Risk-Taking and the Entrepreneur Brain

Young and the impulsive. When young people are given the Cambridge Gamble Task, teens to early twenty-somethings were the most likely to be impulsive and take risks. As the ages go up, impulsivity and risk-taking go down...at least if you're not an entrepreneur. If you're an entrepreneur, your performance on the gambling task is more like a young person's.

Risk-taking and impulsivity usually conjures up talk of ADHD, substance abuse or deliquency, but higher levels of risk-taking and impulsivity also correlated with higher likelihood of being an entrepreneur rather than a manager.


On a test of cognitive flexibility (Tower of London), entrepreneurs were just as likely as managers to score high. And on the Gamble task, both managers and entrepreneurs were able to to make good decisions 95% of the time.

But where entrepreneurs differed from managers is on "hot" or risky decisions in which they had to risk a greater portion of their earnings in order to win bigger. On these high reward-high punishment decisions, managers were  risk-averse.

"Entrepreneurs demonstrate creativity through the development of positive financial opportunities for society as well as themselves. Although we know little about the psychopathological ‘dark side’ of entrepreneurship10, we would argue that the effects seen with our gambling task reflect functional impulsivity11, a subtype of impulsiveness that may enable impulsive individuals to capitalize on environmental niches. This functional impulsiveness of entrepreneurs combined with enhanced cognitive flexibility is a winning combination."

So the question is - when we see bright and creative impulsive children, are we really thinking, wow these kids would make great entrepreneurs...

Innovative Brain - Nature pdf

Impaired Sensory Integration in Autism

Researchers from Albert Einstein Medical Center have found that sensory integration (sound and vibration) are abnormally integrated in children with autism. Not only do sound and vibration fail to summate as in typically developing children, but for children with autism, there is a pronounced delay in the arrival of sensory stimuli to the the cortex (measured by EEG).

Excerpt:

"This was a much-needed study of multisensory integration in autism," said Barry E. Stein, Ph.D., professor and chair of neurobiology & anatomy at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the Einstein study. "Using simple logic and standard techniques for electrically mapping the brain, the authors have identified defects in the way ASD individuals synthesize cues from different senses. In doing so, they have not only helped confirm the insights of parents
and clinicians, but they've improved our understanding of how the behavioral differences in children with ASD may result from sensory anomalies."

Hooray, this information has been a long time coming for parents, professionals, children, and adults with autism. Hopefully it will help provide more objective support that therapeutic interventions help the disabling effects of sensory processing impairment.



Physorg.com Multisensory integration and autism

Scientific American: Autism and Multisensory Integration

People without Words - Art and Experience of the Languageless Deaf

Wittgenstein said "The limits of my language are the limits of my world," but I know that is not true for everyone. Here are two stories about life without language.

From a NYT's review of Susan Schaller's A Man Without Words (she discovered an deaf 27 year old man who seemed "bright and curious", but who had never been taught sign language or any written or spoken language): "Without language, there is no way to understand the passage of time. Ildefonso had no idea what a birthday was. In order to get to work on time he memorized how the face of the clock looked. Ms. Schaller began to realize how crucial language is in the organization of our inner selves, how it influences our perceptions about the world. To teach adjectives, the author began with colors. When she hit the color green Ildefonso was horrified. Eventually Ms. Schaller realized that, for Ildefonso (an illegal alien), green represented the immigration officials who frequently captured him -- the color of their trucks and uniforms, even the green card he didn't have. Without language, the color came to symbolize all that was frightening. Without some language system, some explanation, history and geography cannot be comprehended unless one has lived every moment in time and traveled every foot of ground. There isn't even a way to illuminate the concepts of deafness and hearing." Despite these difficulties, he was able to work a variety of jobs throughout the United States. And when Schaller catches up with him 7 years later, he is working as a gardener "for a hospital in Los Angeles and the proud holder of a green card. His gardens are characterized by order and symmetry. He is an eager student, and his signing has advanced by light years. He tells the author he now tries to find people to interpret the evening news for him. And he has developed a philosophical bent from all those years of observing: "There is enough in the world for everyone to have a little garden," Ildefonso tells Schaller.

Our second story comes from rural Idaho: James Castle was born deaf in 1899 to a hearing family and grew up without language. He attended school for the deaf and blind, but "did not learn to read, write, speak, sign, or lip read, perhaps by choice." What he did like to do was draw and communicate through images. James drew all the time, often with soot from his woodburning stove. Check out more of James Castle's artwork in the video below. It's very moving.

From Susan Schaller's interview with a deaf teacher of the deaf, Dennis Waterhouse: "I met a languageless deaf adult who used cartoon-like drawings to communicate. My deaf students often begin conversations by pointing to a picture, drawing a picture, miming/acting out a scene-a picture. That's the beginning of almost all my lessons-my introduction to signs and words and language. We [Deaf people] all use pictures and art to communicate."



I can't help but think of many children's names and faces that come to mind who really seem in this mode. One child who immediately comes to mind is a young boy who was adopted from a poor faraway country and deprived in his earliest months. He was 6 years old and minimally verbal. As a result, intelligence testing was fairly futile. But what was neat to see was how animated he became when he discovered various little figures (a wide assortment, animals, lego and various star wars figures) in our waiting area. Suddenly the figures were dancing in the area and interacting with each other, we heard sound effects and saw whole plots unfolding. As it turned out, imaginative play with figure turned out to be of critical importance in his language development. When he was shown how Windows Moviemaker, he made wonderful stories that entertained family and friends. He began to add dialogue and his expression took a big leap.

Kids have a harder time than adults because their fine motor skills may not be as developed and so it may be harder for them to express their ideas through their hands or created projects, but fortunately technology can be a great evener.

The lives of Ildefonso and James Castle are good reminders of looking deeply for the gifts in children and adults without words.

Mathematician's Lament

"It is not the job of mathematicians... to do correct arithmetical operations.  It is the job of bank accountants." ~Samuil Shchatunovski

Came across Paul Lockhart's excellent Mathematician's Lament today.

Excerpt: "Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problems and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.”

Lockhart doesn't mince words: 

"Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education."

Read the article for its full effect, but here are some pearls:

* play at math and mathematical relationships, look for patterns and ask questions

* math should not be about following directions...it's about making new directions

* students should hear about great problems in math, and also the stories about how they were solved

* a good problem is something you don't know how to solve

* let students struggle a bit, experiment, respond to criticism, and refine arguments

* math should be taught by math thinkers

* play games like Go and Hex and work on puzzles in math class


If you need a little inspiration for mathematical play and beauty, check out Erik Demaine's Transformation of a Cube:

Late Bloomers and Those Who Love Them

"His mother had read everything to him and in medical school his wife was reading aloud all books and references...there was some opposition to his continuance in medical school on the part of the dean and one other faculty member, but the opposition subsided...After his graduation a report came from a distance medical school hospital stating that this man was the best intern they had had for some time. He passed his American boards in internal medicine and became the head of a group practice clinic in a large city..." - Lloyd Thompson, Reading Disability

In Malcolm Gladwell's chapter on Late Bloomers, you'll find touching stories of talented late bloomers and the friends and family who did patiently supported and guided them through the years. At right, Ambrose Vollard, who sat 150 times from 8am until 11:30 without stop for Cezanne, although the end product was still thrown away by the artist in disgust. Vollard believed in Cezanne; and eventually he took it upon himself to collect every painting of his he could, sponsoring Cezanne's first one-man show at the age of 56.

From another paternal patron, Emile Zola:

"I’ll reckon out for you what you should spend. A room at 20 francs a month; lunch at 18 sous and dinner at 22, which makes two francs a day, or 60 francs a month. . . . Then you have the studio to pay for: the Atelier Suisse, one of the least expensive, charges, I think, 10 francs. Add 10 francs for canvas, brushes, colors; that makes 100. So you’ll have 25 francs left for laundry, light, the thousand little needs that turn up. "


Gladwell ends "Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them. We’d like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius.But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table."

Simpler is Better: Avoiding the TMI Trap

In studies of map-based problem solving, whether young or old, expert or novice, a consistent pattern was always seen - people of all ages and expertise seemed to prefer being presented more information, not less, even if it takes longer to study detail-laden maps, figures, or diagrams filled with extraneous material.

Too Much Information is the TMI trap.

In experiments involving Navy weather forecasters, Hegarty and colleagues found that "novice and experts alike have a tendency to choose more realistic over less realistic displays, even though realism impairs their performance in simple display comprehension tasks. Some experts prefer no just realism, but also prefer maps that display extraneous meteorological variables." More data and details were extremely seductive; the TMI trap has been seen in all types of problem solving scenarios involving all ages as well as all levels of experience. Hegarty adds, "detail, animation, realism, and showing the third dimension do not consistently enhance performance and often impede it."

Maybe the problem in the weather forecaster study is that the experts (postgraduates in meteorology) were not expert enough.

Other studies of expertise have suggested that experts differ from novices by the fact that they have more abstract (simplified) representations and they know more solutions. Experts are more likely to categorize problems, while novices are more likely to be misled by details or concrete aspects of the problem.

From Chi and colleagues: "When experts are presented a problem or task relevant to their domain of expertise, they see the problem in terms of prior meaningful patterns of information," like the recall of the significance of chess moves by expert chess players or  the significance of X-ray findings by experts radiologists. "Experts are more likely than novices to categorize problems at a deep level of abstraction (or function), whereas novices are more likely to categorize problems based on the surface features." In addition, experts are more likely to organize their schemas for problems in hierarchical fashions, that help them reason through the possibilities and again prioritize what approaches are best.

So simpler is better, but it's the kind of simplicity that's not based on lack of knowledge or experience. To the contrary. Expertise simple has plenty of knowledge and experience, but it's now also beyond them.

Getting All A's But Flunking Life - IQ Scores Climb As Creativity Sinks

Almost 30 years ago philosopher James Flynn discovered that IQ scores were increasing in every industrialized country around the globe. But before we pat ourselves on back, Bronson and Merryman warn us that we may be in the midst of a Creativity Crisis. Although IQ scores continue to climb, creativity scores, at least as measured on the Torrance Test of Creativity are dropping through the floor.

After reviewing the scores of 300,000 children using the Torrance Test of Creativity, Kyung-Hee Kim of the College of William and Mary saw a steep decline in scores from kindergarteners to 6th graders.

What are some of the reasons for this? A few possibilities are mentioned by Bronson and Merryman suggest one "likely culprit" is the number of hours kids spend in front of the TV or playing videogames. Other fingers are pointed at "drill and kill", "no time", and the "art bias" - thinking that creativity in school should only be taught in art class.

In The Invisible Gorilla, authors Chambris and Simons warn about the "illusion of knowledge". When Rozenglit and Keil polled random students in the hallways of the psych building and asked them if they knew how a crossbow worked or why the sky was blue, most gave up quickly, answering no more than one or two 'why' questions before encountering their ignorance. Not surprisingly, when students when then instructed about a particular process or mechanism, their ratings about their self-knowledge dropped! They had at least learned how little they knew.

We would add some additional reasons why creativity may be dropping with our current younger generation - there is more-and-more technology yes, but more often more breadth than depth, and more distancing from the tasks of direct learning and problem solving. From Keil: "One important factor underlying the illusion of explanatory depth arises from the richly hierarchical nature of most complex systems, which means that they can be understood at several levels of analysis. One can understand how a computer “works” in terms of the high-level functions of the mouse, the hard drive, and the display while not having any understanding of the mechanisms that enable a cursor to move when a mouse is moved, or allow information to be stored and erased, or control pixels on a screen. This hierarchical structure of complex causal systems seduces us into a sense of understanding at a high level, which is then mistaken for having an understanding at a lower level."

So maybe in our quest for higher learning, we are spending too little time flailing about at the low?

BTW, if you'd like to take part of the creativity test, go here.

When Words Get in the Way - Verbal Mediation Interferes with Spatial Imagery

A colleague recently mentioned the work of Jonathan Schooler who discovered that talking about a problem interfered with problem solving by insight. Verbal mediation does not worsen all types of problem solving of course - in older adults, in fact, researchers found that having older adults talk aloud while solving Raven's matrices increased their IQ performance by 11 points.

But verbal overshadowing is a real phenomenon, and another example of counteracting processes of words and images in the brain.

Verbal overshadowing refers to the process by which putting experiences into words can certain aspects of visual and other perceptual memories.

Examples:

-  After viewing a video of a bank robbery, subjects were 64% accurate picking the robber from a line if they relied on vision alone, but only 38% accurate if they gave a verbal description of the robber before searching the lineup.
- After viewing a map with landmarks, only those subjects who had been asked to verbally describe the map had trouble estimating the distances between landmarks. The thought is that words interfered with the spatial image of the map.
- After listening to a spoken phrase,  test subjects who were asked to write down everything they heard had a harder time identifying the voice that was used

More recent information about the verbal mediation suggests that individuals with stronger spatial ability are more susceptible to the verbal overshadowing effect...so that means that spatial thinkers may really not want to solve problems with words because it may disrupt their spatial processing and cause them to make more mistakes. In most of the students we see in the clinic where verbal mediation helps, their imagery for the task is weak (like dyslexic students verbalizing spelling words) - so this all makes sense.

In the figure at left, Melcher (2004) found that perceptual training increased the verbal overshadowing effect (in this experiment, subjects were trained on visual discrimination of different mushroom types).

Take-home point for teachers: when we're teaching or demonstrating a lesson, we should be attuned to primary modality we're trying to entrain. Sometimes we need to show and talk less.

Also if our students are spatial experts, we should understand why they don't like to "show their work" and not have it required of them.

Verbal Overshadowing of Spatial Mental Models
Verbal Overshadowing Articles
Talk picture

Emotions and Humor in Learning and Memory

For many students, attention may not be the roadblock learning, but rather remembering what's been learned once, twice, or dozens and dozens of time. When we see these kids in our clinic, more often than not, we don't find a child with a severe memory impairment; rather we see a boy or a girl who has a good memory for certain types of things and a bad memory other types of things.

Some children (and adults for that matter) do seem to be powerfully interest-driven, and if a subject is uninteresting or seems to have no intrinsic value, it seems impossible to retain.

General memory training activities may be of help, but using humor and emotional memory might be the make it or break it for getting information into long term memory.

On tests of sentence memory, researcher Stephen Schmidt found humorous sentences were much easier to remember on free and cued-recall tests (below, right).

 

And when memory for words in emotional neutral sentences was compared (figure above), words that tweaked  emotions were much better remembered than 'bland' words. With emotional word encoding, the right amygdala and hippocampus became activated too.

 Rote memory and auditory verbal memory are especially difficult for many children and adults with dyslexia, but tweaking subjects with humor or emotional content may suddenly turn an impossible-to-learn subject doable.

Some low-tech ideas: making up funny associations, cartoons, or word plays with places, names, or new technical vocabulary that has to be learned. Talking aloud notes with funny cartoon voices, reciting notes to a popular tune, or standing on a chair. Surprisingly all this stuff really works. One time we saw an older dyslexic who had had a horrendous time with letter and number reversals for years. We asked him, what helped the most? How did he finally get things straight? He grinned and answered, "I just found out that I had to give the letters and number different personalities... like "nasty number nine". If you the information somehow touches you personally, you'll remember it.

Humor on Sentence memory pdf
Emotional memory: separating content and context pdf
Mnemonics
Memory Tricks at MindTools

One Father's Lessons About the Structure of Knowledge - Happy Father's Day

"One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?”

I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.”

He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you
anything!”

But it was the opposite. He had already taught me:'See that bird?' he'd say. 'It's a Spencer's warbler. (I knew he didn't know the real name.) 'Well, in Italian, it's a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it's a Bom da Peida. In Chinese it's a Chung-Iong-tah, and in Japanese it's a Katano Takeda. You can know the name of the bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the birds and see what it's doing - that's what counts!' (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)" - Richard Feynman, The Making of a Scientist

Happy Father's Day.

For another nice article, Bruce Albert's reflections on Feynman's essay pdf (it's about the importance of inquiry in education).

Why Math is Hard - Implications of Developmental fMRI Changes in Arithmetic

In this paper from Stanford, Menon reviews how brain pathways necessary for multistepped math problem solving take time to develop from early grades into adulthood. It's studies like these that are long overdue.

Children have to drive their procedural and working memory systems much harder when solving path problems because they haven't automatized number relationships or procedural steps. The brain areas involved show that math is difficult because it requires word / symbol recognition, basic number / quantity processing, fact and procedure retrieval, working memory, visual / semantic representations, episodic memory, attention, decision-making, and of course error detection, conflict resolution etc....and the truth is many of these cognitive systems don't come on online until later in childhood, and sometimes not fully into the early 20's. Some implications for educational programming are obvious - are some educational expectations developmentally appropriate? Are teachers sensitive to individual differences in neurodevelopment and can they modify educational expectations appropriately? The conventional school approach is to not advance students to the next grade if certain academic standards are not met. But what of the legions of students who are ahead in some areas and behind in others?

The developmental truth seems to be that brain processes important for math problem solving take time to develop:

Excerpts:

"maturation of the prefrontal cortex and development of connections to the
prefrontal cortex increase in children between ages 6 and 14 years"

"posterior parietal cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex regions that
support working memory continue to mature from the age of 7–25 years"

"the capacity of memory systems, the speed of retrieval and the strategies used to remember continue to develop through young adulthood"

And "Because the prefrontal cortex matures relatively slowly compared to the posterior parietal cortex, children may be slower or have particular difficulties with certain types of arithmetic problems that require reasoning and interference resolution even when computational and retrieval skills are mature."

In our dyslexia clinic, these developmental factor often become huge issues. Though a student may be advanced in many areas, if automatization of tasks such as rote math fact retrieval or handwriting or weak, it may be enough to sink their boat and hold them back a whole grade. But if you follow these kids into high school, college, and beyond, you see their abilities just come online later - suddenly everything is easier and tasks that would have taken them hours to days, now can be done in 20 minutes.

This paper also highlighted another bone we have to pick with the way things are in medicine and education. When a child has weakness in visual working memory, we can't use that as a diagnosis in the clinic (ICD9 codes) or classroom (504 or IEP). They have to be diagnosed with ADD or ADHD or nothing. It's like trying to fix a fine precision watch with a sledgehammer. If a review paper from a reasonable place like Stanford can address children's learning in terms of episodic and procedural memory, visual or semantic representations and decision making, can't some of these same principles be discussed at school? The better we can get at identifying the problem, the better we can get proposing an answer.

Developmental cognitive neuroscience of arithmetic

The Different Ways We Think: Conceptual Thinking and the Brain

In this interesting paper that looks at how conceptual knowledge develops in the human brain during decision making, the hippocampus (along with ventromedial prefrontal cortex), an area well known for its importance in spatial navigation and long term memory, seem to play an important role with decision making about future conditions. The importance of the hippocampus was a bit of a surprise. On other studies of conceptual learning, individual differences in patterns of brain activation were noted for conceptual decision making tasks, but the differences were more commonly related to right and left prefrontal areas, and not the hippocampus.

The reason we found this interesting, is because not uncommonly we see very different conceptual thinking and memory styles among the students. A common pattern among our gifted dyslexic students who are strong spatial thinkers (high spatial reasoning, love to build, hands-on learners) is their preference for autobiographical / personal memory. They have vivid memories for personal experiences, but may need many repetitions for dry information that is master by rote repetition. From Maguire and colleagues: "our findings (with the hippocampus and vMPFC)...offer a fresh perspective on the intriguing question of why these brain regions are engaged during such a diverse range of tasks (e.g. spatial navigation, imagination, autobiographical memory, self-projection, fear extinction)." Hippocampal involvement may also account for why associational strategies for learning such as mnemonics seem to be such a valuable approach for rote learning among these students.

Perhaps other group (the not-strong spatial thinkers, for want of a better term) are more likely to use the more conventional left prefrontal pathway - when they recall information or make predictions, it is less rooted in personal or autobiographical memory, but more abstracted like algorithms or rules. It's this pathway that may be more optimized for quick processing and retrieval, whereas the former, could be best for decision-making under uncertainty and be richer by its wider associations.

Memorial Day - Flash from the Past

He was small in stature, but scrappy. The first eight years of his life were spent in Nome, Alaska, which was still a pretty lawless place at the time, and he learned how to defend him self by street fighting. Finally his mother had had enough, she insisted on moving the family to California, where he could get more education.

He continued to streetfight, and in fact got arrested for brawling, but things changed when one of his teachers took him aside and taught him fight properly... Then fighting became discipline rather than an emotional outburst. The advice he would remember in years to follow: "You get mad when you fight, and if you lose your temper, you're going to get licked sooner or later because you let your emotions rule your body instead of your head." With this advice in mind, he also went on to win high school boxing championships in the bantam weight class.

As a teenager, this Flash from the Past also became increasingly interested in mechanics. He saved up his money, and built his first glider plane based on a design he found in Popular Mechanics. When he failed to get the glider airborne from a small hill, he convinced a friend to drag him from a car, but this resulted in the demise of his plane and he was dragged 100 feet before his friend could stop. This didn't stop him, of course, and he salvaged some parts from the wreckage to built a second plane.

In school, he admitted he "didn't have a fondness for academic classes but did have a liking for the shop courses working on gasoline engines and wood lathes."

Who was this? This was James ("Jimmy") Harold Doolittle, a scientist, aeronautics engineer (masters and doctorate from MIT) who greatly advanced flying technology, and General in the United States Army. He set a world speed record for flying and was the first pilot to fly completely "blind", using only instruments to guide a plane. He also lead a harrowing bombing raid over Tokyo (Thirty Seconds over Tokyo) that had an enormous emotional effect on War in the Pacific. He would be one the most decorated soldiers of WWII and a most worthy recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor.



On this Memorial Day Weekend, we'd like to pause and remember all the brave men and women and their families who have helped make and keep this country strong. Thank you, all.


Jimmy Doolittle Reminiscences About World War II
Wings of Valor II- The Doolittle Tokyo Raid

Going Deep - Finding Time for In-Depth Learning

In a survey of 8,310 undergraduate students, students who had been exposed to a topic in depth (meaning they had spent at least one month studying it [e.g. electromagnetism in physics]), earned higher science grades than those who did not. In contrast, "those who had been exposed to a relatively long list of topics, but not in depth, did not have any advantage in college chemistry or physics and were at a disadvantage in biology."

At the high school level, the debate between depth and breadth often arises in the discussion of the value of Advanced Placement courses. From the Washington Post: "The two biggest shortcomings that I see in the would-be AP U.S. History teachers I meet are their sparse knowledge of history and their limited understanding of what it means to "think historically" (and how to teach their students to do so). To many of them, history is just facts and AP History merely requires that they memorize more facts."

The difficult thing to do in this period of crowded course and subject requirements, is to find time to do it. As Dr. Kieran Egan of the Learning in Depth Project argues that children who never have the opportunity to study a topic in-depth never realize how knowledge is structured, and that does ring true. With out knowing how present knowledge is structured, all sorts of mischief and misconceptions arise as people never come to recognize how existent knowledge was created and what its limitations might be.

The answers are not always so simple - for instance in the situation in which Phil Sadler and his colleagues analyzed what factors determined success in college chemistry, fact memorization was as important as repeating work for conceptual mastery. So perhaps some breadth and depth should be considered both essential components of a 'complete' education. In high school, the requirement for a senior project or mini-thesis in addition to survey courses might help bridge both worlds. Our daughter's attending a classical Great Books school that's roughly based on the Trivium: with grammar (rote), logic (analytical / reasoning argumentation), and rhetoric (persuasion). Some of the sweep of World History is introduced in the early years so more depth is possible in the high school years.

A very different approach to depth in education is suggested by the program Learning in Depth. When first grade students begin their classes, they are assigned a subject that they will study over the 12 years of their future schooling (examples given: apples or dust). The idea is that as they will return to their subject over the next 12 years, continually adding to it so they will have a greater respect for how knowledge is accrued and learning can be conducted from different points-of-view. I don't think that approach is for everybody actually, but it's an interesting idea. I much prefer allowing students to choose their topics and encourage continuity as much as possible - but working with intrinsic interests more than subjects that can be easily digested and assigned in the 1st grade. Even if students had some experience of working on a project for a year or two - this would be an improvement over never having to really think.





Depth Matters
A Brief Guide to Learning in Depth
A theoretical model for learning complexity - depth, abstraction, and transfer of learning
Cognitive Complexity in Math and Science

Video Gamers Have Bigger Brains

On a challenging space game, University of Illinois researchers found that students trained on a more challenging version of a task task (switches from one task to another) developed greater gains in procedural learning and cognitive flexibility that generalized to other tasks, and yes, that their brains got bigger. The area that bigger was the striatum - bilateral caudate, and to a lesser extent, the putamen.

The data are interesting for a number of reasons - brain studies in ADHD and dyslexia have suggested reduced caudate size and greater impairments in procedural learning. Games that employ motor skill and cognitive flexibility just might be able to generalize to other motor tasks like writing by hand or working with one's hands.

There are also caveats of course. Dorsal striatum has also been implicated in addictive behavior and it may be that the 'adrenaline rush' of fast-paced video gaming is not so far from the truth in the dorsal striatum.

But all-in-all, research like this is supportive of computer-based approaches to learning and neurorehabilitation. It is no accident that research of this sort is funded by the Office of Naval Research. Active duty personnel would benefit by training that boosts visual detection, visuomotor skills, and cognitive flexibility. That's probably why surgeons who play video games worked more quickly and made fewer errors than surgeons who didn't. Video game play was more predictive of surgical skills than years of training or number of operations performed (that's pretty amazing).

Striatal Brain Volume Predicts Video Game Skill pdf
Video Game Playing Surgeons Work Faster and Better

The Creative Advantage: How Vivid Memories of the Past Help Predictions for the Future

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards..." - Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

A fascinating new area of cognitive neuroscience has been looking at the link between personal or episodic memory and future prediction.

Episodic memory is an autobiographical that encodes specific times, places, sensory details and context, in contrast to semantic or non-personal memory that encodes facts (like 3 + 2 = 5 or the definition of a shoe) that can deal with more abstract or representational information that now may only be distantly linked to prior experiences.

When researchers looked at the brain regions involved in looking at the past, they found many of the same regions activated in response to prompts to imagine events in the future.

It was the cognitive neuroscientist Tulving who first noticed that an amnestic patient who had no recollection of any event that he had personally experienced also could not answer questions about events he might experience in the future. It was Suddendorf and Corballis who raised the idea that mental time travel into the past was closely linked to time travel into the future.

Any other significance to the brain areas found to be activated into future visualization experiments? Maybe - these are the same areas important for theory of mind or thinking about the perspectives of others, and spatial navigation tasks.

It's not hard to find examples of highly creative forward-thinking adults who seem to have had this prodigious memory pattern (Nikola Tesla, Isaac Asimov, Leonardo Da Vinci etc.) but amazingly we think we see some of these budding versions in our clinic because of our interest in highly gifted and twice exceptional (gifted with LD) learners.

Vivid personal memory doesn't always translated into academic success in the early years of education - because it's usually impersonal or rote memory that's emphasized in school. Vivid visualizers can be easily distracted, lost in their daydreams, or more concerned with personal trivia (what Toby brought to school, the games on Sarah's DS, etc.) or personal experimentation (homemade catapults) than the steps for rounding decimals or regurgitating dates and names for a history test.

But because personal memory is so closely linked to future prediction pathways, shouldn't we think about the implications for education? There's a lot concern these days about American students not being prepared for the new millennial global workplace. Perhaps we spend too little time cultivating rich personal experiences, the development of spatial intelligence, and future thinking.

Episodic Foresight pdf
Episodic simulations of future events pdf

Attention and Distraction - Battle Between the CEO and Creativity Director

Recent research from Illinois researchers indicates that the battle for attention in the Stroop task is not a matter of frontal executive function being present or absent, but rather due to the different patterns of activations in the posterior attention (parietal lobes) brain areas.

When two different Stroop tasks were given that different in the nature of task-irrelevant information (color-word vs. color-object task), little changes were seen in frontal executive areas, whereas marked differences were seen in the posterior areas.

 At left, color-word (orange), color-object (blue) for incongruent vs. neutral condition. Overlapping areas were shown in purple.

The data are interesting and remind us of the Chief Operations Officer or COO (executive) and Creativity Director described in our book, The Mislabeled Child. Stroop tasks are commonly employed in ADHD scenarios or tests of executive function, but this research suggests the truth is a bit more complicated than that.

Some children (and adults) undoubtedly may struggle with the Stroop because of weaker frontal executive functions, but differences in posterior pathways probably account for at least some of the lower performers - the question is how to distinguish the two - either in the clinic or in the classroom. Recently dyslexic teens were reported to have poorer performance on the Stroop, but is that because of weak COOs or 'too strong' Creativity Directors?

In this older study of positive mood on creative fluency and executive function (Stroop) , positive mood was positively correlated with greater creative fluency (e.g. how many different things can you think of to do with a cup), but negatively correlated with strong executive function performance on the Stroop. So happiness may help the Creativity Director, but not the COO. Instead, perhaps it's Seriousness (i.e. not really a positive mood) that drives the Chief Operations Officer.

Two attention systems in the Stroop pdf

Mind over Matter: Imagery Enhances Motor Training

Mental practice improves performance over motor practice alone - that's what the latest imagery research suggests. Texas A & M students learning to draw blood or surgically suture were found to improve if given guided imagery in addition to motor practice. The old saw, "See one, do one, teach one" that we learned in medical school should perhaps become "See one, do one, imagine one".

Psychologist Erica Wohldmann suggests that imagery practice may even be better than motor practice alone because it requires the cognitive generation of more abstract representations of physical movements. Makes sense.

University of Washington scientists are taking this research a step farther, looking at the effects of imagery-based biofeedback training on the learning motor tasks. As it turns out, combining a biofeedback task (moving a computer cursor) with electrical activity at a particular electrode is fairly easy for their sample subjects (graduate students?)  to master. In their study, two students were able to master the task without motor imagery in less than 10 minutes of training...after 5 and 8 min respectively, all they had to do was 'think' about moving the cursor and it moved up and down.

So what are implications for students?

Imagery-based training for motor skills  Many high performance athletes already incorporate imagery training in their routines, but perhaps imagery should be considered more often in children who have dysgraphia and / or other procedural learning difficulties like children with sensory processing difficulties or dyslexia. The idea of air writing, or rather the imagining of air writing may be a useful addition to plain writing your abc's over and over again.

Imagery for Visual Skills? Would guided imagery also be beneficial of disorders of eye movements (e.g. kids who have trouble moving their eyes smoothing across a horizontal line of text)? After all, the muscles that move the eye are voluntary muscles just like the ones in the hands and legs. We would think imagery would be especially helpful for complex tasks that require coordination between different motor groups (e.g. hand-eye coordination) and complex motor sequences.

Treatment for People Who Have Deficient Imagery? And what of children and adults who can't make imagery at? It's hard to know how many of these people there are, but we know of at least some because they tell us so when we ask them. In our clinic,  the children who report an absence of visual or kinesthetic imagery usually have severe sensory processing difficulties, very restricted working memories, and / or impaired gestalt perception. It's a step in the right direct to recognize the organic basis of imagery and its importance for learning. The next step is to help those who don't have it. It's possible that the development of an imagery-based computer feedback system could be extremely valuable for these folks.

Motor performance and imagery-based feedback
Psychology Today: Mind your body

Novelty Seekers are Emotion and Reward Seekers

fMRI studies show that people who score on novelty seeking scores (high exploratory, extravagant response to potential pleasures) also score the highest on emotional expectancy and activation of the medial prefrontal cortex (reward).

Not surprisingly, novelty seeking has been associated with the dopaminergic system and ADHD.

When we see kids with a strong novelty-seeking personality, it's interesting to watch them explore our waiting area. They always seem to find the most interesting things in the room right away - it definitely can be a strength in the right situation, but not surprisingly it's a poor fit with non-entertaining, non-salient teachers. What these kids often need is time to explore, an animated teacher, and lessons that whet the interest - What's unexpected, what's extreme, what's funny.

If a novelty-seeking student has no problems learning from a teacher who teaches with a high salience approach, is it a disease?

fMRI of Novelty Thinking Personalities pdf CY6F2JXE9YXF

Why Thought Experiments Work - Non-Verbal Reasoning in Engineers

"Without experiment, I am sure that the effect will happen ... because it must happen that way." -Galileo Galilei

A thought experiment is an experiment in the mind that is usually a test of a theory, principle, or hypothesis. Many breakthroughs in physics and mathematics are due to thought experiments, but thought experiments have also been important in the advancement of mathematics, philosophy, and computer science. The importance of thought experiments seems somewhat counter-intuitive because why should a non-performed experiment be expected to yield new or better information?

John Clement offers an interesting theory why this is so.

"...these simulations can generate new knowledge using several sources, including the 'extended application' of perceptual motor schemas, implicit prior knowledge, and spatial reasoning operations, in contrast to formal arguments."

Clement goes on to speculate that thought experiments tap into implicit (not expressed) 3D spatial knowledge using analogous mental models. Important thought experiments in science were not flights of fantasy, but rather "distillations of practice, based on real-world experience."

Other interesting features of successful thought experiments were that they could used to expose conflicts in an existing theory - and so play destructive as well as constructive roles in the modification process.

In studies of engineers doing thought experiments such as the one at right (will a wire with coils twice as wide stretch more or less with the same weight?) , kinesthetic and visual imagery were used to solve the problems, and as the engineers used twisting motions of their hands, the actions seemed to tap into implicit knowledge about how the springs would behave.

It's interesting in his video recordings of the engineers that most also seemed to manipulate the springs beyond the condition in the problem for instance: Now I'm confirming (moves clenched right hand toward clenched left hand) that, by using this method of limits. As (moves right hand to left hand until they almost touch at the first word "closer") I bring my hand up closer and closer (keeps holding clenched right hand next to left hand, making slight vertical punctuating motions at the words "hold," "clearly," "harder," and "harder") to the original place where I hold it, I realize very clearly that it will get harder and harder to twist. So that confirms my intuition so I'm quite confident of that." 


Adding extreme cases to thought experiments allowed the engineers to test out their predictions and change their theories appropriately depending on the results.


What are the take-home points for education?


1. Thought experiments can be valuable both as a source of new ideas and in critical analysis of existing theories.
2. Because success at thought experiments often employ perceptual-motor knowledge that can only be gained through direct hands-on experiences, we should not consider a complete education 'hands-off' education.
3. Imagery is essential to many types of generative thinking; practice in imagistic reasoning might be a valuable addition to the educational arsenal.

Thought Experiments in Science and Science Learning pdf
Thought Experiments - Wikipedia

Increased brain sensitivity and visual attention in people with sensory processing sensitivities

From Stonybrook University and a collaboration with China, comes this latest study showing that people self-reported as "Highly Sensitive People" on the Aron's HSP Questionnaire (see below) do have more sensitive brains when looking at visual stimuli. The effect isn't just higher levels of brain activation, but also high performance scores on tests of visual detail.

Our understanding of sensory processing sensitivities and disorders has taken a leap forward in the past few years though the field is still messy because people come to the topic from so many different disciplines and viewpoints. Aron's work described "SPS" or Sensory Perception Sensitivity, a personality trait only partly associated with introversion or emotionality. Sensory Processing or Sensory Integration Disorders have been defined by professional occupational therapy associations to be dysfunctions in the normal modulation, discrimination, and organization of the body's sensory systems (vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste, balance / proprioception). Some of the most severe instances of sensory processing dysfunction seem to be in the setting of autism spectrum disorders and genetic disorders such as fragile X or Williams Syndrome. But among gifted parenting and educational communities, sensory sensitivities are also well known, especially with the high overlap of Dabrowski's Overexcitabilities with conventional sensory processing disorder or HSP checklists. All of these conditions also overlap with attention deficit disorders because attention functions (among other things) to coordinate responses to outside stimuli.

This study doesn't do much to clarify the mess between different professional and lay descriptions of sensitivities, but it does give credence to the subjective reports of many that they can be overwhelmed by sensory inputs that others might find inconsequential. It's interesting too, that more sensitive people did notice more when studying visual stimuli, so that although the sensitivity can be seen as a burden, it also seems to come with some gifts.

High sensitive person self-test (Aron):
I am easily overwhelmed by strong sensory input.
I seem to be aware of subtleties in my environment.
Other people's moods affect me.
I tend to be very sensitive to pain.
I find myself needing to withdraw during busy days,into bed or into a darkened room or any place where I can have some privacy and relief from stimulation.
I am particularly sensitive to the effects of caffeine.
I am easily overwhelmed by things like bright lights, strong smells,coarse fabrics,or sirens close by.
I have a rich,complex inner life.
I am made uncomfortable by loud noises.
I am deeply moved by the arts or music.
My nervous system sometimes feels so frazzled that I just have to go off by myself.
I am conscientious.
I startle easily.
I get rattled when I have a lot to do in a short amount of time.
When people are uncomfortable in a physical environment I tend to know what needs to be done to make it more comfortable (like changing the lighting or the seating).
I am annoyed when people try to get me to do too many things at once.
I try hard to avoid making mistakes or forgetting things.
I make a point to avoid violent movies and TV shows.
I become unpleasantly aroused when a lot is going on around me.
Being very hungry creates a strong reaction in me,disrupting my concentration or mood.
Changes in my life shake me up.
I notice and enjoy delicate or fine scents, tastes, sounds, works of art.
I find it unpleasant to have a lot going on at once.
I make it a high priority to arrange my life to avoid upsetting or overwhelming situations.
I am bothered by intense stimuli, like loud noises or chaotic scenes.
When I must compete or be observed while performing a task, I become so nervous or shaky that I do much worse than I would otherwise.
When I was a child, my parents or teachers seemed to see me as sensitive or shy.

"If you answered more than fourteen of the questions as true of yourself, you are probably highly sensitive. But no psychological test is so accurate that an individual should base his or her life on it. We psychologists try to develop good questions, then decide on the cut off based on the average response."

Sensory processing sensitivity and response to change in visual scenes
Sensitive people use their brains differently
Sensory Processing Sensitivity and Introversion pdf
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Diffuse attention and creativity

Sensory Processing Master Class on DVD with Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide and Lindsey Biel MA OTR GM7M3GWDSPNC

Helicopter Parents Revisited - LD Students in College and Graduate School

From TR Miles' Dyslexia at College: "From our discussions with dyslexic students we have noticed that many of them have had at least one person as a 'prop' during their school career. This 'prop' is often a parent or other relative...Such a person will have guided them in a variety of ways, for instance by showing them how to fill in forms, by reminding them of appointments, by supplying them with addresses and telephone numbers, and by making suggestions to how they might plan their studies and their revision..."

Helicopter parents were a negative term for parents who hover around their teen and young adult children "overparenting", trying to clear obstacles out of their childrens' paths and make their kids' decisions for them. The College Board even published a 'Quiz' to encourage parents to "rethink" their helping habits.

Undoubtedly there are some extreme cases, more recent research says that many so-called helicopter parents are getting a bad rap. Now there seems to be a change in the winds. The College Board has now added Helicopter Parents Revisited, citing research from the Harvard Family Research Project that teens whose parents play an active role do better in school and more likely to enroll in college, and parents who are more involved while their students are in college are more engaged in their studies and more satisfied with their college experience. Because researchers found that the children of "helicopter parents" performed slightly worse than those with "non-helicopter" parents, it was theorized that the helicopter action was taking place because the students were really struggling in school.

Because of our interest gifted dyslexics, we read a lot of early life histories of individuals who later became eminent - and more often than not, a parent's unconditional support seemed to make the difference in that child's success - when John Yeats could not read, his father took it upon himself to read him Macaualay, Scott, Shakespeare, Shelley, Rossetti, and Blake into his teen years when he began to write verses of his own. When Pierre Curie struggled with multitasking, slow processing, and dysgraphia, his father took it upon himself to homeschool him, supplementing his studies with tutors and work he could do along with his brother in their dad's lab at the Museum of Natural History. More recent examples include dyslexic head of the Intel Reader creator team, Ben Foss JD MBA. In the video at the bottom of this post, Foss admits that he used to fax his papers home so his mother could read them to him.

These biographical studies still have a ring of truth today. Whenever we meet with a twice exceptional student who has made some remarkable accomplishment in higher education, more often than not, there's also a remarkable parent behind him or her. This shouldn't be surprising, but with all the negative press about 'helicopter parenting', many well-meaning people can get the wrong idea. A much more common mistake is that parents try to give their 2E child more independence after entering school, only to suddenly find out it was all too much, there're failing grades and their student wants to throw in the towel. What these kids often can't do well are lower order cognitive tasks - like decoding read quickly, writing by hand or note-taking, retrieving math facts etc. And the gap between high school and college away is too great. College professors often receive no training in the LD needs of their students, and college freshman find themselves buried under core requirements with outrageously long reading lists and tests that require fact regurgitation and trivia more than thinking.

Parents may often know best what their child's strengths and weaknesses actually are. If they think they are college / grad school material, they are probably right. Research from Drs. Linda Silverman and Karen Rogers has found that parents are excellent identifiers of giftedness in their children. In the setting of Gifted with LDs, that must also certainly be true. Not only can the see the promise, but they knew how much work went into keeping on schedule and writing papers and how many assists were necessary.

The truth is that parental support at university and grad school levels (if necessary) may be very important to these very talented students. What many of these students can do well is think - and they just need to reach high enough levels of education that thinking reallymatters (usually upper division courses).

So hooray for helping parents - and don't get down about your help - and share these stories with your students.

We don't mean to say it's not important to have these older students advocate for themselves or make independent decisions - there are of course common sense distinctions about all this business, but our take-home point to you is that the over-the-top helicopter parent is more an exception than a rule, and the truth is that many of you good parents are really making a difference in your kids' lives. Many twice-exceptional students are also developmentally late bloomers. College might be better suited to them in their early 20's rather than right out of high school, but delaying college for years may be impractical. This also means too that the help may not necessary forever. Thankfully, a lot of life is not the same as freshman year at college.

From Thompson's Reading Disability -

"When the writer interviewed the (medical) student, he admitted that he "never could read much." Throughout his education his mother had read everything to him, and in medical school his wife was reading aloud all books and references. His father had had the same trouble, but he graduated from medical school with the aid of his wife's reading to him. However the father could not pass state board examinations, because he could not read them. Later he became a professor in one of the preclinical sciences and wrote a textbook for his field...From interviews, it was obvious that the student had a specific reading disability. Arrangements were made for him to have expert and intensive remedial reading instruction during vacation time...there was some opposition to his continuance in medical school on the part of the dean and one other faculty member, but the opposition subsided...After his graduation a report came from a distant medical school hospital stating that this man was the best intern they had had for some time. He passed his American boards in internal medicine and became the head of a group practice clinic in a large city..."



More on this theme: NYT: More parents relocating to live closer to their kids at college

College Living Experience - a program to help college students with LDs transition to college XNQ7QRKQ7WC9

How Many Harvard / MIT Students Does It Take To Light A Light Bulb? - Science Misconceptions

"The interesting part about the batteries and bulbs question is that people always predict that they can do it..." - Philip Sadler

After a wonderful interview with dyslexic astrophysicist Matt Schneps last week, we watched his now-classic documentary for science education Minds of Our Own with our kids. You can watch it free online here.

When Schneps and Sadler asked graduating seniors at Harvard and MIT whether they could light a lightbulb with a battery and a wire, they all said "Yes!" or "Definitely yes!" - but in reality only very few could actually do it. The scenario highlighted of the challenges that teachers face when trying to learn. It's not sufficient just to teach; if we want 'deep learning' then we also need to attack pre-existing misconceptions.

We are watching the 3 hrs series with our kids - and heartily recommend it for stimulating family discussions.

The show also jogged a memory of something the famous dyslexic architect Richard Rogers had said, "If you’re forced to question everything, you’re actually likely to make less mistakes…The things that don’t work in my experience, are never, at least practically never, the new things. They’re the old things that you forget to question.”

With the brain's economy, it's much easier to sneak in a wrong idea that fits with a pre-existing schema (plausible) than a new idea that might be true, but is unexpected (implausible).

If all this sounds sinister, it can be - this laziness of learning means that the propaganda technique of misinformation is so effective (for more reading, check here.

So what's a teacher to do? It seems as if one way to overcome misconceptions is to use effective analogies. An isolated fact won't stick, but if you can find something to hang a new fact on, then maybe long-term learning will take place.

Eide Neurolearning Blog: Why it's hard to get rid of old ideas
Cautions of bad analogies.
More analogies to overcome misinformation
Bridging analogies

Take a Brain Break or Nap to Boost Your Memory & learning

Researchers at UC Berkeley found that taking a short nap, improved learning by 10%. NYU researchers at right found that providing a 'rest' period before a memory task improved learning efficiency and blood flow in to the hippocampus.

All this makes great sense, but for most of us, naptime is over in Kindergarten.

Well, at least most places. Google seems to have recognized the importance of taking a rest for boosting general brain efficiency. At left is a nap pod that blocks light and sound at Google headquarters in Mountain View.

The importance of taking a break shouldn't be lost on classroom (or home-based) teachers. Instead of grinding it out lessons, reinforcing points, and trying to cover as much as possible, our students will remember more if we interrupt our lectures with little pauses or diversions and take more breaks!

Brain Break to Boost Associative Memory pdf

Brain Fitness: If You Don't Use It, Will You Lose It?

Thanks, Dr. Trevor Tebbs for this week's question about whether failure to use one's mind results in the cognitive deterioration. What's the answer to this question? YES. There is good evidence that the brain needs ongoing stimulation to preserve its function and to protect against injury. During development, the principle is also true; early deprivation affects intellectual development for years.

Dr. Marian Diamond conducted pioneering work showing that increases in cortical dendritic growth was at its greatest in the first 10 years of life - a big reason for why childhood intellectual development is so important.

From the Carolina Abecedarian project of preschool educational intervention for poor children, long-lasting benefits were noted into the young adult years in terms of reading and math achievement and admission to college.

More recent research has been even more encouraging about the importance of intellectual stimulation: enriched environments were seen to have protective or beneficial recovery effects on such diverse conditions as Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's Disease, Epilepsy, Stroke, Traumatic Brain Injury, and Fragile X.

The data are also encouraging for all of us adults with aging brains. If you look at the figure at right, it really is alarming. From Intellectual Development in Adulthood:

"Substantial intellectual changes within individuals occur only late in life and tend to occur for abilities that were less central to the individuals' life experiences and thus perhaps less practiced."

Fortunately, even in the area of aging, keeping one's mind active does seem to build up 'cognitive reserve' that will make it more resistant to cognitive decline with aging.

If you are over the age of 65, you can take the LEQ questionnaire for free here for free. It estimates complex mental activity over the lifespan (reading, writing, social activities, travel, occupation, etc.).

In the figure below, see how higher lifetime complex mental activities slowed the rate of hippocampal atrophy over three years (good thing you're reading this blog!)





Lifespan Mental activity predicts slower atrophy: