Amphetamine, Mood, and Reward

Amphetamine and its effect on the brain's incentive mechanisms were studied in this report from Stanford. Using healthy volunteers, research studied the effect of amphetamine on brain activation of reward centers. There was some elevated mood seen during the testing, but the most notable finding was that amphetamine decreased the amount of ventral striatal activation during anticipation of gain, but it boosted activation during loss anticipation.

It's clear that further lines of investigation involving amphetamine, reward, and mood, will be important as the numbers of U.S. children and now adults are diagnosed with ADHD, but some of the results are also cautionary. Because fMRI measures blood flow oxygenation, it raises the possibility of negative (and unwanted) effects on normal brain reward systems. Also, the mood properties of stimulants need to be considered as possible confounding variables when evaluating whether students or others have improved on stimulant trials.



Amphetamine, Mood, and Reward
CDC: More Kids with ADHD

Fantasy Sports and Math

Need to jazz up your math lessons? - Fantasy Sports are popular with both boys and girls.

Fantasy Football Unit Study
Guardian: Fantasy football? It's all maths to us
PBS: Fantasy Baseball Lesson Plan

Perspective Taking... Through Blogs?

We accidentally came across this Writers Write site while surfing with our kids for creative writing helps. The site has ideas about using the Internet when researching characters. Beside suggesting Psych sites (different temperaments) and Biography sites, it also mentioned respectfully visiting different discussion groups and lists (farmers, fire fighters, different political groups) to learn more about what these different people were interested in, how they talked, and what their experiences were. This type of activity is of course not only helpful writing, but also broadening our own exposure, and having the time to consider different perspectives and points-of-view at a more leisurely pace.

Careful and supervised explorations of this sort may be valuable for students when they are seeking to understand different points of opinion and controversy, and understand the context and perspectives that accompany these views. The blogosphere has certainly contributed a lot to this, because more ordinary people can have blogs, and its usually seen as a platform to speak ones' mind.

Check out the picture below which shows which shows the different pattern of activation in a visual spatial perspective taking task involving a virtual ball tossing game. The red areas were activated when playing the game from a first person perspective. The blue areas were activated when playing the game from a third person perspective. Pretty dramatic difference. Even just the visual spatial process of taking another perspective requires a great deal of activation of representational areas.



Keep in mind this sort of perspective taking is only the simplest kind - not considering who the person is, what their experience, value system, emotional feelings, or intentions are. It's not surprising that many of us even as adults find we have a lot to learn about perspective taking.

Any way, may this will be a helpful idea for one of you out there. Another thing this scan shows is why children with visual perceptual difficulties (happens with birth injury, prematurity, autism spectrum, other conditions) have such trouble with perspective taking. Look at the large blue area that's required.

For some of them, close captioning of movies or reading blogs is their breakthrough. It's no accident that people with visual perceptual difficulties may become engrossed in language - because a lot perspective taking can be gained (context, intention, assumptions, humor) from understanding the differences in language well.

Kid Pick Brain Break: Eliza, Computer Therapist

Here's a cute site which requires surprising little programming code to imitate a Rogerian psychotherapist. Ask questions and 'dialogue' with Eliza, and read her responses. This is not artificial intelligence, it's surprisingly simple. Check the source code and see how the program was generated.

Eliza, Computer Therapist

What We Remember: 2 Very Different Types of Novelty Seeking

There are definite differences in how and what we remember best, but this latest research article from Stanford, researchers have been able to dissect out different pathways for novelty-based learning depending on whether recollections were conceptual or perceptual.

From the individual person point-of-view this makes complete sense. Sometimes we meet people who are very lopsided in what interests them. Sometimes these differences are very apparent at early ages.

Powerful conceptual novelty seekers are wonderful to talk with (they could go on for hours and hours in fact) because they make interesting observations, notice unusual aspects to prosaic topics, and play and appear to endlessly ruminate on personal topics of conceptual fancy. They may not always succeed in the classroom because they can think of better ideas in their heads, may prefer the company of smart adults, and have broad intellectual interests because it allows them to distill different subjects to their essence, and examine underlying conceptual foundations. Their most likely public school diagnosis: underachiever.

Powerful perceptual novelty seekers are often equally frustrating in the classroom but they are more likely to be misdiagnosed as 'ADD' or 'ADHD' because they're always noticing and playing with objects in the room. A bit of color here, texture there, weird shape, and their hands are running over it and using it exotic and unexpected ways. These perceptual novelty seekers may be excellent mechanical diddlers, find new uses for old things, and seem to always be wanting to make ordinary things better.

In the figure below, check out the very different brain patterns of activation depending on whether novelty-based recollections are 'conceptual' or 'perceptual' - sure it's not all-or-none right vs. left brain, but there is a pretty striking preferential pattern of right/left activation.



It's another question, how education might be optimized for these two very different classes of novelty seekers - but we'll have to talk about that another day (doing the crazy beginning of the school year dance).

Creative corporations probably have some of these lopsided novelty seekers - do you think they always get along?

Domains of Novelty Memory and fMRI

DNA Interactive

Very neat interactive sites are springing up for science. Animations are very valuable for helping students to visualize processes that they can't see. DNA Interactive also has free interactive features for teachers that allows them to set up customized lesson plans, videos, and animations for their students. HHMI also has wonderful scientific animations as well

DNA Interactive
HHMI Cardiovascular Animation

Mental Toughness, Resiliency, and Endurance

"Mental Toughness" is a concept that's talked about in terms of sports and physical challenge, but it's also a character trait that seems important for a lot of life obstacles - personal or work-related setbacks, academic or job-related disappointments, and perseverance to run the long race and meet one's goals.

So how to do it? These days, emphasis of personal self-esteem and immediate happiness seems to potentially work at cross purposes with an ethic of personal denial or sacrifice, and without just nagging the kids, how can we encourage students to be tougher, more resilient, and to endure?

We came across It Takes a Parent by Betsy Hart in the book store, and though there are spots that are sure to get some people fired up, she scores a lot of direct hits.

Sure we want our young people to be happy and confident about themselves, but we also want them to be mentally tough, take risks, shrug off and learn from disappointments and failures, and persevere for long term goals.

Hart has this nice excerpt from an interview Columbia psychology professor Carol Dweck has with Education World:

"EW: Why is it that many students who succeed throughout their elementary school years suddenly seem to fall apart when they get to junior high or middle school?"

Dweck: Many students look fine when things are easy and all is going well. But many students, even very bright ones, are not equipped to deal with challenges. When they hit more difficult work, as they often do...they begin to doubt their intelligence, they withdraw their effort, and their performance suffers....The students who blossom at this time are the ones who believe that intellectual skills are things they can develop. They see the more difficult schoolwork as a challenge to be mastered through hard work, and they are determined to do what it takes to meet these challenges."

There are many different factors which can help a child be come more "mentally tough" and it doesn't have to mean become stoic. Check out the picture below which shows how resilient college students were better at 'letting go' of negative images than their non-resilient counterparts. When viewing negative pictures, resilient students reacted the same as the non-resilient - the difference was in how they were able to stop the negative emotional reaction after it had been seen.



Resiliency can be modeled for young people, and it's never too young to begin praising effort and perseverance more than accomplishment, to encourage risk-taking and boldness, and to allow kids to fail, but being ever ready with unconditional emotional support, context (failure is one of the best ways to learn), and redirection toward the future.

Resiliency and fMRI
Well being and affective style

Free Online Courses at Sofia

Hurray for Intellectual Freedom! Check out these great free online courses from Foothill College. They include Creative Typography, Elementary Statistics, Physical Geography, Enterprise Network Security, Introduction to Java, Introduction to Macromedia Flash, Musicianship II, and Webpage Authoring.

The Introductory Flash course is fabulous (we used it ourselves as well as for teaching our kids animation). We'll also probably dabble in the Physical Geography course in the upcoming year.

Sofia Course Gallery

Flashes from the Past: "He was a born teacher..."

If you're a teacher, you probably won't have time to read this because it's the beginning of the new school year. Here's a nice flash from the past about a great teacher when things begin falling into place...

From Caught in the Web of Words, "He was himself a born teacher, never throughout his life able to resist passing on information...". We know who they're talking about. We've been fortunate enough to be mentored or inspired by a number of these folks in our lifetimes- they are generous souls who with every fiber of their being just want to share what they learn and know.

As a young boy, today's 'Flash from the Past' showed this teacherly trait when, seeing his baby brother for the first time, he gave a primer book to the baby and told his parents "I will show little brudder round 'O'and crooked 'S'." From a very early age, he was fascinated by letters.

Later as a young man, he would become an assistant schoolmaster in a country schoolhouse - and he loved it there, visit students at home, gifting them with personally drawn cards or little books, and keeping detailed monthly records of the progress of each of his students in every subject. He wrote his own outline of English literature that included its precursors in Celtic, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman works, and encouraged 'direct learning' in science adventures in the countryside or by inviting any visitors to the town to meet the school children, point to where they were from on the globe, and talk about their different language or dialect.

Who was this natural born teacher? This was James Murray, author of the Oxford English Dictionary, a remarkable tome about word origins and meanings, and the definite dictionary of the English language.

This biography is great fun to read, and Murray seemed to be a nice family guy as well. Reading his early life history, we were impressed by the good fortune he had having kind and generous teachers and tutors- his elementary teacher took the initiative to teach him Latin because he seemed to love words (he was the only one in his school at that time to study it), a retired minister who took him along rambles in the countryside studying botany and geology, and another schoolmaster who would devise interesting science experiments like exposing the class to laughing gas. The latter teacher also found aneighbor woman who could teach him German and Italian after school for fun.

James Murray did find a way of paying back these generous teachers - by becoming a generous teacher himself - as a school master, as a father, as a colleague, and as lexicographer he could share his encyclopedic memory and love for language. The reverbations of his teaching legacy continue in other ways as well- his biography was written by a granddaughter, a principal in the U.K.

Got Words? Vocabulary Links, Quizzes, Historical Linguistics

Language is fascinating to study because of its evolution over time. My mother's family grew up with standard English and Pidgin (dialect of Hawaiian with English, Japanese, and Portuguese rolled in), and from our extended family and academic wanderings, we are blessed with exposures to Swedish, Norwegian, and Chinese, as well as dialects from the Northeast, Midwest, and 'Valley' (California - surfer).

For those who love language, here are interesting language links:
Jabberwocky: There are no Such Things as Words
Tolkien Languages Site
Pidgin - Wikipedia
Nicaraguan children create new sign language

Also here are good Vocabulary Links and Lists:
These are good for challenged readers and reluctant writers who need to learn more words. The lists include the most frequent words in the English language and free quiz sites for things like vocabulary, adjectives, and word categories.

Vocabulary Lists and Quizzes
Word Groups
Vocabulary Quizzes

What?? Memory Problems Caused by Auditory Processing Difficulties

A recent report from Brandeis has suggests that mild to moderate hearing difficulties in older adults can tax the brain's resources so much that it impairs memory difficulties and cognition. For our experience, this happens in kids too. Hearing disorders are something that are often undiagnosed, and if you add central (brain-based) auditory processing disorders, the numbers are even greater.

If you're young and don't seem to have very good auditory attention (what, huh?), you could be written off as having ADD. If you're older and tend to say what, huh? then people might think you're 'slow'.

Well, as it turns out, you might be perfectly fine with reading - so it's not a general attention deficit disorder or age-related memory impairment, but few people are available to help you fgure that out.

In the classroom and in formal school evaluations, we would like to see more professionals thinking about comparing reading to hearing when problems with attention, memory, or comprehension arise. Standard accommodations might include Teachers' Notes (if available), textbook at home, close captioning of movies, and assignments, instructions, requirements always provided in writing.

15% of school children have measureable hearing loss in one or both ears, and fully one-third of children diagnosed with only 'minimal' hearing loss will fail at least one grade.

The Figure below shows the different patterns of brain activation when reading a sentence (warm colors) vs. hearing a sentence (cool colors).



Press Release: Poor hearing may cause poor memory
Hearing vs. Seeing Sentences
Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension

National Reading Panel Report

This report will be helpful for parents, teachers, and tutor of students with reading difficulties. Topics include: Phonics Instructional Approaches, and tips for Fluency, Comprehension, and Teacher Education.

National Reading Panel Report

Seattle Times: WASL scores rise statewide

WASL scores are rising throughout the state, but there's still a long way to go. Fewer than half of students passed all three subtests.

fMRI of Peer Pressure

This study from Emory provides an interesting view of peer pressure and the 'pain' of independence. Test subjects were given mental rotation tasks to perform individually and 'in a group'. In the group situation, they saw either the faces of others giving their answers (really student actors) or computer terminals that were supposed to be reflecting the answers of others.

When subjects succumbed to peer pressure and made errors, it was evident that they were giving in to their peers because the reaction times were shorter and they didn't activate their brains as much as when they were doing the task by themselves. The 'peer pressure' site appeared to be in the right parietal sulcus, which might be reflect the possibility of an alternative representation (from the group) being considered.

A unexpected finding was researchers were also able to see the sting of independent thinking. When people went against the group and made correct choices despite the three subjects choosing otherwise, the emotional amygdala and right caudate (salient stimuli) became activated, perhaps reflecting the pain of marching to the beat of a different drummer.



fMRI of Peer Pressure
Adolescence and Peer Pressure
Helping Gifted Students With Stress Management
Black Enterprise: Financial Peer Pressure
Adolescents Adjust to Giftedness

New Scientist - Most scientific papers are probably wrong

Always good to keep in mind...

Homeschooling Dads Links

Homeschooling Dads
Research on At-Home Dads
Help for Fathers with Autistic Children
Homeschooling Dads Talk

Spatial Cognition: The Final Frontier

The Spatial Brain is where everything seems to come together - sight, sound, touch, position, movement, imagery, and interaction. But it's more than that - spatial brain processes are also essential for our representations of ideas and reasoning, and we make predictions based on our spatial 'intuition' every waking minute.

Here's some nice spatial reasoning links. When it comes to this 'intelligence', surprising numbers of folks think they are just born 'good' or 'bad' spatial learners, but it's probable that there's a self-selecting that goes on too. Some natural endowment does seem to exist, but expertise is built upon experience, practice, and analysis. Spatial ability can be improved by direct instruction and even computer programs, but it is rarely tapped in conventional academic programs.

Spatial gifts in children generally appear more noticeable in boys than girls, and young spatial experts have often honed their talents in hands-on / spatial hobbies and out-of-school activities. Because spatial expertise is acquired by doing and imagining more than listening or reading, it takes time, and won't easily fit into a classroom period.

The pictures below show the increased in brain activation required for the more complex levels of the spatial reasoning in the Tower of London task.



NSTA:Enhancing Spatial Reasoning
AI Magazine: Qualitative spatial reasoning about sketch maps
Spatial Reasoning 'Tutor' Program
Importance of Spatial Reasoning
Perceptual Representations and Design
How Spatial Representations Affect Reasoning
Transdisciplinary Spatial Cognition - Reasoning, Action, and Interaction
Eide Neurolearning: Visual, Sensory-Motor, & Math Spatial Learning
Tower of London fMRI
Spatial Reasoning Lessons
Spatial Sense and Geometric Reasoning

Harvard Digital Educational Library - Problem Solving

There aren't too many videos here yet, but the ones we've seen are thought provoking. Check out one of the videos on Real Life Problem Solving. Mathematicians posed a question involving Eadweard Muybridge's film of a cat walking to groups of high school students in a summer problem solving program.

It's clear that work such as this takes time, and that this group of students has had the benefit of previous practice in working with each other and learning in this fashion, but it was impressive to see them move toward an understanding of calculus fundamentals.

Harvard Digital Library
Eadweard Muybridge

Teens, 20's, and Motivation

Are there really differences in an average teenager's level of motivation and a twenty-something? Answer: Yes. Below, researchers at Stanford found that teenagers had lower levels of brain activation in response to monetary incentives, while twenty-somethings were more robust.



In the figure, it also look a little like 20's showed great responses at the time of receiving rewards, but it did not meet statistical significance. The key conclusion was that adolescents had a harder time activating their brain's motivational circuitry than young adults.

There may be many nodding heads out there, but it's a good reminder to provide strong emotional support to our teens. Adolescence is a very traumatic time for many as they desire support for autonomy, they struggle for acceptance, and may waiver on feelings of competence and self-esteem...and the biology tells us that it really may be harder for them to anticipate gains and become motivated.

Teens, 20's, and fMRI of Motivation
Motivation in Middle School
Thrivals: High achieving young adult African Americans
Special Issues of Gifted Adolescents
Achievement in Science

Nifty AP US History Site

For those of you gearing up to teach your students U.S. History this year, here is a wonderful site with links to primary documents, Powerpoint presentations, and assignments.

AP U.S. History from historyteacher.net

Hurricane Katrina

In-depth coverage of devastating Hurricane Katrina at Wikipedia. Our thoughts are with all those affected.

Hurricane Katrina
Donate Red Cross
Salvation Army

Action! Experiencing Words Through Reading

FMRI of language can be a bit mind boggling. We used to think of language in a very isolated way. But the truth is much more interesting than that.

In the figure at right, researchers found that 'action' or movement words are associated with relevent action or movement areas of the brain. What that means is that when we read a word like 'kick', we activate the leg movement area of the brain. When we read 'chew', then the mouth movement area of the brain becomes activated. Talk about your virtual reality.

The implications are wide for how we teach children words (should be rich, associated with sounds, imagery, movement, feeling), how we express words ourselves (gesturing, moving), and how we rehabilitate or strengthen word memory. The fact that this study's findings seem to be a bit of surprise may be because we are not fully conscious of all the motor and sensory (kinesthetic) associations we might have with the wide world of words.

Maybe that's why active people may like adventure stories (and text-based video gaming), and why we can tire after reading an exciting or gripping book.

Feeling Words

Flash from the Past: "Build This!..."

While we were down in Southern California, we couldn't resist spending some time at that remarkable spot in Anaheim. Disney was certainly no man of small ideas (he did once get fired from a newspaper because of a "lack of ideas", though).

After a trip to Switzerland with his family, Walt was so impressed by the Matterhorn, that he sent a postcard to his Imagineering team, saying "Build This!" and that's just what they did. The current issue if "E-Ticket Magazine" has wonderful coverage of this Matterhorn building project. Somewhat unbelievably, Walt initially pondered setting up a snow machine for a real snowy toboggan ride in sweltering Anaheim. Fortunately, he eventually settled on the basics: "it had to be safe, fun, travel in and around a replica of a real mountain with a Skyway ride going through the middle of it, have a high ridership capacity and...be two separate rides that would twist and turn within the other's path."

Design engineers Ed Morgan and Karl Bacon had no roller coaster experience before they accepted this job. They had met working at a Naval plant in Sunnyvale. Ultimately they designed, built, and tested the Matterhorn for opening within just 10 months.

The E-ticket article is great fun to read and a great example of innovative thinking and design. Unfortunately it's not online, although some links to the Matterhorn history are presented below. The Matterhorn ride really rides like a non-computer generated roller coaster, and apparently Morgan and Bacon had to grunt through a lot of calculations by hand.

"Many coaster dynamics are variable; speed based on up and down slopes, banking required in turns, bank change rates, variable guest weights, etc. I had to figure on variable friction coefficients depending on how long the car has been running, temperature of the day and so forth. This meant that as the track course was being layed out, the speeds had to be calculated based on the course effect on the car. I needed to learn trigonometry real quick....I'd failed geometry one in high school but found I could learn enough trigonometry just from a chart in one afternoon."

Morgan and Bacon seemed to have the right ingredients for a creative collaboration. Recalls Ed Morgan, "I definitely wouldn't have been as successful had I not met Karl Bacon. We generated ideas and projects together, often over lunch in the conference room. I was the guy that made them happen from the mechanical standpoint; Karl was the guy who did the math. We complemented each other completely and without strife of any kind."

Matterhorn Makers at Disneyland
Matterhorn Patent
Matterhorn History
E Ticket Magazine

Commenting on Commentary: Interdisciplinary People vs. Teams?

"Focusing on interdisciplinary teams instead of interdisciplinary people reinforces standard disciplinary boundaries rather than breaking them down. An interdisciplinary team is a committee in which members identify themselves as an expert in something else besides the actual scientific problem at hand, and abdicate responsibility for the majority of the work because it's not their field. Expecting a team of disciplinary scientists to develop a new field is like sending a team of monolingual diplomats to the United Nations."

Check out this Plos Commentary on Antedisciplinary Science. He makes some good points. Interdisciplinary learning is a 'hot' topic at the levels of higher education (here and here), but very little has trickled down to K-12 levels - probably for many reasons (e.g. teachers aren't trained for this, NCLB woes, students failing to meet standards).

Other than general politeness guidelines, most K-12 students don't learn about how to interact in groups. In the name of democratic classrooms, sometimes the emphasis is more on equal treatment than diversity of thinking and problem solving styles. This is unfortunate, though, because it may be that an individual's greatest contribution to a group will be found in their differences - ideas, fund of knowledge, personal history or associations, and thinking style- rather than their traits in common.

Many of the most successful innovative personalities are quite lopsided in their cognitive and social abilities. In fact, sometimes very smart people can make big mistakes by diluting their native talents by brooding and working too hard on their weaknesses rather than devoting themselves to their strengths.

Sean Eddy sounds like a polymath who is accustomed to crossing disciplines regularly-and these sort of folk are often great paradigm shifters in business or scholarly areas. However, there is always a flipside to this. Polymaths are also a restless sort. They are less attuned to incremental development of an area, and they may be so independent-minded that they work better with subordinates (e.g. their workers) than with colleagues.

Creativity by committee can be doomed to fail if the groups themselves are not chosen carefully by some who knows the talents and the personalities involved. Groups can also get cumbersome with increased size and extreme diversity (no one knows what anyone is talking about), and they can be sabotaged if given too little authority, or overly managed or supervised. Members of great groups often need to be recruited and valued for their distinctive roles, contributions, and personalities, and they need a worthy problem to devote themselves to.

As public school kids ourselves, we often found group activities to be frustrating: the experiences were often chaotic (people thrown together), members were not differentiated (everyone try to solve a problem and suggest things), and sociological aspects could overshadow any lesson or process (for instance, domination by a few strong personalities, or apathy or confusion of all).

We wonder, how much time is spent trying to improve collaboration between teachers of different subjects or grades, or offering them practice at collaborative problem solving? It's hard to teach it, if you haven't had successful experiences yourself.

Creative Collaboration - BBC Article

Brain Break for Kids: MatheMUSEments

Interesting reads for math kids: splitting light with your fingernail, floating paraboloids, and mathematical music (BTW, if you're interested, my brother has fractal music located here).

MatheMUSEments

Blog Vacation Until August 26th

We're traveling with the kids for the next two weeks, so unfortunately we'll be on break from the blog until August 26th. When we return, we have some great articles to cover though, and have updates for the Index. See you then!