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The Learning Brain: Memory and Brain Development in Children
Despite all our highly publicized efforts to improve our schools, the United States is still falling behind. We recently ranked 15th in the world in reading, math, and science. Clearly, more needs to be done. In The Learning Brain , Torkel Klingberg urges us to use the insights of neuroscience to improve the education of our children.
The key to improving education lies in understanding how the brain works: that is where learning takes place, after all. The book focuses in particular on "working memory"--our ability to concentrate and to keep relevant information in our head while ignoring distractions (a topic the author covered in The Overflowing Brain ). Research shows enormous variation in working memory among children, with some ten-year-olds performing at the level of a fourteen-year old, others at that of a six-year old. More important, children with high working memory have better math and reading skills, while children with poor working memory consistently underperform. Interestingly, teachers tend to perceive children with poor working memory as dreamy or unfocused, not recognizing that these children have a memory problem. But what can we do for these children? For one, we can train working memory. The Learning Brain provides a variety of different techniques and scientific insights that may just teach us
how to improve our children's working memory. Klingberg also discusses how stress can impair working memory (skydivers tested just before a jump showed a 30% drop in working memory) and how aerobic exercise can actually modify the brain's nerve cells and improve classroom performance.
Torkel Klingberg is one of the world's leading cognitive neuroscientists, but in this book he wears his erudition lightly, writing with simplicity and good humor as he shows us how to give our children the best chance to learn and grow.
The key to improving education lies in understanding how the brain works: that is where learning takes place, after all. The book focuses in particular on "working memory"--our ability to concentrate and to keep relevant information in our head while ignoring distractions (a topic the author covered in The Overflowing Brain ). Research shows enormous variation in working memory among children, with some ten-year-olds performing at the level of a fourteen-year old, others at that of a six-year old. More important, children with high working memory have better math and reading skills, while children with poor working memory consistently underperform. Interestingly, teachers tend to perceive children with poor working memory as dreamy or unfocused, not recognizing that these children have a memory problem. But what can we do for these children? For one, we can train working memory. The Learning Brain provides a variety of different techniques and scientific insights that may just teach us
how to improve our children's working memory. Klingberg also discusses how stress can impair working memory (skydivers tested just before a jump showed a 30% drop in working memory) and how aerobic exercise can actually modify the brain's nerve cells and improve classroom performance.
Torkel Klingberg is one of the world's leading cognitive neuroscientists, but in this book he wears his erudition lightly, writing with simplicity and good humor as he shows us how to give our children the best chance to learn and grow.
179 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
16 people are currently reading
295 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
November 30, 2014
This was an interesting summary of current research on neuroscience as it applies to childhood cognitive development. I didn’t have any particular reason to read it other than that I saw it at a book fair and have recently read other books about the brain that I thought were interesting. Klingberg had a European perspective, although much of the research cited was from American studies as well. Many of the cognitive deficits mentioned (e.g., ADHD, dyslexia) seem to be treatable by improving working memory, although the author acknowledges that that happens to be his area of expertise, so take that as you will. I think if I were a parent I might be reassured to discover that the pace of cognitive development in children is extremely variable, although anyone who works around children—neuroscientist or not—should be able to figure that out. But in an increasingly competitive world for children (not, perhaps, designed with the best interests of said children at heart), these types of books might be worth reading so that you don’t send your children off to “brain gyms” or whatever other snake oil gets peddled these days.
July 29, 2013
For anyone who is interested in how the findings of neuroscience relate to education this is a must read. Up until about 1990 there were relatively few scientific studies of brain development. However with the advent of modern neuroscientific technology, the field has expanded exponentially. While many studies are cited, the book will be very understandable for people who have little related scientific background.
August 2, 2016
Interesting book. A bit tedious at times, not surprisingly, but worth working through. Fascinating consideration and discussion of the way that memory works and the way it contributes to various aspects of life. Also takes up pedagogical possibilities for those with poor working memory.
February 11, 2018
I would split this book in two sections. The first half of this book is mostly descriptive on the topic of the child brain. The second half describes environmental factors in development, many I’ve read or heard of elsewhere.
January 2, 2014
1. One problem is that when politicians, teachers, or the general public apply what they believe to be neuroscientific knowledge, it is often misunderstood.
2.
The general public seems as resistant to scientific knowledge as they are willing to spread misconceptions, such as that we only use ten percent of our brains, that men think with their left hemisphere while women think with both, and that creativity resides in the right side of the brain.
3.
long-term memory is the memory system that stores learned facts, rules, names, and experiences. It’s the memory that stores what we traditionally associate with learning at school: the accumulation of an encyclopaedia of facts and figures.
4.
Working memory, on the other hand, keeps information up front just when we need it and holds relevant items “in our head” when we’re solving a problem.
5.
Alan Baddeley, one of the developers of the working memory model, once said that given a second chance, he’d call it “working attention” instead of “working memory.”
6.
it’s controlled attention that overlaps with working memory, as we must always remember what we have to concentrate upon. Put another way: we keep the information in working memory by constantly concentrating on it.
7.
People with lower storage capacity are also more sensitive to distractions.
8.
roughly forty percent of the differences in mathematical skills between children is attributable to differences in working memory. But their results on the math test also correlated highly with verbal working memory, reasoning, and reading skills.
9.
working memory is key to mathematical skills and reading comprehension, and not just for a child’s performance on an isolated occasion but for his or her long-term development. The enormous variation in capacity is a crucial factor
10.
Children diagnosed with ADHD perform on average much more poorly on working memory tests than other children, particularly on the visuospatial tasks. But studies by psychologists like Gathercole show that ADHD and low working memory are far from synonymous,
11.
The Working Memory Rating Scale to measure their ability to remember an instruction and to carry out a sequence of tasks, and thus to isolate and pin down the specific behavior traits that she observed in them. For instance, there were questions asking whether the child “abandons an activity before it reaches completion,” “often loses his/her place in longer activities that require multiple steps,” “finds it hard to concentrate” or “shows poor linguistic and mathematical development.”
12.
having your problems explained can be of intrinsic value in and of itself, just like for other problems such as ADHD, as the title of a self-help book perfectly encapsulates: You mean I’m not lazy, stupid, or crazy?5
13.
Rosemary Tannock, cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Toronto, has been a driving
14.
force in the development of a pedagogical method specifically for children with working memory deficits. Her method involves educating teachers about the nature of working memory, what aspects of schoolwork demand working memory capacity, and the consequences that can be expected of working memory deficits.6
15.
also provides a range of strategies designed to make it easier for children to learn despite a poor working memory.
16.
For example, the children might be given briefer instructions that don’t overload their capacity (reducing demands) and notes or pictures that remind them of a sequence of actions so that they don’t have to keep the information active in their working memories (external aids).
17.
the children with the diagnosis of ADHD showed an almost wholesale delay in brain maturation. The effect was most pronounced in the frontal lobe, with as much as three to seven years’ difference between the ages of peak cortical thickness.5 Part of the phenomenon can thus be attributed to delayed development. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as if children with ADHD ever catch up.
18.
One of the most critical factors of memory storage is the ability to associate new memories with earlier ones.
19.
we ask someone to look at a number of pictures and ask the person to assess a particular quality of each object, such as whether it can be eaten or worn, his or her memory of the pictures will be much better than if we’d simply asked if there was, say, anything green in them. This phenomenon is referred to as “levels of processing,” and it is possibly the outcome of how the analysis of an object’s function demands a level of information processing that, in going deeper than simple image recognition, enables associations to be made with previously stored memories.
20.
there are different types of long-term memory, each related to different parts of the brain (see Fig. 4.1).
21.
declarative memories, which are the memories of which we are aware,
22.
also divide the declarative memory into episodic memory, which encodes the personal experiences, and the semantic memory, which encode the facts, as well as the meaning of words and general knowledge that cannot be associated with a specific time and place of learning.
23.
Figure 4.1 The hippocampus is situated within the temporal lobe close to the amygdala, and it plays a critical part in the encoding of long-term memories.
24.
Memory tasks that demand no particularly sophisticated form of strategy, such as answering yes or no to the question of whether you recognize a photograph of a face, are just as easy— if not easier—for eight-year-old children to do as they are for adults. However, if the memory task requires some sort of pre-frontal activation for handling strategies, reasoning, or holding information in working memory during a long-term memory search, children underperform teenagers and adults.
25.
without information review it takes just a few days to forget roughly eighty percent of what we originally learned.
26.
A
27.
few days after the second learning event we remember roughly forty percent of the information, as opposed to the twenty percent we remember with only the one input phase (Fig. 4.3).
28.
Robert Bjork, UCLA, and others have subsequently shown that the most effective strategy seems to be to gradually spread out periods of rehearsal, so that the first occasion takes place immediately after initial learning with successive relearnings at gradually lengthening intervals.9
29.
self-testing is the best way to learn;
30.
SuperMemo and is sold around the world, mainly as a tool for learning foreign language vocabularies.
31.
He marks the texts or articles he wants to memorize and inputs them in priority order into his software, which then keeps tabs on when it’s time for him to refresh his memory.
32.
of Bjork’s studies from the 1970s included data from 700 people and concluded that a time interval between rehearsals of 1-4-10 is better than 5-5-5. But might 1-2-12 be better? To find out, we’d need another 700 people and two more years of research.
33.
working memory capacity correlates highly with performance in a test of mathematics (see Chapter 1). Almost half of the difference between individuals was attributable to differences in working memory. Visuospatial working memory also determined how the children’s mathematical performance changed over time, and those children with better working memories made greater progress in math from one test session to the next two years later; no such correlation was found, however, between long-term memory or reading and mathematical skills.7a
34.
The visuospatial working memory is closely related to reasoning and fluid intelligence, which is the ability to find connections and draw conclusions independent of previous knowledge.
35.
Figure 5.1 gives an overview of the some of the most critical areas used in mathematical reasoning.
36.
dyslexia and dyscalculia can be disengaged from each other: children with dyscalculia have greater numerical difficulties; children with dyslexia have greater phonological difficulties.
37.
visuospatial working memory and math are associated regardless of whether children have been diagnosed with dyscalculia.
38.
When the brain activity of a group with dyscalculia was compared with that of a control group, the researchers observed once again that the dyscalculia group displayed a lower degree of activity in the right intraparietal cortex as well as in two areas of the frontal lobe and occipital lobe.
39.
Dyscalculia is largely hereditary.26,27 One twin study shows that as many as between sixty and seventy percent of mathematical difficulties among seven- to nine-year-olds is genetically conditioned and only ten percent attributable to their environment.28
40.
Roughly half of the individuals with dyscalculia also have reading and writing difficulties.
41.
Drs. Anna Wilson and Stanislas Dehaene at Inserm in Orsay, France, the same experimental psychologists that led many of the studies on number sense and the intraparietal cortex, have built a computerized training program based on research into dyscalculia. The program is called The Number Race and can be downloaded for free from the Web site of the organization Unicog.31
42.
the mental ruler.
43.
between one-third and two-thirds of all children with dyscalculia also have dyslexia.1,2
44.
correlation between attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and an increased risk of both dyslexia and dyscalculia, whereby between twenty and forty percent of those who have the one diagnosis also have the other.3,4
45.
The fact that the brain has a letterbox area that’s universally located in the same place is remarkable; it’s as if we’re born with an inherent capacity for reading.
46.
Figure 6.1 Areas activated on reading (after Dehaene, 20098).
47.
The area marked in black is used in the analysis of phonemes. It’s a dysfunction of this area that has the strongest association with dyslexia.
48.
the area of the intraparietal cortex isn’t only important to reading and math, it’s also one of the common working memory areas activated during both verbal and visuo-spatial memory tasks.
49.
both the verbal and visuospatial working memories of the participants were closely linked to reading comprehension;
50.
children with the poorest reading comprehension also have greatly impaired working memories,10
51.
the most salient problem in dyslexia is the analysis of phonemes, and that this is linked to a dysfunction of the posterior part of the midtemporal lobe (the area marked in black in Fig. 6.1).
52.
irrespective of language there was an anatomical aberration and a lower degree of activity in the posterior part of the midtemporal lobe.7,11
53.
Figure 6.2 Map 1 shows lower brain activity in dyslexia. Map 2 shows changes in cortical thickness in dyslexia (from Silani, 2005).11 Map 3 shows disruptions in the white-matter pathways (from Klingberg et al., 2000).12
54.
Figure 6.4 A newer model for the relationship between genes, the brain, cognitive function, and behavior.
55.
Instead of treating dyslexia, dyscalculia, and ADHD as “diseases” linked to a specific gene, we can see them as a manifestation of normal variation in behavior and brain function determined by a large number of genes.
56.
“Dyslexia: A New Strategy between Education and Cognitive Neuroscience,” John Gabrieli
57.
cognitive development seems to be extremely environmentally sensitive between the ages of six months and two years.
58.
genes can be modified, and how this happens is now a hot research field called epigenetics.
59.
Figure 7.2 Effect of caring on stress management (measured as time spent in open spaces).9
60.
Acute stress can almost halve a person’s mental capacity.
61.
the most salient problem in dyslexia is the analysis of phonemes, and that this is linked to a dysfunction of the posterior part of the midtemporal lobe (the area marked in black in Fig. 6.1).
62.
irrespective of language there was an anatomical aberration and a lower degree of activity in the posterior part of the midtemporal lobe.7,11
63.
Figure 6.2 Map 1 shows lower brain activity in dyslexia. Map 2 shows changes in cortical thickness in dyslexia (from Silani, 2005).11 Map 3 shows disruptions in the white-matter pathways (from Klingberg et al., 2000).12
64.
Figure 6.4 A newer model for the relationship between genes, the brain, cognitive function, and behavior.
65.
Instead of treating dyslexia, dyscalculia, and ADHD as “diseases” linked to a specific gene, we can see them as a manifestation of normal variation in behavior and brain function determined by a large number of genes.
66.
“Dyslexia: A New Strategy between Education and Cognitive Neuroscience,” John Gabrieli
67.
cognitive development seems to be extremely environmentally sensitive between the ages of six months and two years.
68.
genes can be modified, and how this happens is now a hot research field called epigenetics.
69.
Figure 7.2 Effect of caring on stress management (measured as time spent in open spaces).9
70.
Acute stress can almost halve a person’s mental capacity.
71.
In several controlled studies we have seen how working memory training improves the performance of subjects by fifteen to twenty percent when they are tested on tasks extraneous to the training program.5,6 Moreover, the improvement is still there three and six months after the training period.6
72.
Spark, Dr. John Ratey
73.
Education is a narrow term that merely conjures up images of classrooms. What we’re really interested in, however, is child development, and this includes both body and mind, knowledge and health. Mens sana in corpore sano—a sound mind in a sound body.
74.
If you do a search for scientific articles on “learning” and “brain,” you’ll find over 80,000 such papers published since 1945. Of these, eighty percent will have been published after 1990 and fifty percent since 2000.
15 days ago
75.
Why not an X Prize for learning? A million dollars to the one who can find a better algorithm than what we currently have for how learning is to be optimally spaced out in time; ten million to those who can create a significantly better method for helping children with dyscalculia; and a hundred million to those who can create a scientifically based, digitalized form of elementary teaching that can be sent wirelessly to developing countries.
2.
The general public seems as resistant to scientific knowledge as they are willing to spread misconceptions, such as that we only use ten percent of our brains, that men think with their left hemisphere while women think with both, and that creativity resides in the right side of the brain.
3.
long-term memory is the memory system that stores learned facts, rules, names, and experiences. It’s the memory that stores what we traditionally associate with learning at school: the accumulation of an encyclopaedia of facts and figures.
4.
Working memory, on the other hand, keeps information up front just when we need it and holds relevant items “in our head” when we’re solving a problem.
5.
Alan Baddeley, one of the developers of the working memory model, once said that given a second chance, he’d call it “working attention” instead of “working memory.”
6.
it’s controlled attention that overlaps with working memory, as we must always remember what we have to concentrate upon. Put another way: we keep the information in working memory by constantly concentrating on it.
7.
People with lower storage capacity are also more sensitive to distractions.
8.
roughly forty percent of the differences in mathematical skills between children is attributable to differences in working memory. But their results on the math test also correlated highly with verbal working memory, reasoning, and reading skills.
9.
working memory is key to mathematical skills and reading comprehension, and not just for a child’s performance on an isolated occasion but for his or her long-term development. The enormous variation in capacity is a crucial factor
10.
Children diagnosed with ADHD perform on average much more poorly on working memory tests than other children, particularly on the visuospatial tasks. But studies by psychologists like Gathercole show that ADHD and low working memory are far from synonymous,
11.
The Working Memory Rating Scale to measure their ability to remember an instruction and to carry out a sequence of tasks, and thus to isolate and pin down the specific behavior traits that she observed in them. For instance, there were questions asking whether the child “abandons an activity before it reaches completion,” “often loses his/her place in longer activities that require multiple steps,” “finds it hard to concentrate” or “shows poor linguistic and mathematical development.”
12.
having your problems explained can be of intrinsic value in and of itself, just like for other problems such as ADHD, as the title of a self-help book perfectly encapsulates: You mean I’m not lazy, stupid, or crazy?5
13.
Rosemary Tannock, cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Toronto, has been a driving
14.
force in the development of a pedagogical method specifically for children with working memory deficits. Her method involves educating teachers about the nature of working memory, what aspects of schoolwork demand working memory capacity, and the consequences that can be expected of working memory deficits.6
15.
also provides a range of strategies designed to make it easier for children to learn despite a poor working memory.
16.
For example, the children might be given briefer instructions that don’t overload their capacity (reducing demands) and notes or pictures that remind them of a sequence of actions so that they don’t have to keep the information active in their working memories (external aids).
17.
the children with the diagnosis of ADHD showed an almost wholesale delay in brain maturation. The effect was most pronounced in the frontal lobe, with as much as three to seven years’ difference between the ages of peak cortical thickness.5 Part of the phenomenon can thus be attributed to delayed development. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as if children with ADHD ever catch up.
18.
One of the most critical factors of memory storage is the ability to associate new memories with earlier ones.
19.
we ask someone to look at a number of pictures and ask the person to assess a particular quality of each object, such as whether it can be eaten or worn, his or her memory of the pictures will be much better than if we’d simply asked if there was, say, anything green in them. This phenomenon is referred to as “levels of processing,” and it is possibly the outcome of how the analysis of an object’s function demands a level of information processing that, in going deeper than simple image recognition, enables associations to be made with previously stored memories.
20.
there are different types of long-term memory, each related to different parts of the brain (see Fig. 4.1).
21.
declarative memories, which are the memories of which we are aware,
22.
also divide the declarative memory into episodic memory, which encodes the personal experiences, and the semantic memory, which encode the facts, as well as the meaning of words and general knowledge that cannot be associated with a specific time and place of learning.
23.
Figure 4.1 The hippocampus is situated within the temporal lobe close to the amygdala, and it plays a critical part in the encoding of long-term memories.
24.
Memory tasks that demand no particularly sophisticated form of strategy, such as answering yes or no to the question of whether you recognize a photograph of a face, are just as easy— if not easier—for eight-year-old children to do as they are for adults. However, if the memory task requires some sort of pre-frontal activation for handling strategies, reasoning, or holding information in working memory during a long-term memory search, children underperform teenagers and adults.
25.
without information review it takes just a few days to forget roughly eighty percent of what we originally learned.
26.
A
27.
few days after the second learning event we remember roughly forty percent of the information, as opposed to the twenty percent we remember with only the one input phase (Fig. 4.3).
28.
Robert Bjork, UCLA, and others have subsequently shown that the most effective strategy seems to be to gradually spread out periods of rehearsal, so that the first occasion takes place immediately after initial learning with successive relearnings at gradually lengthening intervals.9
29.
self-testing is the best way to learn;
30.
SuperMemo and is sold around the world, mainly as a tool for learning foreign language vocabularies.
31.
He marks the texts or articles he wants to memorize and inputs them in priority order into his software, which then keeps tabs on when it’s time for him to refresh his memory.
32.
of Bjork’s studies from the 1970s included data from 700 people and concluded that a time interval between rehearsals of 1-4-10 is better than 5-5-5. But might 1-2-12 be better? To find out, we’d need another 700 people and two more years of research.
33.
working memory capacity correlates highly with performance in a test of mathematics (see Chapter 1). Almost half of the difference between individuals was attributable to differences in working memory. Visuospatial working memory also determined how the children’s mathematical performance changed over time, and those children with better working memories made greater progress in math from one test session to the next two years later; no such correlation was found, however, between long-term memory or reading and mathematical skills.7a
34.
The visuospatial working memory is closely related to reasoning and fluid intelligence, which is the ability to find connections and draw conclusions independent of previous knowledge.
35.
Figure 5.1 gives an overview of the some of the most critical areas used in mathematical reasoning.
36.
dyslexia and dyscalculia can be disengaged from each other: children with dyscalculia have greater numerical difficulties; children with dyslexia have greater phonological difficulties.
37.
visuospatial working memory and math are associated regardless of whether children have been diagnosed with dyscalculia.
38.
When the brain activity of a group with dyscalculia was compared with that of a control group, the researchers observed once again that the dyscalculia group displayed a lower degree of activity in the right intraparietal cortex as well as in two areas of the frontal lobe and occipital lobe.
39.
Dyscalculia is largely hereditary.26,27 One twin study shows that as many as between sixty and seventy percent of mathematical difficulties among seven- to nine-year-olds is genetically conditioned and only ten percent attributable to their environment.28
40.
Roughly half of the individuals with dyscalculia also have reading and writing difficulties.
41.
Drs. Anna Wilson and Stanislas Dehaene at Inserm in Orsay, France, the same experimental psychologists that led many of the studies on number sense and the intraparietal cortex, have built a computerized training program based on research into dyscalculia. The program is called The Number Race and can be downloaded for free from the Web site of the organization Unicog.31
42.
the mental ruler.
43.
between one-third and two-thirds of all children with dyscalculia also have dyslexia.1,2
44.
correlation between attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and an increased risk of both dyslexia and dyscalculia, whereby between twenty and forty percent of those who have the one diagnosis also have the other.3,4
45.
The fact that the brain has a letterbox area that’s universally located in the same place is remarkable; it’s as if we’re born with an inherent capacity for reading.
46.
Figure 6.1 Areas activated on reading (after Dehaene, 20098).
47.
The area marked in black is used in the analysis of phonemes. It’s a dysfunction of this area that has the strongest association with dyslexia.
48.
the area of the intraparietal cortex isn’t only important to reading and math, it’s also one of the common working memory areas activated during both verbal and visuo-spatial memory tasks.
49.
both the verbal and visuospatial working memories of the participants were closely linked to reading comprehension;
50.
children with the poorest reading comprehension also have greatly impaired working memories,10
51.
the most salient problem in dyslexia is the analysis of phonemes, and that this is linked to a dysfunction of the posterior part of the midtemporal lobe (the area marked in black in Fig. 6.1).
52.
irrespective of language there was an anatomical aberration and a lower degree of activity in the posterior part of the midtemporal lobe.7,11
53.
Figure 6.2 Map 1 shows lower brain activity in dyslexia. Map 2 shows changes in cortical thickness in dyslexia (from Silani, 2005).11 Map 3 shows disruptions in the white-matter pathways (from Klingberg et al., 2000).12
54.
Figure 6.4 A newer model for the relationship between genes, the brain, cognitive function, and behavior.
55.
Instead of treating dyslexia, dyscalculia, and ADHD as “diseases” linked to a specific gene, we can see them as a manifestation of normal variation in behavior and brain function determined by a large number of genes.
56.
“Dyslexia: A New Strategy between Education and Cognitive Neuroscience,” John Gabrieli
57.
cognitive development seems to be extremely environmentally sensitive between the ages of six months and two years.
58.
genes can be modified, and how this happens is now a hot research field called epigenetics.
59.
Figure 7.2 Effect of caring on stress management (measured as time spent in open spaces).9
60.
Acute stress can almost halve a person’s mental capacity.
61.
the most salient problem in dyslexia is the analysis of phonemes, and that this is linked to a dysfunction of the posterior part of the midtemporal lobe (the area marked in black in Fig. 6.1).
62.
irrespective of language there was an anatomical aberration and a lower degree of activity in the posterior part of the midtemporal lobe.7,11
63.
Figure 6.2 Map 1 shows lower brain activity in dyslexia. Map 2 shows changes in cortical thickness in dyslexia (from Silani, 2005).11 Map 3 shows disruptions in the white-matter pathways (from Klingberg et al., 2000).12
64.
Figure 6.4 A newer model for the relationship between genes, the brain, cognitive function, and behavior.
65.
Instead of treating dyslexia, dyscalculia, and ADHD as “diseases” linked to a specific gene, we can see them as a manifestation of normal variation in behavior and brain function determined by a large number of genes.
66.
“Dyslexia: A New Strategy between Education and Cognitive Neuroscience,” John Gabrieli
67.
cognitive development seems to be extremely environmentally sensitive between the ages of six months and two years.
68.
genes can be modified, and how this happens is now a hot research field called epigenetics.
69.
Figure 7.2 Effect of caring on stress management (measured as time spent in open spaces).9
70.
Acute stress can almost halve a person’s mental capacity.
71.
In several controlled studies we have seen how working memory training improves the performance of subjects by fifteen to twenty percent when they are tested on tasks extraneous to the training program.5,6 Moreover, the improvement is still there three and six months after the training period.6
72.
Spark, Dr. John Ratey
73.
Education is a narrow term that merely conjures up images of classrooms. What we’re really interested in, however, is child development, and this includes both body and mind, knowledge and health. Mens sana in corpore sano—a sound mind in a sound body.
74.
If you do a search for scientific articles on “learning” and “brain,” you’ll find over 80,000 such papers published since 1945. Of these, eighty percent will have been published after 1990 and fifty percent since 2000.
15 days ago
75.
Why not an X Prize for learning? A million dollars to the one who can find a better algorithm than what we currently have for how learning is to be optimally spaced out in time; ten million to those who can create a significantly better method for helping children with dyscalculia; and a hundred million to those who can create a scientifically based, digitalized form of elementary teaching that can be sent wirelessly to developing countries.
November 21, 2022
Even though this book was written a decade ago, I found this book to be useful and the information is still relevant today.
Backed by scientific journals, the various chapters covers the major aspects on how a child’s developing brain can affect their learning. I like how this author delved into how working memory can affect language and mathematical skills - I’ve been searching for resources which show a correlation in these areas and was pleased to find it in here!
Backed by scientific journals, the various chapters covers the major aspects on how a child’s developing brain can affect their learning. I like how this author delved into how working memory can affect language and mathematical skills - I’ve been searching for resources which show a correlation in these areas and was pleased to find it in here!
February 23, 2014
I found it dull at best. I knew if I tried to read the entire thing I wouldn't get far so I picked the two chapters that would apply to my situation with an infant (there were many chapters on teenagers and school learning etc. that I knew I wouldn't glean anything from at this juncture of my life). I honestly just didn't find the anectdotes and obscure references to brain anatomy helpful in my quest to help develop my infant's brain, cognition, memory, etc. It wasn't the kind of book I was looking for.
December 14, 2013
Very interesting. A lot of information about how a child's brain learns in 147 pages, mostly in understandable language.
Read
April 1, 2016useful research for pointing to ways that environmental / nurturing habits can help working memory function like musical training, cardiovascular activity and being licked a lot by your rat mom.
September 5, 2016
This book is full of great information. However, the information is organized in a confusing manner making it hard for the reader to understand what the author is getting across.
May 19, 2017
Very interesting. Mostly focused on working memory. If you are looking for a practical book and advice on how to help your children in their learning, you might find this heavy on the neuroscience research advances. It does have advice and it clears some common misconceptions. If you do not enjoy reading about neuroscientific research you might find it heavy.
March 9, 2023
Mostly about the research done. Basically, problems such as dyslexia, dygraphia, and ADHD stem from lack of working memory. I found several parts of the book interesting, but I wished that it had more tips on how to improve working memory.
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December 19, 2012Not just awesomesauce, but also totally readable for people who don't fancy themselves scientists or science readers. Highly recommended for anyone in education (teachers because it will be meaningful and useful; administrators, policy makers and elected "officials" of school systems because they generally don't know anything) or related fields.
Reviewed at my blog (thanks, Netgalley): http://mclicious.org/2012/12/18/the-l...
Reviewed at my blog (thanks, Netgalley): http://mclicious.org/2012/12/18/the-l...
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