Writing Projects, where, of the 28 enertaining suggestions for writing related to the brain, the first project is brain limericks.

And so I share with you Emily Dickinson’s poem, taken from 42opus, ‘an online magazine of the literary arts’, and then leave you to your own poetic ponderings.

The Brain–is wider than the Sky–
by Emily Dickinson

The Brain–is wider than the Sky–
For–put them side by side–
The one the other will contain
With ease–and You–beside–

The Brain is deeper than the sea–
For–hold them–Blue to Blue–
The one the other will absorb–
As Sponges–Buckets–do–

The Brain is just the weight of God–
For–Heft them–Pound for Pound–
And they will differ–if they do–
As Syllable from Sound–

Plasticity and Localization

It is New Year’s Eve and I have just completed reading Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself – Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. I read the paperback version, but at the end of his book Doidge notes that the cover of the hardcover “captures, in a single image, what this book is about and even the mood I hope the book creates.” Much in this book intrigued me – there were fascinating ideas to ponder, and brain science to digest. The first seven chapters held me captive for their personal stories; the final four chapters for the science and philosophy.

To have a comfortable grasp of the ideas, be able to discuss them and maybe even remember them, I need to “play” with the ideas, so you know what that means in terms of upcoming blog posts. Especially if anyone has read the book, I hope you will chime in with comments.

Since the book is mainly about plasticity, let’s see if I can explain what that means. Plasticity is not just the brain’s ability to change, for that is what happens all the time when we learn.

Let’s take a look at an old theory of the brain called localization. For many years, it was thought that each area of the brain had its own responsibilities. In fact, my early posts are all about the various parts of the brain, including descriptions of what each area tends to control and monitor. Until the idea of brain plasticity took off, it was thought that specific areas of the brain were responsible for specific functions, in other words, certain functions were localized or hardwired to certain brain areas. If something is hardwired then it is fixed and not capable of change.

The telling words above are “tends to”, because while certain areas of the brain tend to be responsible for specific functions, since the brain is plastic, areas overlap and even can co-opt one another’s functions. Initial maps drawn of our mental system turn out to be not as static as originally thought. If one pathway gets blocked, the brain is very good at finding alternative pathways.

As with any pathway, the more a particular path is used, the more ingrained it becomes, and pathways near one another become associated with each other. If a path is underutilized, over time it will be co-opted by other pathways that are branching out and need more space.

This concept of brain plasticity can be summed up in a few succinct statements revolving around the brain’s ability to reorganize itself, all from chapter 3, Redesigning the Brain:

Neurons that fire together wire together.

Neurons that wire apart fire apart.
This is also stated as Neurons out of sync fail to link.

Use it or lose it.

These statements will become that much more clear in upcoming posts. Meanwhile, here is more information about brain mapping and the idea of localization.

~ Neuroscience for Kids – Functional Divisions

~ Brain Maps: The Study of Brain Function in the Nineteenth Century

~ serendip: Mind, Brain, and Adaptation: the Localizaton of Cerebral Function
The serendip site is a most interesting place to visit and explore. There are a number of simulations and experiments designed to get you thinking!