Autobiographical memory is a personal memory of events and places personally experienced. The medial temporal lobe appears to be an important area for these memories, and these sorts of memories appear to be multimodal (sight, sound, smell, touch, emotions) and often lifelong.

In our experience, autobiographical memory is often poorly tapped as a resource or as a conscious part of learning. Maybe it's because the sort of memory that teachers, doctors, or neuropsychologists assess is often of a different sort (impersonal, semantic, etc.).

In some people though, autobiographical memory may appear so strong, that it is a dominating style of their learning. In order to remember, they may have to experience or wrestle with the information personally. Sometimes when we assess a child who has had significant neurological difficulty that impairs both auditory and visual memory, we have used autobiographical memory techniques to see whether it helps them retain the information better. Often it works like a charm - this may meaning weaving the information to be learned into a story that is dramatized (sensory-motor memory too) so that they experience it and then recognize it later. The pictures below show one strategy for studying autobiographical memory. Subjects travel in a taxicab in a virtual reality environment while in a scanner, and then time in taxicab is correlated with brain activity - the area that lights up is the medial temporal lobe. Autobiographical memory is also being tapped in the 'spatial technique' used by Superior Memory champions (originally devised by an ancient Greek) whereby list information is projected on a familiar (autobiographical) scene.



AutobiographicalMemory Taxi
Autobiographical Memory Review
Neurolearning Blog: Superior Memory (scroll down page)

Our community recently suffered a tragic loss when a brilliant young man took his life. Existential Depression is very common among gifted individuals. In a survey of 5,000 high achieving teens listed in Who's Who Among High School Students, 31% had contemplated suicide and 4% had attempted suicide. The most common reasons given for wanting to end their lives were: 86% feelings of personal worthlessness, 81% feelings of isolation and loneliness, 81% pressure to achieve, and 61% fear of failure. The most common time for teens to commit suicide in is the 'after-school' period and many teens mask their feelings.

If there's a child you're worried about, please check out the resources below. Often children may feel more comfortable talking to a professional with special expertise in dealing with gifted social and emotional issues. SENG has an article library and many other links are provided below.

SENG: Articles & Resources - Existential depression in Gifted
Letter and Resources from Betty Meckstroth
More Resources
NASP Resources
Hoagies'Gifted: Depression and Suicide

"Everybody's special, Dash"....
"Which is just another way of saying nobody is..." - The Incredibles

The question of Who is Smart' or 'Who is Special' is an insidious one, because whether we want to our not, we all have some sort of expectations of ourselves. Kevin McGrew, co-author of the Woodcock-Johnson III, is a new member of the blogosphere and he has added an interesting post IQ Scores, NCLB & Forrest Gump on his new blog at: http://intelligencetesting.blogspot.com. Some highlights:

"Correlations of this magnitude tell us that IQ tests, on their best days, predict 40-50% of school achievement (Applied Psychometrics 101 – square the correlations and multiply by 100 to get the percent of variance explained). This is very good. Yet…50-60% of a person’s school achievement is still related to factors “beyond IQ!”

"In the context of NCLB (No Child Left Behind), there is a real fear that IQ test scores may seduce educators and other education-related professionals into the “soft bigotry of low expectations”

In fact, when high IQ or prodigy subjects are wheeled into the fMRI scanners, not suprisingly, there are very different patterns of brain activation depending on what task and what kind of prodigy. There are certain areas that appear to be more common than others (frontal, temporal) and these may reflect task-related requirements such as working memory or insight. The parietal lobes also appear to important for many high level events -probably because the importance of imagery in problem solving and idea manipulation. These people are different from others - and what's more we can learn from them.

Today, IQ testing is one of the most common tools in the school system for assessing cognitive ability, classroom placement, need for accommodations and cognitive expectations. But good gracious, 50-60% achievement is beyond IQ! Rather than using IQ to tell us about our limitations, we should look for strengths that tell us what to build on.

We have to remember too that a few years ago, nobody would have dreamed that we would have seen brain reorganization with software programs in dyslexia or increased brain gray matter from juggling lessons.

We are filling in parts of the puzzle - understanding what sorts of cognitive strengths are important for high level problem solving, and what sorts of environmental or educational interventions can change brain wiring and its efficiency. The next phase of research will have something for everyone - we will learn how to teach and learn better, and really build on whatever we've got.

Insights on Intelligence Theories & Tests
Fluid Intelligence
Fluid Analogies
Math Prodigy
Insight
Exact Vs. Approximate Problem Solving

Helicopter parents? Helicopter parents are the nickname that some school folks have coined for parents who 'hover' and swoop down to rescue their children so - the idea goes- they don't learn good traits of perseverance or how to grapple with problems themselves. How do these Parents from the Past measure up?

This protective dad flew into his daughter's classroom one day and scolded the teacher for giving his daughter a homework assignment. Because she was already in school for six hours a day, he reasoned, she shouldn't have to do any additional work at home. When this young lady told her mother that a teacher was 'emotionally ugly', her mother came to her rescue, and told her she didn't have to attend that class.

Later on this gal became interested in ice skating, so her parents bought her the best skates and skating outfit they could afford...and every day there was good weather, they said she could ice skate instead of go to school.

Who did this woman become? This was Barbara McClintock, very hard-working and internally-driven Nobel Prize winner in genetics (1983, for 'Jumping Genes') who worked at lab bench science until the age of 89 (James Watson once told one of us that she was always prowling around Cold Spring Harbor at night working in her lab). As it turned out, McClintock didn't really get jazzed about schoolwork until high school, when she discovered she really liked scientific problem solving.

Barbara McClintock
No escape from 'helicopter parents'

"Phonomena" is now commercially available in the US and Europe. This had a solid research background, appeared more challenging than Earobics, and a lot cheaper than Fast Forword. This software may help people with auditory processing disorders from CAPD or dyslexia. There is a free flash demo at the site.

MindWeavers
Phonomena News article

What do we think of when we think of risks - being daring, entrepreneurial, innovative, or more like ADHD, self-destructive, and impulsive? This paper looks at cognitive processes involved while college students (remember - they're still supposed to be a little 'hypofrontal') decide to take risks.

The interesting points here are that decision-making is different depending on whether options are presented negatively or positively. If both options appear positive- then most choose quickly and pick low-risk. In fact, much more brain work is needed to choose a high risk choice when both things look good. Not much difference is seen when when low- and high-risk choices are given (maybe fatalistic?)
-kind of a "Who cares?" because they're both bad.




So maybe when looking at rosy options, we may be more likely to 'play it safe' and go for a simple good. When things look bad anyway, we may be more likely to 'go for broke.' This study also suggests that somewhat paradoxically, sometimes 'risky choices' can occur as the result of 'more thought' rather than less.

fMRI and Risky Decision Making

This report from UCLA hit home. For a time, our family struggled with family balance, and it's only in the last few years, we found the right answers for our situation. The changing sociology of dual career families does affect learning- and in profound ways.

The takehome points for this study is that children these days have much less time for face-to-face interactions and conversations with family members, and less opportunity for idleness and daydreaming. This is not good. All of these activities affect the development of character, social interaction, encouragement, and creative vision. In the histories of famous people, families often figure prominently as sources of inspiration and encouragement. We need to figure out how to allow more thoughtful and intelligent parents flexible working hours and working options, so they can spend more time with their families.

Seattle Times: American families' plight

Bhatt and Camerer of Cal Tech cover big topics in this paper - sucessful strategic thinking, self-referential thinking, social thinking, and neuroeconomics by carefully examining patterns of brain activation while college students played games and reflected on their experiences. Different experiments looked at the differences in patterns when individuals made choices, expressed their beliefs, and expressed what they thought others would do.

It turns out successful strategic thinking negatively correlated with insular activation. Insular activation, they suggest, was an indicator of too much self-preoccupation and emotional feeling. The insular is preferentially activated in situations like when a person is made to feel socially excluded (virtual game of 'catch', then the other subjects don't share the ball with you anymore -we'll talk about that one later). It looks like this study is a chapter from an upcoming book entitled "Games and Economic Behavior."

Here's a look at how not to look when you're playing to win.



The Mind in Games

If you have a few seconds, please vote in our free poll we put in the sidebar. If you find it difficult to answer, reply to this post about why (add a comment). When it comes to "Learning Styles", the most common route to figure this out is supposed to be a 'poll'-type inventory - but there are many problems inherent in this.

We would think that people who read blogs might be more strongly oriented toward words - but even this is murky area. There may be differences in the ways you prefer to take information in, different ways you prefer to generate possibilities, and different ways you ultimately decide on answers. Some people get such strong imagery from reading (words), they can't stand to watch movies after reading books because it doesn't match with the images they have already seen. What is that? Words and Imagery. But think of the implications- these people may be overloaded by lots of graphics or visual material when they're learning. They may prefer anything visually bland or text, even though they are high-visual imagery learners. A little paradoxical.

The learning styles arena were benefit from an infusion of ideas from people of very different backgrounds who share an interest in thinking \ about how they really think. There are insights from brain studies as well.

Sometimes we see people who seem to fit the 'visual thinker' profile very strongly (by checklist), but then find they have terrible visual memory. If we look more closely, we find they may be powerful visualizers (imagery) or outstanding with visual problem solving, but not remember exact details of what they see.

There are also some situations where all modes seem mixed. One of us (Fernette) played classical piano since she was 3, and as a result, she can't listen to music without having some proprioceptive and visual imagery associated with it. The visual imagery - is also a bit subconscious, so that only really reflecting on it afterwards can she think about specific images called to mind.

The educational process needs to take into account learning differences to take learning onto the next level. But we also need a firm foundation. To get handle on the wide range of different styles of learning, we need to ask more questions, rather than handing out pre-determined surveys. Maybe the blogosphere is ideal for this.

Here UW researchers use Virtual Reality to reduce the perception of pain in burn patients. Entering the immersive 'Snow World' of virtual reality, the burn victims felt less pain and lower activation levels of pain pathways were seen by fMRI. It will interesting seeing just how many different ways virtual reality and immersive video games can affect other brain mechanisms of perception, attention, and emotion. As the information becomes more detailed, perhaps it will provide software engineers and game designers with more ideas re: affecting brain biology and experience.



fMRI and Virtual Reality Analgesia

In the last few years, great resources have become available for students to understand the various steps to creative production in the real world: audio commentaries on DVD.

This past week, our kids got the DVDs for "The Incredibles" - what a thrill to see the brainstorming process (sketches, personal vignettes), the different levels of interaction within a group, contribution of unique personalities and technologies, and some of the tough intellectual and emotional decisions that going into making a final product. There's a lot of other information to be gained through these film clips and documentaries too - story and character design, the logic of color, gesture, and imagery, sequence and cohesion.

Wouldn't it be nice if more disciplines did this? In science, some videos capture the creative process (Race for the Double Helix, documentary about the solution of Fermat's Theorem), but these behind-the-scenes views are much more unscripted and therefore seem more realistic. Some DVDs (like Wallace and Gromitt) also include some of artists' work as children - and this can be energizing for some of the kids.

There is also something a little like blogging in these audio commentaries - people doing what they're interested in, sharing with the world real time what the experience is like, and how they they are thinking.

Wired : Welcome to Planet Pixar

Students who speak English as a second language are the largest growing student population in the U.S., and Hispanics comprise 11% of the U.S. population. So what are the consequences of bilingualism for language learning and learning differences? They are significant, though the number of practical recommendations from educational groups to parents or teachers are surprisingly few.

From the brain research perspective, it looks like different languages are stored in roughly overlapping areas, although more territory is needed to mobilize the second learned language, and an area of the frontal lobe (executive function) is needed to supervise switching between languages. As a result, signals can be jammed in bilingual learners (in the phonological loop) and attention and brain resources can be divided. The result can be reduced accuracy and fluency in both languages. The red arrow below points to the extra region of brain that has to be used for language selection.



Maybe this is why gifted bilingual children are less likely to be recognized by teachers and standard assessment tools as gifted. We've listed some links for resources about bilingual learning and giftedness, but in some references when bilingual students are mentioned as being generally better as visual or hands-on learners, we wonder whether this is inherently true, or just the result of their having to otherwise take in lessons through their second acquired language.

There are other kettles of fish with bilingualism as well - including the difficulty identifying dyslexia in ESL students and the occurence of monolingual dyslexia (dyslexia in only 1 of 2 known languages).

Language Switching
Strategies for Teaching Hispanic Students
Identifying Hispanic Gifted Children
Second Language Interferes with Word Production in Fluent Bilinguals
Gifted and Talented Minority Language Students
IngentaConnect Phonology in the Bilingual Stroop effect
Second Language Interferes with Word Production in Fluent Bilinguals

Why Stevie Can't Spell (washingtonpost.com)

Here's a wonderful article (with reader comments) about spelling from a dyslexic Washington Post Staff writer.

Why Stevie Can't Spell (washingtonpost.com)
Post Magazine: Why Stevie Can't Spell