Quotes from a great article, Professor, 81, proves brain stays young:

- In 1960, Diamond became the first female faculty member in Cal’s science department, achieving full professorship in 1974. She still teaches anatomy with her 81st birthday two weeks away.

- Diamond, a professor of anatomy at UC Berkeley, determined that the brain can stay young through stimulation, which can be achieved through her five-point plan: diet, exercise, challenge, newness and tender loving care.

- Using her plan, how is she challenged?

- “Every student who sits in that chair,” she said, pointing across the desk in her fifth-floor office in the Life Sciences Building on campus. “They come in here asking questions, and you better have the answers.”

- What newness, then, is in her life?

- “I have grandchildren,” she said. “What could be better, deciding new things for them, to stimulate their brains.”

- She has four children, four grandchildren and a husband, Arnold Scheidel, who teaches anatomy at UCLA. They see each other on school weekends,

- Diamond feels her own brain growing.

Keep reading here.

 

Related resources

A previous post listing a number of her essays: Marian Diamond and the Brain Revolution

Her great book Magic Trees of the Mind: How to Nurture Your Child’s Intelligence, Creativity, and Healthy Emotions from Birth Through Adolescence, by Berkeley’s Marian Diamond and Janet L. Hopson.

Alvaro and I had the good fortune to attend a great conference last week called Learning & The Brain: Enhancing Cognition and Emotions for Learning. It was a fascinating mix of neuroscientists and educators talking with and listening to each other. Some topics were meant to be applied today, but many were food for thought – insight on where science and education are headed and how they influence each other.

Using dramatic new imaging techniques, such as fMRIs, PET, and SPECT, neuroscientists are gaining valuable information about learning. This pioneering knowledge is leading not only to new pedagogies, but also to new medications, brain enhancement technologies, and therapies…. The Conference creates an interdisciplinary forum — a meeting place for neuroscientists, educators, psychologists, clinicians, and parents — to examine these new research findings with respect to their applicability in the classroom and clinical practice.

Take-aways

• Humans are a mixture of cognition and emotion, and both elements are essential to function and learn properly
• Educators and public policy makers need to learn more about the brain, how it grows, and how to cultivate it
• Students of all ages need to be both challenged and nurtured in order to succeed
• People learn differently – try to teach and learn through as many different modalities as possible (engage language, motor skills, artistic creation, social interaction, sensory input, etc.)
• While short-term stress can heighten your cognitive abilities, long term stress kills you — you need to find balance and release
• Test anxiety and subsequent poor test results can be improved with behavioral training with feedback based on heart rate variability
• Dr. Robert Sapolsky is a very very enlightening and fun speaker
• Allow time for rest and consolidation of learned material
• Emotional memories are easier to remember
• Conferences like these perform a real service in fostering dialogues between scientists and educators

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Jonah Lehrer dissects and builds on a New York Times article on the education Achievement gap. Quotes from Jonah’s post:

• “most of the research suggests that the “achievement gap” has real neurological roots, which are caused by distinct home environments: Hart and Risley showed that language exposure in early childhood correlated strongly with I.Q. and academic success later on in a child’s life.”
• “This is really important research, but I can’t help but think that part of the equation is missing. While Paul Tough, author of the Times article, focuses on gaps in environmental enrichment – poor kids are exposed to fewer words, have less stimulating conversations, etc. – he ignores what might be an even more potent variable: stress.”
• “Gould’s work implies that the symptoms of poverty are not simply states of mind; they actually warp the mind. Because neurons are designed to reflect their circumstances, not to rise above them, the monotonous stress of living in a slum literally limits the brain.”

Dave writes How to educate those who seem uneducable, building on Jonah’s post and linking to “research by Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman showing that self-discipline is more important than high IQ in student achievement.”

I agree that the importance of stress management and self-discipline (or emotional self-regulation) are often overlooked, which is precisely why we are focusing there. You can read a Technology & Learning magazine article on Biofeedback for Emotional Management and Peak Performance, and a post on Cognitive Neuroscience and Education Today, where we mentioned:

(new programs help address) Anxiety and stress: not only test anxiety, but overall high-levels of anxiety that inhibit learning and higher-order thinking: a program already used in many schools, and with promising research results, is the Institute of HeartMath’s Freeze-Framer. Read How stress and anxiety may affect Learning Readiness, and Why chronic stress is something to avoid.

Good night,

Alvaro