Brain Bliss: Christmas Joy and Looking Forward to the New Year

Joy is not something easily understood even if you can study it in an fMRI scanner, but while positive psychology researchers will tell you it is much harder to get funding happiness, joy, or optimism, than negative behaviors and symptoms, accentuating the positive will be a good thing for your health.

Optimists are more likely to read up on their health and be compliant with their medications. Studies show that optimists will develop 50% more antibodies in response to vaccines, and be less likely to develop hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and even death.

In the brain, optimism is associated with greater activity in the rostral anterior cingulate and amygdala, important areas known to be important for emotional arousal and motivation, but also error detection, and conflict resolution. It's not surprising then that optimists may outperform pessimists on many scales.

We are thankful for many things this Christmas season, especially that our family will be home for the holidays. Thank you all for your prayers and encouragement. If we are able, we'll post at the beginning of 2008 before we head down to LA. Have a safe and blessed holiday!

The Biology of Joy - TIME
Wall Street Journal: Optimism pdf
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Your Brain While Christmas Shopping
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Visions of Sugarplums
Thanksgiving and Charity
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Tis the Season
Eide NL Blog: Teaching Optimism
Eide NL Blog: Generation Whatever: From Pessimism to Pragmatic Optimism

Walking and Chewing Gum at the Same Time: Multi-Tasking and Complex Thinking

Here's an interesting proposal from Just and Varma that tries to integrate what we know from fMRI studies about multitasking and complex problem solving. It discusses the interesting observation that at least in some cases, less brain work is used for solving two tasks at once, then the two tasks separately (underadditivity).

They propose the following:

1. Each cortical area can perform multiple cognitive functions, and conversely, many cognitive functions can be performed by more than one area.
2. Each cortical area has a limited capacity of computational resources, constraining its activity.
3. The topology of a large-scale cortical network changes dynamically during cognition, adapting itself to the resource limitations of different cortical
areas and to the functional demands of the task at hand.
4. The communications infrastructure that supports collaborative processing is also subject to resource constraints, construed here as bandwidth limitations.

These are interesting ideas that have direct implications for classroom and lifelong learning. A remarkably little-mentioned topic in educational pedagogy is learning efficiency, yet at least when we see students who are have academic struggles of some sort, there are often obvious signs of where the failure to learn took place.

Maybe basic skill sets for schooling should not be thought of as the 3 R's (reading, writing, and 'rithmetic), but rather beyond the memorization of facts and procedures, the efficient working of working memory and long term memory, the strategic use of brain resources for dynamic problem solving and multi-tasking, and the organization of ideas and perceptions for all types of output: verbal as well as non-verbal.

Organization of Complex Thinking
Complex Thinking Article pdf
Eide Neurolearning Blog: The Multitasking or Music-Tasking Generation?
Eide NL Blog: Balancing Multi-Tasking and Distraction
Eide NL Blog: Complex Thinkers
Eide Neurolearning Blog: How the Brain Solves Problems

Elementary Angst: Early Problems with Attention and School Behavior May Still Mean Success

"Themistocles was an unruly boy, and carried on his mad pranks without much restraint. When taken to task for them he said, "The wildest colts make the best horses when they come to be properly trained." - Plutarch (46-120 AD)

There's a lot of buzz about two new studies this month that suggest that children with attentional and behavioral problems in the early elementary grades are not doomed to failure as they grow up. In fact most of them seem to do just as well as their "easier" fellow students in the early grades.

From the NY Times:

"Kindergartners who interrupted the teacher, defied instructions and even picked fights were performing as well in reading and math as well-behaved children of the same abilities when they both reached fifth grade, the study found."

and from the NIMH, Dr. Philip Shaw:"'The basic sequence of development in the brains of these kids with A.D.H.D. was intact, absolutely normal,' Dr. Shaw said. “I think this is pretty strong evidence we’re talking about a delay, and not an abnormal brain.”

About three in four children do grow out of the problem by early adulthood..."

The kids diagnosed with ADD in this group had been on stimulant medication. It will important to the non-medicated kids too, of course. The articles are just released; the PNAS article is free abstract only now. The NIMH group is the same that found young superior IQ kids had delayed frontal cortical development compared to mildly elevated IQ and normal IQ groups.

All of this should be encouraging to parents and teachers of bright children with challenging behaviors in the early grades, but don't think all these kids will grow out of it. Too many people who like the wildest colts saying forget the "properly trained" part at the end.

In our clinic see some remarkably bright children who really present with very challenging behaviors in their early years. An metaphor we like is Ben Hur and his three-horse chariot. If you've got three horses running together in the same direction - that's good. If you don't have the control of the three horses, you've got a wreck.

So the bottom line for many of these "ODD-ADHD-but-smart-kids" in school is that the eventual prognosis is good; it is not a disease, but it can still mean a lot of work, wisdom, and guidance from Mom and Dad.

(BTW: What happened to Themistocles? Wealth and achievement as an adult, but lousy leader because of his moral weakness)

NYT: Bad Behavior Does Not Doom Pupils
PNAS:Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is characterized by a delay in cortical maturation
School Readiness and Achievement pdf
Eide Neurolearning Blog: The Biology of Late Bloomers
Eide Neurolearning Blog: The Blessings and Burdens of High IQ
Smarty Brains: High-IQ kids navigate notable neural shifts: Science News Online
Themistocles in Plutarch's Lives