Most par­ents want the best for their chil­dren and hope they will be healthy, happy and smart indi­vid­u­als. And most par­ents won­der what they should do to make sure this hap­pens. In Brain Rules for Baby, John Med­ina (author of Brain Rules), pro­vides a good sum­mary of cog­ni­tive sci­ence find­ings that shed light on how a baby’s brain grows from 0 to 5.  In this book you learn as much about fac­tors inher­ent to a child that par­ents can­not con­trol (the seeds) as about fac­tors that par­ents can con­trol (the soil). What fol­lows is an excerpt from the “Smart Baby: Seeds” chap­ter in which John Med­ina describes the many “ingre­di­ents that make up the human intel­li­gence stew”.

2. Self Control

A healthy, well­-adjusted preschooler sits down at a table in front of two giant, freshly baked choco­late chip cook­ies. It’s not a kitchen table—it’s Wal­ter Mischel’s Stan­ford lab dur­ing the late 1960s. The smell is heav­enly. “You see these cook­ies?” Mis­chel says. “You can eat just one of them right now if you want, but if you wait, you can eat both. I have to go away for five min­utes. If I return and you have not eaten any­thing, I will let you have both cook­ies. If you eat one while I’m gone, the bar­gain is off and you don’t get the sec­ond one. Do we have a deal?” The child nods. The researcher leaves.

What does the child do? Mis­chel has the most charm­ing, funny films of children’s reac­tions. They squirm in their seat. They run their back to the cook­ies (or marsh­mal­lows or other assorted caloric con­fec­tions, depend­ing on the day). They sit on their hands. They close one eye, then both, then sneak a peek. They are try­ing to get both cook­ies, but the going is tough. If the chil­dren are kinder­gart­ners, 72 per­cent cave in and gob­ble up the cookie. If they’re in fourth grade, how­ever, only 49 per­cent yield to the temp­ta­tion. By sixth grade, the num­ber is 38 per­cent, about half the rate of the preschoolers.

Wel­come to the inter­est­ing world of impulse con­trol. It is part of a suite of behav­iors under the col­lec­tive term exec­u­tive func­tion. Exec­u­tive func­tion con­trols plan­ning, fore­sight, prob­lem solv­ing, and goal set­ting. It engages many parts of the brain, includ­ing a short­-term form of mem­ory called work­ing mem­ory. Mis­chel and his many col­leagues dis­cov­ered that a child’s exec­u­tive func­tion is a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of intel­lec­tual prowess. We now know that it is actu­ally a bet­ter pre­dic­tor of aca­d­e­mic suc­cess than IQ. It’s not a small dif­fer­ence, either: Mis­chel found that chil­dren who could delay grat­i­fi­ca­tion for 15 min­utes scored 210 points higher on their SATs than chil­dren who lasted one minute.

Why? Exec­u­tive func­tion relies on a child’s abil­ity to fil­ter out dis­tract­ing (in this case, tempt­ing) thoughts, which is crit­i­cal in envi­ron­ments that are over­sat­u­rated with sen­sory stim­uli and myr­iad on­demand choices. That’s our world, as you have undoubt­edly noticed, and it will be your children’s, too. Once the brain has cho­sen rel­e­vant stim­uli from a noisy pile of irrel­e­vant choices, exec­u­tive func­tion allows the brain to stay on task and say no to unpro­duc­tive distractions.

At the neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal level, self­ con­trol comes from “com­mon value sig­nals” (mea­sures of neural activ­ity) gen­er­ated by a spe­cific area of the brain behind your fore­head. It is called—brain jar­gon alert—the ven­tro­me­dial pre­frontal cor­tex. Another area of the brain, the dor­so­lat­eral pre­frontal cor­tex, throws out bolts of elec­tric­ity to this ven­tro­me­dial cousin. The more prac­tice a child has in delay­ing grat­i­fi­ca­tion, the bet­ter aimed the jolt become, and the more con­trol it can exert over behav­ior. Researchers orig­i­nally dis­cov­ered this while hav­ing diet­ con­scious adults look at pic­tures of car­rots, then switch­ing the pic­ture to candy bars. Their brains exerted pow­er­ful “I­ don’t­ care­ if­ it’s ­sugar­ you can’t­ have ­any” sig­nals when the choco­late appeared.

A child’s brain can be trained to enhance self­ con­trol and other aspects of exec­u­tive func­tion. But genes are undoubt­edly involved. There seems to be an innate sched­ule of devel­op­ment, which explains why the cookie exper­i­ment shows a dif­fer­ence in scores between kinder­gart­ners and sixth graders. Some kids dis­play the behav­iors ear­lier, some later. Some strug­gle with it their entire lives. It’s one more way

Every brain is wired dif­fer­ently. But chil­dren who are able to fil­ter out dis­trac­tions, the data show, do far bet­ter in school.

3. Cre­ativ­ity

[…] Human cre­ativ­ity involves many groups of cog­ni­tive gad­gets, includ­ing episodic mem­ory and auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal mem­ory sys­tems. Like a TiVo record­ing a sit­com, these sys­tems per­mit the brain to keep track of events hap­pen­ing to you, allow­ing you a ref­er­ence to your per­sonal expe­ri­ences in both time and space. You can recall going to the gro­cery store and what you bought there, not to men­tion the idiot who stubbed your heel with a gro­cery cart, because of these episodic mem­ory sys­tems. They are sep­a­rate from the mem­ory sys­tems that allow you to cal­cu­late the sales tax of your pur­chase, or even remem­ber what a sales tax is. But that’s not all episodic sys­tems do.

Sci­en­tist Nancy Andreasen found that these TiVos are recruited when inno­v­a­tive peo­ple start asso­ci­at­ing connectively—making the insight­ful con­nec­tions across seem­ingly unre­lated notions that allowed to them to cre­ate. The TiVos reside in brain regions called asso­ci­a­tion cor­tices, which are huge in humans—the biggest of any pri­mate, in fact—stretching out like cob­webs across the frontal, pari­etal, and tem­po­ral lobes.

A sec­ond set of find­ings asso­ciates cre­ativ­ity with risk-taking. This is not the kind of fool­ish­ness where you as an under­grad­u­ate ate two 16­inch piz­zas in one sit­ting because some­one named Tom­ Tom dared you (don’t ask). Abnor­mal risk­ tak­ing, which is also asso­ci­ated more with sub­stance abuse and bipo­lar mania, does not make you more cre­ative. There is a type of risk ­tak­ing that does, how­ever, and the research com­mu­nity calls it “func­tional impul­siv­ity.” Researchers uncov­ered two sep­a­rate neural pro­cess­ing sys­tems that man­age func­tional impul­siv­ity. One gov­erns low­ risk, or “cold,” decision­making behav­iors; the other gov­erns high­ risk, or “hot,” deci­sion ­mak­ing behav­iors. A cold deci­sion might involve a child going to a favorite restau­rant with a friend. A hot deci­sion might involve order­ing the nuclear inferno chili appe­tizer on the friend’s dare.

[…] What­ever their gen­der, cre­ative entre­pre­neurs have func­tional ­impul­siv­ity instincts in spades. They score atmos­pher­i­cally high on tests that mea­sure risk­ tak­ing, and they have a strong abil­ity to cope with ambi­gu­ity. When their brains are caught in the act of being cre­ative, the medial and orbital sec­tors of the pre­frontal cor­tex, regions just behind the eyes, light up like crazy on an fMRI. More “man­age­r­ial types” (that’s actu­ally what researchers call them) don’t have these scores—or these neural activities.

Related arti­cle: Brain Rules: sci­ence and practice

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