Don't let this be your fMRI! This is how your brain looks when you've eaten too much chocolate...
The Brain with Too Much Chocolate
You're better off spending your time doing cool Halloween effects / science / virtual pumpkin carving with the kids.
Spangler's Hands-on Halloween Science
CoolStuff 21 Haunted Physics Lab
Virtual Pumpkin Carving
Congratulations to the Roger Kornberg, for the Nobel Prize in chemistry. He and his dad are now the 8th parent-child pairs to win in the history of the prizes. Not unlike Linda Buck, young Roger had a leg up on his classmates in elementary school because he did recreational science at home with his mother (a biochemist) and his father (Nobel Prize in Physiology & Medicine, 1959).
When Roger was in elementary school, his dad would take him and his two siblings to tinker around in the lab. "One Christmas, when he asked Roger what he wanted for a present, the boy replied: "A week in the lab." One brother is a biochemist at UCSF, while the other is an architect who works in laboratory design.
A childhood friend of the Kornbergs recalled, "The Kornbergs were legendary way back then,' said Berg, who grew up in the same neighborhood. 'They read 'The Cat in the Hat,' then 'Biochemistry 101."
But it doesn't look like competition or pressure is going to crack the next generation of Kornbergs. When asked about potential stress of this latest accolade on his children, Roger Kornberg replied, "They're good kids and they'll do what they want to do. They're very independent-minded."
Want to try your hand at extracting DNA with the kids? The bottom link below is a simple recipe we used to get plenty of DNA from dried peas.
DNA research chemistry Nobel / Roger Kornberg
Nobel Prizes Rooted in Genetics
Son follows father with Nobel prize
Arthur Kornberg (1918 - )
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Flash from the Present: "After her pet hamster died, she decided...
Science in Our Home
The figure above shows how even Harvard students struggle with remembering faces (and cubes). Complex visual stimuli like faces and 3-D objects are more likely to overload our visual memory.
Based on genetic studies, face blindness, or prosopagnosia is estimated to be as common as in 2% of the population. This is often not recognized in childhood, although it may create significant stress and social difficulties. For more on this, check out the links below.
Face Blind
Wired 14.11: Face Blind
Prosopagnosia.com
We're in Phoenix tonight and looking forward to the COVD meeting with Dr. Barry, Lindsay Biel, and all the behavioral optometrists tomorrow.
Here's a nearly final draft of the handouts for the COVD Visual Processing talk: here. It is in Adobe Acrobat pdf form. If you are in the Phoenix area and interested in the visual processing issues in children, you may want to come to our free and open-to-the-public talk (with Barry, Biel, Press) at the Squaw Pointe Hilton tomorrow. For more information about this, check out our Appearances link at MislabeledChild.com here.
The talk surveys the visual input, pattern processing, output, and attention difficulties in children. It also includes a more technical discussion of the visual (and non-visual) aspects of dyslexia. This handout is a bit rough- we didn't have time to post the final before we left - but we'll try to get around to this when we get back.
Here's more good news - computer-based programs look like they have promise in training up auditory working memory and visual perception. If you can find it (i.e. specify the problem), you probably can refine it.
First the visual - the figure below shows how training in a fairly intense 10 hour visual program corrected age-related visual perceptual decline.
From the auditory memory PNAS study, improvement could also be seen in most participants, although the magnitude of improvement was slight in some cases, suggesting that more tweaking is probably needed in the program. The results are promising, but statistical significance doesn't necessarily mean practical benefit. 
Memory enhancement in healthy older adults
Posit Science Visual Perceptual Training
Thanks to Stephanie from Idealawg.com for the hat tip about this Rocky Mountain News column from Seebach. Seebach is commenting on a recent USC-Utrecht paper entitled Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching here.
From the RMN: "The idea that the most effective way to teach students is to give them problems to solve, with only minimal guidance, has been around for half a century or so, under a variety of names. And it's always been wrong...It is bound to fail because of the way human memory functions." Huh? Seebach argues that most experiential learning will swamp lower ability students with so much information (working memory overload) that they may even know less after the "learning experience" than before.
Some of Seebach's and Kirschner & Co's critiques of discovery- or problem-based teaching have merit:
- working memory may often be overloaded when students are immersed with too much material
- students without explicit instruction may not learn
But their are weak points in their case as well - they admit that low and high ability students prefer problem-based learning to conventional / explicit teaching (improve motivation for learning, potential better memory for practice / concepts), but that, they suggest, is immaterial if the learning outcomes are not better.
So what do outcome studies suggest? When medical students are instructed with case-based instruction - they have superior clinical practice skills, but inferior basic science test performance. So what's the matter with this? Seeback and Kirschner deemphasize this result by mentioning, "But the negatives include lower scores on basic science tests, more study time and a pattern of ordering significantly more unnecessary tests at a much higher cost per patient with less benefit." But who would you rather have for a doctor - one who practiced medicine better or one who knew more answers on a pencil-and-paper test.
Actually, we can see the merit in explict instruction and discovery-based learning, and think parents and teachers should be skept if students' programs are touted as all-or-none. Discovery-based learning alone - is inefficient because many students will be clueless (or just copy answers from a neighbor) using a completely unguided approach. But, guided instruction-advocates should not lose sight of the fact that the ultimate goal of almost all learning should be its application to new situations or solution of new problems, or at least a fresh perspective on the present or the past.
Rather than a minimally-guided problem-based learning approach, we seen effective teaching when...
- The goals of teaching include facts, principles, process, and application
- Learning is interactive and not one-sided (wholly teacher- or student-focused)
- Learning from example and problem-based learning are not mutually exclusive
- The ties between theoretical and practical knowledge are explicitly looked for and taught if students don't get them.
- The limits and assumptions of information and subjects are considered, and applications to the real world, constantly reinforced.
- Teachers are taught to be very aware of working memory demands of material - so they are able to provide organization or scaffolding for students unable to assimilate information or problem-solving steps.
- Finally, practice and instruction in problem-solving are given, so students don't get all A's, but later flunk life.
Learning Last for Life - Review of Problem-Based Learning
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Learning That We're Wrong
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Easing the Work in Working Memory
Cognitive Apprenticeship / Math Forum
Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible
Short blog break until Oct 24th because we'll be heading to Vancouver for what will certainly be a wonderful event sponsored by the Gifted Children's Association of BC and Vancouver Gifted. For more information, check here. This coming Friday, we'll also also be on the Bill Good Show at CKNW AM 980 in Vancouver.
Today, a brief post on intellectual diversity. At Salon Life, a reviewer of the recently released Hothouse Kids book, suggests that one of the take-home points may be "the joys of just being average," but is that really a joy?
We may not all want to be super-achievers in all areas (it's usually not possible anyway), but doesn't everyone want to know what they are especially good at, and wouldn't that be a valuable goal of the educational process? That is certainly the message of The Animal School Movie (adapted from a story Rabbi Greenwald) and a point-of-view backed up by neuroscience.
In education or in clinical neuroscience, we can average the data from different individuals, but do the averages or the differences reflect more of the truth?
From the Small Numbers and fMRI paper below, this interesting reflection,
"It may someday turn out that the information from a few brains, thoroughly studied will reveal more about the universal aspects of human brain functional and organization than the current torrent of studies from lage collections of brains."
The figure below shows 4 different test subjects took a remembering task. 
Now just by looking at the scans, would you think all four would have the same preferences and needs in how they learned?
Review of Hothouse Kids at Salon.com
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Well-Rounded vs. Lop-sided Learners
Extensive Individual Differences with Memory Retrieval pdf
Individual Differences in Trait Rumination pdf
Small Numbers and fMRI pdf
At least on this latest review of the SAT, these Canadian researchers suggest so...
Using individual SAT subtest scores to estimate general cognitive ability, researchers found that 17-18 year old males averaged 3.63 IQ points higher than their female counterparts.
The authors also make this interesting observation:
"Age turns out to be an important factor for determining sex differences in IQ because the male advantage does not emerge until the late adolescent growth spurt when the brain size differences peak."
This study raises a number of issues, and in truth it can be critiqued from a number of perspectives, including the possibility of sampling error (e.g. boys and girls may differ in percent who choose the SAT because boys have better job prospects that don't require college, etc.). Nevertheless, because boys are more likely to drop out of school, the findings are interesting.
Boys are more likely to have late blooming brains...
Men Have Greater General Intelligence on the SAT
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Boys, Girls, and Different Brains and Slower Processing
Smart Boys, Bad Grades
We ran across this interview with Peter Agre, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. His autobiography touches on some of the complex paths for some talented, but restless young people.
Excerpt:
"I kind of intentionally flaunted being not a good student in Chemistry since my father was a professor in Chemistry and I had no intention of finishing that course because it wasn't required. It was interesting that this D in Chemistry was something came up after I won the Nobel Prize (in Chemistry). I mentioned this just once to a reporter, immediately it was everywhere. The sense is: he couldn't do any better than that? Well, my answer is that, if I tried hard, I could have gotten a C. (laugh) I knew a lot of chemistry, but I just had no interest in conforming to the proper behavior. We had an underground newspaper. I think sometimes children from very traditional families; we have this term "act out". Parents want the child to be perfect; the child is always making his own trouble. It was something like that.
The college I went to is a modest college, it is not as selective. It is not like Duke or UNC, where there are a lot of top students. It is for average students. It was a little humiliating in that sense. I knew I had the ability but I didn't have the performance. But it was a wake up call. The wake up call was that arrogance is a very bad trait. If you want to be stuck in kind of a mediocre situation, then go ahead and be arrogant. To really achieve something requires a lot of organization and commitment. "
Nobel Laureate Peter Agre elaborates on life and science, interview
The Mislabeled Child: Focus on Gifted Children & Stealth Dyslexia
Our online web conference starts in about 30 minutes. It is free to join, but you must subscribe at yahoo groups. Once you're subscribed, you'll get all the messages and replies and can post messages at: OGTOC@yahoogroups.com We'll be live from 6:30-8 pm PST.
If you can't make it, you may register at any time for our forum at: Mislabeled Child Forums and participate in the discussions there.
See you soon!
Here's a look at why it's often so crucial to put emotional experiences and perceptions into words. Researchers at UCLA found that adding a verbal label like scared or angry (a.k.a. affect labeling) to a view of a person's strong emotional expression significantly dampened the viewers' activation in the amygdala.
That's why many kids (and many grownups for that matter) who are grappling with extreme feelings like anger, fear, despair, feel a great breakthrough when they area able to verbalize their feelings and experiences. Even before the emotions have been fully understood or woven into a context, just being able to put a name to it calms the amygdala.
fMRI Putting Feelings Into Words pdf
Cognitive Reframing Affects Memory of Event / Press Release
The Power of Optimism Powerpoint
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Controlling Feelings
We will be leading an Online Gifted Conference: Gifted Children, Gifted-LD / 2E, and Stealth Dyslexia at this site on Monday. The conference is free and open to the public, but you must register before at Yahoo: OGTOC-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Some list members have already begun posting questions, but we won't post answers until Monday, and will be online "live" on 6:30-8 pm Pacific Standard time, Monday Oct 16th.
Before you head off to play video games this weekend, think about whether the games you play are improving your central or side attention. In the figure below (increased contrast from the online pdf), look at the difference in eye movement tracking depending on whether a game was Halo II (first-person shooter, blue) or Legacy of Kain (adventure game, red).
Video games will affect visual attention - but whether it's strengthening central or peripheral (side) attention depends on the game.
Prelim Report: Visual Attention in 3D Games
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Are Computers Driving Us to Distraction?
Small Library of Papers: Effect of Video Games on Visual Attention - U Rochester Brain & Vision Lab
This is just so cool, had to share it. Watch this Google Video of an MIT program that animates sketches on a whiteboard using real world physics principles. 
Sketching Animated Worlds at MIT on Google Video
From Carol Dweck and her team, here's research that shows that providing generic or trait-related praise to kids ("You are a good drawer") is more likely to induce feelings and behaviors of helplessness when negative criticism about drawing is later received. Children who received more situation praise ("You did a good job drawing"), had fewer strong emotional feelings and were more likely to persist with drawing activities.
Yikes! This may catch a lot of us. When trying to foster positive self-esteem, it's possible we may be discouraging resiliency. 
In other work (figure excerpt below), Dweck has found that beliefs about intelligence (whether it's a fixed entity or changable through experience or practice) had effects on trial and error learning - those who felt intelligence was fixed were less likely to learn from their mistakes, and ERPs suggested they were also devoting fewer attentional resources to challenging tasks. 
How to Praise Kids
How Beliefs About Intelligence Affect Motivation
Got back late from Bainbridge tonight, so just this quickie post when ran across while on web surf. It's from a young Stanford postdoc in physics. The story is all too familiar, "I have never been a fan of learning in as classroom. Inside a laboratory or a garage, I always wanted to know more..."
So who are students out there who may never find out that they love learning through discovery / first-hand experience, because they haven't really gotten a chance to spend time tinkering in a garage or a laboratory?
NOVA | Einstein's Big Idea | The Equation Today: Riding the Wave of E = mc2 | PBS
The New Atlantis published a wonderful online article Shop Class as Soulcraft that reflects on our increasing removal from manual work that might cause us to become more passive "consumers" than "producers", certainly more removed from the process and materials of how things are made.
Manual work has long been devalued, but perhaps even more so in this increasingly computer-driven world. But Crawford has really put his finger on something here. This article is not just a nostalgic look at the handcrafts or work of the past, it also points to an important truth about work done with ones' hands - there are insights that come only from physical experience, and because the lessons are not fully conscious or verbal, the learning may be hard to pass on except through other physical lessons. Also there are practical experience lessons that can only be learned by doing, like the experiences he cites with the computer modeling program Hypergami:
"In our early work with HyperGami, we often ran into situations in which the program provided us with a folding net that was mathematically correct—i.e., a technically correct unfolding of the desired solid—but otherwise disastrous. Figure 7 shows an example. Here, we are trying to create an approximation to a cone—a pyramid on a regular octagonal base. HyperGami provides us with a folding net that will, indeed, produce a pyramid; but typically, no paper crafter would come up with a net of this sort, since it is fiendishly hard to join together those eight tall triangles into a single vertex. In fact, this is an illustrative example of a more general idea—the difficulty of formalizing, in purely mathematical terms, what it means to produce a ‘realistic’ (and not merely technically correct) solution to an algorithmic problem derived from human practice."
Hypergami is a free downloadable program. Maybe a good activity with your kids? It might generate some interesting discussion about theoretical and "real" knowing. Practice with 2D to 3D conversions will also help stretch the spatial skills of some students.
Hypergami
For those who are still on the fence about homework, here's another article from San Francisco Gate.
While we're not completely opposed to homework, we can anticipate that YMMV (your mileage may vary) for many students. We've certainly seen some students with an inappropriate load of repetitive or physically impossible (dysgraphic)assignment-levels of work. On the other hand, for some students, homework may be the only way their parents can see what subjects are being covered in class, or if a child is mastering material. Out-of-class projects are also valuable because they allow students to pursue more individually-chosen projects in depth, but we suspect these are not usually the assignments that frustrate parents.
SF Gate: Homework Wars
Bracing for the Homework Wars
These researchers may have not found what they were looking for because the look of the brain solving math problems with a visual model vs. through algebraic symbols (x & y), looked largely the same:
From another perspective, though, it is interesting to see how much working memory is involved with algebraic problem solving. It might be also explain while young precocious math students may still prefer visual mathematical problem solving to more symbolic methods. It may not be that they aren't able to think symbolically, but rather their working memories are the limiting factor (remembering the Blessings and Burdens post?...the higher the IQ, the weaker the working memories in the early years).
Visual vs. Symbolic Math, Algebra, and fMRI
The Blessings and Burdens of High IQ
"...At the age of twenty-nine, I discovered it was connected with my eyes. How is it I never suspected, never complained, never spoke of it before? The answer, I guess, is that we tend to feel that all people see and feel things the way we do. At least, having nothing to compare it with, I assumed my vision was normal." - Jess Oppenheimer
We are prepping for our Vision Course at the Annual COVD Meeting in Phoenix Oct 26th, but also wanted to highlight the fact that Dr. Susan Barry and Lindsay Biel (SensorySmarts.com) will presenting there as well. Dr. Barry, a neuroscientist at Mount Holyoke, has recently been profiled in The New Yorker (Stereo Sue) and now NPR here.
Though Dr. Barry was born with crossed-eyes, she never developed truly binocular vision because her eyes weren't surgically corrected until after the age of 2, and no one recommended visual rehabilitation / therapy.
That changed when Oliver Sacks recommended that she undergo vision therapy as she neared her 50th birthday, and Excerpt: "Well miracles do happen. Barry found out what it's like. And she wasn't imagining...the astonishing moment when against all expectations, Barry's vision suddenly -- after a half century --popped into 3-D...
Barry's experience, it turns out, is not unique. Apparently other people have spent their lives with visual deficits expected to last forever and, through various therapies suggested by their eye doctors, they say they have gotten back some of the sense they had lost."
It's exciting to see that the COVD has such an interdisciplinary conference. These presentations and course we're presenting require registration at the convention, but a free and open-to-the-public event is being scheduled for the evening of Oct 26th, if any of you will be in the area. This event will be Visual / Visual Perceptual because of its association with the COVD. 
Magic Eye How to See 3D copyright © 1995-2004 by Magic Eye, Inc.. All rights reserved. Can you see this? It's a Dino.
NPR : Going Binocular: Susan's First Snowfall
Vision3d.com - 3D exercises, games, puzzles
We're back from our great adventure - met wonderful people and our brains are bubbling. Our kids were absolutely great, but we are all happy to be home.
The picture above was from of our visit with Henry Tenenbaum at KRON Channel 4 in San Francisco. He was a fabulous host and as nice off-camera as on. He took special care to make sure our kids got a chance to be on the set and watch how things worked in the control room. They were thrilled. It's now available on Google Video here: Eides on KRONTV Ch4
Looks like lots of articles and research to catch up on - including a trend study of high school sophomores (here showing increased demands for homework), reviews of Hothouse Kids here...young author's critique of overly ambitious parents, and research papers such as the study from Israel that found an increased risk of autism with advanced paternal age (Washington Post article here, Arch Gen Psych Abstract here.
We're still catching up - we'll try to return to our usual blogging schedule by the end of this week.
We're not quite back yet, but for those interested, Washington State WASL scores are back. The OSPI site is here.
20 schools and 4 districts made it off "Needs Improvement" list, while 248 schools and 28 districts received word that they "Need Improvement."
In our "good" Edmonds School District (here), the results are dismal in Math & Science for 5th-10th graders (45-65% failing). This is particularly worrisome because these WASL tests don't test math or science knowledge, as much as mathematical or scientific reasoning or problem solving.
The Mislabeled Child
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