Weekly articles related to brain-based learning and learning styles, problem-solving and creativity, kids, families, and parenting, gifted and visual learners, dyslexia, attention deficit disorders, autism, and more.
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...
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.
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.
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:
"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."
