Let’s continue.

Teachers can help student overcome stress by teaching them to identify the impediments they might encounter in doing a certain task.

The teacher can ask:

What’s going to get in the way of you doing this work?
He or she may have to jump-start the students’ thinking by suggesting such things as:
- competing events (family activities, friends call, IM-ing, new video game, etc.)
- lack of adequate place to study
- inadequate prior preparation or skills
- a negative attitude (this is not necessary, I can’t do math, I’ll never need to know this, etc).
- health factors (I’m sick; I’m tired)

Conversely, teachers have to teach students to identify the enhancers; What’s going to make it more likely that you will do this, and do this well?
(examples)
- I have confidence in my ability
- I feel competent in this skill
- I am committed to learning this because: I have the necessary resources to complete this task, such as materials, sources of information, people supports; parents, tutor, other kids

Teachers can turn distress into de-stress by using the Language of Success

The key is to de-emphasize PRAISE and emphasize SELF-APPRAISAL.

Teachers can encourage self-evaluation by asking:

- How do you think you did?
- Are you satisfied with this?
- What goal were you working on?
- Did you achieve your goal?

Consider use of simple rating scales for students who lack language of self-appraisal (and then provide the language to go with their number rating, as in:

1 = not the best work you can do
2 = work that’s OK, but not great
3 = about the best you can do

For younger kids, smiley faces might replace the numerical rating system.

When a student turns in work that is substandard (for him/her) and says: “I think this is great, you say: “I have seen great work from you, and I have to disagree with you–this is not great work.” (focus is on comparisons with self; personal best is the standard.)

If a student turns in work that is acceptable and devalues it, (“This stinks!)

You say: “I’m sorry that you feel this way Sean; I’ve been teaching for a long time, and what you did here definitely does not stink–I can show you some examples of lousy work if you want, but this is not it…”

This communication establishes the teacher as an impartial judge, giver of honest feedback.

Teachers should encourage students to keep an electronic or paper portfolio of work samples.

Having this “evidence” allows the teacher to say: “Here’s what you did in October. Now compare that with what you just did. (And here, resist the temptation to evaluate). Instead ask: “How would you say these are different?”

Focus on the process more than the product:

When a child turns in work, you say:

This looks good (it’s still OK to praise — kids expect it), but also ask:
How did you do this? What did you do to make/write/construct this?

If the student can’t say, give her suggestions:

Ex: “I see that you used a word processor. Did that help you get your words down on paper without having to worry about handwriting?”

Or: “You folded your paper into fourths; it looks like the sections helped you organize your work—and helped to keep this math problem from running into this one.”

And get confirmation: “Would you agree?”

The goal here is to get the student to self-appraise and be able to identify the behaviors or strategies that have allowed him/her to be successful. This leads to a feeling of competence and confidence that helps keep stress in check.

Summary: This is a sample of activities and strategies that parents, teachers and other professionals can use to make learning a safer, more satisfying experience for students. These strategies should help to make learning less stressful, lessen anxiety, and build competence and confidence. Please add to this list and pass it on to others; I invite you to share your ideas and comments below.

– Jerome J. Schultz, Ph.D., is a clinical neuropsychologist and is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry. He served until recently as the Co-Director of the Center for Child and Adolescent Development, CCAD, a multi-disciplinary diagnostic and treatment clinic which is a service of the Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Teaching Hospital. Dr. Schultz is the Consulting Neuropsychologist to the Newton, MA, Public Schools and the Binnacle Tech Foundation. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Academic Psychiatry, and The Professional Advisory Board of The Learning Disability Association of America. Dr. Schultz lectures extensively on the relationship between stress and learning, especially in youth with special needs.

Related articles:

- Stress and Neural Wreckage: Part of the Brain Plasticity Puzzle
- Mindfulness and Meditation in Schools for Stress Management

Consider this vignette:

-Roxanne: (agitated and loudly) “I can’t stand this freakin’ book!”

-Teacher: “Roxanne, you need to take it easy. Just calm down! Try to relax.You need to finish your reading.

-Roxanne: (to herself) “Right easy for you to say, teacher. But very hard for me to do. What do you mean calm down? I feel like my head is going to explode.”

-Teacher: (seeing no response) “Well if you can’t settle down, maybe a trip to the office will help you!”

Some kids are so agitated that even if they know how to relax, they can’t. If you think about it, calming down when you’re upset is the hardest time to do it! Other kids can’t “calm down” or “relax” because they don’t know what that feels like. Teachers, occupational therapists, physical education teachers and parents need to actually teach children (of all ages) how to get themselves into a physical state of being relaxed. This doesn’t happen automatically. If it did, there wouldn’t be so many adult yoga classes!

Setting the mental and emotional stage for success.

Teachers who want to reduce stress and increase learning know that getting kids into a positive mindset will do both. They say things and do things that connect kids to the security of past positive experiences. A boat in the harbor is not likely to be tossed onto a rocky shore if it is tethered to an anchor set firmly into the sandy ocean floor. Similarly, kids whose minds are re-united with the feelings associated with previous successes will be less likely to flounder in an anxious or distracted state.

Consider this interaction:

The teacher says to the class “Do you remember this? (holds up test tube filled with red fluid; a visual prop). Turn to your study partner and tell each other one thing we learned about this liquid yesterday.”

“Now raise your hand if you want to say what your partner just told you.”

Paired sharing has the following benefits:

• enhances social interactions that the teacher can monitor and guide

• increases information trading which promotes mutual interdependence

• allows the anxious child a chance to rehearse a response before “going public”

Telling about someone else’s idea reduces the possibility of public shame and decreases stress. Having the choice to do it reduces the stress even more.

Capitalize on the relationship between learning and feelings.

It is clear that emotions and learning are linked. Why is it that most of us remember where we were when the space shuttle Challenger blew up, or where you were on 9/11? Why does the smell or texture of certain foods make us remember certain places or events in our lives? Research tells us that positive thoughts enhance learning and memory; negative thoughts get in the way.

Here’s a scene from a classroom in which the teacher understands the connection between state of mind and learning. “Kids, I would like you to close your eyes (thereby reducing stimuli and putting children out of public view) and think of a time when you learned something very well and felt proud about it. This could be something academic, like fractions, or it can be something you learned to do, like a hobby or a sport. When you get that thought in your head, simply raise your index finger a bit and I’ll know you’re connected to that time and the feeling you had when you learned to do that particular thing.”

“Now, open your eyes and tell us (solo or in sharing pairs) what it was that you learned and how it made you feel.” The teacher asks the kids what was going on (place, people, timing) that made this such a positive experience. Kids can also be asked to write this, or draw a picture of the event as the first step in the new assignment.

The teacher continues: “Today we’re going to learn something new” (anxiety rises). “We’re going to learn about ________. I want you to tell me, based on that positive experience you just recalled and/or talked about, what would make learning this new material successful for you?” She gives the students the choice of saying the answer, telling a classmate, or writing a paragraph about it.

By building the new activity on this foundation of comfort, the teacher hopes to lessen the stress that can be generated when taking kids into new territories.

Humor enhances learning and memory

Talented teachers know that students hang on to words in a joke because they want to hear the punch line. They also know that humor, in the form of funny stories, puns, limericks or cartoons can increase a student’s enjoyment of the activity. Students who enjoy learning are less anxious, less threatened and more likely to retain and apply what they learn. Teachers who spend time putting the lid on a funny student’s comments or antics may be missing the opportunity to use that jester as a collaborator. Teachers need to remember that sarcasm and ridicule have no place in the safe classroom. It may appear that at student can “take” the barbs tossed at him or her in class, but that’s often an erroneous assumption. That student is using up psychological energy coping with the tension created in such interchanges. Teachers also need to think about the “collateral damage” they do to the kids (especially the anxious kids) who are watching and hoping that they’re not the next “target” of this teacher’s verbal pot-shots. That student may not want to come to class, and certainly won’t want to come to see that teacher for extra help after school, where there’s no chance of escape if the teacher starts to “tease.”

In the second part of this article, to be posted next week, we will explore additional ideas such as the need to focus on process, not product.

– Jerome J. Schultz, Ph.D., is a clinical neuropsychologist and is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry. He served until recently as the Co-Director of the Center for Child and Adolescent Development, CCAD, a multi-disciplinary diagnostic and treatment clinic which is a service of the Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Teaching Hospital. Dr. Schultz is the Consulting Neuropsychologist to the Newton, MA, Public Schools and the Binnacle Tech Foundation. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Academic Psychiatry, and The Professional Advisory Board of The Learning Disability Association of America. Dr. Schultz lectures extensively on the relationship between stress and learning, especially in youth with special needs.

Related articles:

- Stress and Neural Wreckage: Part of the Brain Plasticity Puzzle
- Mindfulness and Meditation in Schools for Stress Management

(Also, Can you write a haiku describing anything crossing your mind now? Remember the simple rules: write 3 lines, which don’t need to rhyme, containing 5,7, and 5 syllables. You can leave your haiku as a comment below for extra points…)

—–
Top 10 Brainy Haikus – enjoy!

- Amit:

Love, college, career.
A new world of transitions.
Will I survive? Yes.

- Kathy:

My release technique,
Forgive, forget, love all,
Meditate on that!

- Alan:

Through the microscope,
slice of brain stains pink and blue,
the wonder of thought.

- Justin:

Justin the genieus
Must spell check the word genius
to post this Haiku

- Tim:

writing quick haiku
seems so very difficult
can i pull it off

- Mercury:

Seeking brain fitness.
Am I haiku-focusing,
or just distracted?

- Kalsang:

My fingers tapping,
I chant out five, seven, five.
Is this new music?

- LW:

body aching now,
yoga isn’t so easy,
good for you they say?

- Emma:

You think yoga’s bad?
Try Aikido my good friend.
Knackers your shoulders.

- CJ:

Rain Stormy Boomer
Sewer Backing To My Door
Is Insurance Paid?

—–

In case you want to read more, below you have many more haikus contributed during the year:

- Techne, the philosopher, wonders:

Solve the big questions:
How do I know when I know?
Who knows the knower?

- Steve, the environmentalist, requests:

Neuroplastic good.
Plastic, though lasts forever.
Always recycle!

- GTB, the skeptic, says

Haiku’s are easy
But sometimes they don’t make sense
Refrigerator

- Millie, spiritual, suggests:

Playing music feeds
my soul while reading music
nurtures my old brain.

- Mark, the optimist, reflects:

I thought I did well
Then I reviewed my answers
I am retard

- jolovli, the boomer, tries again:

improving function
smoked too much weed in college
it’s never too late

- Lloyd, the stressed-out, volunteers:

I thought so damn Hard.
My brain built lots of pressure.
I farted out loud.

- Terry says:

New information
Synthesizing my knowledge
A forward movement

- Frank says:

Painfully easy
Significantly harder
Mental stimulus

- Chuck says:

This was fun, and no,
I don’t intend to haiku.
Thanks for posting it

- Sarah says:

finding your teasers
added fun to my morning,
helped wake my brain up

- Lorraine says:

teaching math is fun
when you find great resources
sharp brains is the place

- Psalm says

As my mind expands,
it grasps new ideas…oh look
there’s something shiny!!

- anon writes

the noon hour portends
a burrito with salsa
brightening my tongue

- Mike says

See I think I see
Here now, not so – really real?
Wounded, mind leaves me

- Lisa

new thoughts activate
frontal lobe work hard, harder
no senility

- Karen

Brain training others
Like watching the Earth open
One thought at a time

- Bruce

My brain stem works hard,
But the tests are much harder,
Need more grey matter

- Alvaro

Can perform better,
Learning, training, and practice
Body, brain and mind

- terri

strokes take speech away
someone should find a quick fix
everyone needs to speak

- qt

Aha, a challenge
for the brain to endeavour
sooner than later

- Stacy

Brain hurts so badly
Working night shift: not so fun
Need to get some sleep

- campercourt

It is morning now
The sun rose very early
Goodmorning to you

- kestrel

first white is purple

or it was red I think

now haiku, what next?

- Stacey

I thought is was fun.
Then it got a lot harder.
Wow i suck at this.

- anon

oh boy I wonder
will my teeny little ears
still hear loud thunder

of course it is true
the aforementioned thunder
came out of the blue

from the blue you say
I think perhaps you are wrong
but it’s still okay

- Steve:

Accountant’s cull.
Farewell to long-time work-mates.
Too real for haiku!

- Gail:

Old women gather
Seeking change is the power/
Thanks to grandmothers

- Robert:

My brain is just fried.
I used it too much this week.
I need some Spongebob.

- Shelley:

An infinite mind
Expansive, conscious, knowing
Alert and aware

- Jet:

Haiku to you too
Now is forever, now is
Now is now to you

- Jack:

Cool death match: face off
Wernicke’s area and
Broca’s Region.

Yours, please?

(Remember the simple rules: write 3 lines, which don’t need to rhyme, containing 5, 7, and 5  syllables. You can leave your haiku as a comment below for extra points…).

So is there anything you can do about it besides exercise like crazy, eat healthy foods that you don’t like all that much, pop your statin pills, and take up yoga?

Yes. In short: focus, focus, focus.

Changing thinking styles can help. Research shows that older people tend to have lost some of their ability to pay attention, which fortunately can be improved if they work at it. More specifically, older people tend to have difficulty in ignoring distractions and irrelevant stimuli. Distractions and a reduced ability to focus disrupt the consolidation process that converts working memory into long-lasting form.

In one study of this aging problem, a typical group of trials involved presenting a picture of a face for about a second, a picture of a scene for about a second, then a picture of another face for about a second, and then another picture of a different scene for about a second.  Then after a nine-second delay a picture was presented and the subject was instructed to press a button to indicate whether the stimulus matched one of the previously presented stimuli. In other words, the subject had to suppress the memory of irrelevant stimuli. In this study (Gazzaley, A.  et al.  2005) the investigators went beyond behavioral assessment of the responses, because that kind of thing had been done before.  What they wanted to know was what was happening in the brain during this suppression of irrelevant task. They used functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) imaging over a region of brain that was responsive to the visual images.  What was being measured was the amount of brain activity under conditions when the instructions were to remember a type of image or ignore it.  What they found was that brain activity in all of the young subjects increased when they were viewing scenes they were asked to remember and decreased when presented with an image that they were supposed to have ignored. That is, the brain suppressed its response to irrelevant stimuli.  Many older participants, however, were unable to suppress brain activity when presented with stimuli that they had been asked to ignore.  So what these data suggest is that older individuals have difficulty in ignoring irrelevant or distracting information that is contained in working memory.  But let us not come away with the conclusion that memory deficits in the elderly are inevitable, when in fact in this study nearly half of the elderly showed no deficit. 

In a study at the University of Illinois (Fabiani, M. et al. 2006.), researchers recorded brain electrical responses in young adults and old subjects (65-78) who were passively listening to bursts of sound that contained a base frequency of 500 cycles per second, with superimposed higher frequencies at lower amplitude. Sound volume was adjusted to the hearing threshold for each subject. Sound was presented while subjects were instructed to concentrate on reading a book and to ignore the sound bursts. Four bursts were delivered with variable silent intervals. The brain registered the memory of each burst in the size of the evoked electrical response. The repetition of sound burst was expected to induce suppression of the sound-evoked electrical response to later bursts in the train, while the silent interval was expected to allow for recovery as the memory of a preceding burst decays. By varying the interval, researchers could evaluate the decay process.

Results revealed that the electrical responses persisted longer in older people, but the effects of delay interval were the same irrespective of age. Since age did not seem to affect memory decay, one is left to conclude that the brains of older subjects were less able to inhibit the sound burst distractions. The good news for the elderly is that age does not make you forget any faster. It does, apparently, make you more distractible.

Such studies should probably also be done in children, who I would suspect are more like older people in being less able to inhibit distractions.

A study at the University of Toronto (Grady, C. L. et al. 2006.) used MRI imaging of people while they performed a variety of memory tasks, both during encoding and recognition. They found an age-related increase in activity in brain areas that normally decrease during task performance. This is interpreted to indicate that these areas normally do not respond during a memory task because the brain is paying attention to the task and assigning the memory work only to the parts of brain that need to process the memory. However, another interpretation is that as you get older, your brain has to recruit more help from other parts of the brain. A related finding of the research was an age-related decrease of activity in brain areas that normally become activated during the memory task. The researchers thought that this finding indicated an age-related decline in ability to distinguish task-related demands from those that were irrelevant. It could also be that as you age, the circuits that are normally needed to handle memory are less capable. However you look at it, the findings document an age-related decline in the brain’s ability to focus its neural resources on memory tasks. What may be most troublesome to contemplate is that the brain activity-pattern changes showed signs of decline around age 40.

So, what do we do about attention deficit? One possibility is that by keeping our brain working hard as we age, we might reduce this tendency to lose ability to handle memory workload. Think of it like exercise for the brain, which strengthens the neural circuits in the parts of the brain that have to distinguish irrelevant from relevant information in memory tasks and those parts of the brain that have to do the memory work. Another general strategy is to reduce the distractions in our life, at least distractions that are present when we are trying to remember something. Multi-tasking is hard enough to do when you are young. That ability probably declines markedly as you get older. On those occasions when I forget what I opened the refrigerator door for, it is always because I let myself get distracted between the time I decided what I wanted and the time when I opened the door. Obviously, older people (and children) need to work at paying attention, disciplining the brain to concentrate. Second, since they are so distractible, information should be absorbed in smaller, more manageable chunks. By lowering the memory demand, the brain’s limited resources can deal with it more effectively.

— W. R. (Bill) Klemm, D.V.M., Ph.D. Scientist, professor, author, speaker As a professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University, Bill has taught about the brain and behavior at all levels, from freshmen, to seniors, to graduate students to post-docs. His recent books include Thank You, Brain, For All You Remember. What You Forgot Was My Fault and Core Ideas in Neuroscience.

 

Sources:

- Fabiani, M. et al. 2006. Reduced suppression or labile memory? Mechanisms of inefficient filtering of irrelevant information in older adults. J. Cognitive Neuroscience. 18 (4): 637-650.

- Gazzaley, A.  et al.  2005. Top-down suppression deficit underlies working memory impairment in normal aging.  Nature Neuroscience. 8: 1298-1300.

- Grady, C. L. et al. 2006. Age-related changes in brain activity across the adult lifespan. J. Cognitive Neuroscience. 18:227-241.

-Alvaro

—————————————

Mindful Kids, Peaceful Schools

With eyes closed and deep breaths, students are learning a new method to reduce anxiety, conflict, and attention disorders. But don’t call it meditation.

— By Jill Suttie

At Toluca Lake elementary school in Los Angeles, a cyclone fence encloses the asphalt blacktop, which is teeming with kids. It’s recess time and the kids, who are mostly Latino, are playing tag, yelling, throwing balls, and jumping rope. When the bell rings, they reluctantly stop and head back to their classrooms—except for Daniel Murphy’s second grade class.

Murphy’s students file into the school auditorium, each carrying a round blue pillow decorated with white stars. They enter giggling and chatting, but soon they are seated in a circle on their cushions, eyes closed, quiet and concentrating. Two teachers give the children instructions on how to pay attention to their breathing, telling them to notice the rise and fall of their bellies and chests, the passage of air in and out of their noses. Though the room is chilly—the heating system broke down earlier that day—the children appear comfortable, many with Mona Lisa smiles on their faces.

“What did you notice about your breath this morning?” one teacher asks.

“Mine was like a dragon,” says Michael, a child to the teacher’s right. Albert, another child, adds, “Yeah, I could see mine. It was like smoke.”

The teachers lead the children through 45 minutes of exercises focused on breathing, listening, movement, and reflection. At different points, the kids are asked to gauge their feelings—calm, neutral, or restless. There are no right or wrong answers, just observation. The session ends with the children lying quietly on their backs, stuffed animals rising and falling on their stomachs, as they contemplate peace within themselves and in their community. Later, seven–year–old Emily sums up her experience. “I like the class because it makes me calm and soft inside. It makes me feel good.”

Toluca Lake is one of a growing number of schools that are using “mindfulness trainings” in an effort to combat increasing levels of anxiety, social conflict, and attention disorder among children. Once a week for 10 to 12 weeks, the students at Toluca take time out from their normal curriculum to learn techniques that draw on the Buddhist meditative practice of mindfulness, which is meant to promote greater awareness of one’s self and one’s environment. According to mindfulness educator Susan Kaiser, bringing this practice into schools is “really about teaching kids how to be in a state of attention, where they can perceive thoughts, physical sensations, and emotions without judgment and with curiosity and an open state of mind.”

That such an unconventional practice—with its roots in a religious tradition, no less—has made its way into public schools may come as a surprise to many people. But schools have been turning to mindfulness for very practical reasons that don’t concern religion, and their efforts have been supported by a recent wave of scientific results.

Steve Reidman first introduced mindfulness practices to Toluca Lake about six years ago. Reidman, a fourth grade teacher at the school, had been experiencing problems with classroom management—a first for him, after many years of teaching. Conflicts on the playground were escalating and affecting his students’ ability to settle down and concentrate in class. When he confided his problems to Kaiser, a personal friend, she offered to come to his class to teach mindfulness, a technique she’d taught to kids as a volunteer at a local boys and girls club.

“I noticed a difference right away,” says Reidman. “There was less conflict on the playground, less test anxiety—just the way the kids walked into the classroom was different. Our state test scores also went up that year, which I’d like to attribute to my teaching but I think had more to do with the breathing they did right before they took the test.”

News of Reidman’s positive experience spread to other classes at the school and helped launch Kaiser’s career as the founder and director of a new nonprofit organization: InnerKids. Funded through private grants, its mission is to teach mindful awareness practices to students in public and private schools for little or no cost. In the last five years, the organization has served hundreds of schools across the country and has grown to the point where there’s more demand for the program than Kaiser can handle alone. Recently, she retired from her successful law practice to devote herself fully to InnerKids. She’s now busy training new teachers. “Requests come from all over—New York, California, the Midwest,” says Kaiser. “It’s really amazing how this has caught on.”

A 2004 survey of mindfulness programs by the Garrison Institute in New York—an organization that studies and promotes mindfulness and meditation in education—showed that many schools are adopting mindfulness trainings because the techniques are easy to learn and can help children become “more responsive and less reactive, more focused and less distracted, [and] more calm and less stressed.” While mindfulness can produce internal benefits to kids, the Garrison report also found that it can create a more positive learning environment, where kids are primed to pay attention.

InnerKids is one of several mindfulness education programs that have sprouted up around the country; others include the Impact Foundation in Colorado and the Lineage Project in New York City, which teaches mindfulness to at–risk and incarcerated teenagers. Like these programs, Kaiser’s curriculum was inspired by the work of Jon Kabat–Zinn, the founder of the Stress Reduction Program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat–Zinn was among the first scientists to recognize that mindfulness meditation might have healing benefits for adult patients suffering from chronic pain. He developed a secular version of the Buddhist practice, which he called Mindfulness–Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and ran studies demonstrating its effectiveness. Now, with over a thousand studies published in peer review journals about it, Kabat–Zinn’s MBSR program has been found to reduce not only chronic pain but also high blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Evidence also suggests MBSR can help improve one’s ability to handle stress and alleviate depression, anxiety, post–traumatic stress, and eating disorders.

Despite the success of MBSR with adults, there has been little corresponding research on children, though that’s starting to change. At the University of British Columbia in Canada, psychologist Kimberly Schonert–Reichl and a graduate student, Molly Stewart Lawlor, recently finished a pilot project on mindfulness in schools, with funding and teacher training provided by the Bright Lights Foundation (now called the Goldie Hawn Institute), an organization founded by actress and children’s advocate Goldie Hawn. Fourth through seventh graders in six Vancouver public schools were instructed in mindful awareness techniques and positive thinking skills, then tested for changes in their behavior, social and emotional competence, moral development, and mood.

The positive response to the program was almost immediate. “In one classroom, the children went from having the most behavioral problems in the school—as measured by number of visits to the principal’s office—to having zero behavioral problems, after only two to three weeks of instruction,” says Schonert–Reichl. Her results also showed that these children were less aggressive, less oppositional toward teachers, and more attentive in class. Those who received the mindfulness training also reported feeling more positive emotion and optimism, and seemed more introspective than children who were on a waitlist for the training. “It’s important to do research like this because kids need something to cope with all the pressures at school,” says Schonert–Reichl. “If we don’t find something to help them, there are going to be tremendous health costs for these kids down the road.”

Similar research is getting underway in the United States. Susan Smalley, a geneticist and the director of the new Mindful Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that a modified version of MBSR can help teenagers with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) by reducing their anxiety and increasing their ability to focus. She is continuing to work with ADHD teens, but her encouraging results have prompted her to wonder if MBSR might help other groups of children—particularly preschoolers, who must learn to regulate their emotions and behaviors to be successful throughout school. She contacted Kaiser and together they launched a program with children attending a preschool run by UCLA. They adapted a version of Kaiser’s curriculum to see if it could be taught to such young kids; their results so far indicate that it can. Now they’re embarking on a series of studies over the next year that will compare a control group to the UCLA preschoolers, as well as to second and fourth graders at Toluca Lake.

“We want to find out if mindfulness can help children over their entire lifespan, and if it might help inoculate them against psychological problems later in life,” says Smalley.

Patricia Jennings, a researcher at the Garrison Institute, finds much of this research encouraging but says more work is necessary to prove the effectiveness of mindfulness programs. In particular, she hopes studies will focus on specific components of these programs and control for other factors that might be operating on the kids. This will give researchers and practitioners a better sense of which aspects of the programs have the most positive effects on children. “If we found something, like breath awareness, that is effective at reducing stress and requires very little in terms of teacher training or cost, we would have a lot easier time getting it into school curricula,” she says.

Despite these concerns, teachers have encountered little resistance to introducing mindfulness to their students, and they report generally positive results. Though some expressed initial concern about how parents might react to the programs—which, after all, grew out of spiritual traditions—practitioners and researchers say they have successfully removed mindfulness from any religious context. I don’t even like to use the word Meditation when I talk about Mindfulness, since it has religious connotations for some, says Smalley. The programs we are studying are about stress reduction and increasing awareness and are totally secular.

Still, there’s likely to be controversy around these programs as they expand, says Goldie Hawn. “There will always be people who see this as scary, or as some kind of Eastern philosophy that they don’t want for their kids,” she says.

But, she adds, most people find research results convincing, and she believes research will eventually show that mindfulness helps kids in much the same way it’s already been shown to help adults. “Mindfulness gives kids a tool for understanding how their brain works, for having more self–control,” says Hawn. “If we know it also has the potential to decrease stress, decrease depression, and increase health and happiness—like the research on adults shows—wouldn’t it be selfish to withhold it from children?”

At Toluca Lake Elementary School, the students make their own arguments in favor of mindfulness. “Last week, I made a picture of a heart to give to a special friend of mine, but my little brother ripped it up. I was really mad at him,” says Emily, of Daniel Murphy’s second grade class. She pauses a moment before adding, “Breathing helped me to calm my anger. I realized, Hey, I can just do it over again.’ I never would have thought like that if I hadn’t taken the class.”

— Jill Suttie, Psy.D., is Greater Good’s book review editor and a freelance writer. Copyright Greater Good. Greater Good Magazine, based at UC-Berkeley, is a quarterly magazine that highlights ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism.

We coudn’t be happier about the growing number of books popularizing the key lessons about brain training that Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg has been researching and writing about for years, and that motivated us to embark ourselves in the SharpBrains adventure.

Discover Magazine presents a great article, Rewiring the Brain, reviewing two recent books.

• The subtitle is “Neuroplasticity can allow for treatment of senility, post-traumatic stress, ­obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression—and Buddhists have been capitalizing on it for millenia.” I would add that the strong value of lifelong learning present in jesuit and jewish traditions reflects the same wisdom. Some quotes:
• “Two new books, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (Ballantine Books, $24.95) by science journalist Sharon Begley and The Brain That Changes Itself (Viking, $24.95) by psychiatrist Norman Doidge, offer masterfully guided tours through the burgeoning field of neuroplasticity research. Each has its own style and emphasis; both are excellent.”
• “Finally, both authors conclude that adult neuroplasticity is a vastly undertapped resource, one with which Western medicine and psychology are just now coming to grips. An important emerging research agenda is to figure out ways to direct and maximize this brain repair and reorganization.”
• “Brain scans reveal that the neural activity of highly trained monks is off the charts, relative to meditation novices, in circuits that involve maternal love (caudate), empathy (right insula), and feelings of joy and happiness (left prefrontal cortex). Even when these monks are not meditating, their brains bear the imprints of their psychic workouts. The latter two structures, for instance, are anatomically enlarged. Based on results like these, Begley holds out hope that our emotional lives and personalities, far from being carved in stone by our genes and early experiences, will prove as sculptable through mental training as our bodies are through physical training.”

It these concepts and research don’t kickstart a reinvention of what we understand for “education” and “health”, I don’t know what will. “Physical training”, in fact, includes training our brains!.

Another great book a colleague just recommended (thanks Kate!):

Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife, a first-person story by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin, a journalist and aging baby boomer (who isn’t “aging”, by the way) on how she improved her confidence, concentration and memory, combined with good scientific background.

For more context on this new understanding of the brain, check Marian Diamond and the Brain Revolution.

Here you can find more good Books and Articles.