The MC at the Uni­ver­sity of Michigan’s reunion din­ner encour­aged audi­ence mem­bers to reveal the most sig­nif­i­cant take-away from their under­grad­u­ate nurs­ing edu­ca­tion. The great­est ben­e­fit was quickly clear to me — problem-solving think­ing. Mem­ory pro­duced a mind video: a short, dark-haired, nurs­ing instruc­tor lec­tur­ing a small group of first year stu­dents in an empty patient room. “Don’t mem­o­rize the steps of ster­ile tech­nique. Use a problem-solving think­ing process.” She described the sequen­tial, cycli­cal process: define the prob­lem, gather infor­ma­tion, develop a solu­tion strat­egy, allo­cate resources, mon­i­tor progress, and eval­u­ate the solu­tion. Read the rest of this entry »

Brain changes seen in cab­bies who take ‘The Knowl­edge (BBC Health):

“The struc­ture of a Lon­don taxi driver’s brain changes dur­ing the gru­el­ing process of learn­ing the quick­est way around the cap­i­tal, scans reveal. Dozens of trainee dri­vers had MRI scans before and after they acquired “The Knowl­edge”, mem­o­riz­ing hun­dreds of jour­neys and street names.

The Uni­ver­sity Col­lege Lon­don team, writ­ing in Cur­rent Biol­ogy, found brain parts linked to mem­ory grew big­ger. Read the rest of this entry »

NIH-funded study finds dyslexia not tied to IQ (NIH press release):

At left, brain areas active in typ­i­cally devel­op­ing read­ers engaged in a rhyming task. Shown at right is the brain area acti­vated in poor read­ers involved in the same task.

- “Regard­less of high or low over­all scores on an IQ test, chil­dren with dyslexia show sim­i­lar pat­terns of brain activ­ity, accord­ing to researchers sup­ported by the National Insti­tutes of Health. The results call into ques­tion the dis­crep­ancy model — the prac­tice of clas­si­fy­ing a child as dyslexic on the basis of a lag between read­ing abil­ity and over­all IQ scores.”

- “In many school sys­tems, the dis­crep­ancy model is the cri­te­rion for Read the rest of this entry »

How To Help Your Child’s Brain Grow Up Strong (NPR):

- “Kids who learn two lan­guages young are bet­ter able to learn abstract rules and to reverse rules that they’ve already learned,” says Aamodt. “They’re less likely to have dif­fi­culty choos­ing between con­flict­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties when there are two pos­si­ble responses that both present them­selves. They’re also bet­ter at fig­ur­ing out what other peo­ple are think­ing, which is prob­a­bly because they have to fig­ure out which lan­guage to use every time they talk to Read the rest of this entry »

Work­ing mem­ory is the abil­ity to hold infor­ma­tion in your head and

Pic: Flickr (Plasticinaa)

manip­u­late it men­tally. You use this men­tal work­space when adding up two num­bers spo­ken to you by some­one else with­out being able to use pen and paper or a cal­cu­la­tor. Chil­dren at school need this mem­ory on a daily basis for a vari­ety of tasks such as fol­low­ing teach­ers’ instruc­tions or remem­ber­ing sen­tences they have been asked to write down.

The main goal of our recent paper pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Exper­i­men­tal Child Psy­chol­ogy was to inves­ti­gate the pre­dic­tive power of work­ing mem­ory and IQ in learn­ing in typ­i­cally devel­op­ing chil­dren over a six-year period. This issue is impor­tant because dis­tin­guish­ing between the cog­ni­tive skills under­pin­ning suc­cess in learn­ing is cru­cial for early screen­ing and intervention.

In this study, typ­i­cally devel­op­ing stu­dents were tested for their IQ and work­ing mem­ory at 5 years old and again when they were 11 years old. They were also tested on their aca­d­e­mic attain­ments in read­ing, spelling and maths.

Find­ings and Edu­ca­tional Implications

The find­ings revealed that a child’s suc­cess in all aspects of learn­ing is down to how good their work­ing mem­ory is regard­less of IQ score. Crit­i­cally, work­ing mem­ory at the start of for­mal edu­ca­tion is a more pow­er­ful pre­dic­tor of sub­se­quent aca­d­e­mic suc­cess than IQ in the early years.

This unique find­ing is impor­tant as it addresses Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: as part of our Author Speaks Series, you can enjoy below a stim­u­lat­ing excerpt from the new book The Brain Advan­tage: Become a More Effec­tive Busi­ness Leader Using the Lat­est Brain Research).

Brain-imaging tech­niques allow researchers to wit­ness the brain’s activ­ity reflected in a rain­bow of col­ors on a com­puter screen. When brain cells are highly active ”work­ing harder” the result shows up as brighter col­ors on the com­puter screen. Bril­liant reds and yel­lows indi­cate brain areas that are most active. In con­trast, the blues and greens on a scan show a qui­eter, less active brain.

What would we expect to find if we exam­ined the brain scans of peo­ple with high ver­sus aver­age IQ scores? We might pic­ture the active brain of an Ein­stein as a hotbed of smol­der­ing col­ors ”but we’d be wrong. Neu­rol­o­gist Richard Restak sum­ma­rized a UCLA study that com­pared indi­vid­u­als with high IQs to those with aver­age IQs. Restak wrote, The researchers started off with the seem­ingly rea­son­able idea that ‘smarter brains work harder, gen­er­ate more energy, and con­sume more glu­cose. Like light bulbs, the brains of bright peo­ple were expected to illu­mi­nate more intensely than those of dimwits with a reduced wattage.  What they dis­cov­ered instead was exactly the oppo­site. Higher IQ peo­ple had cooler, more sub­dued brain scans “while their less intel­lec­tu­ally gifted coun­ter­parts lit up like minia­ture Christ­mas trees..

Why would smarter brains work less hard? Read the rest of this entry »

Work­ing mem­ory (WM) is the cog­ni­tive sys­tem respon­si­ble for the tem­po­rary stor­age and manip­u­la­tion of infor­ma­tion and plays an impor­tant role in both learn­ing and focus­ing atten­tion. Con­sid­er­able research has doc­u­mented that many chil­dren and adults with ADHD have WM deficits and that this con­tributes to dif­fi­cul­ties asso­ci­ated with the dis­or­der. For an excel­lent intro­duc­tion to the role of WM deficits in ADHD, click here.

A sim­ple exam­ple illus­trates the impor­tance of WM for par­tic­u­lar aca­d­e­mic tasks. Try adding 3 and 9 in your head. That was prob­a­bly easy for you. Now try­ing adding 33 and 99. That was prob­a­bly more dif­fi­cult. Finally, try adding 333 and 999. This is quite chal­leng­ing for most adults even though each cal­cu­la­tion required is triv­ially easy. The chal­lenge occurred because you need to store infor­ma­tion — the sum of 3+9 in the one’s col­umn and then ten’s col­umn — as you process the remain­ing part of the prob­lem, i.e., 3+9 in the hundred’s col­umn, and this taxed your WM. If your WM capac­ity was exceeded, you could not com­plete the prob­lem successfully.

This sim­ple prob­lem also illus­trates the dif­fer­ence between short-term mem­ory (STM) and WM. Short-term mem­ory sim­ply involves retain­ing infor­ma­tion in mind for short peri­ods of time, e.g., remem­ber­ing that the prob­lem you need to solve is 333+999. Work­ing mem­ory, in con­trast, involves men­tally manip­u­lat­ing — or ‘work­ing’ with — retained infor­ma­tion and comes into play in a wide range of learn­ing activ­i­ties. For exam­ple, to answer ques­tions about a sci­ence chap­ter, a child not only has to cor­rectly retain fac­tual infor­ma­tion but must men­tally work with that infor­ma­tion to answer ques­tions about it. Thus, when a child’s WM capac­ity is low rel­a­tive to peers, aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance is likely to be com­pro­mised in mul­ti­ple areas.

Because WM deficits play an impor­tant role in the strug­gles expe­ri­enced by many indi­vid­u­als with ADHD, it is impor­tant to con­sider how dif­fer­ent inter­ven­tions address this aspect of the dis­or­der. In this study, the authors were inter­ested in com­par­ing the impact of Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing and stim­u­lant med­ica­tion treat­ment on the WM per­for­mance of chil­dren diag­nosed with ADHD.

Par­tic­i­pants were 25 8–11 year-old chil­dren with ADHD (21 boy and 4 girls) who were being treated with stim­u­lant med­ica­tion. Children’s mem­ory per­for­mance was assessed on 4 occa­sions using the Auto­mated Work­ing Mem­ory Assess­ment (AWMA), a com­put­er­ized test that mea­sures ver­bal short-term mem­ory, ver­bal work­ing mem­ory, visuo-spatial short-term mem­ory, and visuo-spatial work­ing memory.

At time 1, the assess­ment was con­ducted when chil­dren had been off med­ica­tion for at least 24 hours. The sec­ond assess­ment occurred an aver­age of 5 months later and when chil­dren were on med­ica­tion. The third assess­ment occurred after chil­dren had com­pleted 5 weeks of Cogmed Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing using the stan­dard train­ing pro­to­col (see below). The final assess­ment occurred approx­i­mately 6 months after train­ing had ended. This design enabled the researchers to make the fol­low­ing comparisons:

- WM per­for­mance on med­ica­tion vs. off med­ica­tion (T1 vs T2)
– WM per­for­mance on med­ica­tion vs. after train­ing (T2 vs. T3)
– WM per­for­mance imme­di­ately after train­ing ended vs. 6 months fol­low­ing train­ing (T3 vs. T4)

This final com­par­i­son pro­vided infor­ma­tion on whether any ben­e­fits pro­vided by the train­ing had endured.

In addi­tion to mea­sur­ing STM and WM at each time point, mea­sures of IQ were col­lected at times 1, 2, and 3.

- Work­ing Mem­ory Train­ing -

WM train­ing was con­ducted using the stan­dard Cogmed train­ing pro­to­col with each child com­plet­ing 20–25 train­ing ses­sions within a 25 day period. The train­ing requires the stor­age and manip­u­la­tion of sequences of ver­bal, e.g., repeat­ing back a sequence of dig­its in reverse order, and/or visuo-spatial infor­ma­tion, e.g., recall­ing the loca­tion of objects on dif­fer­ent por­tions of the com­puter screen.

Dif­fi­culty level is cal­i­brated on a trial by trial basis so the child is always work­ing at a level that closely matches their per­for­mance. For exam­ple, if a child suc­cess­fully recalled three dig­its in reverse order, on the next trial he had to recall four. When a trial was failed, the next trial was made eas­ier by reduc­ing the num­ber of items to be recalled. This method of ‘adap­tive train­ing’ is thought to be a key ele­ment because it requires the child to ‘stretch’ their WM capac­ity to move through the program.

- Results -

- Impact of Short-Term Mem­ory and Work­ing Mem­ory -

Med­ica­tion vs. no med­ica­tion — When tested on med­ica­tion, Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: I recently came across an excel­lent book and resource, The Alzheimer’s Action Plan: The Experts’ Guide to the Best Diag­no­sis and Treat­ment for Mem­ory Prob­lems, recently released in paper­back. Dr. Murali Doraiswamy, one of the authors and lead­ing Alzheimer’s expert, kindly helped us cre­ate a 2-part arti­cle series to share with Sharp­Brains read­ers advice on a very impor­tant ques­tion, “How can we help the pub­lic at large to dis­tin­guish Alzheimer’s Dis­ease from nor­mal aging — so that an inter­est in early iden­ti­fi­ca­tion doesn’t trans­late into unneeded wor­ries?” What fol­lows is an excerpt from the book, pages 72–78, dis­cussing the Pros and Cons of the most com­mon assessments).

—

While no sin­gle test (other than a brain biopsy, which is a very inva­sive and risky pro­ce­dure) can con­clu­sively prove that a per­son has Alzheimer’s, many tests can give us a good idea. A list of all the tests that help us assess mem­ory and think­ing prob­lems appears at the end of this chap­ter. Mean­while, let’s take a good look at the whys and hows of a thor­ough mem­ory assessment.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE AN EXTRA TEST CAN MAKE

To under­stand why get­ting tested (and retested as symp­toms change and the dis­ease pro­gresses) is impor­tant, check out the expe­ri­ence of Kather­ine, who went to the doc­tor com­plain­ing of a mem­ory slow­down. She took five of the most impor­tant neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal tests, which assess brain func­tion with­out actu­ally phys­i­cally look­ing at the brain. Then she under­went brain scans, a car­dio­vas­cu­lar workup, and blood tests to see what else was going on that might be under­min­ing her men­tal func­tion. Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: inter­view­ing Richard Nis­bett, author of the excel­lent recent book Intel­li­gence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cul­tures Count, was in my To Do list. I then found that fel­low blog­ger David DiS­alvo was faster than I was and did a great job, so here we bring you David’s inter­view and take).

While the debate over intel­li­gence rages on many fronts, the bat­tle over the impor­tance of hered­ity rages loud­est. It’s easy to see why. If the camp that argues intel­li­gence is 75 to 85 per­cent genet­i­cally deter­mined is cor­rect, then we’re faced with some tough ques­tions about the role of edu­ca­tion. If intel­li­gence is improved very lit­tle by schools, and if the IQ of the major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion will remain rel­a­tively unchanged no mat­ter how well schools per­form, then should school reform really be a priority?

More to the point, if our genes largely deter­mine our IQ, which in turn under­lies our per­for­mance through­out our lives, then what is the role of school? For some in this debate the answer to that ques­tion is sim­ply, “to be the best you can be.” But that seems lit­tle com­fort for those who aspire to “be” more than what their IQ cat­e­gory pre­dicts they will.

Those on the other side of this debate ques­tion whether hered­ity plays as big a role as the strong hered­i­tar­i­ans claim. And for the role it does play, they ques­tion whether hered­itabil­ity implies immutabil­ity. Hered­ity of height, for exam­ple, is about 90 per­cent, and yet aver­age height in sev­eral pop­u­la­tions around the world has been steadily increas­ing due to non-genetic influ­ences, like nutri­tion. If such a strong hered­i­tary trait can be rad­i­cally altered by envi­ron­men­tal factors–and height is but one exam­ple of this–then why is intel­li­gence different?

It is not, argues the camp that might best be described as intel­li­gence opti­mists. For them, the pes­simism that col­ors the strong hered­i­tar­ian posi­tion isn’t only dis­cour­ag­ing, it’s dan­ger­ous. Too much is hang­ing in the bal­ance for pes­simism about the poten­tial of our chil­dren to prevail.

Richard Nis­bett is a cham­pion of the intel­li­gence opti­mist camp, and with his lat­est book, Intel­li­gence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cul­tures Count , he has emerged as the most per­sua­sive voice mar­shalling evi­dence to dis­prove the heredity-is-destiny argu­ment. Intel­lec­tual advance­ment, Nis­bett argues, is not the result of hard­wired genetic codes, but the province of con­trol­lable fac­tors like schools and social environments–and as such, improv­ing these fac­tors is cru­cially impor­tant. Read the rest of this entry »

Arts edu­ca­tion influ­ences learn­ing and other areas of cog­ni­tion and may deserve a more promi­nent place in schools, accord­ing to a wave of recent neu­ro­science research.One recent study found that chil­dren who receive music instruc­tion for just 15 months show strength­ened con­nec­tions in musi­cally rel­e­vant brain areas and per­form bet­ter on asso­ci­ated tasks, com­pared with stu­dents who do not learn an instrument.

A sep­a­rate study found that chil­dren who receive train­ing to improve their focus and atten­tion per­form bet­ter not only on atten­tion tasks but also on intel­li­gence tests. Some researchers sug­gest that arts train­ing might sim­i­larly affect a wide range of cog­ni­tive domains. Edu­ca­tors and neu­ro­sci­en­tists gath­ered recently in Bal­ti­more and Wash­ing­ton, D.C., to dis­cuss the increas­ingly detailed pic­ture of how arts edu­ca­tion changes the brain, and how to trans­late that research to edu­ca­tion pol­icy and the class­room. Many par­tic­i­pants referred to the results of Dana Foundation-funded research by cog­ni­tive neu­ro­sci­en­tists from seven lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties over three years, released in 2008.

“Art must do some­thing to the mind and brain. What is that? How would we be able to detect that? asked Barry Gor­don, a behav­ioral neu­rol­o­gist and cog­ni­tive neu­ro­sci­en­tist at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­sity, who spoke May 8 dur­ing the “Learn­ing and the Brain” con­fer­ence in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. “Art, I sub­mit to you with­out absolute proof, can improve the power of our minds. How­ever, this improve­ment is hard to detect.”

Study links music, brain changes

Among the sci­en­tists try­ing to detect such improve­ment, Ellen Win­ner, a pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­ogy at Boston Col­lege, and Got­tfried Schlaug, a pro­fes­sor of neu­rol­ogy at Beth Israel Dea­coness Med­ical Cen­ter and Har­vard Med­ical School, pre­sented research at the “Learn­ing, Arts, and the Brain sum­mit May 6 in Bal­ti­more. Their work mea­sured, for the first time, changes to the brain as a result of music training.

For four years, Win­ner and Schlaug fol­lowed chil­dren ages 9 to 11, some of whom Read the rest of this entry »